Christian Mirande is one of those few musicians whose releases I buy without hesitation. The Philadelphia-based sound artist can always be relied upon to produce wonderfully difficult music with distinct and unmistakable emotional resonance; see the simultaneous domesticity and seismic rumble of Trying to Remember a House, the criminally underappreciated sprawling sonic odyssey Scaled Deposits, or even the minuscule field recording collages of Strangeways if you need proof. It’s immediately apparent that his newest work, My Friend Went to Heaven on the Frankford El, is a very personal outing for Mirande; the title, along with the tape’s dedication to “Jason & Sean” and a link providing instructions for administering Naloxone, immediately evokes a profound sense of loss. But My Friend Went to Heaven is not cheaply elegiac, never tugging on low-hanging heart strings with monologues about grief or other clichés. Instead, Mirande bases what may be his most elusive release yet around the strange milieu of American life during a rampant opioid epidemic. There are no warnings, no time to say goodbye; your friends and family are simply there one day and gone the next, and the surrounding world is heartbreakingly apathetic to your grief—trains rattle by with countless passengers all oblivious to what you’ve lost, conversations carry on without you, classic pop anthems are snatched away by the same uncaring, unceremonious hands that yank so many lives from their human vessels. The world of My Friend Went to Heaven on the Frankford El is one that is at once familiar and distorted, an unyielding constant viewed from the fragile perspective of a single consciousness.

At the heart of PINK, Prism Shanks’ debut cassette release, is percussion—not only the “hand built” rhythmic devices the duo utilizes but also the way in which they approach the other elements in their music. This “largely improvised audio collage” finds footing amidst almost entirely formless cascades of manually struck drums and other objects, yet snaking in and out of this tactile clatter are the unmistakable metallic scrapes and ragged, distorted howls of a prepared guitar, an instrument here used with the same percussive predilection as its fellow sound objects. To my knowledge I’ve never heard any music by either James Worse or John W. Newman, the two members of Prism Shanks, but their abilities to construct immersive atmosphere and hypnotic headspace are immediately clear when you hear PINK; despite never quite falling into the familiar comfort of conventional rhythm, the tape nonetheless draws a magnetic energy from the dark, ritualistic timbres at play in the music. Every instant of the release’s thirty minute duration radiates a powerful, mystical force, concluded in the sublime final moments of the B side, where uneasy beauty is hewn from electric hum and Prévost-esque bowed cymbals (I can’t be the only one reminded of the formidable drone-scapes of Crux / Flayed).

Note: each copy of PINK comes with a unique custom collage overlay.

I know I repeat this ad nauseam, but Bandcamp is a truly wondrous place. There are endless bewildering, obscure gems to be mined throughout the depths of the popular music hosting service, finding something like Actually Stupid is the equivalent of finding a mysterious old cassette at the very back of a rack or an unmarked CD amidst the stacks filled with bizarre sound. What makes this discovery even more valuable, however, is the fact that what is ostensibly New York based artist Richard Pizzaro’s first release is defiantly new and fresh, released on the fourth day of the new year and adorned with an artfully low-effort cover image made with Snapchat. Actually Stupid is also not a work that distances its aesthetic from the zeitgeist; featured on the cover is someone’s iTunes music library, “Aria” gets extensive mileage out of samples from Ariana Grande’s “God Is a Woman,” and everyone knows sex dolls are all the rage right now—but the music itself could hardly be any stranger. Opening track “Draining” evokes an arresting feeling of isolation, stripping fuzzy field recordings of a running tap and rushing air currents down into a single, spectral drone like the feeble sound of the arctic wind as you lie freezing to death in the snow. “Sex Doll I & II,” a continuous two-part piece that is itself part of a “Sex Doll” track trilogy, collapses into chaotic clusters of malfunctioning percussion patches and contorted electronic glitches; the soft synth washes of “Midwit” battle against jagged, unpredictable intrusions of silence and grating radio grabs until the whole track is commandeered and we’re left with an absurd yet strangely melancholy mass of monotone text-to-speech, a grandiose pop ballad, and what seem to be field recordings from either a cacophonous construction site or a violent firefight; and download-only bonus track “White Powder” concludes the proceedings with another delirious pop song dissection. Three cheers for democratic hosting platforms, hilarious album covers, and the people out there able and willing to make shit as weird and wonderful as this.

Bandcamp opens up many opportunities for avant-garde artists in regards to how they make their music accessible to the masses. Artists can simply host albums on Bandcamp that they would have released anyway without impacting their release timeline, while others perhaps get carried away with the ease and freedom that the site provides, releasing so much music that fans get overwhelmed and the individual merits of single works are drowned out by prolificacy (I’m looking at you, O’Rourke and Drumm). Joe Posset is no stranger to handmade CDrs or ultra-limited cassette tape runs, media that certainly coincide with his sonic aesthetic, but he also doesn’t shy away from having an established online presence, something many of his peers in the field of text-sound, tape skronk, and lo-fi surrealism often eschew in favor of obscurity. Posset’s Bandcamp allows us access to many things we otherwise wouldn’t be able to hear, such as the short We Are Fresh Weekend collection or a collaborative live set with fellow UK gargle poet Territorial Gobbing. Nine Copper Rods rings in the new year with eight pieces from various origins, along with easily one of the most entertaining album descriptions I’ve read through in a long time. The slithering, plasticky swirl of “Exi” encourages us to “feel the whirr [sic] of polyurethane nestle the gong farmer” while the kinetic swipes and yanks of “Dicta Solo 26th Oct (take two)” contradict its being “recorded in bed, sunny afternoon. Probably should have been doing something else.” The absence of any single unifying theme on Nine Copper Rods, abandoned in favor of scatter and sketch, allows the walls of impenetrability to fall away and reveal the truly amazing technique and skill involved in Posset’s music-making process.

“Download, press play and go about your business. I hope soft grey clouds bloom in your ears and it makes you sizzle a smile like Nicholson’s bacon.”

Once the new year rolls around there always seems to be a standout short ‘n’ sweet extreme hardcore release that helps me barrel through the duller moments of winter break. Last year it was Bandit’s Warsaw, an eight minute slab of brutal techgrind that still gets regular plays over a year later. Exactly one year and two days after, we’re given the gift of LA fastcore quartet Guilt Dispenser’s succinct self-titled debut. Plowing through ten tracks in less than half as many minutes, Guilt Dispenser draws elements from a vast array of hardcore subgenres into its breakneck vortex of speed and fury, devoting as much time to angular riffs in odd time signatures and mathy core breakdowns as the breathless d-beat gallops one would expect. Incendiary opener “Incite” fulfills its titular promise with a heavyweight propulsive groove that gets heads banging right off the bat, while shorter tracks like “Discern” showcase the band’s penchant for jarring arrangements, tempo changes, whiplash vocal trade-offs, and bite-sized atmospheric interludes. The minuscule outing ends on a powerful note with the formless “Cease,” a swirling whirlwind of effect-laden vocals and distortion. Inject full contents intravenously for maximum energy increase.

Howard Stelzer’s single track release Fever Song was assembled “in secret” during the latter months of 2019, finally completed after the Massachusetts based schoolteacher and sound artist recovered from a nasty bout of pneumonia. Stelzer says: “As soon as my fever lifted, I was so grateful to be able to do the things I usually do (like being able to concentrate on a task for more than a few minutes at a go, or walk from one side of my house to the other, or carry on a conversation with my wife) that I returned to this album right away and ironed it out rather quickly.” So many elements of this excerpt from the album’s description translate well into analysis of it; like many of Stelzer’s compositions, “Fever Song” is built around patient drones, but the sustained textures and tones he utilizes here are not somber or dull, instead always climbing with radiant vigor to further heights, brighter patches of light. Our fever breaks and we see an opening in the shroud of sickness, an escape toward which we desperately claw and climb. “Fever Song” is also a celebration of not only the everyday, but also the patience to appreciate the everyday. The piece could have been shorter, of course, but it isn’t; Stelzer carefully constructs spans of controlled noise to allow for the barest amount of progression, allowing meditative stretches to become illusions of stasis, sonic monoliths in which we lose ourselves until the subtle developments become impossible to ignore or the rug is yanked from under our feet. And finally, I love the use of the phrase “iron out” to describe the process of finishing “Fever Song”; it appeals to both the work’s recognition of the value of the mundane as well as Stelzer’s pragmatic approach to music-making. And even some of the drones feel as though they’ve been ironed; trivial materials forcefully pressed into gorgeous, unified slabs of sound.

The genre and culture of black metal has come quite a long way since its infamous origins in early 90’s Scandinavia, as new scenes, communities, and styles popping up all around the world at an ever-increasing rate. I don’t think it would be an overstep, however, to name the Germany-based imprint Amor Fati one of the most significant voices for contemporary black metal. Often focusing on bringing independently released music to physical media and a wider audience, the label either brought me or introduced me to many of my more modern favorites, including HWWAUOCH’s Into the Labyrinth of Consciousness, Pharmakeia’s self-titled debut, Mahr’s Antelux, and now Cult of Erinyes’ Æstivation (all of these are available for name your price digital download from the artists). Fitting right in with AF’s raw, oppressive aesthetic without sacrificing melody or succinct structure, Æstivation is a more concise effort than 2017’s Tiberivs, building to and from punishing blast beat sections with atmospheric interludes and developing riff repetitions. The array of guest vocalists of which the band makes use allows for a wide range of utterances, from distant howls and throat-shredding shrieks to guttural growls and throaty spoken word (the pained screams on “Nihil Sacrum Est” are definitely a highlight). Æstivation is a superb, well-executed celebration of both classic black metal tradition and more contemporary stylistic augmentations.

While my end of year review hiatus is always a much-needed break from an undammed influx of new music, there are usually a few remarkable or fascinating albums in December that demand immediate attention. One of many works in a large quantity of final month releases that exposes the stupidity of publishing comprehensive end of year lists in November, Barn Sour’s first 7″ horses fucked over the head with bricks concludes newcomer NYC imprint Careful Catalog’s superb 2019 with a flourish. The EP was released just a week before we rang in the new year in tandem with Mattias Gustafsson’s equally amazing Frusen Musik, and over a modest nine minutes it proceeds to fuck every conception you have about music over the head with bricks. The names of the two musicians listed on the release are most likely pseudonyms; James Druck probably refers to one of the key figures in a series of cases of insurance fraud commonly known as the “Horse Murders,” and who knows what “C.Lara” is referencing, if anything. The music itself doesn’t answer many questions, instead taking the form of a bewildering amalgam of emotions that cultivates a mysterious power through evocations both visceral and cerebral. Maniacal laughter rings throughout the entirety of side A, balancing any interpretation on an unstable tight rope between unfettered joy and complete hysteria while our understanding is further assaulted by shifting layers of dissonant drones, earthen clatter, and some brief beauty near the jarring, unceremonious end. On side B, harrowing, half-nonsensical, Boredoms-esque babbling is tempered by the cavernous reverberations of a somber piano melody, and barn sour burrows even further into a rabbit den of oddness and impenetrability that, coupled with the EP’s short length, makes it extremely addicting.