Sick Days is music for the summer. Vacancy operator Jeffrey Sinibaldi’s flagship project wrests sleepy beauty from the heat-shimmered doldrums, the lengthy meditations leaving plenty of room to breathe. Since the release of the sprawling and eclectic self-titled double CD (a modern classic of DIY experimental music if you ask me) back in 2019, subsequent cassette documents like The Calm Before and Org Chert Baker have narrowed the focus to patient, droning collages of slurred field recordings, reticent improvisations, and everything in between. There’s an easygoing holism to Sinibaldi’s approach that makes for an understated yet irresistible atmosphere. He uses every tool at his disposal to cobble together unified soundscapes that feel ambiguous and straightforward, tense and languid, all at once. Even with such a high bar already set, Dress Entire offers up his most magnetic material in years. Each side grounds itself in drowsy tactility—A with lapping water and percussive shuffle that could be a washing machine, ghost-train traffic, or one of the project’s mysterious “live installations”; B with delicate precipitation tickles and distorted speech—and slowly but surely progresses with measured momentum. Nothing happens suddenly. New textures ease themselves in as if submerging into a pool on a sweltering evening, already deep in the mix before you realize what’s happening. Both the sweat on your brow and the cool cloth you use to wipe it off. The crickets and the condensation and the steam of life.

Though they’ve only been playing together for a year and a half, West Coast duo Sheep Ditch are already shaking things up. Foster Park Bowl / Perkins Cul de Sac comprises their first all-acoustic material, recorded outdoors in Ojai and Oxnard respectively. I know of both Jay Howard and Scott Miller from other projects, albeit ones drastically different and much louder—Howard of Circuit Wound  fame and Miller the original guitarist/vocalist of Cattle Decap—and there’s something extra special about this quiet, ambling tape coming from these guys. The two sides deploy the same laid-back, anything-goes approach to improvisation in distinct locations. For “Foster Park Bowl” it’s a deserted amphitheater, the curve of the hill carrying distant noises in to join the musicians as they make use of unidentified instruments and everyday objects. Guests Rob Magill and Max Pippin lend hands to “Perkins Cul de Sac,” an onsite ode to the titular dead end. Throughout the C60 there’s a soothing sense of wide-open space around and above the main event, dwarfing yet nestling. The stakes couldn’t be lower and it’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Moments of pure magic are peppered throughout: I especially love the bit about ten minutes into “Perkins,” when the quartet gets some full band electricity going and works up a sleepy brut-jazz racket with shades of Jackie-O.

For the nearly two decades now, infamous anti-music unit Penis Geyser have made it their sworn duty to reduce the already mangled corpse of shitcore to some elusive, accursed base state. Across a smattering of tapes, splits, and live shows that range from manic bursts of semi-rehearsed noisegrind to borderline performance art, the trio (a.k.a. Chad) have set a high standard for sonic desecration. Their new self-titled cassette on the venerable Gracious Host label is both a  culmination of all that unholy work and a great entry point for any new converts, willing or unwilling. Clocking in at around twelve minutes, it’s one of the longest things they’ve released, probably cobbled together from scattered sessions and sets over the years. The result is a patchwork of hazardous ideas, rancid chunks at different stages of decomposition Frankensteined together. It documents some of the band’s most abstracted material yet, with many of the tracks dwelling in the negative space between one bleurgh and the next (which may or may not come). This downtime is familiar to anyone who’s attended a PG gig—there are usually drum pieces to retrieve from somewhere in the crowd, after all—but here it’s a full trough of its own, rich with feedback and squeaking kit hardware and noodle notes. Much like Juntaro’s iconic ONETWOTHREEFOURs, the stick count-ins become near-meaningless intrusions into whatever is already happening of its own accord. The all-out blasts are rare and all the more cathartic for it. I’ve found myself reaching for this tape over and over these past few weeks, finding some new detail in the rotten muck each time. Czerkies killed it with the layout as always. Unmissable.

On his full-length CD debut as Robert Fuchs, Dean Fazzino summons his most minimal apparitions yet. The newly Queens-based artist’s best-known alias has gathered a substantial following from the strength of several tapes on New Forces, White Centipede, and his own in-house imprint, but the change in format for this digipak release on Usagi represents a similar development as Dogmono in that it marks a new high point for the project. The separation between the Fuchs and Spate material has always been somewhat clear—albeit muddied by loud, screeching live performances as the former that sound more like the latter—but never this pronounced. Where Spate has expanded into harsher and more complex realms, C.O.T.H. documents a burrowing inward, a descent into somewhere grey and shadowed. These seven tracks feel both assured and experimental, purposeful with regard to the approach taken but mercurial in terms of the directions they go. “A Number of Two Figures” is a mission statement of sorts, narrowing the focus to the haunted interiors of a motley electronics system. The familiar electromagnetic hum is agitated, shifted, and transformed by a series of discrete actions, shuffling steps along a path toward an elusive equilibrium point that’s never quite reached. Built-up tension discharges in the noisy seethe of “Small Molecule” and further decomposes into the spectral “Allele.” Fazzino’s work as Fuchs is memorable not just in itself, but also because of the range of reactions it elicits, and C.O.T.H. is no exception; a friend called it “almost… incidental, like it would exist without human intervention or observation,” while the website description muses that it is “restrained, somnambulant and perhaps even heartfelt.” “Pure” is a descriptor most agree on, though: this is abstract sound stripped of all context and pretension, neither cold nor warm, or maybe both. Ghost in the machine music.

The audio-travelogue is an underexplored tradition in abstract music-making. Montréal sound artists Christian Calon and Chantal Dumas demonstrated its full potential with their classic Radio Roadmovies, the first disc of which features on-the-go vignettes from a scattershot trip through the Canadian countryside, and now this new globetrotter joins them and a few others (Daphne X, Ezio Piermattei) in a modestly sized canon. The uncredited person(s) behind Opera Benezet—likely Zach, who we hear speak around the 19-minute mark—gives the following description of the tape: “The spark bardo passage of the bridge building Saint Benezet by a chance geographical crossover with a Delco man following a Paris power outage. A cross consciousness hallucination between Benezet and a foreign fan club trailing one man’s wheel path across France.” The supernatural aspects aren’t entirely overstated. The collage piece drifts like a dream, its progression more stream-of-thought than a single line across a roadmap. We find ourselves in bustling urban locales and sleepy liminal spaces with no knowledge of how exactly it happened, but it sure does make sense once we’re there. Overheard music from buskers and/or local concerts plays a central role, often clipped into echoing loops that add to the hazy atmosphere. Come to think of it, it’s a more accurate representation of a journey than a straightforward series of recordings could ever be. The traveler often ends up being a passive presence, caught in some other current that could never have been foreseen (in this case, a DIY tour de France). As listeners we too are just along for the ride, slack-jawed and wide-eared at endless mundane majesties.

Copies come with an 11″x17″ poster and a photograph and are available via email: postalswing.key@gmail.com.

One of the things I miss about Cincinnati (and Dayton too, of course) is the noise. That does have a dual meaning—for example, there were these beautiful train-brake squeals that carried all the way up the hill to Clifton from the Queensgate Yard—but here I refer to the music. It’s always great to hear about new things going on in the city, and right now I’m excited about Black Corolla and their label Clangor. Zach Collins and Lauryn Jones just released their debut tape in October of last year but are already generating plenty of buzz, sure to surge after their set at Ende Tymes on Saturday. For Lonely God they teamed up with head favorite Slacking from Pittsburgh, also with a highly anticipated slot this weekend, and the results are explosive. This C20 features what might be the best material I’ve heard from both projects. Slacking throws the psychedelic nightmare collaging honed on last year’s Sacred Heart of Reinvention into high gear for “Do What Thou Droop,” an anxious suite that never stops twisting into increasingly horrific knots. Each stage of the the cascade is stuffed to the gills with detail, all of it swirling in hallucinatory murk. The curse passes on to Black Corolla and their pall of contact-mic’d glass abuse, blasting from a dark corner into a room filled with ghosts. The duo is already fine-tuning their pacing and execution; a well-timed break (literally) takes the last third of the track to a new level, a plane of desolation that runs through the true center of the mind. The lights are off, Gonga’s a fraud, everything shatters into dust. Music for the ende.

Copies are available from Puke Pink as well as former Cincy stalwarts Torn Light, along with other Clangor titles.

Anyone who knows a gen-alpha kid is well aware of the massive presence Roblox still has. The dissonant combination of creativity (players design and share their own games) and exploitation (Roblox Corporation, which reported $3.6 billion in revenue last year, profits off that unpaid labor) is already emblematic of the horrors of late-stage capitalism, but the other day I discovered a new aberration when a young library patron asked for help logging in to the game. I immediately saw that the barrier was the most convoluted CAPTCHA I’ve ever come across. It instructed the user to click through a series of ten images to select the cup with the most liquid that also matched the given symbol… TEN TIMES. It took me, a grown adult (debatable, I’ll admit), several minutes to figure it out, during which time something we’ve always known but tend to ignore became unignorable: we are now human data feeders for predatory algorithms. This absurd reality is the impetus for CAPTCHA, an audiovisual collaboration between multimedia artist Berto Herrera, producer Manao (a.k.a. Oswaldo Rodríguez), and graphic designer Shamma Buhazza. It’s one of the more ambitious submissions that’s come into the inbox this year, and while I’m usually turned off by fancy press releases and headshots, it’s great that the concept was taken so seriously and this much work was put in.

The composition itself is a single hour-long suite of bleak repetition and synthetic atmosphere, owing its lurching pseudo-rhythms and digital intricacies to Rodríguez’s background in club music and its emotional dynamics to Herrera’s eye (and ear) for abstract sublimity. It’s part mood piece and part main attraction, at home in both the background and the foreground—which, in fact, represents the same blurring of boundaries as the “endless shadow economy” it critiques. Those contradictions abound throughout all elements of the project, whether it’s the dark beauty we’re reluctant to recognize in the music (that’s inevitably torn apart by a recurring synthesized voice instructing us to PLEASE TYPE THE NUMBERS YOU HEAR) or the dual consumerist/aesthetic urge to purchase the physical editions of the release: twenty tapes with handmade collage covers and seven handmade hollow “river stones” housing SD cards, both of which feature Buhazza’s visual contributions. I’m reminded of the packaging for Seth Cooke’s Selected Works for No-Input Field Recorder, and I’m also led to ask similar questions—and acknowledge a similar futility in trying to answer them. CAPTCHA strikes back against the descending big-tech boot with a glimmer of hope for “a return to spaces of silence and human connection”… but is a glimmer enough? It sounds like it, at least.