tsx and Sue Tompkins Extend Their Odd Lexicon with recur⁷

The collaborative space tsx and Sue Tompkins have carved out remains a narrow one, and recur⁷ shows little interest in broadening it. The new entry in their recur series dropped recently, marking the sixth documented iteration of a project that began as a solo vehicle for tsx, the alias of Oswald Berthold, and found its permanent shape when Tompkins joined on recur² in 2020.

The series chronology is part of its peculiar character. recur appeared in 2017, followed by recur² in 2020, recur³ in 2019, recur⁵ in 2022, and now recur⁷. The missing fourth part either never existed, was pulled, or was never meant to be public. The numbering doesn’t attempt to explain itself, and the music follows a similar logic.

Berthold’s pedigree runs through farmersmanual, the Viennese collective that warped electronic expectations in the mid-90s, and the falsch label he now curates. Tompkins brought the voice that made Life Without Buildings’ Any Other City a touchstone, all fragmented speak-singing and looping phrases. On recur⁷, her vocals were captured on a phone in casual settings, then sliced into small chunks and sorted into heaps by sonic similarity. The result sits somewhere between language and texture, phrases surfacing and dissolving inside beats that feel assembled rather than programmed.

The sound owes something to the lo-fi glitch pop of early Dat Politics, particularly the playful disorientation of Plugs Plus. Melodies bubble up and drift sideways. Rhythms stay off-balance. The production holds things together without smoothing them out. It feels improvisational, almost accidental, but the shape is deliberate. Each recur installment could slot seamlessly into the others, a single long piece released in irregular chapters.

Berthold works with neural networks and algorithmic processes, but the machine logic here stays in the background. The foreground belongs to Tompkins’ cut-up voice and the strange, slipping rhythms beneath it. Their collaboration has settled into a durable pattern. recur⁷ doesn’t push forward so much as dig deeper into a rut they’ve made their own.