Feedback Destroyer is a misleading title. On his first outing as Stalking, Matt Hex does plenty of gating, chopping, strangling, crushing, warping, all actions that one might call destructive. But feedback is like energy—indestructible. In lieu of being ground into nothing, it escapes to areas of less pressure, contorting into unpredictable and exciting shapes. This is the essence of feedback noise, and it has been for decades; this new CD-R from underappreciated Dubuque imprint Breaching Static doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. What it does do is carve out ample space in a surging cut-up harsh revival that spans the States and beyond. Stalking is not yet another high-tech modular initiative doomed to stand in the shadows of modern titans Negation or 886VG, nor is it a novel deconstruction of the tradition itself in the vein of Prolepsis or Parasite Nurse. The closest comparison that comes to mind is Developer: no-frills, muscular pedal-chain frenzy that doesn’t waste a single second. At 21 tracks, there’s no shortage of ideas. Other artists might have shelved some of these sketches for future releases, but Hex lays it all out on the table, opting to offer an LP’s worth of material for his first outing. No samples, no silent stretches, no ambient interludes, just noise. The stereo field gets a comprehensive pummeling, the crunch blasting through mono, left, right, and all over, always changing up just as you start to find your footing. The pace is incessant and intense, but Hex isn’t afraid to fuck around a bit now and then either; there’s more than one grin-inducing delay noodle. Solid, satisfying stuff, and a great debut for this project.

Copies available via email: breachingstatic@gmail.com.

Zhao Cong is one of the central fixtures of the Beijing avant-garde scene. Like many of her peers, her sound practice is humble and unassuming, rooted in tangible aspects of the everyday. These aspects are often objects or even novelties with sonic profiles that are familiar but not conventionally “musical”—her repertoire includes cardboard tubes, light fixtures, fans, pop rocks, spray bottles, playing cards, bug zappers. She devotes extraordinary attention to the simplest of interactions. In the case of blow,blow,​blow,blow,blow the focus is the most basic of all: inhale/exhale. Balloons are her tool of choice to isolate and magnify the elusive mechanism, and thus her interest is not in the properties of the stretched latex that Judy Dunaway explored in an improvisational context, but rather in its use as an elastic vessel. “Blow” is a brief invocation of sorts, amplifying the physical influxes of air that will be let back out in “Expel.” Zhao’s mic placement is just as crucial as her materials, and this pair of tracks makes that apparent with their fundamental contrast; the precise binaural array used for “Blow” makes it sound like the inflations are happening inside our ear canals, while “Expel” widens the lens to capture both the hissing flow and the surrounding environment. After the scope of the palette is established, its potential is fully reached in the lengthier pieces that follow. So much of the beauty of Zhao’s work lies not just in the happening but in the doing, the rustle of shifting hands and the creak of the table and the immanent intimacy of it all. Music via escaping gas. Might be my new favorite of hers.

In addition to putting out the best in extreme sound on his long-running label Dada Drumming, Greg Babbitt contributes to it himself as A Fail Association. Alongside Kevin Novak of T.E.F. his early work in the mid aughts carved key contours in the exploding harsh noise tradition in the Lone Star State and beyond, honing the strain of muscular, virtuosic cut-up that we’re still hearing rip two decades later. After a ten-year break Babbitt doesn’t seem to have lost any steam, releasing material at least yearly since 2018. The slung-together “Only Connect” Sessions C30 doesn’t concern itself with the crystal-clear production of East V. or This Will Hurt You More Than It Will Hurt Me; the first track was recorded with a mobile phone, the second with a handheld Tascam, all live and uncut. But as Texas friends have told me, that’s where AFA shines, which I finally got to see for myself at Red Light District last weekend. Both of these recordings are fair and accurate representations of the ear-shredding assault he hurls through the speakers. His style feels less surgical, more of a free-associative brute force surge—even if he rehearses it doesn’t sound like he does, and that’s a huge compliment. The blasts hit in all the right places, the rapid-fire loops capture and amplify the momentum like lightning in a bottle. Side B wrestles with piercing feedback squeals that probably would have euthanized the dying PA used for the flip. The honest “postscript” Babbitt leaves in between is the cherry on top. The stakes are low, the reward (clearly) is high as can be.

Copies are available from the label via email—limitedhangoutrecordings@gmail.com—or eventually from Tobira.

It never feels inaccurate to call Rhizome Weaver’s sprawling texture-feasts “walls” even as they shift and splinter with a sinewy restlessness, because the essentials are all there: the crushing initial blast, the lush crackle interwoven with rumbling low end, the immobilizing hypnosis. This refreshing new German project from Silken Heart co-founder Lukas Gerhmann brings to mind several points of comparison—Kakerlak’s recent work, Nascitari’s Your Sewer / My Church, the cosmic crumble of Train Cemetery—but there isn’t anything else quite like it, which is the greenest of flags, especially these days. Amidst the hyperbolic (though endearing) release description for You Are Not Sorry Enough, one phrase stands out: “a sea of granite incrementally surging and receding.” The coarse, crystallized igneous rock is an apt analogy for the forces at work here. Each track is both monolithic and constantly in flux, breaking apart into the magma only to reform seconds later. “Urn Stock” is a great example. Settle in for its nine minutes and find that it never lands at an equilibrium point. This low frequency range falls out and then slams back in again, that high one trembles between the stereo channels, until it all sputters out into near-nothingness… and then “Arche Fossil” erupts and obliterates what’s left. Despite all the primordial imagery, however, the energy Gerhmann harnesses is not just the slow, indifferent flow of nature but also that of his own scrambling human hands, and the result is a raw volatility that I can’t get enough of. It’s hard to tell whether this material emerged out of an analog or digital setup (or some blend of both), but intense live footage makes clear that Rhizome Weaver is grounded in tactility, in all its smashing, crashing glory.

For the handful of heads who would name Yeast Culture, Small Cruel Party, Kapotte Muziek, and Damien Bisciglia (RIP) as the Four Evangelists of fringe cassette culture, the brief existence of Born Physical Form was life-affirming. Between 2019 and 2022, Philadelphia-based artist Tyler Games quietly released twelve cassettes by a motley roster of enigmatic aliases, all worth listing for those unfamiliar: C720, UVC, Winston 1, Bill Lewis Medicine Cabinet, Megawatt Mike, Eye Walk Eye, Van Gelder Skelter, Microphone Crumb, Mongo’s Head Disease. Except for flagship-ish moniker UVC, which also graced like-minded imprints Hologram, Irrational Tentent, and Regional Bears, these projects were one-shot exercises in elusive sound-making, each tape a singular variation on a base setup of tape and electronics. It’s hard to describe what exactly it is that makes this unassuming music so beguiling (I plan to write a longer piece on it at some point). For now, we’ve been blessed with this wonderful surprise that opens up the question to a much wider audience. Games’s return as Radio Species sees him shifting similar ideas in a new direction, and hopefully Compressed Knowledge is just the beginning.

The release description succeeds in verbalizing what’s going on here with its mentions of “broadcast without a source . . . hinting at formal structures while continually slipping away from them.” These nine short tracks are somehow at once sketches and final drafts, built on stumbling repetition that feels less like loop playback and more like a homespun series of cybernetic cells, the iterations near-identical but nonetheless novel. The delicate systems trundle along, deceptively complex and dependent on close attention. “Vastu” and “Apiary” evokes the humble process music of Takamitsu Ohta, but earthier, more reflexive to the noise that intrudes and disrupts—or does it come from within? The title track is something entirely new, a stuttering mashup of swung brush-drumming and chopped-up speech samples. Does it lose something in stepping out from under the veil of hermitic obscurity? Maybe. But it gains plenty too. Among the welcome new additions: the eager eclecticism, the sense that this time it’s not a one-off.

Copies of Compressed Knowledge are or will soon be available from Forced Exposure (US), Boomkat (UK), Soundohm (EU), and likely Tobira (JP).

With their 2018 self-titled debut tape, Double Goocher Shop established a definitive and compelling approach rooted in the space where the two members’ aesthetic interests intersect. Throughout their respective careers, Renato Grieco and Moss Hopkins have both plumbed the fecund depths of text-sound, concrète music, tape assemblage, and field recording to achieve singular ends—Grieco’s work brings to mind the complex, theatrical “cinéma pour l’oreille” of the tradition’s pioneering composers with a modern twist; Hopkins’s is more domestic, introspective, self-conscious—but their ongoing collaborative project proves how complementary those ends are. Radio Carrion is their first material since The Kaplan Text back in 2021 and sees the pair diving into the paranormal currents of their sound that had previously only been implicit. The technique of using shortwave radio to make contact with the dead (or otherwise ontologically displaced) is a familiar one, both in experimental music specifically and ghost-hunting in general, but here the artists engage with a meta dimension to the practice as they investigate the “anthropological hoax” of the concept of the supernatural itself. Though humbly distinguished with mere numbers, each “Finding” is a mesmerizing and well-structured shadow-world, a promising new lead in the duo’s cryptic investigation. #1 tugs at the veil with speech dissections, motheaten piano gloom, and wisps of electromagnetic interference; #2 lets us waltz through a flooded cathedral. The casual, assured sparseness of the compositions is what makes them so harrowing. A rustle here, a few footsteps there, and all the thick grey nothing in between. We create our own hauntings. #13 is like a nightmare with an oddly hopeful ending, capping off this stellar CD (that gets better with every play) with an invitation to stay forever.

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.