Most of the tapes released by Chicago imprint Hausu Mountain, from the garish, color-clashing 16-bit cover designs to the frenetic electronic hodgepodges of the music, can reliably be described as “overwhelming.” All three of uncompromising artist Bonnie Baxter’s solo albums (she also performs and records with fellow Brooklyn noisemakers Hisham Bharoocha and Nicos Kennedy as Kill Alters) have been put out on HM, and all three fit that description of “overwhelming,” but AXIS especially is unlike anything you—or at least I—have heard before. The short release is structured around Baxter’s singular vocalizations, which pounce from animalistic chattering and gibbering (sounds which, as recurring elements in the strange, fluid current of “Nocturnal Emissions,” are strangely hypnotic) to angry, raving, eerily cut-up rejections of sexual advances (“No DICC”) faster than you can say “what the fuck is happening.” AXIS lurks behind many less grotesque guises throughout its modest duration—elastic and intricate EDM, plasticky synthpop, punishing power-noise—but at its heart is the bizarre energy that Baxter’s unhinged vocal performance introduces. Equal parts repulsive and mesmerizing, her nonsensical ad-libs and surreal ruminations help make AXIS a true “Spirit Enema.”

“I need some fucking help with my asshole so please take me to the fucking doctor thank you very very much.”

Tactility is something Andrea Borghi has been exploring in his music over the course of his entire career; apart from his multimedia “discomateria” pieces (circular discs made of various materials, often marble or other types of stone, prepared with both natural and artificial ephemera and played on Borghi’s turntable), the Italian sound artist has coaxed tensile metallic textures from his bass while playing with adventurous quartet VipCancro; constructed miniature worlds of whirs, glitches, and hums using open back VHS recorders; and captured the warbly, lumbering sound of a stylus across fabric. The calming, sterile rustles of texts_und fit in well with these other traversals into physicality, but what’s unique about it is the importance of words. No, there are no actual voices present on the recordings; instead Borghi uses “text-imprinted metal discs” on a prepared turntable—plus some unknown auxiliary devices—and the result is a collection of clean, chirring, circular drones that echo the soothing yet fascinating sounds of other metal-inclined artists (Rie Nakajima, Max Eastley). The five tracks that comprise the tape range from the minuscule cacophony of “#4” to the campfire-like crackles of “#1” to the delightful experiments with space on “#3.”

Coutoux’s 2017 tape Hellicoprion, a deafening descent into shadowy aquatic depths via a unique stylistic amalgam of black metal, power electronics, industrial, and heavy electronica, rarely leaves my car (when I have access to a car). Until hearing Seething Rage, I was under the impression that the hellish genre cocktail explored on Hellicoprion would largely dictate Coutoux’s approach on future releases, but it turns out that it’s a bit of anomaly in the artist’s oeuvre. This new tape sidles back into grimy EBM territory; while “Ancient Waters” announced itself with throat-shredding shrieks and a blast of metallic noise, “Oppression” evokes more of a dark, dingy dance floor. Though there are some organic sound sources—the artist makes use of what appear to be heavily processed vocal samples—Seething Rage is almost entirely electronic, but that’s not to say it’s not as atmospheric or hard-hitting. It’s quite the opposite, actually; the punishing drum machine grooves carve themselves from distorted bass punches and ever-varying snare patches, creating a structure around which more aerobic synth arpeggios and abrasive rumbles are woven. Coutoux’s slamming, grinding rhythmic punishments echo the relentless assaults of especially hard-hitting industrial techno artists like Regis and Container, but also possess some very danceable, hip-hop-esque qualities.

The self-titled release from Andrew Bowen’s new project Slave to Society is a mangled, abrasive mess of techno and hardcore, the five tracks each punishing onslaughts of pounding four-on-the-floor rhythms, blown-out buildups, and space-synth transmissions entirely stripped of warmth; everything here is cold and metallic and menacing. Bowen’s squalling, noise-plagued raves oftentimes sound like they’re barely being held together, always on the edge of collapsing under their own tremendous weight. There’s enough rhythm to keep heads bobbing and feet stomping, but the densely packed layers of seething electronic cells don’t always perfectly mesh, creating janky, angular polyrhythms that hover above the infectious pulse—ghosts in the machine. I found out about this tape from Bowen’s labelmate DJ Speedsick, who called it “a flat out game changer for contemporary hardcore and extreme electronic music.” Many of the tracks here have that frenetic, anxious pace and stabbing distortion that made Nothing Lasts such an amazing release, but something else entirely is reached with the fifth and final track on Slave to Society, which slows things down dramatically and undergoes a groaning, lethargic disintegration that sounds like the glitched-out final breaths of a dying robot.

Though much of the music that’s covered by this site tends to defy description, works as choice and subtle as Grisha Shakhnes’ being there are especially difficult to write about. Not the music itself per se, but its impact, the qualities that make it such an emotional experience. That being said, this doesn’t seem to hinder Shakhnes himself from providing a wonderfully succinct summary of his approach to the album:

I’ll just say that what has been increasingly important in my work… is this gap between what you know and what I know, between what I choose to tell you and what I choose not to, between the sounds you think you hear and you actually hear. The most significant difference between this release and the previous ones is probably my choice to eliminate some of this gap. My choice to let you know all these things; that this is a record about an artist, a musician, and his living room. It’s about his presence in this room. It’s about his environment, and his relationship with his environment. It’s about [the] listener’s relationship to the artist’s environment and also his own environment. And it’s about listening and the choices we make—as artists and as listeners.”

Such simple yet evocatively relationary language hits at the core of being there, a work that’s ultimately about representing and creating connections; conveyed to the listener are the comfort of recognizable environmental sounds, the wordless conversation Shakhnes is engaged in with those sounds (one of my favorite examples of this is his call and response to flutters of birdsong midway through “Occurrences at the End of a Curve”), and the moments of otherworldly beauty when the borders between artist and environment fall away completely. Though entirely unique, it’s another fantastic entry in the genre that Thomas DeAngelo so aptly dubbed “focused ennui.”

The picture used as the cover of the digital release of Pasvikdalen (taken by the artist herself) almost looks like part painting, part photograph; the sky and distant hills in the upper half are recognizably “real,” but to me at least the colorful tenements below are like the work of a skilled oil painter in comparison, all rich tans and burgundies and soft mountain grey-blues. I begin with these observations because like the photograph, Jana Winderen’s phonography compositions portray some aspects of reality in unique ways such that they often sound like something more synthetic—take for example the granular textures of the recordings of shrimp in The Noisiest Guys on the Planet—but there are also always swathes of unconcealed reality woven in, and it’s a testament to Winderen’s skill as an artist that she’s able to convey such powerful atmosphere and emotion via both elements. Spectral and somber, Pasvikdalen is at times as austere as the mysterious, misty landscapes of Nikel, Russia, where the source recordings were gathered, but throughout its nearly 40 minute run time there are also moments of the therapeutic calmness that only such environments can provide. Also of note are the animal sounds of which Winderen makes use; the wails of dogs and sea creatures evoke almost human-like feelings of grief and lament, making this sonic portrait all the more poignant.

I sat down to listen to Anamorphoses for the first time without any idea of what to expect, and ended up emerging from a trance-like state partway through the third section and realizing how utterly enraptured I’d been. I know next to nothing about this London-based project, but whoever’s behind it has graciously provided an abstract for the release that introduces even more fascination. The arcane explanations of “auditive projection broadcasting, elaborated through perspective spatial experimentation of infinite harmonics elements” is difficult to grasp at first, mostly because I’m unsure of the context of the work—whether it’s a pre-programmed installation, a performance, or some combination of both—but one thing I can wrap my head around are the vivid descriptions of the music itself: “A mechanical echo wraps the glittering metallic fabric in a spectral soundscape. Underground transmissions that bounce in the ether and asymmetrical pulsations from long tunnels are like a message from an unknown world.” These touch on the aspects of Anamorphoses I am most drawn to: the contrasts between spacious, reverb-filled expanses and more closely captured tangible elements; the richly subterranean atmosphere evoked throughout (especially by the recognizably tunnel-like sounds, such as the echo-y air currents and distant voices in part two or the whooshing train recordings in part three); and the presence of “glittering” light that never seems to fade even in the release’s most nocturnal stretches. Though the length of Anamorphoses may be intimidating at first, but it is truly one of the most immersive things I’ve heard recently, and I can assure you that you’ll be left wondering where the hell all that time went once it’s over.

Though the release as a whole is quite the head-scratcher, the opening moments of Astor’s new tape The Aubergine Dream are, to me, profoundly disconcerting. “Aubergine dream. I love aubergine. I fucking love it,” states the immediately recognizable voice of a text-to-speech program. It’s not the use of text-to-speech itself, but instead that the actual text being transferred to speech is so colloquial and earnest that hearing it spoken in such a flat, synthetic manner is disturbing. In fact, though, most of the elements that make The Aubergine Dream so befuddling arise from this apathetic warping of humanity. The material on the tape was performed in 2017 at Cafe Oto, a London venue known for its ongoing support of experimental arts, but in trying to decipher the expected sonic space that a live performance provides we’re left floundering. The deafening contact mic shuffles and mysterious hum that materialize after the spoken introduction fade away around five minutes into side A, and after an extremely muffled bout of applause—and I wonder if it’s even the same audience that was watching Astor perform that day—we’re left in complete silence for nearly 30 seconds before the entry of some reverently struck piano chords and grimy hiss. Further on in the side the “live” identity of the piece becomes even less concrete as warbly tape manipulations distort what we’re inclined to believe are recordings of the surrounding environment, but at this point I’ve given up trying to align The Aubergine Dream with any preconceived musical templates I’ve stored away in my brain, and as the stuttering, segmented collages of side B unspool, it’s clear that’s the best approach. Unpredictable to say the least, endlessly subversive, fascinatingly strange, and ultimately sublime, Astor’s newest release is one I’ll be returning to many times.

The fittingly titled “Ex Musica” rises into being with a wonderfully delicate, deliberate touch not at all unexpected in the work of VipCancro, a quartet comprised of sound artists Alberto Picchi, Andrea Borghi, Nicola Quiriconi, and David Lucchesi. Though their music is free by every meaning of the word, liberated from conventional melody and structure through instantaneous sonic interaction, the group’s philosophy doesn’t focus on the inherent impermanence of improvisational performances; instead, they chart progressions and evolutions throughout their work, make an effort to try new approaches, work toward their own musical language. Su Se Stesso, according to them, is where this “new language” has finally been achieved, one that’s “based on the search for personal solutions oriented towards characters and gestures, according to the typical methods of a concrete matrix improvisation. The mixture of electronic and acoustic instruments reflects the attention of the quartet to spaces and sound objects organized through pure instant composition.” Like many analyses of such abstract methodology, it sounds arcane at first, but these observations couldn’t be more apparent in the music itself. Though the two pieces are quite mechanical and metallic in nature, all slithering scrapes and stifled snuffles, they’re undeniably gestural as the descriptions states; each action taken by the performers has a destination in mind, like things are being set in motion rather than entirely manipulated. The quartet’s appreciation for space is also clear, and their ability to construct vivid, immersive, physical sound-worlds like the heaving, sighing cluster of clatter on “Laterale” is astounding.

As a duo, Earthworms is not Giacomo Salis and Paolo Sanna’s first rodeo. The two abstract percussionists perform and record frequently as Salis/Sanna Percussion Duo, as well as embarking on other ventures with other artists—although, more often than not, they still appear on these releases together. I had the good fortune of being sent some video recordings of the sessions that produced the Humyth tape on Confront last year, and even with the most unconventional combinations of objects, natural ephemera, and actual percussion instruments, Salis and Sanna’s chemistry is palpable (and that’s definitely the case here). But arguably their most successful works are those which involve just one other participant, like 2016’s KIO GE with Jeph Jerman (also on Confront) and now Earthworms with Emanuele Fais. The latter is an artist I don’t know much about, but his unique role in the trio as the sole provider of electronic effects often throws the delicate interplay of the disc into strange new areas, maintaining the quiet, almost subterranean atmosphere (and that’s not just because of the title) but also introducing foreboding, murmuring flows that curl beneath the clatter and subtle glitch warps that, sometimes, shape the proceedings into something quite alien, and, at others, desperately reach for beauty.