Coaxial’s Redux Trilogy unfolds less as a conventional album release and more as a listening proposition, one that deliberately resists neat categorisation and passive consumption. Released on 9 February 2026 across three cassette labels—Cruel Nature Recordings, Coju Records and Endogenic Noise—the project positions itself at the intersection of ambient, drone and experimental electronic music, while quietly questioning the habits through which contemporary music is usually encountered.
The London-based project of Benjamin J. Heal has, since 2017, operated within a distinctly material understanding of sound. Tape, analogue synthesis, degradation and chance are not aesthetic gestures here but structural principles. Redux Trilogy extends this logic into a three-part system designed for recombination. Each cassette functions independently, yet the work’s core idea lies in simultaneous playback, allowing rhythmic structures, drones and fragments to collide, misalign and occasionally cohere. The result is music that behaves more like an environment than a sequence of tracks.
At the rhythmic level, Redux Trilogy avoids pulse in the traditional sense, favouring repetition that suggests motion without ever fully committing to it. On Redux Media, looping analogue synth patterns form a motorik skeleton that feels stable at first, then subtly unstable. Micro-variations in timing and tuning accumulate, producing a hypnotic tension where order and error coexist. The rhythm becomes perceptual rather than metrical, something sensed rather than counted, its insistence gradually undermined by slippage.
Synth work across the trilogy is deliberately reductive, stripped of flourish and foregrounded melody. Heal’s approach privileges texture, drift and interference. Oscillators breathe and waver, sequences loop long enough to erode their own meaning, and tonal centres remain implied rather than stated. This restraint creates space for the listener to notice detail: the slight phasing between layers, the way harmonics bloom and decay, the moment when repetition tips into hallucination.
Firemaniac occupies a markedly different temporal space. Built around a single gong recording stretched through recursive tape processes, it abandons rhythmic articulation almost entirely. Instead, time is marked by decay and resonance. What begins as a recognisable strike gradually dissolves into a dense drone field, where internal movement emerges through overtone interaction rather than external progression. The atmosphere is austere, even ritualistic, its severity softened only by the organic instability of the source material. When layered with the other cassettes, this sustained mass acts as a binding agent, smearing edges and deepening spatial perception.
The trilogy’s most abrasive element arrives with Wittgenstein–Cronkite–Hellholes. Here, atmosphere becomes fractured and referential, populated by distorted quotations and degraded broadcast-like artefacts. Rhythm appears in broken gestures, abruptly interrupted, while synth textures are corroded and hollowed out. The overall mood is one of semantic collapse, where sound gestures hint at language, media and memory without ever resolving into clarity. It is the noisiest and most conceptually charged of the three, destabilising any sense of coherence established elsewhere.
Across all three releases, atmosphere is the dominant connective tissue. Redux Trilogy sustains a mood of unease and attention, neither overtly bleak nor comforting. There is a sense of quiet insistence running through the work, an invitation to slow listening and shared presence. The cassette format reinforces this stance, foregrounding physical engagement and temporal commitment over frictionless access.
Taken as a whole, Redux Trilogy stands as a high-quality and rigorously constructed release, one that aligns sonic exploration with a broader reflection on listening itself. It is a project that rewards patience and curiosity, offering no fixed narrative but a set of conditions through which meaning can emerge. It is precisely this openness, combined with a disciplined command of rhythm, synthesis and atmosphere, that makes Coaxial’s latest work a compelling subject for close attention and critical hosting within a contemporary music context.