I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about how both the aesthetic and the social aspects of noise can be alternately welcoming and alienating. There’s so much to be said on the subject, but this isn’t the time nor the place. I’m not trying to be vague. I just want to give due respect to the simplicity of Total Sweetheart’s credo, their beautifully succinct solution to this complicated problem: noise is about kindness, respect, friendship. Community. Since 2022’s debut Early to Bed the duo of Texas veterans Nathan Golub (Ascites, BLJ) and Ryan Jones (Struggle Session) has made their stance clear with a string of wholesome declarations, from the straightforward statements of Being Nice to People Is Cool and Loud Sounds, Friendly Faces to the nostalgia and familial warmth of Better Half and A Country Drive. But it all seems to have led up to this new tape, fittingly released by beloved boutique imprint Handmade Birds as part of the ambitious Black Alchemy batch.

The Great Southern Kindness is a radical manifesto for handshakes and hugs in a scene overrun with anger and exploitation. Don’t be fooled—it has sonic extremity in spades, the muscle to back up the message. The pair’s sprawling array of modular electronics has never been this high-powered, or this detailed. As always, there’s a gestural ease to the proceedings that echoes the most abrasive of tabletop improvised music duos (think Rehberg/Schmickler or Nakamura/Yan), an assured, open-eared amble that carries supercharged synth cacophony like it’s a cloud of dandelion wisps. After an apt introduction by Longmont Potion Castle’s own Buford Clifford (an unsurprising sample choice if you know these yahoos), “Cowboys from Heck” minces a briar patch’s worth of sound sources every second, knitting a quilt so dense it tackles you with its loving weight. The B side diptych sounds like construction site psychedelia, so tactile it’s hazardous. “Post-harsh” is a term that gets thrown around every now and then, but usually to refer to projects quite different than Total Sweetheart, who deconstruct the tradition from the roots up while still honoring its tenets and tropes. A “Vulgar Display of Positivity” indeed.

Copies are mostly (deservingly) sold out in the States; looks like Scream and Writhe (Canada) and Silken Heart (Germany) still have some.

Thanks to our good friend climate change, turbulence-free flights are becoming a rarity—ironic, considering how much carbon the aviation industry spews into the atmosphere. Those nerve-racking bumps and batters only add to the nightmare that is air travel, a nightmare in which Red Eye to Hell revels. From the stressful release description to the auxiliary packaging (a “Travel Service” paper barf bag), this debut single-sider by Frequent Flyer nosedives toward an aesthetic that is all the more repulsive for its familiarity. Beginning with a transportation security announcement as a cursed overture, the tape soon climbs to a cruising altitude of thick analog distortion, much of which sounds like it could have been sourced from recordings of commercial jet engines. Fans of blown-out four-track harsh will feel right at home in this catastrophically depressurized cabin; the noise is heavy, dense, sluggish, but with just enough bite to keep it from fading into the background. Around the eight-minute mark the fuselage starts to shake itself apart, and a brief interlude of loose bolts and groaning metal plates builds anticipation for the roar’s unceremonious return. The pacing feels like flying against the current, deliberate but impeded, and especially in the latter half the trajectory tends toward rumbling stasis… less wall, more wind tunnel perhaps. Another great release from a criminally underappreciated label.

Copies are available via email: brucepilaf@gmail.com.

It’s no secret that Niagara/Toronto-based Vacancy Recs. is one of my favorite labels right now. This new batch as much as any other underscores what they’re all about: a C100/double-CD of material from stalwart in-house project Sick Days, Luigi Bilodo’s follow-up to last year’s beloved debut, a “home-spun” sampler cassette of dubbed whale sound recordings… and then this. Much like Bilodo’s sophomore offering, it is simply titled II, but whether I was their half of the Sound_00 + Lefterna split earlier in the Vacancy catalog or something else, I’d never heard Fort Erie project PORTAL before. Which might be some—but definitely not all—of the reason this tape blew me away. Reflecting many of the other roster artists’ interest in near-static meditations, each track is essentially a wall in terms of progression. The A side mesmerizes with the drone of an industrial HVAC unit, burrowing ever deeper into that deceptively complex sound that’s both cold and warm, even as signs of life start to soak the edges. A subtle electroacoustic element gradually reveals itself, enhancing the natural ebbs and flows of flora and fauna. That same element is not so subtle on the B, but that’s not a bad thing. Far from it, in fact; this is truly breathtaking music, in a way that’s both immediate and patient. Meticulous processing and layering makes for an intricate soundscape with the immersive skitter-scatter of IYS and the organic force of Prepared Rain. Just wonderful work. I already know II is never going to be far from the deck this year (and beyond).

I’ve been a fan of Rie Nakajima for longer than almost any other sound artist, but I’ve surprisingly never written at length about her solo material for the site (though I have reviewed two releases by O Yama O, her pop-inflected duo project with Keiko Yamamoto, and Free Percussion, a V/A comp curated by fellow fan Francesco Covarino to kick off tsss). This latest tape on Tokyo imprint ato.archives is as great a first as any, a full-length live session that showcases everything I love most about her work. Those who have been to or even just seen footage of a Nakajima performance are familiar with the intimacy she creates with her arrays of miniature electroacoustic devices, which tap and twirl and trundle in the space encircled by an attentive crowd. The 40ish-minute set that comprises Unshaping, recorded in a castle courtyard in France all the way back in 2016, starts out quiet and reserved even by her standards. Natural outdoor ambience and noises from the audience—exclamations and murmurs, footsteps crunching on grass—are as much in focus as the soft clatter and whir of the various gizmos, even when more are activated and the soundscape gets denser. The way it gently phases in and out with the breeze is breathtaking. That dynamic continues on the B side, which might be even better than the A… the first third or so is lush and magnetic, the crystal-clear fidelity showcasing the tiniest of textures.

Magnetic tape, as a sound-producing material, is often something to be wrangled or wrestled with. Though it can be elegant in its humble warble, its insubstantial and unpredictable nature is usually the selling point. Concrète and/or collage conjurers can achieve greater precision and more complexity with digital tools, but analog remains many artists’ first choice for a reason. On Postures, a new C23 from Minnesota’s Marsha Fisher, small-scale percussion performances serve as the basis for a concise quartet of sketches, each one a great example of how the classic approach can give new life to already active sound events. Fisher’s technique here is straightforward yet quite gestural: the source material is unprocessed, only recontextualized in a solely kinetic manner. Knocks and scrapes, rattle and rustle stretch across the stereo field, every individual texture agitated into a lurching waltz. Despite their rough tactility, the samples weave together with grace and purpose; it’s like Fisher is tying a system of boating knots, the nodes and tension choreographed quickly yet precisely, braids braided (needless to say, the track titles are apt). For fans of Translucent Envelope, Dressing, and things that go bump in the day.

The members of Human Adult Band each have one foot in the world we know and the other in someplace entirely different. The crucial components of Western popular music are present, at least: guitar, bass, drums; some sort of dynamic progression; semi-intelligible recording techniques. The way in which these ingredients are baked, brewed, and fermented, however, follows no known recipe. The Movers Brought Rainbows, the project’s newest offering, feels like it was conjured on an interdimensional plane, aspects from both this and that side of familiarity curdling into a psychoactive mass. It’s not that “rock” bands have never dabbled in deconstruction—the actual music here is not too far from that of Fushitsusha, Mouthus, or various Kiwi hermits old and new—but the hazy, profoundly distant production approach further blurs the concrete essence of the performance itself, melting the psychedelic slouch-jams into a screeching industrial soup. The A side especially howls and heaves with seismic force, the title cut rendering the quartet(?) as mere specks at the center of a maelstrom. The release notes mention a gauntlet of “tortuous electronic post processing,” so it’s hard to tell whether the expansive space these tracks fill is natural, artificial, or both, and I wonder how similar it is to the live experience. But something tells me that these alleged human adults put on a good show regardless.

Sometimes you just need to lie down, listen, and smile. That applies to both the source recordings from which Nanahari Edit grew and the finished product itself. Billy Gomberg (whose work I originally discovered by way of Fraufraulein, his ongoing duo project with Anne Guthrie) has hinted at this strain of wholesome, well-lit synthesis on previous solo releases, and it finally shines with fullest brilliance on this second Dinzu tape. Environmental sound itself can be breathtakingly beautiful, but that beauty too easily loses its luster during the process of capturing it and then presenting it to new ears. Here, Gomberg shades in those gaps with the help of a kaleidoscopic digital palette, each colorful addition brightening and complementing—never obscuring—the original textures. Much like the mundane snatches of everyday life that constitute its softly beating heart, the single 23-minute piece has no specific destination in mind. The spritely synths run errands and stop for coffee, bubbling in bliss at the sight of ducks crossing the road or a serendipitous run-in with an old friend, but overall they simply amble, any “progression” amounting to a contented stretch on a bed of sun-drenched grass in a pocket park. And isn’t that all anyone could ever want anyway?

Geneva’s presque fantôme has been one of my favorite tape-based projects since I got a hold of their self-titled cassette back in 2021. A generous care package sent by the artist on behalf of their label dents de scie dosed my ears with the murky sounds of chutes as well as the extensive back catalogue of prior alias crève-chiens, which is full of equally enrapturing analog gloom. Though the distinct style teeters over the symbiotic abysses of noise and dark ambient, presque fantôme remains faithful to its specific spin on rustic, basement-bred musique concrète, ensuring that each release never loses its balance on that slippery ledge. cachette presents some of the most desolate material yet, taking the project’s name (French for “almost ghost”) to heart with its paranormal shrouds of shadow. The A side begins with a yawning, cloying drone, less emerging from the darkness than burrowing farther into it. But this place is not smooth or spare—it’s filled with things, objects, appliances and furniture and clutter crammed into corners that all come to “life” at night, rendered rogue and restless by the reality that something, perhaps everything, is wrong. As eerie as the music is, there’s not much of a sense of mystery or paranoia; the textures move and shift, rattle and shiver, but they don’t evoke any sort of outside force, let alone a resolution or an “answer” (not even a “question”). The lengthy closing track in particular is a haunting display of this absolute insularity, its symphony of slur dragging like a moldy bejewelled tapestry across the rotten floor, from wall to wall and back again… the “why” is of no consequence.