Album Review: Aural Hallucinations, Flocking to the Nozone
Posted in Reviews on October 21st, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Headphones on or you might miss some of the birdsong. Flocking to the Nozone, which indeed begins with the first of several field recordings featured throughout before the swelling guitar and synth drone begins the 12-minute leadoff title-track, is the third full-length from the cross-oceanic two-piece Aural Hallucinations, with the esteemed lineup of Scott “Dr. Space” Heller (Øresund Space Collective, Doctors of Space, Black Moon Circle, etc.) and Matthew Couto (Kind, ex-Elder). In 2020, the synth-based duo offered Alucinações Auditivas (review here) as their remotely recorded debut, and followed with the correspondingly expansive Hearing What You See the next year.
As the band notes, the seven songs/79 minutes of Flocking to the Nozone represent the first time Couto and Heller actually got together in the same physical space to collaborate. Granted, the end result one way or the other is layers of synth and effects stacked on each other, manipulated and mixed for depth and/or reach, resulting in an immersive atmosphere, but even if you’ve never made an album, it’s easy to imagine it being different experientially when you’re in a room together responding in real-time as opposed to bouncing ideas back and forth via the internet. Nothing against that; many killer records are made remotely. Many killer records are recorded live. Fortunately there’s room for both in the grand ether of soundwaves.
Because I’m not an expert on either vintage or modern synthesizers — or, for that matter, anything else — I will cut and paste here the list of instruments Heller and Couto employed to make the record: “Pittsburgh Modular, Custom Modular, MOOG Spectravox, MOOG Opus 3, Jen SX1000 synthesizer, Bastl Kastle, Bastl Drum Kastle!, MFOS mini-moudlar, multiple guitar effects pedals (MXR-Reverb, Phaser, Carbon Copy, RAT, Snare Trap).” Recording took place over two days this past March in Stow, Massachusetts, at Couto‘s home studio, with Heller traveling from Portugal before taking the stems back to his Éstudio Paraíso nas Nuvens to mix and master.
The field recordings, birdsong and such, come from a Portuguese specialist in that regard named Luís Antero, and add much to the cosmic sprawl of the often-extended pieces, bringing a sense of reality to material that seems so ready otherwise to depart from it. They add more than it seems at first in terms of character, and could be further incorporated. It’s all pretty experimental sounding, however it was made. The closing pair of “Gois Paraíso” (6:37) and the rain-soaked “Vespas Aqui!” (7:34) are the shortest and arguably the noisiest of the drones created throughout, but they too are works of exploration, no less than the 18-minute centerpiece “Stow it Away Here,” which one can easily imagine seeing on a self-storage billboard somewhere near Couto‘s place, whether or not that’s the actual source of the title.
A well-duh focal point, “Stow it Away Here” is less a repository in the listening, but indeed doesn’t lack for elements coming and going around its persistent central drone and the odd blips and blops, varied in how it’s built up, but growing harsher and more aggressive in its midsection, echoing the distortion in “Vincy’s Primero Viagem” (13:45) earlier and likewise setting up the post-apocalyptic soundscaping of “Gois Paraíso” and the organ-driven final stretch of “Vespas Aqui!,” though when you’re dealing with something dug deeply enough into its own procession as the weirdo worldmaking of “Curps” (9:45) and “Flocking to the Nozone,” it’s all open to interpretation. That is, wherever “Stow it Away Here” takes you, I’m not arguing.
The point is that it goes, and if you can get yourself into the right headspace, you can even go with it, but Couto and Heller come across here and with the project generally as being more about the process than engaging listeners. Maybe that’s glaringly obvious when you hear it — 79 minutes of keyboardy, sometimes grating, likely entirely improvised psychedelic and cosmic drone is not going to be every casual listener’s cup of chá preto; shocking, I know — but the fact of the matter is that when they got together in-person as Aural Hallucinations, they were able to produce not only such a quantity of material, but pieces that are able to flow together cohesively and hypnotically as a whole work. “Vaca Fala” (10:17) picks up with some of the distorted rumble of “Stow it Away Here,” while at the same time shooting laser bursts and running a current of foreboding drone that sounds like something from the last Blade Runner movie. I’m not arguing with it or complaining about it; the times call for a bit of horror (not that Blade Runner is horror, but it does get dark), and “Vaca Fala” provides, leading deeper into the unknown with “Gois Paraíso” immediately following.
If that sounds like I’m setting up a narrative thread across the seven tracks of Flocking to the Nozone — as though perhaps the listener is right there in the flock with Heller and Couto as they make this plunge into more extreme drone and ambience — maybe I am a little bit, but true to the unstructured-feeling nature of the work generally, no single way of hearing it feels definitive, which leads me back to the above. If you hear space, great. If you hear Stow, Mass., great. Part of the appeal here, honestly, is that the medium becomes the message in terms of how open they’ve made the songs feel. Imagine heuristic painting and I think you’re not far off. If you want it in internet terms, it’s kind of like ‘fuck around and find out,’ except what they’re ‘finding out’ is that there’s a whole infinity of sounds waiting to be explored.
Clearly with the geographical disparity at play, it’s not like Couto can scoot over to Portugal every weekend to practice, and if I was Heller or, let’s say, anyone in Europe, I wouldn’t set foot on US soil right now for just about any reason if I didn’t have to, so it may be a little bit before Aural Hallucinations can offer a follow-up, but having proved the concept remotely already, they’ve now pushed that to the next level with in-person communication as instrumentalists, and Flocking to the Nozone feels accordingly next level. You should know going in it’s not for everybody, but nothing is, so you’ll be fine.
