** Edition of 250 copies, textured sleeve ** Observations is a duo album built on looking and listening as hard as possible. At its core lies a single concert at Ateliers Claus in Brussels in March 2024, preceded by just three concentrated hours of rehearsal spread over two days. In that brief window, eRikm and Pierre Bastien didn’t chase repertoire or practice set pieces; instead, they engaged in what Bastien calls “a series of careful observations of each other's playing.” Both arrived with more than enough equipment to sustain multiple, completely different concerts: eRikm with turntables, sophisticated electronic machines and a virtually inexhaustible sound bank; Bastien with his mechanical orchestra and a broad array of acoustic instruments. The first task was subtraction. Over two sessions they eliminated the superfluous and the merely effective, paring their resources down to what would matter most in dialogue.

On the evening of the concert, this preparatory work became a method. “It was through close observation - of each sound, each direction taken by one or the other, each intention, each break - that we composed this record in the moment: vigilant and scrutinising, like the pairs of eyes on the cover of this album,” Bastien notes. That image is key to how Observations operates: composition as continuous, mutual scrutiny. Rather than trading solos or falling into fixed roles, the two musicians shadow, interrupt, double and re‑route one another, building pieces whose form emerges from the accumulation of split‑second decisions. The record documents that process without smoothing its edges; you hear the false starts, the sudden cuts, the way an idea is taken up, twisted, then abandoned when it has yielded all it can.

Bastien has recalled how Jean Dubuffet described his own music as “disordered and dirty,” and that spirit runs through Observations. But here it is “a Dubuffet returning from a long journey in Africa, with haunting rhythms that reach trance‑like states,” now “corrupted by eRikm’s UK Drill.” Bastien’s mechanical orchestra lays down loops that teeter between ritual pulse and junkyard groove: motors knocking against strings, rubber bands flicking metal, tiny rotors striking drums. These patterns generate a stubborn, bodily momentum. Into this, eRikm injects strata of vinyl abrasion, sampled fragments and sharply contoured electronics. Echoes of contemporary beat structures - drill’s stuttered kicks, warped bass accents, sudden voids - slip through the texture, not as genre homage but as one more influence being stressed, bent, made strange. The result is a music where trance and fracture coexist: rhythms long enough to lose yourself in, constantly unsettled by cuts, glitches and detours.

For eRikm, Observations extends a practice that has been mutating on the international experimental scene since the early 1990s. Born in 1970 and based in Marseille, he has consistently fused thought, instinct and sensitivity, pursuing multiple practices at once and refusing any single compositional mode or language. From early work as a guitarist to later visual pieces, he has acted as a maverick genre‑breaker, undermining attempts to classify him. Recognised from 1996 as a virtuoso turntablist and sound artist, he has made a habit of crossing supposedly separate “independent” and “institutional” worlds, treating both as spaces to be hacked rather than scenes to belong to. Since 1997 he has approached technological media as both creative instrument and experimental economic model, using tools for creation, production and diffusion in ways that foreground their material and social conditions.

Crucially, he handles sound as if it were alive: constantly in flux, always open to accident, delight and sudden unison. His improvisations play deliberately with contradictions - understanding versus sensation, seriousness versus farce, anticipation versus instinct - and reach intensity by keeping all of these tensions active rather than resolving them. His references span the intimate and the political, popular culture and so‑called high art, but he shuns didactic gestures. Instead, he draws short circuits between points, using live‑generated and deliberately “degenerated” material, from pure noise to recognisable quotation, to offer multiple, simultaneous ways of hearing the present moment.

Collaboration has been a through‑line in this trajectory. Encounters with Luc Ferrari, Christian Marclay, Mathilde Monnier, Jérôme Noetinger, FM Einheit and many others have reinforced his drive toward transmutation and multi‑layered play. On his own or with partners, he has toured widely with numerous on‑going projects and created commissions for labels, radio, festivals and art centres. Parallel to this, early work in photography, drawing, installation and video continues to inform a singular, kaleidoscopic vision in which scientific curiosity and poetic speculation continually overlap. That sensibility is everywhere in Observations: in the way turntable grit and digital precision collide, in the playful yet rigorous handling of Bastien’s mechanical patterns, in the sense that each track is both a sonic event and a small experiment in how two systems can observe and transform one another.

Opposite him, Bastien’s machines and acoustic instruments offer their own resistant logic. They bring timbres and behaviours that are stubbornly physical, grounded in motors, springs and resonant bodies rather than code. When those sounds meet eRikm’s media‑saturated interventions, Observations becomes exactly what its title promises: a record of two artists watching and listening so closely that each action is already a response, each sound already folded into the other’s evolving map of possibilities.