** Handnumbered edition of 200. Clear vinyl, gatefold. ** Tectonic offers a concentrated snapshot of Simon Berz’s geological sound research, compressing a decade and a half of travel, collaboration and experimentation into a single, striking statement. Rather than treating “nature” as a backdrop, Berz drags the earth itself into the foreground: his core setup fuses drum kit, electronics and a set of basalt stones from Iceland, wired and amplified so that every scrape, strike and resonance becomes part of a volatile, living instrument. Across continents and contexts, these millions‑of‑years‑old stones have served not just as tools but as collaborators, shaping the direction and grain of the music as surely as any human partner.

The story behind Tectonic traces a fault line from Iceland to Indonesia and Bali, from New Orleans to China, into caves and along shorelines. Everywhere he goes, Berz carries his basalt set, adapting it to local acoustics, traditions and musical cultures. On Java he encounters Baron, a builder of stone gamelan instruments, whose practice of tuning rock into shimmering metallophone constellations resonates deeply with Berz’s own obsessions. At Indonesia’s Pacitan Tabuhan Cave, he performs with Misbach Bilok and Wukir Suryadi of Senyawa, artists who use coral as an instrument, turning fragile marine fossils into resonant bodies. These meetings expand the project beyond a solitary research into a shared, translocal vocabulary of mineral sound.

Back in the Stöðvarfjörður studio in Iceland, Berz gathers these experiences and “field recordings” - not only environmental sounds, but the memory of techniques, tunings and approaches - into a dedicated Tectonic setup. Here, drums lock into and push against the irregular pulse of the stones; electronics magnify microscopic resonances, stretching tiny impacts into long, quivering tones or shattering them into rhythmic fragments. The material is then taken to Berlin, where Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) shapes the final mix, giving the music a spatial clarity that honours both its physical force and its intricate internal detail. You can hear the studio as another layer of geology: a place where strata of sound are compressed, folded and re‑exposed.

The resulting album refuses to settle into a single genre, preferring instead to move along a fault line between forms. Some pieces lean into club‑driven structures, with kick‑like thuds, looped stone hits and flickering electronics converging into dancefloor‑adjacent momentum. Others dissolve into more open, ambient passages where the ear is invited to follow the decay of a single resonance through the stereo field, tracing the contours of an unseen cavern. Gamelan‑inspired textures surface in interlocking patterns of pitched stone, while elsewhere the drums fall into loping, HipHop‑like beat shapes that anchor otherwise alien sonorities in bodily familiarity. Throughout, the impact remains direct and physical: this is music you feel in your chest and fingertips as much as you hear.

What holds Tectonic together is not stylistic uniformity but a clear, underlying question: what happens when we treat rock, fossil and landscape as active partners in composition? Berz’s answer is to build an album where geography, collaboration and material all leave audible fingerprints, a record that carries the resonance of caves and coastlines into the studio without smoothing away their edges. In doing so, Tectonic becomes more than a travel diary or a concept piece; it stands as a vivid, compressed portrait of a long‑running artistic inquiry, channeling the slow timescale of geology into music that feels urgent, contemporary and intensely alive.