There are always things both lost and gained when one favors transparency in naming tracks. Artists like Toshiya Tsunoda and Taku Unami (as is apparent from the titles of the pieces that comprise their Wovenland series on Erstwhile) believe that a sound being identified is what provides and ensures its significance, while many others (including myself) would disagree. I’d instead argue that identification guarantees a particular kind of significance, one that emphasizes the sonic character of the sound itself rather than its overall presentation or aesthetic. This is ostensibly acknowledged in the case of Emanuele Fais’s new release Haikustica, self-described as “raw recordings, no editing, no effects, no structures. Just pure sounds.” This purity is partly achieved via the track titles, which reveal exactly what is being used in each of the improvisations (“Singing bowl and bells,” “Broken guitar strings,” “Trash bin,” etc.), but also through the crystal-clear quality of the recordings, which contain little to no intrusions from the surrounding environment/location—with the exception of “Found percussions and field recordings.” Thus, the objects, devices, and other materials that Fais uses are not situated in a preexisting space, but rather they create the space. This is especially apparent on the “Self-built junk instrument” tetralogy of tracks, whose audio-physical dimensions expand and contract along with the intensity and volume of Fais’s performance. Haikustica is an excellent release for those who enjoy both junk/clutter improvisation (a la A Realistic Morning Prayer or Discordant Seeds) and the crystalline sublimity of Max Eastley’s installation work.

Since March, when I first encountered Max Nordile’s Hair Clinic project and reviewed its inaugural release Mirror in a Bag, the Oakland-based multimedia artist has churned out seven more albums of varying sizes, including the full-length “Jim’s Place” tape on the always-excellent Regional Bears label. Since the archetypal “non-music” improvisations of its debut, Hair Clinic has evolved to encompass a much wider variety of subversive sonic practice. In his interview with Thomas DeAngelo for Mutually Assured Marginality, Regional Bears head Louis Golding described the character of the project as both “careless” and “nicely done,” a “fun kind of no technique field recordings… harvested field recordings.” Such a summation is especially applicable to recent documents such as Early Music, which encompasses a multitude of aspects of the mundane everyday such as snatches of radio broadcasts, distant traffic, conversations, gusts of wind, and other less identifiable elements. I’ve written about the way in which a distortion or obscuration of intentionality is an important aspect of non-music, something that reaches a punk-rock zenith in the case of Nordile’s single-microphone “lens,” which treats semblances of musicality, accidents, annoyances, and even acknowledgements of the presence of a recording device with equal attention. The line between the artist’s eponymous releases and his work as Hair Clinic increasingly blurs as this aggressively democratic approach becomes more established and the separations between his musical and anti-musical predilections steadily dissipate.

An album’s cover is frequently a reliable indicator of how harrowing of an experience the music contained within will be. This is certainly true for Extravios, the first release by the duo of Christian Moser and Paula Sanchez under the name The Tongue Is an Eye, whose artwork is not overtly disturbing yet barely belies a dark uneasiness (my theory is that the covering of the eyes of a human face, while the mouth remains visible, triggers a response of revulsion consistent with the Uncanny Valley phenomenon). The three improvisations that comprise the album are restless hodgepodges of tensile agitation, percussive clatter, and nocturnal claustrophobia, with both Moser and Sanchez contributing conventional instruments abused with extended techniques (oud and cello, respectively) as well as objects and found ephemera. Sanchez also makes use of abstract vocalization on “Fibra 2,” the longest and most diverse of the three, her stuttering inhales and strangled utterances colliding with equally unpredictable shards of unidentifiable rattle and pained string emissions. The second half of this piece gravitates toward the enrapturing interplay between the oud and cello, the recordings sounding as if they were captured with microphones less than centimeters away from the necks as sliding fingers and atonal attacks snake directly into the eardrums. This could either be a document of the duo’s first meeting or the culmination of many rehearsal sessions; the two musicians have mastered an approach to interaction that somehow sounds both tentative and seasoned. I certainly look forward to hearing more of their wonderfully bizarre and confrontational creations.

Even as someone who prefers Ornette Coleman’s more structured 70’s work (Science Fiction, Dancing in Your Head, Body Meta), it is utterly impossible not to acknowledge his invaluable contributions to the free jazz tradition, which he essentially both created and named with his revolutionary group improvisations in the late 50’s and the prophetic 1961 LP Free Jazz. Though the genre has undoubtedly come quite a long way since then—Coleman’s approach seems rather tame even in comparison to albums released less than a decade later—every musician playing adventurous, formless jazz music is well aware of his name, legacy, and power. On For Ornette, the quartet of Don Malfon (alto sax), Juan Castañon (guitar), Itzam Cano (upright bass), and Chacal del Tamborazo (drum set) imbue their deep reverence for the late visionary with both a titular and conceptual significance, channeling his influence through performances of his compositions as well as original conjurations. The band displays a seamlessly dichotomous interest in abstract dissonance and harmonic interplay, fluidly trading moments of full-throttle chaos for driving solo exchange sections and lightning-fast call and response. Castañon’s use of a clean tone with occasional wah pedal wobble is the perfect choice for a collective style both abrasive and whimsical; his off-kilter backing shells and serpentine scalar runs are only made more agile by their clarity. The album ends with a stunning re-imagining of “The Sphinx” from Something Else!!!!, a fitting dual-dose of melody and mayhem.

There’s an important distinction to be made between “spooky” music and “scary” music. The former is the fun, festive tunes you hear come Halloween season each year—BOR-ING. Druuna Jaguar’s newest release Memória Aumentada is an example of the latter, the sort of music that deeply unsettles, sends inexplicable chills down the spine, evokes horrible isolation, fear, and existential despair. Unlike other notable instances of this (Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” Dolden’s “Below the Walls of Jericho,” etc.), Memória Aumentada is much more reserved, forgoing harrowing blasts of overwhelming discordance and hair-raising dissonance for creeping drones and cloying aquatic textures conjured entirely from manipulated field recordings. It is certainly a “dramatic pivot from visceral noise as a focal point” as stated in the description, but the extent to which the music stirs the deepest, unnamed emotions is not at all compromised. One feels intensely disconcerted by the contrast between ethereality and the uncomfortable closeness of the water recordings, the latter of which are almost presented as invasive violations. The final moments of “Musée Des Yeux Clos” produce intense dread via a tense drone that eventually dissolves into a confusing cacophony of delay-effect feedback and eviscerated human speech. The piece ends, however, with yet another appearance of dripping, sloshing liquid, further cementing its role as a successful counterpoint element. “Tillandsia” seems to tap into the subterranean underbelly of the Earth, summoning a bassy, barely perceptible seismic rumble, later complemented by the light, flitting textures of a field recording played backwards. If you’re looking to feel like whatever is happening on the album cover, like your soul has been ruthlessly dissolved and escapes your body through your face in horrific tendrils… fulfillment definitely awaits.

Though DETERRITORIALIZED ZONE was the first album by mysterious Tampa project précède l’essence that I discovered, fans who have been listening to the artist prior to its release might be a bit taken aback by its drastically new style. Whereas previous documents were experiments in various electronic dance music subgenres and other more generally palatable areas, DETERRITORIALIZED ZONE is an all-out harsh noise assault, a deafening bitcrushed maelstrom of disparate sound materials mangled into the most punishing auditory forms imaginable. For an ostensibly digitally-generated album it has all of the visceral density and tactile crunch as the meatiest of analog pedal sets, adopting a hyperactive dynamic approach that consistently engages. The tracks dive and whiplash between lushly-panned stereo destruction and brief, unpredictable stretches of mono error tones, feedback squalls, and electronic squelch, with track two presenting some of the most enthralling textural hodgepodges I’ve ever heard in harsh noise, assimilating everything from looping, fractured samples to what sounds like dead air from an FM radio. précède l’essence is clearly a newcomer to this type of music, but if on their first attempt their ideas and techniques are this refined, I hotly anticipate future works.

If you’re anything like me and are pretty much always fiending for some loud, violent harsh noise, you’d be forgiven for expecting that on Cotard Delusion based on its description: “A continuing descent into the metallic void. Heavy electronic squall. Oppressive machinery. Melancholic currents.” However, Martyn Reid’s solo project Depletion is more concerned with the words “void,” “machinery,” and “melancholic” rather than “metallic,” “heavy squall,” or “oppressive.” The four pieces on his most recent tape slowly spread like spilled oil on a warehouse floor, evolving from modest beginnings into lush, multifaceted soundscapes. Any of the sounds Reid uses might sound cold and artificial on its own, but when they coalesce in this patient, gradual way, something much more organic is achieved. The title track manifests a puddle of hum, draft, and crumble like a mixture of condensation skimmed off surfaces of different industrial appliances, while “Mirror Image” sounds more like it originates in the innards of those devices, with intersecting tendrils of dissected electronic transmissions and other mechanical ephemera. Rounding out the tape is the side-long closer “Trauma,” a delicate yet seething current of menacing drone and crackle that always threatens to tip over into chaos—but instead concludes in a completely unexpected way. Cotard Delusion is a release entirely in gorgeous greyscale, and thus a perfect addition to Invisible City’s established aesthetic.

Truly disparate fusions of abstract music and pop/folk conventions that are actually successful are few and far between. Musique concrète masters Jérôme Noetinger and Lionel Marchetti lent their talents to experimental rock collective Soixante Étages, but their electronic contributions are still largely overshadowed by the standard lineup of guitars and drums; the sneeze awfull and IT IT crew frequently intertwine odd textures and diverse samples with their music; Áine O’Dwyer blends mundane environments with her own voice and organ dirges. However, none of these projects have the immediacy nor the intimacy of the music of O Yama O, the duo of Japanese-born, London-based sound artists Rie Nakajima and Keiko Yamamoto. Their recordings and performances pair Nakajima’s phantasmagoric toy improvisations and handmade machinery manipulation with Yamamoto’s haunting voice and more harmonic contributions such as flute and recorder. Both their 2018 self-titled debut and the newly released Awadatete Yoku Arau both feel impossibly fluid, as if the music is simply being sighed or exhaled into existence. Yamamoto’s words are not bolstered (in this case, I believe a better word might be limited) by any conventional rhythmic structure or repeating phrases; instead, they breeze forward with the same freedom and frangibility as the whining melodica or clunking objects. I think I like this new EP even more than the duo’s debut, because rather than feeling like sketches or excerpts these tracks are more fully fleshed-out and memorable.

The first music by Thomas Tilly that I loved was also the album that introduced him to me: 2018’s Codex Amphibia on Glistening Examples, which was both a crucial introduction into the world of exploratory phonography and one of the first Noise Not Music reviews. Since then I’ve devoured his many spectacular releases—A Semiotic Survey, Stones, Air, Axioms / Delme with Jean-Luc Guionnet, Script Geometry—but nothing has truly amazed me so intensely and immediately as Le Vent Relatif, his most recent album. These pieces were produced in a metal workshop long ago for a documentary, and it boggles my mind that Tilly has sat on these absolutely superb, fully fleshed-out compositions for nearly a decade. Harnessing an assembly line’s worth of machinery, tools, scrap metal, and other industrial ephemera, each self-contained track is an enrapturing episode of tactile immersion, submerging the listener in a cold yet comfortable world of whir, spin, scrabble, and scrape. The fluid agility of the performances and processing, coupled with a subtle undercurrent of sizzling electricity, reminds me a great deal of Andrea Borghi’s VHS—an esteemed comparison I was unable to justifiably make until now. Le Vent Relatif is an indirect love letter to everything that is so magnetic about machinery noises: the neutral, apathetic tension; sublime overtones emerging in a seemingly static din; the pure and always slightly unsettling beauty of detachment.