The quantity of releases on Bandcamp tagged with the “annoying” descriptor is much higher than one would think. In terms of my own personal definition of what the word means in this context, many of the entries aren’t very accurate, but there are some gems—Rich Teenager’s Sardanapalus, Klöße‘s debut tape, Nice Piles’ self-titled—that not only provide excellent music but also exemplify true “annoyance”: the intentional, aesthetic use of traditionally unpalatable structures or materials. Though Funeral doesn’t have the tag, it certainly deserves it; I imagine, what with the combination of the title of the opening track being “Horny Hentai in the Horse’s House” and its uncompromising, volatile causticity, that there are few things your family or friends would yell at you to turn off faster. Costa Rica–based artist Mante wields these elements of rather unsavory sonic pollution with the same dexterity and virtuosity as would any producer of much more traditional harsh or cut-up noise, gluing together strands and gobs into freely mobile audio sculptures whose intricacies don’t sacrifice the raw auras of obscenity radiated by their individual components. And if you thought the first piece and the following “Overwhelming Dislike” were bad, wait until you get to “Cheap Codes from Hoes,” a cacophonous, hyperactive, completely irreverent collage of Discord tones, Minecraft gameplay audio, and masticated streamer commentary that is probably the best thing I’ve heard all year. “Bajo las Nalgas del Kilimanjaro” too feels like some sort of bleak post-internet exhumation, built upon an ongoing battle scene sample from God knows where (and don’t bother asking him; he sure as hell isn’t here). This latter half of Funeral is the type of stuff I want to see more of from Mante, but overall the brief album is a whiplash-inducing assault on the ears that may be literally impossible to forget.

Songs from Pandaville is the sound of hope. Oh what an auspicious future we as a society might have if there were more people like Eli Neuman-Hammond doing all they can to engender a love for free artistic expression among our youngest comrades. In addition to the innate intrigue of the sound pieces themselves, which were performed by each of Neuman-Hammond’s students individually and collectively on a setup consisting of “amplified water, stones, plastic and metal vessels, voice, cups, brushes, water bottles, and bubble wrap” and may or may not be the results of the ragtag graphic scores pictured on the cover, much of the delight in listening to this collection arises between the seams. Ari, a lad after my own heart, immediately asks to hear his recording before it’s even finished; Lena expresses appreciation for the specific sonic actions she conducted over the course of her performance; participants play rock-paper-scissors to see who goes next and compliment and chant for each other’s efforts; impromptu, impassioned cries of “CUP SOLO!” abound. Any group of kids who spend more than a few minutes together develop a sort of temporary dialect that is a perfectly inclusive summation of literally every ounce of energy contained within each, and that energy comes through with infectious appeal on boisterous ensemble cuts like “Rayford’s Trio.” The suite of outdoor “live” recordings that conclude the release are probably the most “purely” acoustically pleasing, with the distant squealing of breaks and natural ambience melding wonderfully with the diverse offerings from Haddie, Rafa, Nico, Maisie, and Mira. “Banana bread!”

(Don’t forget; Lena’s birthday is coming up again in a week, so send her your salutations.)

In what may already be one of, if not the culmination of a fantastic calendar year for harsh electronic music, Portuguese mainstay Narcolepsia and Hiisi Production’s from the artist’s home country of Finland team up for the monstrous Kulotus, a double-CD anthology of twelve Umpio recordings from the past decade. Other than Bizarre Uproar, there isn’t too much noise that makes it over from the Land of a Thousand Lakes with much oomph left (that I’ve heard about, at least… and I’d love to be proven wrong), but Umpio has been churning out increasingly interesting music since 2009, and now uninitiated listeners (including myself) can get a summative look into his stylistic and creative development throughout the ensuing years. Texturally intricate, dizzyingly detailed, and selectively intense, each and every recording included on Kulotus is its own overwhelming onslaught of whirling kinesis, the unique result of a refined system of oscillators, effects, and feedback manipulation pushed to heights that consistently flirt with the atom-splittingly primordial. We’re at the mercy of violent chain reactions, scalding Velcro-rip abrasions, and tectonic roils from deep within the earth—naïve volcano-voyeurs on the hunt for sounds whose potency is, to say the least, incompatible with the human eardrum. This definitely feels like a collection of various material, but it’s more than atmospherically coherent all together, and 80+ minutes ends up feeling more like 40. Not the worst way to experience ten years of fire and brimstone, or whatever.

Poland’s Gates of Hypnos netlabel has been putting out some of the best material in contemporary wall noise since its inception last year, already boasting an impressive catalog of over a hundred forward-thinking releases by established and unfamiliar names alike, and Anew (perhaps somewhat ironically) is no different. The 31-minute piece marks Thai project Painflux’s second solo appearance on an external label (following a number of splits and Pratyahara on ░░ HNW ░░ ) and fits GoH’s eclectic, descriptivist aesthetic to a T. Like a massive robotic butterfly trying to escape from a thick, sticky chrysalis, gummy goop and oil and chitin clogging creaking joints and sheet-metal wings, Anew embraces intense textures both organic and synthetic. Vine-like stems of bulbous crepitation are tightly wrapped into a single shifting mass that seems to at once be implanted in the center channel and free to extend its countless tendrils outward—it’s like a tremendously complex cluster of rhizomes bulging with so many nutrients that its aboveground form is nearly animate. Fully executing this “rattling cage” type of wall in terms of sound design is quite difficult, but when done well, as is certainly the case here, the effect is spellbinding, even immobilizing. After a long enough time caught up in the strangling grip of these flagitious flora, the listener themselves begins to feel caught in the trap, and not long after realizes here is where they were always meant to be (pay no attention to the root that has covertly replaced your brain stem).

Several promising new labels have either started or found their stride in 2021. That latter milestone, unsurprisingly, looks different for everyone; for smaller, understated labels with narrow focuses, such as Crooked Branch Collections from Nashville, it might mean simply putting out their first single-artist tape. And the eponymous debut by Hit with the Joke Hammer, an unknown, previously undocumented project, is a more than fitting entry to mark such progress. Confined to muffled, claustrophobic mono and delivering a sickly, understated intensity that just barely tickles the fringes of what I would call “noise,” the concise C24 complements CBC’s minimal artisan aesthetic with its slipshod humility. Unidentifiable concrète recordings, which originally could have been anything from trickling water and domestic doldrums to repurposed feedback loops and shortwave fiddles, rake across rusty tape heads with a lethargic, tedious sputter a la UVC (though without the same sense of exteriority). In passing, each of the four short tracks seems to twitch and amble with almost indistinguishable gaits, and it’s only through close attention that the exact character of the specific agitations can be identified—nuance that one might not expect based on the unapologetic castoff-ness of the music. Recent readers are almost certainly aware of my fondness for stuff like this; if you possess similar tastes, definitely do not skip this one.

When choosing a title for an audio document of improvised music, you really can’t go wrong with Impermanence; it’s not exactly original, in terms of either the specific genre or music as a whole, but it will never not be accurate. In the case of Violeta García (a cofounder of the splendid TVL Rec imprint) and Émilie Girard-Charest’s first meeting as a duo, the word accumulates a more unique meaning because of the two musicians’ chosen instruments. Cellos are often associated with their ability to emit sustained, “eternal” tones, and are utilized as such in anything from acoustic drone music old and new to traditional classical and chamber accompaniments. But in García’s and Girard-Charest’s hands they frequently become anything but eternal, instead acting as boundless surfaces for all sorts of extended technique scrabble, auxiliary object play, short stilted bowings, and barely-there below-the-bridge vapors. Despite the differences between the two artists’ careers (García operates almost entirely within improvisational contexts, while Girard-Charest primarily performs solo and ensemble compositions) their musical interplay is superb; some of the best moments of their interactions surface when both take a step back from volume and intensity and deal in quiet timbral harmonies of scrape and rustle, but the louder stretches are excellent too, especially the high-octane tense trills and punchy pizzicato plunks of segment III—which in turn dissolve into and rematerialize from their own forms of sonic reticence. And the near-apocalyptic resin-shredding of V is simply breathtaking. To think that my first reaction when I found this release was, Two cellos? Yeah, right.

It’s difficult to tell whether the so-called Jørgen Brønlund Quartet is actually made up of four individuals; based on the often extreme minimalism of their music, I might be inclined to assume that’s not the case, but multi-member bands like Shots prove that sparseness can be deceiving. “Best played at moderate volume,” the five pieces that comprise Landscapes III seem culled from the same forest as is featured on the cover, bubbling brooks and crunching leaves and auditory constellations of birdsong. There’s definitely some contact mics and/or hydrophones at work in segments II and IV, which sieve delicate, microscopic texture recordings through what is either subtle threads of auxiliary electronic processing or simply unusual sound-capture techniques (or both) to yield meditative rustle-scapes, the hidden organic hustle and bustle revealed when one turns over a partially buried rock. In contrast, the more spatially generous I and V swirl blending long exhales of wind and water in fluid arabesques, not quite the almost overwhelming physicality of some of Jerman’s more immersive nature evocations (I’m particularly reminded of his track on Underwater) but instead viewed from a comfortable distance: a waterfall of cascading spray observed from the safety of the hiking trail, ripples and rapids rushing by beneath a sturdy wooden bridge. As if I didn’t miss autumn enough already.

Nairobi musicians, artists, and community builders DJ Raph (Raphel Kariuki) and Sophia Bauer team up for an eponymous debut as Citysynthesis, the latest in a series of collaborations the pair have undertaken involving each other as well as sound enthusiasts from all over the populous Kenyan city in the interest of mapping its sonic characteristics and geography (read more about these ventures, particularly the World’s Loudest Library and Sound of Nairobi, here). Despite Kariuki’s musical background in beat-centric electronic music, “Pulpit” begins the digital-only EP in a rather formless, abstract manner, setting the stage for the sort of urban soundscape dissections that are used throughout: fragmentary, volatile, textural, but not to the point where a single iota of natural atmosphere of is lost. This is especially apparent on the following “Sitaki Kuongea Mob,” which seems to simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct some sort of street performance, the jarring jump-cuts and splitting rhythms woven together with persistent speech. Then, on “Trio,” it’s the voices that become the object of structural recontextualization, floating ephemerally around a seething center like the beating heart and lifeblood of the city itself. The many paradoxes upon which Citysynthesis is built extend to the actual effect it has as well; one feels as if these meticulous assemblages convey more potent information about what it means to live in Nairobi than simple unaffected field recordings would, and yet it’s difficult to say exactly why that is. My theory is that with passionate residents Kariuki and Bauer acting as deeply involved sonic filters, anything they create will be imbued with the same love and appreciation for their city as is held within them.

I was, as the kids say, “today years old” when I discovered the Geel, Belgium–based Dadaist Tapes. They’re “funded by a cycling allowance” to give away editions of 25 free tapes in the interest of “discouraging product sales,” which is a goal with which I can definitely get on board. Though the label most likely remains incredibly obscure from any standpoint, one could say it is known by enough people since, according to their simple website, each and every copy of the nine tapes they’ve released have found a home. I’m glad to be introduced to this gem of a venture via Urall’s On Broken Stairs, a condensed suite of moth-eaten tape music that strikes the same deep dust-covered chords as Termite Acropolis and Darksmith. Swaddled in lumped-up layers of scum and fuzz, a range of disoriented emotions make attempts to break the oil-slicked surface: almost sunny no-fi drone psychedelia cracking under dizzying industrial collaging on “Melting Hands”; warbling, uneasy tranquility delicately distilled for “Everywhere We Look”; and, finally, complete, terrified delirium on “Taking Turn,” hoarse cries into the void as all around you it crumples into cold mechanical doom. All five tracks are superb compositions in their own right, each using the rich, fecund emptiness of blank (or mostly blank) magnetic tape to its fullest textural possibilities. I’ll be listening to this—digital downloads of Dadaist releases are, unsurprisingly, also free—as I sit at my computer constantly refreshing their website until I can grab the next one.