Don DeLillo, White Noise
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NEW SUBMISSION POLICY BELOW; PLEASE READ
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Welcome to Noise Not Music. Here you’ll find reviews of recent albums, various features and lists, and occasional mixes. I do not agree with the statement I’ve chosen as the title for this site; everything I write about here—a great deal of which could be called “noise”—is music. Catchy name though, eh?
I tend to focus on material that resides in the experimental or avant-garde realm of music, but nothing is off limits. If you have an album you’d like me to review, please email me or comment on a post. When I say nothing is off limits, I really mean it. However, I only review albums I like, and the “reviews” themselves (“blurbs” might be a more accurate label, but god, what an awful word) are more intended to encourage discovery rather than to express my personal opinion. Also, I will be much more likely to review an album if it is not sent as a promo blast/press kit. I almost always restrict coverage to things that have come out in the past two weeks or so.
Currently the site is written by just me, Jack, but I’m open to expanding in the future. If you’d like to write a guest review or essay (or anything, honestly; I’m not picky), just let me know.
See what I’m listening to/liking here:
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Contact/submit via noisenotmusic1@gmail.com
Email for physical address. Based in New York, USA
**I will no longer review or link to any material hosted solely on Bandcamp. Only submissions of any other kind—self-hosted, physical (email for address), file transfer, FMA, Soulseek, etc.—will be accepted. I know this is not the most convenient policy for many, but blame Bandcamp, not me. If you have rehosted previously reviewed material elsewhere and want me to switch links, please reach out.**
**Material hosted on Nina Protocol or any other platform associated with cryptocurrency, NFTs, or artificial scarcity of any kind is also very much unwelcome here.**
Mid-Year Favorites: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2̶0̶2̶2̶
Favorite Albums of the Year: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
⮡ Short Releases: 2020, 2021
⮡ Compilations, Archival, etc: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
⮡ Cassettes: 2021
⮡ Eponymous Debuts: 2020
⮡ Songs: 2020
⮡ Labels: 2018, 2019, 2021
⮡ Most Valuable Players: 2018, 2019
Naturalismo is a painful album. Not only because of its quick and surprising transitions from near-silence to loud, crushing distortion, but also because the raw emotion behind the music is palpable to say the least. Though the wordless language used by Portuguese artist Aries to convey these things is one I’m not sure many could translate, I’d argue that anyone who listens can understand. Naturalismo is filled to the breaking point with despair, defeat, anger, with brief islands of hope and peace appearing amidst the roiling ocean of sound. But these are just words; there really isn’t any way to verbally convey how I felt when a colossal tower of noise grew out of the barely audible glitches in the first part of “Precisamos de espelhos,” or the uneasy calm elicited by the lush ambient drifts of “Todo o tipo de ossos excepto o osso que eu queria.” It all just needs to be experienced.
Noise Not Music 