Bendik Giske (NO/DE) is an artist and saxophonist whose expressive use of physicality, vulnerability and endurance have already won him much critical acclaim. You can hear all  of this in his debut album Surrender, released at the start of 2019 on Smalltown  Supersound, which can be described as Giske stripped to the core: no overdubs, looping,  or effects. Just his body, breath, the saxophone and a resonant physical space, plus lots  of microphones.  The body is important for Giske, even more so than as an acoustic musician. Not just in  the strength and muscle control required to accomplish circular breathing on the  saxophone, the unusual technique he employs to mesmerizing effect. It's also reflected in  the tradition of dance he practiced as a child in Bali - where he split his time between  Oslo with his artist parents - and enjoyed as part of an electronic music epiphany in his  adopted hometown of Berlin. And body is implied in his sense of queerness, which has  helped him create his own sound, blossoming luxuriantly not only on record but also in  his striking, embodied performances.  As such, in the past Giske has likened his performance to transmuting electronic music  through all of his human faults, akin to becoming a machine. And with second album  Cracks he introduces a new set of parameters for the automated processes of his muscle  memory to work against. His decision to collaborate with producer André Bratten and his  extensive studio of electronic machines saw Giske play in the new 'resonant' space of  Bratten's reactive studio tuned to his original sounds.  In a sense, you could call it generative music - a term coined by Brian Eno to describe  music made within a set of rules that can constantly evolve within that system. But here  the only algorithms at work are responding to Giske's self-imposed constraints (or  parameters) - like the afore-mentioned circular breathing. As a practice, it induces in the  player - and perhaps the listener, too - a kind of altered state, more open to discovery,  and as a cycle of sound it defies time. This atemporality, or out-of-timeliness, hints at  theorist José Muñoz's notion of "queer time", which is a chronology wholly other than  the default.  If this new studio-as-an-instrument process has brought Giske one step closer to the  man-machine, it's also a way to bridge the separation - or crack - between the two. This  kind of liminal space, according to Giske, is to be treasured: "The tracks wedge  themselves into the cracks of our perceived reality to explore them for their beauty. A  celebration of corporeal states and divergent behaviors," he explains. He cheerfully  admits to mining the thought universe of Muñoz - especially his book Cruising Utopia- as  inspiration, and the resulting Cracks have a sensual, deeply-felt and lingering beauty with  a touch of the superhuman.