The reason I haven’t posted any reviews since the beginning of the month is that I’ve been wrestling with how to approach Sunik Kim’s titanic EXISTENZ: The Third Malformation, or Combinatorial Rotation of The City / The Tunnels / The House / The Beach (Fragment 3.1 Folio X “ANOMALY”). The 6-hour, 6xCD‑R set is one of three inaugural entries in the LA-based polymath’s new in-house imprint Castrati, alongside the single CD‑R Evanescent Sequence and the handbound essay anthology Brainstorm / Two Short Guns. No single creation by an artist exists in a vacuum and can always be interpreted as a part of the continuum of their oeuvre, but here it is an absolute necessity. Since her 2019 debut Zero Chime, Kim has expanded her body of work with a disciplined, thoughtful dialectics befitting of its Marxist underpinnings, from the frenzied sonic superpositions Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (2022) and Potential (2023) to the history-steeped fractured rave electronics of Tears of Rage (2024). A more distinct theoretical backbone began to materialize with Formenverwandler (2025), “an exploration of the shock and terror of time” via Conlon Nancarrow’s “temporal-perceptual” compositional practices. All of it has led to this, a new frontier in computer music.

In “Zones of Illusion”, Kim tracks the tradition’s evolution from dance music into a novel but problematic art form in which “all music is reduced to interchangeable surface,” a fate inevitable in even the most abstract of its manifestations. In this sense the “experiment” of computer music is a failed one, just another base corruption of capital. And yet there remains an “escape hatch”; by foregrounding the artifice, the interchangeability, music can become a revelatory tautology for the subject—me, you, the listener—such that we become its own “zone of illusion.” EXISTENZ is proof of concept. In the accompanying essay, Kim writes,

If my recent work has been tinged with a kind of optimism in exhaustion—seeking out the potentials nearer to the swoop of zero—stringing dead matter into sheaves and lattices—I am increasingly interested in traversing that zero in search of a music of active negativity.

From this starting point, we can think of EXISTENZ as a journey toward something, or, to use Kim’s terminology, a map of a journey. In the spirit of true subversion, it is not the music itself that progresses. Where in the past her SuperCollider algorithms were deployed in order to generate sound that flows outward, this is an exhaustive, self-conscious turn inward. Each of the four segments (dubbed without separation across the six discs) flails in wracked stasis, coalescing in isolated bursts of activity that range from the frenetic to the lethargic. When confronted with the former, one feels exhilarated, while the latter often only invite bewilderment. And in between are bouts of near-silence, in which the loudest thing is anticipation. The first few minutes of the second segment, “EXISTENZ AB(f)AB(r)”, serve as an example: bitcrushed tendrils coil in writhing motion, exploding in crackling cybernetic lashes, building toward… silence, a loose mess of halting MIDI-like tones, then more silence. Nothing advances, nothing develops. We are left with a structural logic that is catachrestic at best, nonexistent at worst. Sparks across the void. Where do we find meaning when by design there is none to be found?

Kim’s essays are whirlwinds of eclectic synthesis, conversing with everything from Mao and Hồ to Orlando and Resident Evil, and in reading them to try and make sense of this behemoth I’m inspired to sketch my own wide-ranging connections. The intimidating runtime brings to mind Hecker’s absurd 51-hour composition Syn As Tex [AC], but EXISTENZ is the result of much more curation and tangibility due to its explicit conceptual backing, titled sections, and existence as a hand-assembled physical edition. The intentional, artful glitch-tedium resembles recent releases by Luciano Maggiore like self-talk, but the movement here is denser, more mercurial. The most apt comparison I could make isn’t to a piece of music at all, but rather to literature: Richard Makin’s “non-generic prose” trilogy (Work, Dwelling, Mourning), which embarks on a similar project of totally oblique semantic architecture, actively disruptive of its own momentums. In stripping away any and all substance of human convention while retaining its machinic scaffolding, the human becomes more present than it ever could be before—another practice that Kim absorbed from Nancarrow.

In The History of the Devil, Vilém Flusser claims that “When listening to music we are being confronted with the structures of reality.” In a roundabout way, this particular axiom was the key I needed to unlock the “black box” that is EXISTENZ. It is not the structures of reality as a whole that it reveals. It is their opacity, the impossibility of such a primordial revelation. It is the phenomenal reality we ascribe to materiality—something that has always been a central concern of this site. Those punishing storms of dissonant collisions are charged with the electricity of experience; those waddling synth notes are the 8-bit soundtrack to the grand game, the “mastery” of which is “fleeting, isolated and local.” Toward the end of “Fragment 3.1 Folio X ‘EXCEPTION’ SUM 88”, I swear there are voices. Kim asks, “What would it feel like to experience music as a traversal or navigation through a space? What would it feel like to experience music as ‘going through something’—surviving against all odds?” It feels like this. The perspective is singular but not exclusive. It melds with ours through listening. The contradictions resolve through social connection, a hard-won catharsis that only art this radical can achieve. It resists understanding at all costs, but understand it we must. I agree with Kim that there is political potential here too, but that’s something I’ll dig into elsewhere.

EXISTENZ, and by extension this whole first Castrati batch, represents a level of ambition with little precedent. Don’t let the small scale of its distribution mislead you; this is more exciting and challenging music than anything being produced with institutional support. True guerrilla avant-garde. Read, listen, think, count. “We have barely begun to hear music.”

During a recent conversation about likes and dislikes in live noise, a good friend made an observation that resonated with me. It was something along the lines of, “I always prefer a set that you can tell is cathartic for the performer over one that is more concerned with being cathartic for the audience.” I couldn’t agree more; for me noise is such a personal thing that draws all its power from genuine passion rather than theatrics. And when I think back to all the great artists I’ve seen play in just the past few years, the one who emerges as the shining example of this is Dries Beernaert, a.k.a. Vincent Dallas. His set at the now-defunct basement venue The Nurse’s Station while on tour with Geseling and JHK is a fond memory: direct-action metal ’n pedal abuse slung with such heat that it made the cold stone walls sweat. And of all the enthusiasts crammed into the small space, he was somehow still having even more fun than any of us. Dwalen Door het Bos in Mijn Hoofd is the latest ecstatic explosion in Beernaert’s ongoing campaign of “global noise terrorism”—a tagline also attested to by his ocean-hopping roster of labels—and happens to be a new high point. I tend to not be a fan of full stereo separation, especially when it comes to solo projects, but there’s a lot more going on here than just two random sessions thrown into each channel. When both “chapters” begin you’re immediately aware of the split, especially “Barvoetsten alleen” when it takes nearly a minute for the volume level on the left to catch up with the right, a risk that pays off as the rest of the track morphs from side to side. Loops and feedback echo each other across the center, building toward an all-out assault that hits way harder when it finally coalesces. It’s messing with more structural complexity than previous instant classics like Artiest Zonder Circus, a tape another friend described as “caveman shit” (and how dare he, because “though shalt not lahahahahahaugh with serious art”), without sacrificing any of the raw unbridled joy of distortion worship. Those screeches toward the end of “Desondanks de duisternis…” will have you seeing god, or whatever you call it.

Though it’s been almost four years since Puddle mastermind Dan Valetic was interviewed by Brisbane (Meanjin) blog Language of the Damned, and doubtless many of the artists’ opinions and approaches have evolved since then, it’s still true that the project is “harsh noise/power electronics for the end of the world.” He also discusses the influence he owes to early industrial acts like SPK and how it informs the “uncomfortable intensity” and “sense of foreboding chaos” in his work, currents that reach a fever pitch with What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You. The C60—Puddle’s third entry in the stacked catalog of local imprint Minimal Impact (also interviewed by LotD back in 2023)—grafts the best appendages of previous material onto a new and improved metallic mutant, the degraded fidelity and strangled howls of The Gift That Keeps on Giving meeting the sparking powerline ferocity of Peeling Back the Layers of Unbridled Joy. Those tapes felt more like sketchbooks in terms of structure, gleaning appeal from their freeform drift and abundance of ideas, but this one is more focused right off the bat. Each of the tracks is a thrash of gain-maxed scrabble and white-hot feedback laid straight to tape via Valetic’s refined junkyard arsenal, tightly controlled despite the length. “The Endless Tentacles of an Evil Network” writhes in the mid to high register, trapped in stumbling stasis while subtly escalating tension. The heavy use of dry delay is the backbone of the A side, chittering away in the belly of the mix and rearing its head with piercing surges. Another essential ingredient is the gloriously abysmal recording quality, which serves as impediment-qua-complement to the noise. This is especially true in the case of the two B-side tracks that are even more stifled, clawing themselves out of inaudibility and trembling between stereo channels like sick animals—“Lambs Set for Slaughter,” if you will. Crank the volume to melt them out of their misery.

Copies are still available direct from the label. For those in the US, Skeleton Dust will soon have it in stock along with the other great tapes in the batch by ฝรั่ง and Sharps Formation.

Rejoice, friends: an excellent new label was birthed this February. Pennsylvania’s Brandon Dunlap, (who also runs Astral Research and plays in the very good psych band Fade to Pharaoh) released the first two tapes on Light of My Life on Valentine’s Day. They are, without any reservations, both scorchers, trafficking in many of my favorite things: opaque themes, disquieting surrealism and sonics so outré they’re bordering on antagonistic.

Houses of the Holy by Crying Motherfuckers, (a “collaborative effort” with no listed participants, though we have our suspicions) is an early contender for the year’s rippingest C20. The A side, “Receding Gun”, kicks it off with a wonderful, crunchy base layer that soaks up most of the low frequencies, punctured by intermittent feedback bursts that are somewhat reminiscent of a vibraslap. An eerie tonal, perhaps choral, loop creeps in, becoming more prominent as it malforms. The arrangement is progressive and well-considered, and repeated listens revealed that in spite of the chaos, everything sits quite well in the mix.

“Star With No Wish” is a different beast, opening with a startling stab of something harmonic (a MIDI horn?) before giving way to creeping, delay-driven fog. There are slow, deliberate and inaudible vocals that ratchet the dread up a few degrees. Death industrial? Not really, but I’m not mad if you come out feeling that way. There are occasional melodic intrusions and some disorienting panning that cement the funhouse-ride-from-hell feeling; and of course, there’s some release from all this anxiety.

Even more inscrutable is Angel Examination Room’s untitled C10. It lasts a little under 6 minutes, and yet I have found myself chewing on it since it arrived in my mailbox. The easiest way to describe what’s happening here is through the project’s name and what it evokes: a juxtaposition of the loaded-with-meaning word “Angel” with the quotidian “Examination Room.” It’s a jarring collision between the awe-inspiring and the mundane.

The liner notes (machine-embroidered on the back of the fabric 10” sleeve that houses this tape and its chicken wire mount) note the tools employed: “handheld tape recorder, 12 string guitar, rotting wheelchair, AM/FM radio, seance tape.” Interrogating it much beyond that would spoil the fun, but this is indeed a very tape-heavy sound.

A side “Young Terminal Wings” opens with some wild oscillating tones. The recording jumps speeds and lurches around before giving way to glassy clattering. Again, we have a wild arrangement; one gets the sense it could have been an intensely labored construction or a free improvisational burst of fast-forwarding and rewinding. Either way, it’s compelling stuff. “Specimen on Stained Glass” is somewhat harsher and a little more playful, with perhaps a little of the aforementioned 12-string. Where the wheelchair comes into play is yet to be determined.

A strong debut from a very promising label. Lucky for you, the Crying Motherfuckers tape (edition of 25) is still available for purchase from the label. The Angel Examination Room tape is sold out, but there have been whisperings of an eventual reissue. Stay on top of this; it’s shaping up to be something special.

When FIM kicked off in January 2024, it was the CD by Stalwart (the quartet of label founders Caleb Duval and Luke Rovinsky with Ben Eidson and James Paul Nadien) that felt most like a mission statement. Raucous and irreverent, intentionally dissonant, as interested in being combative as in arriving at some sort of cursed textural harmony, the music was and is emblematic of what I see as an exciting movement away from stylistic stagnancy and calcifying tropes in contemporary improvised music. If Blessed was the manifesto, then Enough Nihilism is the praxis. Duval (double bass) and Rovinsky (electric guitar) are once again joined by skin-shredding partner in crime Michael Larocca for this follow-up to HI-FI LO-IQ and various one-off collaborations, and the single-day, nearly eighty-minute session is their most ambitious release yet. Weasel Walter’s liner notes, though deservedly effusive, adopt an angle I find a tad reductive; while I agree that the material is a breath of fresh air in an overcrowded, “overeducated” tradition, his characterization of it as “relentlessly assaulting form and maintaining a ceaseless, bloody-minded aural intensity” misses the mark. Not only are there actually some almost tender bits here, the trio’s interplay is also less about “deconstructing” or “vandalizing” conventions and more about building their own. Sure, there’s disruption—all signs point to Duval trafficking the pop fragments (radio? sampler?) yet no one takes official credit, probably to avoid legal and/or moral culpability—but there’s also connection, moments where things which cannot or should not coexist do so anyway, and they’re beautiful. Larocca’s spider skitters and predilection for brushes pair well with Duval and Rovinsky’s string tension abuse. They get almost jazzy on “Highland Park”, then meld symbiotically with Chief Keef toward the end of “Green Jacket and Maroon Fleece.” The hard panning starts to wear on the ears a bit, and sometimes the more conventional drum rhythms throw a wrench in the momentum rather than pushing anything forward, but that’s just a natural part of taking real musical risks—not all of them pay off. Hoping to see these guys play this year, I can’t imagine it isn’t a blast to see.

When I asked Bob Pulinski about this release, he simply said, “The fan had to be recorded.”

There are times and places for field recordings captured with the utmost fidelity and the least human presence possible. But as I’ve become a more curmudgeonly listener, I find less value in them as standalone music. Internal Electric Fan is the glorious opposite. It distills the practice to its most basic essence: not only the sharing of a sound, but the process of doing so. There is no editing; we hear the activating of the recorder, the scrabbling as it is moved into place, and the turning on of the fan itself. And what a fan it is. Far too noisy for any appliance that could fit in a “room at the electronics store,” a heavy current of hot air over the unmistakable hum and warble of a cheap noisy motor. It had to be recorded. But other things remind us of the room around it. There’s shuffle as Pulinski (I think) sidles over to sit and listen, creaking doors and more movement in the background (or foreground?), a dog (??) jangles its collar. The fan quiets down a bit eightish minutes into “Fan #1” (or does it?). The overall length tells us something too. It takes exactly this long to truly understand the fan, and perhaps even the room that it’s in. Get to the end, and the payoff is sublime—exactly what you think will happen happens, but you could never have predicted it would happen the way it happens. Intimate and beautifully boring, as it should be. Pulinski has the answers. He is sitting in a room (at the electronics store) different from the one you are in now. He is recording the internal electric fan.

Copies (only $7) are available via email: jan95cdrs@gmail.com.

The most understated of Canada noise legend Alan Bloor’s projects, Pholde encompasses his experiments with the sonic properties of metal in a more meditative, ambient context than the extreme amplifications of Knurl or full-throttle distortion of Pyrox. Following 2022’s Deprive of Power, The Central Core is his second tape on Vacancy and fits right in on the Niagara label’s roster of homespun sound art. When Bloor performs live, he usually rakes handheld files against either tined sculptures of his own creation or manufactured components like grill grates, looping and layering the resulting sounds to construct hypnotic tactile drones. The visual dimension isn’t here, so while it’s likely that he made these recordings with the same hands-on approach, they are so patient and methodical that they could easily have come from motorized contraptions operating of their own accord. “To Rule Against” especially evokes a forgotten machine still running in the depths of some cavernous industrial sanctum, its lonely revolutions echoing against the walls. The appeal is similar to something like Small Cruel Party—the simple pleasure of materials making contact—but the scale feels much larger, just as intimate but with more space to breathe. After decades of honing his craft, Bloor has exceptional control of pacing and dynamics; “The Lower Level Is Obtained” slowly swells like an open ocean wave, complete with tortured high-pitched scrapes like wistful whale calls.

Tracked during a cold Berlin January in 2024, this first meeting of Jordan Topiel Paul (snare drum) and Bryan Eubanks (synth) finally sees life two years later. What seems to be an inauspicious instrumental pairing soon reveals itself to be anything but on Pushovers. The interplay between Paul and Eubanks approaches psychic levels. Their unified interest in certain textural inflections makes it difficult to discern where one’s contributions end and the other’s begin. The close alignment of Paul’s all-acoustic setup and Eubanks’ direct-input electronics is a testament to how well-recorded the session is: careful mic placement ensures the former’s precise hits and jumps across the stereo field are just as clear and agile as the latter’s gain swells and whip-panning. I also can’t tell (thanks to my woeful ignorance of modular workings, no doubt) whether Eubanks is processing the snare live or simply using patches that sound percussive. Either way, it’s an alluring dynamic that more often comprises mutual construction rather than response, with both improvisors embracing a classical ratatat-tat ethos, so to speak. The inclinations toward persistent but elastic repetition reminds me of French duo Phanes, whose self-titled release I reviewed several years ago. I also love the moments when Paul sets down the sticks and instead rides the strainer, setting the wires in flux between their two primary tensile states, a blurring of a boundary that’s crucial to extended snare exploration canonized by Murayama and others. The duo shows signs of running out of steam toward the end of the lengthy “Boletus / En polvo,” but they stick the landing with the more concise “Toffee / Muroidea.”