Kirk Markarian Returns as Neuro… No Neuro with ‘MemLoss’ on Audiobulb

Kirk Markarian has released a new album under the name Neuro… No Neuro. MemLoss is out now on Audiobulb, the UK label that has become a steady home for his particular strain of minimal electronics.

The project was originally conceived as a way to process the side effects of several brain surgeries and radiation treatments Markarian underwent. On previous releases, that connection simmered beneath the surface. Here, it’s the entire framework. The album is explicitly about memory loss, about the gaps where words or thoughts used to be.

Sonically, Markarian’s tools haven’t changed much. Bells, blips, keys that flicker close to the edge of a tone, field recordings that surface and disappear. Pads do arrive, but they’re faded and distant, barely holding shape. The arrangements are thin by design, not because there’s nothing to say, but because emptiness itself is the subject. When your mind drops a piece of language mid-sentence, it doesn’t fill the silence with noise. It leaves a hole. Markarian builds around those holes.

That puts him in a different room from peers like Alva Noto or Ryoji Ikeda, names his work often gets compared to. Their minimalism tends toward the clinical, a testing of digital limits. Markarian’s sparse kit isn’t an experiment in perception. It’s a structure built from personal necessity. The restraint doesn’t feel academic. It feels lived in.

Markarian’s history with labels like Mille Plateaux and his consistent Audiobulb output already situated him in a lineage of producers who treat sound with surgical care. MemLoss sharpens that lineage into something quietly urgent. These aren’t compositions that demand close listening as a challenge. They simply don’t work any other way.