This exciting new collaboration between Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor is a highly kinetic and playful endeavour. Body-centric vocal explorations merge with intricate rhythmic systems forming a deliciously disorientating, hypersurreal space of semantic modulations, concrete poetry, cut-up beats and mimicked samples. Their sound is singular and tactile: dissociative dance music that reassembles contorting vocal lines and knotting biomechanics in an explorative network of unstable forms. It’s a blur of bodily fragility and ecstatic disruption, where swells of meaning rise and fall through clouds of synthetic buzz, fleeting breath, and stream-of-consciousness imagery.

The duo first performed together when Counterflows Festival paired them for a new commission at the historic Arches venue in 2023. Glasgow-born, Stockholm-based vocalist and performance artist Cara Tolmie brought her hypnotic vocal technique, Internal Singing — an intimate practice using breath, movement, and touch that explores the subtle binds between voice and body in an unsettling, engrossing sonic space. Treanor’s richly innovative work provided a compounding counterpart: radical, rave-infused structures that bent and contorted around Tolmie’s incantation.

Growing out of a series of charged, improvisational performances, Body Lapse was recorded between Stockholm and Rotherham in 2024. Echoes of their live energy run throughout — a voice shaking through the body, responding to touch and physical modulation, translating performance into something tactile and immediate. Body Lapse marks their debut release together, arriving on Planet Mu as the label celebrates 30 years of groundbreaking electronic music.

The album’s neck-snapping opener, As The Unified Field Bursts, is a track that detonates with a squeaking, gleaming meteor shower of chaotic chimes and machine-made staccato. Rhythmic fragmentation meets elastic vocal modulations head-on, a twisting, contorted body in collapse and expansion. Sleep Guessings marks a dynamic transition into a deep, volatile internal space. Cara’s sharp, gasping in-breaths give way to keening vocal swells. These dramatic shifts in intensity whip in and out with unnerving precision. A soft melodic line “Tonight all your guessings will be sleep” sounds almost lullaby-like, while restless shards of body-morphing sub-bass pulse in extreme contrast with breathless spaces of vacuum-like stillness.

On Ereh Ma I, Cara enters a freer, stream-like mode. Language unravels into automatic impressions, cognition blurs with sensation to form fleeting internal images discovered through her vocalisations, emerging and dissolving in real time. Synaesthetic figures surface: water park flumes winding through her ribs, jets of table salt bursting from her fingertips. Forming a parallel dialogue between bodily intuition and the uncanny interference of synthetic systems, drawing the listener gently and strangely, down the garden path.

My Little Loophole is a warped digital ballad, pulsing with ecstatic claps and zigzags of flickering light. Vocals cut through in strobing bursts, like a shuffled and buffered large language model, disrupting the collective consciousness as the spectacle feeds forward. The closing track, Endless Not, is a bleary labyrinth where meaning folds in on itself and memory becomes entangled in a bleak but captivating mist. Starkly capturing the disorientation of our current moment: the collapse of shared narratives and the hypernormal hum of dissociation, but here repurposed as ground for exploration, resisting the pull of despondency.

Body Lapse conjures a sound of unsettling beauty and frictional intensity: a playful, physical mesh of computer music, voice, and speculative storytelling. In this gnawing, dreamlike space, breath and body become sites of both connection and disruption, sparking thrilling encounters with the unexpected, the playful, and the decisively weird.

(Claire Sawers)