Berlin improvisational trio Primitive Structures bring their elusive mixture of degraded electronics, fractured jazz, psychedelic drift and post-industrial atmosphere to Krim Kram on A Merchant's Nightmare, a suite of nine spontaneous compositions that extends a practice developed through releases for Kashual Plastik, Altered States and Freuyd & Verdrusz. Made up of David Roeder of Nein Rodere, Kashual Plastik founder Frans Aembient and the musician known as Timu, the group operates less through fixed genre than through a shared instinct for unstable forms, worn surfaces and oddly persistent melody.

Primitive Structures emerged from Berlin's experimental underground around 2021, developing an improvisational language that draws equally from DIY electronics, guitar-based abstraction, free-form rhythm, dub-like space and a strangely displaced idea of jazz. Their 2022 debut Your Event Is Our Rehearsal already suggested this breadth, moving through analogue textures, improvised guitar, folk-blues traces, psychedelic repetition and eccentric rhythmic structures; subsequent releases have further refined the trio's ability to make loosely assembled material feel internally coherent without losing its provisional, exploratory quality.

On A Merchant's Nightmare, that language becomes particularly cinematic. Pieces move through sparse, decaying environments where blurred instrumental gestures, grainy electronics and fragmented rhythms suggest abandoned industrial spaces, while elsewhere the trio approaches an oblique European free-jazz vocabulary, with distant echoes of Italian improvisation and the stranger margins of soundtrack music. Melodic fragments surface through the haze only to become distorted, repeated or swallowed by texture, giving the music a peculiar balance of familiarity and disorientation.

Tracks including Zhero, Penkere, Lonely Divider, Stupid HI-FI and Thunder Grain rarely settle into conventional development. Instead, the trio relies on spontaneous juxtaposition, repetition and shifts of density, allowing crude or seemingly accidental materials to accumulate into temporary structures. The result can be abrasive or unexpectedly gentle, archaic and futuristic at once, with humor never far from the surface.

Rather than treating improvisation as a display of instrumental technique, Primitive Structures use it as a means of constructing environments: murky, unstable spaces where jazz, electronics, psychedelia, collage and damaged song forms coexist according to their own dream logic. A Merchant's Nightmare captures that approach in one of the trio's most concentrated statements, balancing desolation, wit and strangely inviting melodic detail across nine compact pieces.