Russian wall noise artist Шумоизоляция is particularly skilled at imbuing their music with both immersive, static crackling and a sense of motion, elements that are, unfortunately, often mutually exclusive. Энтропия, which came out earlier this month, presented two thirty-minute slabs of sputtering crackles, the first, and sparser, of which ambles along without much urgency, while the second takes the form of a sonic mushroom cloud of fast-moving distortion. Нет Радости Бытия, despite its single track being louder and more abrasive than either of those previously mentioned, possesses an unsettling claustrophobia; its sustained conflagration seems to be constricted within the stereo field, perpetually trying to spread beyond an inescapable cage. In a way, it’s somewhat of an auditory representation of the cover art, which shows a roiling mixture of deep blacks and reds trapped behind restrictive scratches of gray. Like all of Шумоизоляция’s releases, Нет Радости Бытия is almost incapacitatingly immersive; it’s easy to lose yourself in the densely layered textures and the ghosts of rhythm that emerge after extended listening, but it’s much more contained than many of the artist’s unconfined blasts of fiery noise.
Noise Not Music 