I first encountered the music of Ushinawareta Tamashī on his split C120 with Warui Yume, one of Lurker Bias’s last releases in 2018. Though both walls were great, Tamashī’s really sucked me in. The dark soundscape of “Runessansu,” formed by an oppressive rumbling and a distant, persistent scraping, is claustrophobic but natural, and before I knew it I’d listened to the whole 60 minutes. Shinda Yuki is a less overtly wall release, with both tracks consisting of largely unmanipulated nature recordings, but the meditative, stagnant atmosphere is still present. The first part presents a much less compressed palette of textures than “Runessansu,” capturing the soft, tactile sounds of falling rain and rustling branches. Both tracks are recordings of storms, and as such the howling of the wind plays a significant role in each; in part one, the wind is a distant presence, occasionally creeping in the sides of the mix, while in part two, the gusts are much more isolated, cast into clarity by the muffling of the rain sounds. My favorite thing about Shinda Yuki is how much movement it evokes without, in a manner of speaking, going anywhere; even in subtle ways that aren’t immediately apparent, like the barely discernible crinkling noise amidst the din of part two.

This split C20 from two new California hardcore bands came out on the first day of 2019, and I love the idea of Potion’s “Sentenced to Death in the High Court of Judith Sheindlin” leading into “David Blaine Trapped Under Ice Pt. 2” being the first thing someone hears in the new year. Because oh boy, the A side of this tape is one of the most viciously intense grind I have heard in a while. The impossibly shrill vocals are like a dying animal, presumably being killed by whatever the fuck is making the contorting, dizzying electronic sounds that form Potion’s instrumental backbone (member Hunter Peterson is only credited with guitar, bass, and keyboards, so there must be some Ichirou Agata level craziness going on). The drums are just as brutal as everything else, all slamming double bass and furious blasts, until a sample from what sounds suspiciously like an episode of Xavier: Renegade Angel abruptly leads into Car Made of Glass’s side. Which—surprise!— is just as heavy. Here we get some (relatively) more straightforward grind-violence, frequently interrupted by bizarre interludes. The drums on the B side, both the way they’re played and how they’re recorded, are the driving force behind the insanity. Unfortunately, both bands end up relying way too much on samples, to the point where the flow is just disrupted, but everything else is so crazy I almost just don’t care.

Both Potion’s and Car Made of Glass’s sides can be downloaded from their Bandcamp pages, and a preorder for the actual tape release can be found here.

This tape came out almost immediately after I began my review hiatus for the month of December, an unfortunate circumstance because all I wanted to do was write about it. Double Goocher Shop is the self-titled debut release from the duo of Matthew P. Hopkins and Renato Grieco; the solo work of the former I am very familiar with, but I cannot say the same about the latter. The tape is a playful but dark romp through mysterious speech, nocturnal concrète ambience, and a distinct penchant for unseating and altering its already haphazard sonic constructions. By this I mean that even the most abstract moments on Double Goocher Shop are never immune from interference, whether it’s the disarming intermittent playback of the spoken nonsense that begins “#1,” the intrusion of silence and slow disintegration of what appears to be a live performance recording on “#parole,” or the bassy clunks that disturb the fragile atmosphere of “#3.” While there are many other elements to the music than just the words, they are what make me remain mesmerized by the tape on every listen. The way each line progresses into the next, how certain words or phrases are repeated several times, the almost uncomfortably hypnotizing effect; Double Goocher Shop belongs amongst the greats of the text-sound medium.