quilium released climatoGRAFIQ, a 26-track album that feels like a collection of brilliant ideas, scary experiments, weird jokes, and unexpected musical turns thrown into one huge, multi-faceted puzzle. It is a record that demands attention, because every track seems to follow its own rules and can suddenly change direction when you least expect it. The best way to approach it is to sit down and really dive into its world — although, considering how playful and unpredictable these songs are, you might just as well listen to it in some completely ridiculous way and let the chaos lead you.

The first track is called veryalien. Synths cut through bubbling sludge-textures like knives. Something alive might be squirming in there, forcing its way out through the slashes. Something alien. Very alien.

But the drum machine keeps a light, even groove going, and it's chill — chill the way my grandfather is chill soldering something, or slicing apples for drying out on the balcony. Which tells you not to take any of this too seriously.

Even if aliens are landing through my open window right now, I'm hoping for something other than annihilation — fun, psychedelia, some insight into how the world works. Same as the album we're listening to.

between the universe, that hurts throws a gorgeous chaotic pile-up of guitar — off-key in places — and vocals that don't give a damn about anything except the vibe of the moment. Probably that's just how people sing when they're on first-name terms with the universe. All of it reminded me of early acoustic Guided by Voices experiments.

There's something baroque in the piano on tenaCITY — but baroque that's aware of 20th-century avant-garde experiments. All of it laid over a plain, straight beat. The keys come off light and floating on one hand, and on the other, in places they ring out like a bell tolling for our civilization. This light, floating structure feels like it could collapse any second — same as our cities, having forgotten their kinship with nature. That's who this piece is for.

exbreviations creeps under your skin slow, like a dark snake — bubbling synths, a wheezy electric organ, a stumbling beat. Then suddenly — a beam of light, of sun, of hope, riding in on some unhinged scat singing in the background. And the dark creeps back in, swallowing that scat whole. This happens a few times over. It's like being spun on some psychedelic carousel.

Why the scat? Because, as the artist himself puts it, the song "is about the tension in the struggle to expand language and meaning rather than condense it."

CATwash is built on the iconic funk of Rose Royce's 1976 "Car Wash." But instead of those famous opening hand claps — the ones endlessly sampled across hip-hop and R&B ever since — what greets you here is a fat fill on electronic toms. Here's hoping somebody samples this one too, someday, for some hit. Or, better yet, several.

The song takes the Rose Royce reference point further, despite the fact that the joke turns sour fast. The producer's own words describe it best — "offputting sounds of steam pipes and unexpectedly stabbing hats".

The groove itself is dragged way down, almost stoned, like someone poured syrup into the tape machine. It slows you down the same way weed does — everything gets a half-second longer, funnier, and a little more sinister at the same time. You start noticing details you'd normally skip past.

Lyrically it runs the old joke about exploiting something small and helpless for someone else's profit. What starts as slapstick — with cats, suds and Sasquatches — gradually slides into a (still fun!) horror story.

After a track as dense as CATwash, we need a bit of breathing room, a reset. It arrives in the form of the instrumental "Motion Quickness." Its blend of psychedelia and homemade charm brings to mind Metronomy, especially their debut album, Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe).

The drum machine hits with real weight, while the sound effects create the feeling that you're standing either in the middle of a Los Angeles freeway or at a Formula 1 race. The synth melodies themselves are playful and instantly memorable. Not every pop song can boast hooks this strong.

"LAST LONGER" brings together supersaw synthesizers that sound as though they've been lifted straight from a rave anthem, breakbeat drums that nod to the classic sound of the '90s, and harsh, abrasive synthetic textures. Together, they make for something that feels playful and exhilarating, yet faintly unsettling at the same time — like being spun around on a giant fairground ride to keep your mind off just how frightening the world outside really is (much like on exbreviations).

As the artist puts it, talking about the next track "nothing sure of it", "Sometimes we don't notice things until we finally notice them." He goes on to describe living with a sense that "nothing sure of it" has become a meaningful pattern, one that shapes the way he interprets both everyday life and larger human stories.

The soundtrack carries that same disorienting quality. Against minimalist drums and the cold, detached sound of an organ, we hear a deliberately careless vocal performance, pushed deep into reverb. Together, these elements create the sensation of wandering through a vast digital cavern, unable to tell right from left, up from down.

On "can’t all be winners," the artist writes: "Not every person and not every song is angling to be the best. This song in particular is a sort of rumination, a mortar between the bricks whose curious rhythm helps solidify the memory." I agree that not every song should be meant to become a hit built around instantly memorable melodies. This one never even tries.

Instead, it simply lets itself drift. Listening to the drums, it's hard to tell whether they're actually locked to the grid or just floating freely, like a piece of space debris with nothing pulling it into orbit. The guitar moves with the same sense of freedom, almost edging into free jazz at times. All of it deepens the feeling of disorientation inherited from the previous track, extending it rather than resolving it.

"step TWO" came out of a new approach built entirely around hardware sequencing. The artist imagined it as the soundtrack to a fictional future family gathering, where all the uncles are doing a conga two-step.

Musically, "step TWO" draws heavily from classic European electronic music. Jean-Michel Jarre is an obvious reference point, but I was reminded just as much of Zodiac's hugely popular 1980 debut, Disco Alliance. Its bright, singing lead synths carry the same kind of melodic phrasing that defined so much early space disco and synth-pop, making the track feel like a conversation with that era when the two-stepping uncles were still young.

On "LET'S practice," quilium talks about the strange barriers people build between each other and the desire to break through them. The lyrics keep returning to the same idea: wanting to say something, wanting to connect, but constantly feeling like the right moment never arrives.

The track is built around a strong hook made of just a few chords. Its arrangement stays remarkably minimal, leaving plenty of space around the melody. With a bouncier groove and a more R&B-influenced vocal approach, it could easily fit into the catalog of a leftfield R&B artist like Blood Orange. In its current form, with a more fluid and melancholic mood, it brings to mind someone like Porches. At the same time, the combination of these elements feels completely its own.

"Adulting is Hard" feels much heavier than its 2-and-a-half-minute length suggests. The lyrics are basically a long apology from a parent who wants to do the right thing but keeps realizing how often he fails. He talks about patience, guilt, responsibility, and the fear of becoming the kind of person his child cannot trust. In the tongue-in-cheek context of the album it feels very sincere, like someone simply trying to explain himself.

The music makes this feeling even stronger. The whole thing was improvised on two keyboards, and you can hear it: the organ melody keeps stumbling somewhere between the notes, while the drum machine pounds underneath with a strange, desperate persistence. It feels like a confession that accidentally turned into a performance rather than like a finished polished track. As I mentioned earlier, the track is only two and a half minutes long, but because of the amount of words and tension packed inside, it feels much bigger — like a sermon that slowly gets inside your head.

"waiting for an answer" continues the hardware-based approach of the previous tracks, this time with Rubi Pluto contributing the beat. quilium describes it as a track built around the atmosphere of a dancer trying to cast a spell through their performance, waiting for a response from the person they are addressing.

The production leans heavily on mood. The synth pads have a mysterious, ancient quality, as if some forgotten ritual is slowly unfolding in front of us. Above them, a winding lead synth crawls through the arrangement. It has the same kind of hypnotic movement as the melodies played by the pipes of Indian snake charmers, creating the illusion that the sound itself is controlling the movement around it.

"lying in the snake pit" approaches its subject with a mix of anger, absurdity, and playful wordplay. The lyrics move between direct attacks on systems of oppression and surreal images, twisting references to racism, history, and hip hop culture into something chaotic and confrontational. The repeated image of lying in the snake pit creates a strange contrast: a place of danger and discomfort becomes the setting for a search for connection.

The track itself feels like a kaleidoscope constantly rearranging in front of your eyes. Fragments of synthesizers, piano, and drums appear and disappear, forming a patchwork quilt made from scattered musical pieces. The vocal is pushed to the extreme — heavily distorted, overdriven, and compressed until it sounds like it might crack apart at any moment.

WHAT did i tie together? is the point where the album’s experimental side finally steps outside the boundaries of pop. Throughout the record, there has been a constant tension between avant-garde ideas and something closer to novelty music, with a sense of humor and irony running through the arrangements. Here, though, the piece could easily pass as a work by a contemporary avant-garde composer, and no one would probably guess that it comes from an indie pop album.

The repeating piano arpeggio brings to mind French minimalists, while the rest of the composition points toward the tradition of Russian contemporary academic music, with composers such as Dmitri Kourliandski coming to mind.

smooth ESCAPE balances between the mindset of a party and the mindset of a philosopher, as the artist describes it, exploring the tension between trying to hold everything together and let everything go.

The choice of sounds, chords, and the overall tension of the track brings to mind the classic electronic music of the '90s and early 2000s, specifically names like Underworld, Orbital, and Moby. At the same time, the arrangement is deliberately unfocused and slightly unstable, as if it is constantly breaking apart into smaller pieces. That fragmented structure adds another layer to the track, making its anxious atmosphere feel almost physical, present on a cellular level.

xd 203 feels like a direct continuation of the previous track, carrying over the same uneasy atmosphere while pushing the sound further into digital territory. The textures immediately place it in a contemporary context, with synthetic tones that feel deliberately artificial and processed: “Subtractive hardware synthesis and crashing delays over a steady pulsing beat simulate the unpredictable waves of subtraction and addition that events cause on our lives that both emanate from and recede back into the driving force of capitalism.”

The mix is even more unfocused here. Elements that would usually sit in the background of a carefully balanced electronic track suddenly jump to the front, competing with the beat for attention. That constant shifting of focus makes the track feel disorienting, as if you are moving through a dark forest where something unexpected could jump out at any moment — a bear, or perhaps something much more scary and/or ridiculous. The artist’s idea of subtraction and addition translates into the arrangement itself: sounds blur in and out of focus, appear, disappear, and collide.

being ALIVE to begin WITH takes the album’s restless electronic side into the realm close to punishing techno. The artist’s idea starts from the strange improbability of simply existing and turns into a reflection on humanity’s tendency to create unnecessary cruelty, even when the chance of being here at all is already so unlikely.

The track reads like a distorted version of a techno workout. In a more traditional techno setting, the force usually comes from a huge, repetitive kick drum that hits like a machine driving you into the floor. Here, the beat is much more chaotic. That is what makes it hit so hard — it pushes against your expectations instead of locking you into a simple rhythm. The vocal is equally aggressive, mixed extremely loud and right in your face, nearly fighting against the beat. Together, they make the track feel tense, physical, and decidedly overwhelming.

smash n grab is one of the album’s most chaotic
moments. The artist describes it as a search for meaning through exploration. Everything here feels deliberately unpolished: the bass stumbles forward with the enthusiasm of someone picking up an instrument for the first time, while the guitars shoot into the higher frequencies, occasionally screaming like wounded bats.

It is a strange kind of energy — the sound of someone ignoring all the rules of playing and production because the excitement of making noise matters more than getting everything right. The track captures that first encounter with an instrument, when technique is still secondary and the main goal is simply to see what happens when you let yourself go. Its roughness becomes part of its character, turning the chaos into something unexpectedly joyful.

Ridin’ the bus is another moment where quilium finds a completely different way to surprise you. After so many strange turns throughout the album, you start thinking that nothing can really throw you off anymore — and then another track appears that changes the rules again.

This is probably the most minimal piece on the record. A calm synth arpeggio repeats hypnotically while the lyrics unfold on top of it. The text starts as an intimate scene of two people riding a bus together, but gradually expands into a reflection on public transportation, oil dependency, and the future of a society built around cars. The humor keeps breaking through the bigger ideas: political commentary, personal affection, and absurd details all exist in the same space.

The whole thing feels similar to a classic spoken-word record. It brings to mind the tradition of albums such as The Last Poets, where minimal music and repetition create a backdrop for words to carry the main weight.

so effortLESSLY is another track where the joy of simply playing with instruments comes through clearly. There is a familiar electronic kinship here, but it points more toward the 2000s than the '90s. The warm, slightly loose atmosphere is similar to artists like acid jazz project Red Snapper.

Again, what separates it from the classic electronic records it evokes is the lack of strict precision. Where electronic music often relies on perfectly aligned rhythms and carefully controlled arrangements, so effortLESSLY allows things to wobble and drift. That playful looseness creates a kind of charming disorder that feels impossible to separate from quilium's approach.

smooth snailing is another track that taps into the atmosphere of early 2000s electronic music, especially the period where club production and rap vocals naturally crossed paths. There is something in the vein of Faithless here: steady electronic grooves form a hypnotic foundation, and a vocal delivery then turns the track into a kind of manifesto.

The lyrics take the idea of “heaven on earth”, but, instead of waiting for salvation somewhere else, the song looks at the consequences of the systems people have built and the hope that future generations might avoid repeating the same mistakes. There is anger toward hypocrisy and complacency, but it is mixed with a strange optimism — the belief that society can still learn, even after making a mess of things.

BAIL to the CHIEF is a short track that still finds time to unveil as hypnotic. It's built around a minimal beat and heavily processed vocals. The references here are surprisingly wide: there are echoes of James Blake, especially his debut album, as well as Kanye West’s experiments on 808s & Heartbreak, where the artificiality of Auto-Tune became a way to highlight the emotion in the voice rather than hide it. The project Francis and the Lights also comes to mind.

As usual with quilium, though, these influences only serve as starting points. He turns them into something rougher and more personal — a slightly unfinished, fragile piece that still carries a lot of emotional weight.

duck your papers, according to the artist, is "a hopeful anarchist-esque ballad about the freedom of ignoring bureaucracy." The track carries that no-f**s-given attitude through its groove: there is a playful sense of rebellion, as if breaking away from the system is something to celebrate.

The funky bassline and memorable keyboard parts open up a wide range of associations. There is the futuristic funk of Funkadelic and Parliament, the way Dr. Dre transformed similar ideas into massive hip hop grooves, and the way European pop musicians reinterpreted funk through the language of catchy electronic songwriting. In particular, the track brought to mind the work of Yuri Chernavsky, especially his productions for Alla Pugacheva, where funk rhythms met a distinctly Soviet naive pop sensibility.

porous smorous was written for a video imagining the listener as a tiny creature moving through a huge garden, discovering an entire world inside a space that is actually quite small.

The guitar parts and the overall guitar ring close to John Frusciante’s solo work, while the groove carries some of the DNA of his playing with Red Hot Chili Peppers. It is not as explosive or rhythmically aggressive as RHCP at their peak, but there is a similar combination of melodic guitar lines and loose, organic funk underneath.

Born Silent II arrives after three extremely short pieces as a complete change of scale. It is a long, slowly unfolding composition that opens up huge spaces in front of the listener, like a journey across Eurasia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The track develops with the patience of an old Eastern tale: every moment seems almost unchanged from the previous one, yet when you compare two distant points, the difference becomes enormous. In that sense, its structure feels close to the way life itself moves.

It was created from a live performance by Totes Ferosh and additional MicroKorg melodies from quillium. The arpeggiated synth lines appear like small signals moving through a much larger ambient landscape, keeping the feeling of curiosity and discovery that the artist describes. After an album full of abrupt shifts and strange collisions, Born Silent II gives itself enough time to expand and simply exist.

I have to admit that I almost hesitate before trying to summarize an album like this. It is not every day that you come across a 26-track record where every single piece feels so different from the one before it. Throughout the whole album, you constantly find yourself trying to understand the balance between a seriousness that is impossible to ignore and a playfulness that can disarm both an adult and a child.

For me, the real value of this album lies in the way it brings back the pure joy of creating. I haven’t been in the creative game for a long time, so to speak, but listening to this record honestly made me want to just start making things again — to write tracks not because someone expects them from me, but because they simply force their way out. To place them next to each other just like colorful fish on the ocean floor, not chosen because they match in color or character, but because nature itself decided that they belong there.

Writing this, I even feel a little emotional because there is something genuinely powerful and brave in that feeling. quilium creates with a kind of freedom that is rare to hear, and climatoGRAFIQ is a remarkable example of an artist allowing curiosity, humor, and instinct to lead the way. It is a very good album — unusual, fearless, and full of the kind of creative energy that reminds you why making music can be exciting in the first place.