Three records land on Friday 23 October, and none of them sounds much like the others. William Basinski’s Passing the Cup of Sorrows is his first solo album since Lamentations in 2020, a single 40-minute piece for lone piano and subtle electronics, out on Temporary Residence. The title comes from a hypnotherapy idea called Life Between Lives, where two souls tied by a harmful bond meet in the spirit world to forgive each other. Piano is a surprise from someone I still associate with tape loops crumbling off their spools, and after A Shadow in Time I want to hear what he does when the decay isn’t doing half the work.

Odd Nosdam’s On Patrol goes the other way: crowded, scratched, deliberately grubby. David Madson built most of it from sounds lifted off obscure second-hand vinyl, added field recordings from Salvador Dalí’s house in Catalonia, and ran the lot through a Roland Space Echo and a cassette 8-track, so decisions made on the fly stayed made. It’s out on Alien Transistor, The Notwist’s label, and Cyclic Defrost’s review ends with “Audiophiles, beware!”, which only made me want it more. I’ve loved his loops of decay since Level Live Wires, so this one was never in doubt.

Civilistjävel! sits somewhere between the two, slow like Basinski but made on modular synths rather than a piano. Tomas Bodén sketched Älvgång through late 2024 and 2025 at EMS in Stockholm, on its Serge and Buchla systems, as a record about family, dedicated to his grandfather. Its tracks take their titles from one cluster of villages on Sweden’s High Coast, side one under the old name, Strinne, and side two under Bjärtrå, the name it has carried since 1980. Cyclic Defrost hears “a certain kind of ominous sadness” in it, which feels right for late October. Carrier brings beats to “Strinne Fyra”, and after Följd I want to know how far Bodén will let rhythm into music that used to drift.

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