Exactly two years after their debut album, the project formerly known as Weltschmerzen returns as Pain Palace. The project’s new moniker resolves potential confusion with the eponymous record label, but it is a change in name only // the music remains ambiguous in genre but emotionally resolute, an amalgam of approaches bound by an awareness of the remorseful nature of the world.

From a viewpoint where the world’s indifference is recognised as a landscape, the tracks are presented as seven distinct perspectives that range from brutalist chaos to tenderness but always remain compassionate.

Daniel Kordik made Brehy vlny an album about the vicissitudes of things. The waves peal. There is a dirge for the last steamer on the Danube executed as a coy rustling recollection of music from two decades ago (Parny pochod). An opening track that is a laminate of clinically aquatic sines. A concluding composition – an ode to sunrise and to how light travels on the river – that, halfway through, turns into rave music and the rave slaps.

Kolektív Runy builds on this acoustic generosity with a combination of empathy and boldness. The attitude is most apparent on the few tracks that are musically harsh, but still offer the same discernible respect towards their industrial venues as the most serene pieces on SILO. It is an homage to these places, teeming with attention and care, and the ninth release by the devout label Weltschmerzen.

A live act renowned for their free improvised performances, BIOS have markedly changed their approach since the debut release Fluorescent Minerals five years ago. To serve as a reliable basis for improvisation, the duo began to play with prearranged themes. Far from being limiting, on Powers of Ten these foundations become structures that are as full of change as they are playful. A single track can seem like a medley moving through sections of drama // reverie // fun without dwelling too long on either so as not to be at the expense of the whole. Fractured yet coherent, these emotions are professed in utmost seriousness and also half in jest.

Disembodied and denied to be gloom or bliss, love is revealed to be a raw process at full length. This makes for emotionally hypercharged music that is more inevitable than tense. The record unfolds, for all its ruptures and weight, as familiar. It is a music of pathos, because it benefits from the emotional knowledge that already resides in you.

Phases is an eerie, orchestral album of restraint and grief. Built of feedback and loops, it extends from sombre // gentle strings to colossal drones that invite headbanging. It’s as intimate as a church organ breathing and, at times, not one jot less loud.

A phase implies repetition and nothing resolves repetition but change. Repetition doesn’t need your attention because it doesn’t go anywhere. Repetition doesn’t need your attention because it’s still there. Repetition is uninhibited and becomes disturbing only when it ends.