Usually, I don’t have to listen to an album very many times before I feel like I can describe and express what I enjoy about it. With Care, things happened differently. I listened to it once, and afterwards I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I listened another time, still ambivalent. I only knew that I wanted to hear it again. Now, after five or six times through, I can confidently say that Care is one of this year’s most enigmatic and elusive releases…and one of its best. Sound artist Klara Lewis and composer Simon Fisher Turner team up to create blissful, dense soundscapes with metallic edges. Opener “8” traipses across a wide map of textures, somehow feeling gradual and sudden at the same time; the swirling, airy drones flow in and out, their distance and intangibility lulling you into a trance — and then whiplashing flashes of samples and processed noises force you back to earth. This is a sonic relationship that the rest of the album continues to explore, to amazing results. The sound these two artists have achieved resides in some inexplicable middle ground between calming ambience and industrial punch, though overall the effect is calming, not so far off from the soft pink gossamer strands on the cover. A truly impressive, unique release, one that requires a lot of time to fully decipher (at least it did for me).

No Hell is a record that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time. These three musicians, whose work outside this album I unfortunately know nothing about, take the listener on an angry odyssey through ambitious style experiments, atmosphere building, and incendiary blasts of all-out aggression. No Hell could easily have fallen apart at the seams, overstuffed with the staggering amount of stuff that gets thrown at you, but it doesn’t. Not even close. Each time the final notes of beautiful closer “Good Old Way (Reprise)” arrive, it feels like the album just started a few minutes ago. “Loup Garou” is a fiery start with labyrinthine songwriting, “No Gate to Close” adds almost black metal-esque flavors with its fast-picked guitars and driving drum blasts even as the anthem “there is hope beyond these teeth!” is called out, “No Hell” delivers more scalding fury in under a minute than many artists can introduce in ten, “Days Gone” slowly crushes with its patient texture layering and false crescendos…and that’s all in the first six tracks of the LP, about twenty minutes! The sheer eclectic density and the cohesive package in which it is presented is what keeps me coming back to No Hell pretty much every day since its release.

One word stuck out to me in the short summary of Metaforma on the Mahorka Bandcamp page. It’s a favorite word of mine, one that often sticks out no matter what the context, especially in regards to music: primordial. Ancient, primitive, primal, visceral…I would use all of these to describe Metaforma, but it embodies those words in a subtle, unusual way. Produced with field recordings, modular synthesis, and various instruments, side A of the tape plays with bright, shimmering layers that are thin but dense. The way the sounds are mixed together avoids highlighting each individual element; instead, they come together to produce these light-filled constructions, rich yet homogeneous — which probably explains their density. The pieces amble along slowly, floatingly, and it’s easy to get lost in the movements of these sounds, even when rhythm is introduced. Side B, made by combining harmonic generator tones with two tape decks, maintains the lethargic pace, but these textures are much colder than the ones before. Not mechanical, nor metallic, just icier; it’s not difficult to imagine falling snow and gnarled icicles. Despite my focusing on them, Ab Uno’s unconventional methods don’t distract from the music, but it’s interesting to know how such unique noises were created.