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If “Wind Dynamic Organ, One & Two” was Zimoun standing quietly inside a breathing building, “Wind Dynamic Organ, Deviations” is what happens when someone switches on the lab lights and starts asking inconvenient questions. This is the same instrument, the same air, the same Bern Minster – yet the atmosphere shifts. Where the solo album trusted duration and physical presence, this collaboration with Taylor Deupree leans into curiosity, detours, and the gentle art of tampering.

Zimoun, whose practice habitually lives at the intersection of installation art and sound, brings with him an intimate knowledge of the organ’s behavior: how wind pressure wavers, how tones hover at the edge of stability, how air can sound like thought before it becomes language. Deupree, founder of 12k and a long-time explorer of digital restraint, approaches this material less as something sacred than as something malleable. The result is not desecration – far from it – but a series of careful incisions, each one revealing new layers under the skin of the sound.

The six “Deviations” are concise by comparison, almost aphoristic. Each piece takes a fragment of the organ’s voice and nudges it sideways: stretched, filtered, folded, refracted. Harmonics are teased apart like threads from an old fabric; low frequencies are massaged into soft, ominous pillows; high-end air noise becomes a grainy halo, hovering somewhere between mist and circuitry. Nothing here feels arbitrarily processed. Even at its most abstract, the music retains the memory of wind moving through pipes – breath remains the DNA.

There’s a subtle playfulness at work, too. Titles as austere as “Deviation I–VI” might suggest academic severity, but the music itself often smirks quietly. Sounds wobble, falter, reassemble. Moments of near-silence sit cheek by jowl with dense, softly buzzing clusters, as if the organ were briefly daydreaming about becoming something else entirely. This is experimentation without bravado: no grand gestures, no dramatic “look what we did to the organ” theatrics. Just patient listening, followed by thoughtful interference.

What makes “Deviations” compelling is the way it refuses to choose sides. It’s neither purely acoustic nor fully electronic, neither documentation nor composition in the traditional sense. Instead, it operates in a liminal zone where the instrument’s physical reality is continuously reinterpreted. You can hear the church space collapse into something more intimate, almost headphone-sized; you can also hear digital processes stretch the sound beyond anything the pipes could physically sustain. It’s less a remix than a conversation conducted in slow motion.

In the context of both artists’ careers, the album feels quietly inevitable. Zimoun has long been interested in systems that generate complexity through minimal intervention; Deupree has built a catalogue around subtraction, texture, and attention to micro-detail. Here, their sensibilities overlap without cancelling each other out. The organ remains stubbornly itself, but it’s allowed – encouraged, even – to wander.

“Wind Dynamic Organ, Deviations” doesn’t try to replace the solo recordings; it shadows them, questions them, pokes at their assumptions. It suggests that even the most carefully observed sound can be turned slightly, productively, off-axis. And in that small act of deviation, it reminds us that exploration doesn’t always mean going further – sometimes it just means listening again, from a different angle, while the air keeps moving.