Release Date: 09th Feb 2026
Coaxial, the experimental electronic project of Somerset-born musician and academic Benjamin J. Heal, returns with Redux Trilogy, an ambitious triptych of cassette releases that rejects linear listening in favour of recombination, interference, and shared analogue experience. Released on Cruel Nature Recordings, Coju Records, and Endogenic Noise, Redux Trilogy arrives on 9 February 2026 as a three-part system designed to be heard individually, sequentially, or—most radically—simultaneously.

Active since 2017, Coaxial has built a reputation for rigorous, concept-driven electronic work rooted in tape manipulation, analog synthesis, drone, and chance operations. Heal—also known for his work as bassist in Bristol’s skewed math-rock group Birdbath, noise project Cowman, and dream-pop duo The Lost Letters—uses Coaxial as a site for more austere and exploratory practices. Much of the project’s output has appeared via limited cassette editions on Steve Strode’s Cruel Nature Recordings, earning sustained attention within experimental and underground electronic circles.

At once a musical work and a listening strategy, Redux Trilogy is a response to five years of global rupture: the COVID-19 pandemic, renewed wars, accelerating political extremism, and the increasing enclosure of cultural life within digital platforms. Rejecting solitary algorithmic consumption, Heal proposes an explicitly offline mode of engagement—listeners are encouraged to gather tape equipment, share physical space, and explore the trilogy as a collective act of attention and resistance.

A TRILOGY AS SYSTEM, NOT STATEMENT

Rather than functioning as three discrete albums, Redux Trilogy operates as a recombinatory system. Each cassette can stand alone, but all are intended to be layered together in any configuration, producing dense auditory palimpsests, chance synchronisations, and emergent meanings. This approach draws on Heal’s academic background in Beat Studies—particularly the cut-up and tape experiments of William S. Burroughs and Ian Sommerville—alongside influences ranging from Aphex Twin’s Analord series and Derek Bailey’s improvisational ethos to Pauline Oliveros’ philosophy of deep listening and the radical multi-speaker logic of The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka.

COAXIAL — Redux Media

Cruel Nature Recordings | Cassette | February 2026

Redux Media is the first aperture in the trilogy and its material base layer: a reductive analog synth work built on motorik pulses and looping sequences that subtly drift out of alignment. Operating in the spirit of coaxial transmission itself—multiple channels sharing a single axis—the music explores repetition, miscalculation, and slippage. Order is present, but never secure. Krautrock and Kraftwerk inspired, but not derivitive.

Micro-errors in timing and tuning introduce a hypnotic instability that never resolves, producing a sense of perceptual unease beneath the apparent rigidity of the system. Fully functional as a standalone release, Redux Media is also designed to be played simultaneously with the other two cassettes, acting as both foundation and provocation—a structure that actively invites interference. Here, Heal pares his vocabulary to its barest components, allowing repetition itself to become expressive: an engine for hallucination, erosion, and accidental meaning.

COAXIAL — Firemaniac

Coju Records | Cassette | February 2026

Released on Heal’s own Coju Records, Firemaniac forms the durational core of Redux Trilogy. Built from field recordings of a gong—originally captured in 2012 by Guy Bartell of Bronnt Industries Kapital as part of the abandoned Human Sacrifice II project—the sound is stretched, degraded, and re-circulated through tape loops until source and resonance collapse into a single smouldering continuum.

Where Redux Media articulates system and sequence, Firemaniac inhabits sustain and combustion. A single strike is made to burn indefinitely through recursion. Over time, harmonic overtones emerge and decay, producing slow internal motion within what initially appears static. The title suggests both ritual and obsession: repetition as devotion, looping as compulsion. Each return is familiar yet increasingly altered, as memory erodes and meaning dissolves into texture.

Within the trilogy’s simultaneous playback configuration, Firemaniac acts as an atmospheric binding agent—smearing edges, filling negative space, and destabilising form. Alone, it is meditative and severe; recombined, it becomes volatile fuel.

COAXIAL — Wittgenstein–Cronkite–Hellholes

Endogenic Noise | Cassette | February 2026

The final cassette, released in collaboration with Endogenic Noise, is the most overtly referential and corrosive entry in the trilogy. Inspired in part by the death of Brian Wilson—and what Heal identifies as the concurrent death of interesting twentieth-century popular music—Wittgenstein–Cronkite–Hellholes treats sound as a compromised language system: quotations without origin, gestures detached from meaning, broadcasts from collapsing institutions.

Fragments are borrowed, distorted, and hollowed out, forming a sonic essay on authorship, cultural terminality, and the impossibility of originality after saturation. The title’s triangulation—language, mass media and its personification, religious imagery and the void—mirrors the album’s internal logic. Reportage mutates into echo; logic games collapse into noise; memory becomes a recursive trap.

When layered with the other two cassettes, Wittgenstein–Cronkite–Hellholes functions as the trilogy’s destabilising agent, puncturing coherence and dragging the system toward semantic overload. Beneath the apparent chaos lies a rigorous interrogation of how we listen, remember, and assign value.

PROCESS, PLACE, AND CHANCE

Redux Media was recorded in two takes at Heal’s Slaughterhouse Studio in Taiwan in 2022. Wittgenstein–Cronkite–Hellholes was produced on a laptop across multiple countries over the course of a decade. Chance operations—including references to the I Ching—were integral throughout the trilogy, reinforcing its resistance to mastery and closure.

The cassette format is essential rather than nostalgic, explicitly invoking Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message: degradation as process, repetition as revelation, and listening as a physical, time-bound act.

LIVE: Heal will perform as Coaxial at “London Interzone” at The Horse Hospital, London, in September 2026, presenting material from Redux Trilogy in an immersive live configuration.