*Half A Century* arrives this month, in the year of its maker's fiftieth birthday, as the closing panel of a trilogy that began with 2024's *Selves* and continued through *Your Star Smells Like Mine*. Its eleven tracks put psychedelia, progressive rock, electronics, improvisation, formal composition and Balkan folk influence in one room and decline to referee. Where a lesser record would spend its running time arranging a truce, Nantschev lets his guests sort out their differences themselves. The result has the flavour of a good dinner party: the conversation is louder than planned, nobody leaves early, and the seating chart turns out to have been a work of genius.

His credentials for hosting are unusual. He served in the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra under Abbado, Boulez, Nagano and Gatti, played at Salzburg, and has spent two decades absorbing the hard-edged 20th-century repertoire of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Anyone who has lived inside those scores knows what rhythmic mischief and bitter beauty they hold, and that schooling gives the album its spine, a discipline that lets the psychedelic wanderings stay wandering rather than dissolving into fog. His debut recital disc, which went looking for rarities by Petar Christoskov and Georgi Zlatev-Cherkin, hinted at a musician drawn to the overlooked corners of the map. The Balkan colours here read as a homecoming to those corners rather than a tourist's souvenir.

Then came FeinSinn, the ensemble he co-founded in 2003 to marry music, dance and video art, and the two years spent with the Isadora visual-performance software. The album that emerged from that period, *Tea On The Moon*, was the first proof that the two ends of the balcony could share a stage. What was once a curiosity has become fluency. Violinist, singer, composer and producer in one, Nantschev has the rare advantage of a single mind at every control, and the record feels authored rather than assembled.

The conceit that has driven the trilogy, that the self is a crowded flat rather than a single room, gives the project its emotional logic. The hippie, the guru, the astronaut, the romantic, the classical composer and the rock star all get keys, and *Half A Century* is the record where they finally stop tiptoeing around one another. It would have been easy, at fifty, to make a victory lap. Nantschev has resisted the retrospective and delivered something braver: a completion. He closes the trilogy because it feels finished, not because he has run out of things to say, and that distinction is the difference between a farewell and a threshold.

The final gesture is the most affecting. Having tidied the past into eleven tracks, he admits the next chapter has already started to stir, its shape unknown, its arrival felt "in his bones". It is a fine thing to hear an artist at fifty sound less like a man settling accounts than one holding a door open.

Here is a record for anyone who has ever loved two kinds of music and been told to choose. Nantschev's answer, delivered with a violinist's precision and a psychonaut's grin, is to stay on the balcony. The view is superb.