Newcastle Upon Tyne artist Kevin Wilkinson has been making music for a long time—nearly three decades, in fact. He established himself in the 90’s with rock band Drill as well as his more abstract solo work as BigRoadBreaker (BRB), the latter presumably evolving, after a decade-or-so hiatus, into his current project brb>voicecoil (many of Wilkinson’s past releases are available on the muza muza Bandcamp for download). Freed from the free-form studio industrial of its namesake, the discography of brb>voicecoil charts Wilkinson’s descent into engrossing, heavily processed modern musique concrète, evoking just as dark of an atmosphere as he always has with a more contemporary approach. The recent Alms of Guilt, is an exemplary exploration of this; despite the provocative, emotionally charged track titles, only the most unfamiliar and evasive sounds are present, whether through intensive manipulation, unusual/obscure capture, or a mixture of both. The six-track album, dual-released as a 12″ lathe by Wilkinson himself and a CD by fellow Newcastle residents Opal Tapes, finds its backbone in the consistently dark, seething waves of dissected sonics, flitting and eddying like hive-mind insect swarms or sewer water currents amidst interjections of reverberating spacial echo and queasy digital glitches. There’s always a lot going on, but at the same time there really isn’t. Wilkinson’s creations are dense but not overwhelming or disorienting; instead, he forcefully condenses countless elements into single entities, conjurations somewhere in the unsettling valley between organic and artificial that flop and writhe like semi-sentient masses of living tissue and industrial machinery. If, like me, you’ve found yourself falling in love with this sort of compositionally “total” acousmatic approach—for other examples, see Corat Coret, Stallgewitter, Staubitz and Waterhouse, To Be Brave—you will definitely enjoy Alms of Guilt.

The “music” that comprises Publick Restroom Performances is, essentially, exactly what one would expect. Departing from artist Arek Orosz’s predilections for harsh noise and power electronics on much of his Enterfant material, the short digital-only release collects two recordings captured in February of 2017 that feature Orosz performing solo as an environmental instigator. The sparse clatters of paper towel and toilet tissue dispensers being used or struck, the hissing rushes of commercial sink faucets, the distinctive canned echo that one immediately recognizes—with his reticent contributions and interactions, Orosz pays humble homage to the innocuous yet mysterious energy that lurks in empty public bathrooms, something I’m sure most, if not all of us have observed during various moments of temporary, inexplicably poignant isolation in these ubiquitous facilities. The first piece, recorded on February 18th, builds itself on the fullness of the spacial spread of reverberating musical segments that sound like something between empty elevator music and alien-abduction electronica, sparse guitar noodling and piano notes filling every inch of the linoleum corners as other familiar sounds—such as brief conversations, flushing toilets, what is probably something clanging against those assistive metal bars in wheelchair-accessible stalls—flesh things out. There are even more curiosities in the February 20th piece, which concludes with the playback of several jarringly out-of-place musical loops (culminating with the Mortal Kombat theme) before the biggest surprise of them all: there’s actually an audience in this bathroom! And they were quiet and appreciative the whole time!