Robocobra Quartet: Hundred Pieces (November)

Robocobra Quartet’s 100-track album Hundred Pieces, out in November, pairs the band’s sprawling five‑hour music with 100 unique photos of home-grown mould — a bold, low-budget artwork experiment that music fans should notice for how it mirrors the record’s improvisatory logic.

Why it matters

The Belfast ensemble built Hundred Pieces around chance, layering jazz, hardcore and contemporary-classical textures across a marathon set. The visual idea grew alongside the music when saxophonist Thibault Barillon began cultivating agar plates at home. The results — vivid, unplanned organic patterns — became a one-to-one visual language for each track, signalling that the band treated sound and image as parallel, generative systems.

How the cover was made

Barillon drew a simple home-science toolkit together: agar plates, organic matter and time. He experimented with what appeared on each dish and photographed every culture in the same way — dead-centre, square format on a white background — creating a consistent frame for wildly different outcomes. Some plates were re-photographed days or weeks later as colonies shifted, echoing the album’s evolving pieces.

"One day I just bought some agar plates and started experimenting,"

— Thibault Barillon

The band noticed strong parallels between the petri process and their recording approach: chance-based moments, cross-pollination of ideas and allowing songs to find themselves. Those organic accidents now map directly onto the release: each of the 100 images will accompany a single track on Hundred Pieces.

Where you’ll see it

A rapid-fire GIF cycling through the 100 dishes will serve as the Spotify canvas for the key track, Haha, which drops in about a week. The band have also emphasised that Hundred Pieces was created without using AI, making the mould project a deliberately analog counterpoint to generative tech trends.

For fans intrigued by process as much as product, the project is a tidy, provocative package: five hours of sound matched to a hundred instances of slow, biological pattern-making — the kind of creative collision that rewards deep listening and a second look.