It’s not often that I make it down to the DMV, but this was unmissable. I’ve been wanting to check out Rhizome for years now, and as luck would have it my good friends recently moved to Takoma just a few blocks away on the other side of the Red tracks, so I was able to feed two birds with one seed. I knew the renowned city-funded arts space was a plucky old house in a rapidly developing neighborhood, but the actual sight of it standing stubbornly in the shadow of enormous copy-paste residentials was striking. Rhizome maintains an eclectic curatorial schedule that I gather only becomes more so as time goes on; what began as a humble spot for improvised music and visual/performance art now also hosts, well, stuff like this. Also on display was Selena Noir Jackson’s exhibition Faces of America. The show was tightly run (started at 7:30 and was over by 10, a dream of a Sunday night) and drew a modest yet devoted crowd. Wonderful vibes that have me already thinking about my next trip south. Free DC!
AS SURVIVING TOTAL has an ambitious and detailed conceptual focus based on loss as both a personal and legal phenomenon (the latter encompassing “litigious judicial practices” and “the quantitative measure of pain”). I only know this from their bio; the music itself didn’t incorporate any samples, just straightforward slow-paced noise, raw and rumbly, riding right on the edge of harsh. It was well-paced, and while I got the sense that it’s a newer project, they had great control over a stripped-down setup. They dodged predictable inflection points in favor of letting things continue organically, which sometimes felt aimless, but mostly satisfying.
VASTERIAN, named after the Ligotti story “Vastarien” (unsure of the significance of the misspelling), was another local I was unfamiliar with. My pre-gig research turned up a recent tape described as “hypnotic, lo-fi radio noise,” leading to expectations that were immediately subverted when the set launched straight into maxed-out meathead power electronics, complete with copious beer-chugging. After the initial shock wore off I was prepared to be bored, but the execution was so solid and energy level high enough that I was thoroughly entertained. As someone who loves the textures of shortwave, so I’m always happy to see one on a table, even if it ended up getting drowned out. I think I overheard that this was their first live appearance; impressive if that’s the case.
LUSTRE CHANTANT was another surprise. A duo comprising sound artist and instrument-builder Max Hamel, whose solo tapes I like a lot, and Chris Griffiths, who booked this show as well as many others at Rhizome, they’re named after a mythologized “singing chandelier” designed by French scientist and inventor Frederik Kastner. The material itself is an attempt to approximate what this lost instrument may have sounded like. Tonight that manifested as a quiet electroacoustic set on the upper floor of the space, structured around small motorized gadgets and minimal electronics. There were somatic aspects too: Hamel bowed a piece of scrap metal while Griffiths rubbed shrapnel on the floor with his foot. Lovely stuff that reminded me just as much of Fornnordiska klanger as it did Rie Nakajima or Takamitsu Ohta.
This was my third(?) time seeing MAX JULIAN EASTMAN play and he continued the trend of constant improvement. His haphazard arsenal looks like a electronics store bargain bin but boils down to a simple combo of source tape playback via deck and walkman plus mixer, and the racket it makes is larger than life. The oddball free-associative stumble pays homage to his mail art heroes, but it’s delivered with a unmistakable harsh ethos. It was during this set that the PA started getting pushed to the max (intended) and you could feel the crunch shaking your bones. I especially liked the repetitive barking with the walkman pressed against his mouth, which gave the proceedings a shambolic, Dilloway-esque lurch.
PSYCHIC SENSE ORGANS were the main draw and they did not disappoint. A brand new initiative formed by two of the best and brightest in harsh noise—Brad Griggs of Heat Signature and Action/Discipline fame, Joe Wang a.k.a. Outdoor Horse Shrine—capped off their inaugural mini-tour with a brutal split-stereo that brought the house down. Having seen both of these guys perform multiple times, it was a treat to see their distinct approaches meld. Griggs deployed his tried-and-true mic feedback assault with plenty of screaming to support as Wang forced piercing shrieks and squeals from his trusty mixer. At first the two halves ebbed and flowed independently, but as the artists settled in they began to respond to each other. By that time, however, someone got a bit overzealous with the table-rocking and the legs kept collapsing, so I got lost in the mosh until one of the power strips got switched off. Still grateful to have had six minutes of brain-liquefying bliss, and I’m eager to dig into their tour tape.
The hype level could not have been higher when OsamaSon’s long-awaited follow-up to Flex Musix, Jumpout, finally dropped in January of this year—and the disappointment level also could not have been higher. So I spent the year looping his past releases once again, latching onto the few underground collaborations he put out (which had some gems; “Shitshow” off his short tape with xaviersobased might be the song of the year) and hoping that the major label curse hadn’t claimed his creativity. And the hope was worth it, because Psykotic is the breakthrough full-length its predecessor purported to be. It delivers a hammer blow in the rage distortion war with opener “Habits,” the thumping beat cranked and compressed to buzzsaw register. Despite some minor pacing issues, the tracklist offers pretty much everything, from bangers to ballads and everything in between. Hoping for a CD release soon.
Looking back to Sine Wave Solo at Ftarri 2022, that material foreshadowed the direction Matsubara would take for her first studio album in nearly two decades. After so many years of honing her craft on one of the most stripped-down musical setups possible, she’s arrived at a mode of free improvisation that subverts the practice’s already nebulous idioms—or, more accurately, doesn’t care to acknowledge them at all. The single session that comprises Sounds from M is more analogous to sketches, or even breaths. She plays a sustained tone here, lets it fall back into silence, works up a crystalline flurry of clicks and bleeps, harps on a stutter, more silence before a fade-in… nothing seems to lead anywhere, and yet everything leads to something. 
If the 2010s was the era of soulful 90s R&B diva revival, then naturally the 2020s is all about dance-pop girl group nostalgia. Last year FLO’s hit-heavy ACCESS ALL AREAS made it onto the list, so it’s appropriate that the trend continues with Jae Stephens and Total Sellout. I debated including it with 
Even though I didn’t put it on the midyear list, C.O.T.H. has stuck with me the way few other recent noise releases have. It feels like the logical conclusion that all the Robert Fuchs material thus far has been leading toward. Here Dean Fazzino’s minimal toolkit achieves its most maximal results, each part of the suite its own world of constrained tension. The logic at work is both singular and familiar: feedback teeters over a shallow abyss in drones and loops, threatening to boil over but remaining enclosed in its sketchy shapes. The elusive, intimate “09/23/1999” is a sleeper that took time to show its hand, but now it’s my favorite track. 
Above & Beyond snuck up on me. I was immediately impressed by how well-structured it was for an hour-long, 34-track tape, but maybe it was too much all at once. And then I kept coming back. Now I’m convinced this is the Chengdu-based underground MC’s best work, an indulgent yet consistent showcase of stellar instrumentals and (based on what translation apps give me, at least) his most thoughtful lyrics, both personal and political. A clear standout is “狗叫” (“Dog Barking”), which features an unforgettable vocal performance that underscores why people are so drawn to and obsessive over this music: the bleeding heart it wears right on its sleeve.
This debut CD from Iris Our has only been out for a couple months, but I already can’t imagine it leaving rotation anytime soon. It also begs inclusion here because the pastel cover art by Maggie Fitzpatrick is some real 2025 shit. I said plenty about the poetic aspects in my review, so now I’m inclined to emphasize just how detailed and immersive it sounds. Each component is precisely placed and inseparable from the whole, and every listen reveals new secrets. The shifting stereo image of “The Columns of Echo’s Lymphatic Library” and the dense, muggy layers of “Unshaped Murmuration” are mesmerizing through both headphones and speakers. 
By far my most-played tape this year. It’s already too easy to listen to a great C10 over and over—another recent example that I picked up after last year’s lists is Terror Mirage’s Piquer—but especially when the material is structured with precise momentum and dynamics. After so many times through, the anticipation of the blasts and breaks to come is just as energizing as the surprise of first hearing them. It’s also a compact overview of the Scathing arsenal: unyielding sheets of high-pitched squalling feedback, raw vocal attack, swirling texture-mash that lulls and then lashes. The sweet spot between meatier stuff like Fever Land Phantasmagoria and the fast-paced assault of his live sets. 
Sawn Half is a project that has been recommended several times since the Sink CD came out on Flag Day last year. While I dug the textures at work on that one and Faults, something wasn’t clicking all the way. Then I gripped Sea of the End and suddenly I understood. Maybe it’s a brand new direction, maybe the mud of magnetic tape was the missing piece, but in any case I love this shit. “Pressure” and “Collapse” are two heavy, hulking slabs of slow-paced harsh that sounds like the earth itself crumbling away. It revels in the thick crunch but knows when to rise out and build tension before plunging back in. Crank the volume as loud as you can, then even louder—this one needs to be felt.
Verrückt is a tape I’ve thought a lot about this year, but words tend to fail when I sit down to write about it. This time I find myself looking at the artwork, which shows the planning sketches for the titular waterslide and a yellow triangular caution sign with a graphic of a crying child. The minimal design is still about as close as we can get to such an unspeakable event. We can read testimony, pore over documents, even visit the place where it happened, but only ever at a profound remove from what took place. Mouths Agape engages not just with the horror of the incident but also the horror of our futile fascination with it. The music is a queasy but intentional weave of analog and digital: the body and the metal, death and its recreation.
Last-minute gems like this are the reason I wait until the actual end of the year to compile my lists. Helena is the trio of Spanish improvisers Clara Lai (keys), Àlex Reviriego (bass), and Vasco Trilla (drums), who have played together previously and subsequently in various combinations. In December 2023 they convened to perform loose compositions by Reviriego in a quiet, careful chamber-style configuration. The mood is placid and pensive, each of the three musicians hanging on each other’s considered tones, anticipating the right moments to meet in fragile harmony. The performance is wonderful, but the humble audience recording is what really makes this tape special. Every creak, every cough is audible, erasing the partition between music and space Skylark Quartet–style.
I can’t name explicit links in the stylistic lineage that led to this tape without revealing my hypothesis of who “A.H.” and “C.M.” are, but anyone who’s been keeping up will pick up on the radical, almost diagnostic distillation of harsh feedback techniques explored here. It’s a lovely surprise from the Head Meat catalog, which has previously featured some of the most active direct-action noise of the past few years. That’s not to say that these two movements are stagnant. The only point of reference I can think of is Sissy Spacek’s CD Slow Move and its use of to create a hypnotic illusion of contrastive but coexistent speeds. Each side hits with a boom, almost like a wall but with so much, so little movement.
It was such a relief to find Pink Thistle this year, just when I was realizing how little new wall I was coming across. Alan Doyle’s new project doesn’t exactly push any boundaries, but his execution and vision are so distinct that “wanting more” is the last thing that comes to mind. The False Memory 2xCS is my favorite of the many tapes and CD-Rs he put out this year, a four-part odyssey from thick crunch to spectral hiss. The tracks are static structurally but not somatically; there’s always a real human presence, especially in part II when you can hear the noise roar into existence after a second or two of dead air.
Any Sick Days release is a world inside a world. Jeffrey Sinibaldi zooms into the nebulous zones between everyday interactions in nature—the rain and the surfaces it hits, the air and the sound it carries—and takes his time capturing the elusive complexity within. Dress Entire is an excellent place to start if you haven’t heard his work before. Its slow pace and intoxicating humidity welcome new ears like a hothouse on a cold day, and once you stay long enough you’ll see the cracks in everything and how the water heals them. 
A serious contender for Most Unserious Offender, Deep Grey has been making waves in the godforsaken tundra of Canada and beyond with his tools for transcendence, netting such prestigious back-cover blurbs as “Sounds sorta like Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting rocking a Knox Mitchell rig.” Though devoid of the excessive samples that made Self-Healing Transformation Seminar so memorable, Lifestyle Determines Deathstyle is just as scatterbrained, a knob-twiddler’s dream. It’s paced like a sketchbook, throwing shit at the wall and not even looking to see what sticks, yet comes across surprisingly put-together.
Tendency is the perfect soundtrack to a slow, bitter winter. I didn’t realize that during the summer when I first heard it, even though I already liked it. I even made the mistake of thinking it was warm, cozy even. But as December set in and the frigid winds and ice arrived, Hewn’s true essence revealed itself. There are two sets of initials credited, implying the project is a duo, which comes through in the many delicate layers of sluggish tape shuffle, wistful drones, and shadowy field recordings. The coldness isn’t total, mind you, and there are some beautiful albeit fleeting bits of sunlight streaked throughout. Frail but nonetheless flesh-and-blood ambient.
On the surface, Head Meat might seem like a rehash of tired trends in classic US noise: anonymous operations (though if you follow the clues, it’s not hard to identify the culprit), high-contrast xerox layouts, blown-out deck-minced masters, etc. There’s some truth to that observation, and it might be more of a downside if every single one of these tapes weren’t absolute fire—the Ants in the Afterbirth self-titled, Outdoor Horse Shrine’s Water Course, and the Executionists’ 
Run by sound artist Anne-F Jacques, presses précaires has been a reliable source for forward-thinking abstract music on cassette for half a decade now, with a varied output that straddles the border between the DIY and academic spheres. 2025’s showing was particularly strong, with impressive tapes by Bárbara González, Sun Yizhou and Tom Soloveitzik, Gudinni Cortina, and W K Werkowicz and Zheng Hao, as well as a.hop, a remote correspondence ensemble project led by Jacques herself. All releases from this year are available from 
For those who may not know, I grew up in Cincinnati. It was where I first got into noise, so even though I’m elsewhere now it’s great to see new things happening in the scene I still have so much love for. Clangor is run by Black Corolla members Zach Collins and Lauryn Jones, originally an outlet for their own projects (Apple Cottage, Gangstalker, Otra Vez) but now expanded beyond that with a tape by the superb NYC project Mouths Agape. The Black Corolla / Slacking Lonely God C30 was my favorite split of the year (see 
In ABQ it seems that the noise, metal, and dungeon synth scenes form a loose triple Venn diagram, and right at the center of it is Malevolent Relics, a label/distro that produces and stocks the best of each. Though ops are currently on pause, 2025 saw the release of the Skafrenningur 3xCS box (see 
Pube Provisional (don’t ask) is dedicated to the symbiotic faiths of green hue (I said don’t ask) and good old fashioned harsh noise. Home to Kale Van Reekum’s flagship moniker Met Glas and his duo with cofounder Jack Sinclaire, Pube, the Society plucks the best and brightest from around the globe: Peking Crash Team, Gemengung, Vincent Dallas. Though they only dropped one three tape batch this year, it was a heater, with top-shelf stuff from Snake Oil Merchants (international triple threat of Dallas+Geseling+Sisto Rossi), Outdoor Horse Shrine, and fellow Great White Norther Wasauksing Sniper. Also of note are the one-of-a-kind editions they hand-craft for the artists.
Would never have known about this if not for new-generation PNW weirdo Ķæ P. Rujhaan, who also operates the highly active 
Noise Not Music 