There isn’t much on Residues of Time that could be easily mistaken for normal, everyday sounds. Even during moments where the source material doesn’t seem to be processed at all, like the beginning section of “De Entro,” there’s still plenty of detachment; any naturalness we attempt to latch onto is always unseated by some form of digital disruption or an even less decipherable ambiguity. And yet I was very aware of my surroundings when listening to the new tape release from French sound artist Méryll Ampe, constantly removing an earbud and looking over my shoulder to see if that was really the door opening, or if some distant conversation I hallucinated is actually taking place. I attribute this phenomenon to Ampe’s singular ability to make music that truly resembles “residues of time,” removed and alien remnants that retain just the barest semblances of their much more familiar origins, the mysterious discharge of temporal passage gathered and shaped into something incredible. This is why we’re able to find so many handholds throughout this uncanny odyssey, even if they are so often yanked away before they can be used; why the cold, stripped-down drone that begins “Residues of Time III” is somehow invigorating, even triumphant; why the heavy, jarring glitches that plague “Autour du lac” are so profoundly unsettling. Residues of Time is a spellbinding album that is not only fascinating for its highly abstract sonic palette, but also for the microscopic hints of reality that it (mostly) conceals.

Geneva duo African Ghost Valley (hereafter AGV) are masters of conciseness. Very few of their releases even reach the 30-minute mark, instead restricting the project’s dense electronic soundscapes and noisy freakouts to digestible lengths. AAM is no different; AGV’s new tape release on Jollies Records feels intensely curated and carefully revised, for not even a single second of its nineteen minutes feels wasted. The oppressive, apocalyptic milieu that the duo so frequently conjures is transposed to a different abstract locale this time around. As the blurb on the album page states, the music on AAM evokes “an unmistakable scent of acrid sulphur, oppressive heat, and sandy air; a raw primitive planet,” a group of sensory images no doubt helped along by the tape’s deep yellow-orange cover and volcanic imagery. The title track begins the journey with frenetic power-noise rhythms and skull-rattling bass frequencies that trade space with ethereal synth melodies and ambience, creating a short slab of shifting sound that’s both abrasive and atmospheric. Things get a bit more deconstructed with the following two tracks, which make heavy use of granular dissection and agile glitch blasts. “USYRUP,” however, is a classic AGV track, complete with the seething drones and portents of doom that make their music so distinct, and “OUDD,” perhaps the tape’s most reserved piece, breathes boiling waves of humid distortion that hang in the air for a while and then dissipate like acid rain clouds opening their maws.

Though have mercy runs just 17 minutes, its structure is clearly defined and it feels perfectly paced. The new tape from Turin, Italy–based sound artist Edoardo Cammisa (who releases music as Banished Pills) makes use of sounds as fleeting and diminutive as its short duration, finding a delicate beauty in the textures of clattering objects and choice bits of warbly synthesis. The opening trilogy of tracks, “bonds_I-III,” begins with a Small Cruel Party–esque symphony of closely recorded rattle and rustle, with the first piece exploring the entirety of the stereo field while retaining a palpable sense of empty space (it’s this latter quality that engendered my SCP comparison, I think). Things get even sparser with “II,” in which an array of domestic recordings forms a skeletal structure around a looping, sprightly synth melody. These tonal pieces create interesting interplay between themselves and the less conventionally musical elements whose world they occupy—though on “wounds_I,” it’s hard to even tell which is which. have mercy also doesn’t restrict itself to the familiar and the minuscule; “wounds_III” is a cut of cavernous environmental capture, which nonetheless possesses the same sense of tactile action and movement as the previous pieces. The concluding “smoke slowly surrounds her lungs” occupies some mysterious midpoint between tiny and vast, crafting a wide, intricate soundscape from the smallest of ingredients that ends beautifully.

Few things act as a better opener to a brutal sludge-hardcore album while simultaneously tapping into pandemic paranoia than a sample instructing citizens that “the bodies must be carried to the street, and- and burned. They must be burned immediately, soak them with gasoline and burn them.” Razor sharp slices of feedback plague those opening words, and once they finish a couple of snare hits signify that it’s time to be crushed. Exquisite Tokens of Love is the second release by London, Ontario quartet Blessing, and this cassette reissue brings their brand of eviscerating, heavyweight metallic hardcore to a much wider audience. The misanthropic growls and industrial strength blast beats evoke beloved bands like Friendship and Sectioned while retaining a uniquely straightforward punk backbone. The whole thing seems like a battle against feedback; “Potent Brew” begins with with a riff that trades between low and high so fast it’s dizzying, before descending into a ridiculously heavy doom breakdown with infectious dualing vocals. And just like that, the first side is over in the blink of an eye, the three bite-sized slabs of sludge offering little preparation for what’s to come on “Hand in Hand Into a Morose Extinction,” the seven-minute closer that leaves no survivors in its path. Far from the overly repetitive riff-fests that conclude many otherwise excellent powerviolence releases, the track draws its energy from the nightmarish atmosphere that surrounds its lumbering grooves and breakneck blasts, a maelstrom of misery and darkness constantly seeping in. The ending riff is pretty much exactly what I’d imagine being clubbed in the head to death would sound like. If that doesn’t motivate you to listen, I don’t know what will.

One of the albums I most heavily associate with my tumultuous, stressful first year at university (I’ve since relocated to a different, more suitable institution) is Astral Social Club’s Happy Horse. Along with some other examples of dense, abstract, sun-drenched psychedelia (Sunroof!’s Found Star Sound, Kemialliset Ystävät’s self-titled LP, Black Dice’s Beaches & Canyons), Happy Horse provided me with a much-needed escape into a beautiful and lush alternate dimension, where oppressive negativity and deep existential paranoia are replaced with joyful, surreal textures and rays of sonic sunlight. The solo electronic project of Neil Campbell (Vibracathedral Orchestra, A Band, Smell & Quim) has been around for a long time, but Abstract Double Concrete is its first solo release since 2014’s Fountain Transmitter Meditations, and in both sound and aesthetic seems to hearken back to earlier releases. “funfun” wastes no time in blasting currents of ecstatic electronic mayhem directly into the vein, its detailed soundscape only becoming more so as harsher modulations are introduced into the mix. “Chunk Abstract” settles into a subdued but persistent techno stomp as saccharine melodic cells create hypnotic headspace, while “Concrete Sag” embodies a more sluggish psychedelic swamp, festooning every inch of the stereo field with watery, organic synth rollicks. While it doesn’t evoke as much raw, unbridled happiness as Happy Horse, Abstract Double Concrete is a superb return to form for Astral Social Club.

Music writers have certainly made use of the painful grinding and invasiveness evoked by orthodontic analogies when talking about harsh noise, but newcomer project polly velvet takes it a step further by releasing an entire album based upon such comparisons. stomatology, whose name references the “study of the structure, function and diseases of the oral cavity,” is a brief but brutal assault on the senses, hurling wave after wave of assaulting sound throughout the six short, hyperactive tracks. Harsh noise is one of those musics that’s not always purely limited to aurality; it’s often also physically punishing, viscerally impactful, something that polly velvet tries to maximize with the album’s imagery, track titles, and presentation. Enter through the unwelcoming entryway of a swollen, diseased open mouth and you’re met with the painful, piercing slices of “wisdom grind”; the seething, unstable churns of “hollow teeth”; and the dizzying, broken oscillations of “dr. feinstone.” Whether stomatology is spicing up the waiting room for your semiannual dental checkup or providing a soundtrack for a readthrough of Harry Mathews’ bizarre novel Tlooth, it’s sure to leave you begging for mercy.

“support your local dentist. ** PLAY IT LOUD **”

On Rendlesham Transmitter, UK sound art and research project Coagulant follows up their superb previous release Anamorphoses with another set of deeply immersive abstract soundscapes. The approach to sonic processing they adopt is once again pleasingly aggregate, with spacious room recordings and airflow drones melding with distant voices and clatter to create opaque, mysterious currents of sound—the elements all truly “coagulate” into something new. For me, Coagulant’s music is difficult to elucidate because it is so unavoidably holistic; just like the complex psychological processes it attempts to examine, each piece the project generates unfolds as an inseparable whole, the multitude of ingredients that constitute them always bound within a dense knot of relationships. This quality provides an explanation for why each track is able to draw so much from what is essentially stagnancy (on “DMT Entities” especially, not much changes throughout its nearly 24-minute duration, yet “boring” or “repetitive” are the absolute last words I would use to describe it); the listener spends their time constantly attempting to decipher that tangled web of inextricable relations, trying in vain to isolate each component in this congealed amalgam of auditory uncertainty. As background music, Rendlesham Transmitter is meditative, nocturnal, murky; as focused listening, it’s an impenetrable clump of sound that we’re constantly trying to break open, but all we can really do is perceive it from different angles and futilely try to convince ourselves that we have it all figured out.

Amazingly, it’s been over a decade since the last full-length release from Belgian improvisational group R.O.T., whose public and internet presence is as elusive and obscure as the music they create. Klein Eiland is an album heavily indebted to location; all ten pieces contained on the CD were recorded in a now-demolished Brussels building of the same name, and the quartet’s abstract textural interactions reverberate through its spacious rooms and halls before disappearing into the dark, spectral void that lurks just beneath our perception. Improvised music and documentation have always been locked in a knotty, even contradictory relationship; purists insist that the identity of an improvisation is hinged inextricably on its taking place in real time, and that recording it creates something entirely distinct. These issues are complicated even further on Klein Eiland—not only was the location where it was recorded demolished, but something entirely new now stands in its place (an apartment complex which is pictured on the back of the CD sleeve). But the skilled sound artists who perform as R.O.T. have somehow managed to evoke that profound reality of impermanence even in this timeless document: the ghostly electronic transmissions, sparse concrete interplay, and distant instruments are somber, elegiac, fleeting, breathtaking in how they fill these mysterious spaces yet dissipate just as quickly. I’m reminded of similarly environment-dependent improvisations like the Battus/Gauguet/La Casa Chantier series or Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda’s KE I TE KI, but Klein Eiland is singularly sublime and harrowing, and evokes something that’s at once material and completely intangible.

Mary Staubitz and Russ Waterhouse’s first release as a duo, a lathe cut 7″ on Gertrude Tapes, is pretty much over as soon as it starts, a brief and concise ten minutes of elusive sound. But strangely, our experience of time during each listen is not nearly as cut-and-dry; the two artists manage to elicit a strong feeling of stasis and permanence in these two short pieces, trapping the listener in comfortable yet subtly sinister ennui extracts that defy our typical conceptions, like the unpredictable, unexplainable temporal distortions that occur during a university class or a shift at work. Plagued by heavily amplified rustles, chewing, and an ongoing churn of heavily processed environmental sound, the sonic scenery of “Pickup for Mark” plots itself with fractured verbal exchanges and ringing telephones. Here, we are both invisible observer and conspicuous trespasser, aware that the events taking place are not caused by ours—or even the artists’—presence, yet keenly cognizant of the jagged, imperfect opening through which we have entered this soundscape, the perceptible seams that expose its artificiality. “Exterior Scroll” is even less concrete, as lo-fi recordings of clattering, cascading junk and other objects disrupt the natural hum of the outdoors and the distant sound of human voices. Staubitz and Waterhouse is one of those modest, unassuming releases that doesn’t make a big deal about itself, but the questions we inevitably ask in deciphering the knotty quandaries it presents are anything but inconsequential.