Five tracks. Spare, atmospheric, unplaceable. The bones of the thing belong to the lineage of experimental electronica — the slow-motion hauntology of early Ghost Box, the procedural gloom of Scott Walker's later period, perhaps a ghost of the more patient moments in Nick Cave's catalogue — but Syjuco isn't trafficking in influences so much as inheriting a sensibility and translating it into something unmistakably personal. The spoken word and prose poetry embedded throughout the record do not feel like affectations. They feel like the only honest way to communicate what he is after: the places where language is insufficient but cannot be abandoned.

"Nothing Ever Grows Here" opens proceedings with the unsettling patience of a man who has learned to sit with his own unease rather than resolve it. The atmosphere is one of scorched earth — emotional, not literal — and Syjuco's production work here is meticulous in its restraint. The temptation in experimental music is always to fill silence with texture, to prove sophistication through density. He resists. The space he creates is doing the work.

"Monster" continues in this vein but with something wetter, more visceral lurking beneath the surface. The word itself — monster — is one of those English words so overused by the culture-fear complex that it has lost almost all its teeth, and part of what makes this track so quietly unsettling is the way it refuses to rehabilitate or ironise the term. The monster here is ambient. Structural. It may be the narrator.

Then "The Box," which has already received some press attention and deserves every word of it. Gerald Mund — the protagonist, the ordinary suburban everyman whose afternoon is wrecked by a package that will not be opened, will not be ignored, refuses to yield to the rational tools of a rational man — is one of the more perfectly conceived characters to appear in a song this decade. The conceit is Kafka-adjacent, yes, but the genius is in the execution: Syjuco commits to the mundane with the same seriousness Kafka committed to the bureaucratic. The box is not a metaphor. Or rather: it is a metaphor that insists it is not, and that insistence is exactly the point. The accompanying production is taut, careful, claustrophobic in precisely calibrated doses.

"Almost" is the EP's most interior moment, and the one where the literary sensibility burns most clearly. The ritual chant elements that surface here give the track a ceremonial quality — not religious, exactly, but devotional in the way that certain kinds of grief become devotional. It is a track about proximity to something without ever arriving. The grammar of the title says everything.

"Goodnight My Darling" closes the record with a tenderness that has been earned by everything preceding it. This is not saccharine resolution — the existential dread hasn't dissolved, it has simply found a way to coexist with affection, which is perhaps the most honest depiction of adult emotional life one can offer. That Syjuco manages this without sentimentality is a feat of considerable craft.

Launched during the pandemic, Black Leather Birds began as Syjuco's outlet beyond the Jack of None aesthetic, and one of the pleasures of this EP is sensing how fully that space has matured. The debut EP, *The Color of Memory* (2021), announced a sensibility; *of Children and Their Sorceries* demonstrates it in command of its own logic. This is a record that does not explain itself, does not flatter its audience with too much accessibility, and does not apologise for the particular temperature of darkness it inhabits.

Anxiety and existential dread are, obviously, not shortage commodities in the contemporary cultural landscape. What distinguishes Syjuco's engagement with them is that he refuses the pose of the sufferer-as-hero. The terror in these songs is not grand. It arrives in packages. It lives in boxes that will not open. It is the thing that grows in soil where nothing else will. That, finally, is the achievement of of Children and Their Sorceries: it takes the scale of private fear seriously, and renders it with the exactitude of a composer who has learned, very carefully, when to speak and when to let the silence do the work that words cannot.