Though it’s been almost four years since Puddle mastermind Dan Valetic was interviewed by Brisbane (Meanjin) blog Language of the Damned, and doubtless many of the artists’ opinions and approaches have evolved since then, it’s still true that the project is “harsh noise/power electronics for the end of the world.” He also discusses the influence he owes to early industrial acts like SPK and how it informs the “uncomfortable intensity” and “sense of foreboding chaos” in his work, currents that reach a fever pitch with What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You. The C60—Puddle’s third entry in the stacked catalog of local imprint Minimal Impact (also interviewed by LotD back in 2023)—grafts the best appendages of previous material onto a new and improved metallic mutant, the degraded fidelity and strangled howls of The Gift That Keeps on Giving meeting the sparking powerline ferocity of Peeling Back the Layers of Unbridled Joy. Those tapes felt more like sketchbooks in terms of structure, gleaning appeal from their freeform drift and abundance of ideas, but this one is more focused right off the bat. Each of the tracks is a thrash of gain-maxed scrabble and white-hot feedback laid straight to tape via Valetic’s refined junkyard arsenal, tightly controlled despite the length. “The Endless Tentacles of an Evil Network” writhes in the mid to high register, trapped in stumbling stasis while subtly escalating tension. The heavy use of dry delay is the backbone of the A side, chittering away in the belly of the mix and rearing its head with piercing surges. Another essential ingredient is the gloriously abysmal recording quality, which serves as impediment-qua-complement to the noise. This is especially true in the case of the two B-side tracks that are even more stifled, clawing themselves out of inaudibility and trembling between stereo channels like sick animals—”Lambs Set for Slaughter,” if you will. Crank the volume to melt them out of their misery.

Copies are still available direct from the label. For those in the US, Skeleton Dust will soon have it in stock along with the other great tapes in the batch by ฝรั่ง and Sharps Formation.

Rejoice, friends: an excellent new label was birthed this February. Pennsylvania’s Brandon Dunlap, (who also runs Astral Research and plays in the very good psych band Fade to Pharaoh) released the first two tapes on Light of My Life on Valentine’s Day. They are, without any reservations, both scorchers, trafficking in many of my favorite things: opaque themes, disquieting surrealism and sonics so outré they’re bordering on antagonistic.

Houses of the Holy by Crying Motherfuckers, (a “collaborative effort” with no listed participants, though we have our suspicions) is an early contender for the year’s rippingest C20. The A side, “Receding Gun”, kicks it off with a wonderful, crunchy base layer that soaks up most of the low frequencies, punctured by intermittent feedback bursts that are somewhat reminiscent of a vibraslap. An eerie tonal, perhaps choral, loop creeps in, becoming more prominent as it malforms. The arrangement is progressive and well-considered, and repeated listens revealed that in spite of the chaos, everything sits quite well in the mix.

“Star With No Wish” is a different beast, opening with a startling stab of something harmonic (a MIDI horn?) before giving way to creeping, delay-driven fog. There are slow, deliberate and inaudible vocals that ratchet the dread up a few degrees. Death industrial? Not really, but I’m not mad if you come out feeling that way. There are occasional melodic intrusions and some disorienting panning that cement the funhouse-ride-from-hell feeling; and of course, there’s some release from all this anxiety.

Even more inscrutable is Angel Examination Room’s untitled C10. It lasts a little under 6 minutes, and yet I have found myself chewing on it since it arrived in my mailbox. The easiest way to describe what’s happening here is through the project’s name and what it evokes: a juxtaposition of the loaded-with-meaning word “Angel” with the quotidian “Examination Room.” It’s a jarring collision between the awe-inspiring and the mundane.

The liner notes (machine-embroidered on the back of the fabric 10” sleeve that houses this tape and its chicken wire mount) note the tools employed: “handheld tape recorder, 12 string guitar, rotting wheelchair, AM/FM radio, seance tape.” Interrogating it much beyond that would spoil the fun, but this is indeed a very tape-heavy sound.

A side “Young Terminal Wings” opens with some wild oscillating tones. The recording jumps speeds and lurches around before giving way to glassy clattering. Again, we have a wild arrangement; one gets the sense it could have been an intensely labored construction or a free improvisational burst of fast-forwarding and rewinding. Either way, it’s compelling stuff. “Specimen on Stained Glass” is somewhat harsher and a little more playful, with perhaps a little of the aforementioned 12-string. Where the wheelchair comes into play is yet to be determined.

A strong debut from a very promising label. Lucky for you, the Crying Motherfuckers tape (edition of 25) is still available for purchase from the label. The Angel Examination Room tape is sold out, but there have been whisperings of an eventual reissue. Stay on top of this; it’s shaping up to be something special.

When FIM kicked off in January 2024, it was the CD by Stalwart (the quartet of label founders Caleb Duval and Luke Rovinsky with Ben Eidson and James Paul Nadien) that felt most like a mission statement. Raucous and irreverent, intentionally dissonant, as interested in being combative as in arriving at some sort of cursed textural harmony, the music was and is emblematic of what I see as an exciting movement away from stylistic stagnancy and calcifying tropes in contemporary improvised music. If Blessed was the manifesto, then Enough Nihilism is the praxis. Duval (double bass) and Rovinsky (electric guitar) are once again joined by skin-shredding partner in crime Michael Larocca for this follow-up to HI-FI LO-IQ and various one-off collaborations, and the single-day, nearly eighty-minute session is their most ambitious release yet. Weasel Walter’s liner notes, though deservedly effusive, adopt an angle I find a tad reductive; while I agree that the material is a breath of fresh air in an overcrowded, “overeducated” tradition, his characterization of it as “relentlessly assaulting form and maintaining a ceaseless, bloody-minded aural intensity” misses the mark. Not only are there actually some almost tender bits here, the trio’s interplay is also less about “deconstructing” or “vandalizing” conventions and more about building their own. Sure, there’s disruption—all signs point to Duval trafficking the pop fragments (radio? sampler?) yet no one takes official credit, probably to avoid legal and/or moral culpability—but there’s also connection, moments where things which cannot or should not coexist do so anyway, and they’re beautiful. Larocca’s spider skitters and predilection for brushes pair well with Duval and Rovinsky’s string tension abuse. They get almost jazzy on “Highland Park”, then meld symbiotically with Chief Keef toward the end of “Green Jacket and Maroon Fleece.” The hard panning starts to wear on the ears a bit, and sometimes the more conventional drum rhythms throw a wrench in the momentum rather than pushing anything forward, but that’s just a natural part of taking real musical risks—not all of them pay off. Hoping to see these guys play this year, I can’t imagine it isn’t a blast to see.

When I asked Bob Pulinski about this release, he simply said, “The fan had to be recorded.”

There are times and places for field recordings captured with the utmost fidelity and the least human presence possible. But as I’ve become a more curmudgeonly listener, I find less value in them as standalone music. Internal Electric Fan is the glorious opposite. It distills the practice to its most basic essence: not only the sharing of a sound, but the process of doing so. There is no editing; we hear the activating of the recorder, the scrabbling as it is moved into place, and the turning on of the fan itself. And what a fan it is. Far too noisy for any appliance that could fit in a “room at the electronics store,” a heavy current of hot air over the unmistakable hum and warble of a cheap noisy motor. It had to be recorded. But other things remind us of the room around it. There’s shuffle as Pulinski (I think) sidles over to sit and listen, creaking doors and more movement in the background (or foreground?), a dog (??) jangles its collar. The fan quiets down a bit eightish minutes into “Fan #1” (or does it?). The overall length tells us something too. It takes exactly this long to truly understand the fan, and perhaps even the room that it’s in. Get to the end, and the payoff is sublime—exactly what you think will happen happens, but you could never have predicted it would happen the way it happens. Intimate and beautifully boring, as it should be. Pulinski has the answers. He is sitting in a room (at the electronics store) different from the one you are in now. He is recording the internal electric fan.

Copies (only $7) are available via email: jan95cdrs@gmail.com.

The most understated of Canada noise legend Alan Bloor’s projects, Pholde encompasses his experiments with the sonic properties of metal in a more meditative, ambient context than the extreme amplifications of Knurl or full-throttle distortion of Pyrox. Following 2022’s Deprive of Power, The Central Core is his second tape on Vacancy and fits right in on the Niagara label’s roster of homespun sound art. When Bloor performs live, he usually rakes handheld files against either tined sculptures of his own creation or manufactured components like grill grates, looping and layering the resulting sounds to construct hypnotic tactile drones. The visual dimension isn’t here, so while it’s likely that he made these recordings with the same hands-on approach, they are so patient and methodical that they could easily have come from motorized contraptions operating of their own accord. “To Rule Against” especially evokes a forgotten machine still running in the depths of some cavernous industrial sanctum, its lonely revolutions echoing against the walls. The appeal is similar to something like Small Cruel Party—the simple pleasure of materials making contact—but the scale feels much larger, just as intimate but with more space to breathe. After decades of honing his craft, Bloor has exceptional control of pacing and dynamics; “The Lower Level Is Obtained” slowly swells like an open ocean wave, complete with tortured high-pitched scrapes like wistful whale calls.

Tracked during a cold Berlin January in 2024, this first meeting of Jordan Topiel Paul (snare drum) and Bryan Eubanks (synth) finally sees life two years later. What seems to be an inauspicious instrumental pairing soon reveals itself to be anything but on Pushovers. The interplay between Paul and Eubanks approaches psychic levels. Their unified interest in certain textural inflections makes it difficult to discern where one’s contributions end and the other’s begin. The close alignment of Paul’s all-acoustic setup and Eubanks’ direct-input electronics is a testament to how well-recorded the session is: careful mic placement ensures the former’s precise hits and jumps across the stereo field are just as clear and agile as the latter’s gain swells and whip-panning. I also can’t tell (thanks to my woeful ignorance of modular workings, no doubt) whether Eubanks is processing the snare live or simply using patches that sound percussive. Either way, it’s an alluring dynamic that more often comprises mutual construction rather than response, with both improvisors embracing a classical ratatat-tat ethos, so to speak. The inclinations toward persistent but elastic repetition reminds me of French duo Phanes, whose self-titled release I reviewed several years ago. I also love the moments when Paul sets down the sticks and instead rides the strainer, setting the wires in flux between their two primary tensile states, a blurring of a boundary that’s crucial to extended snare exploration canonized by Murayama and others. The duo shows signs of running out of steam toward the end of the lengthy “Boletus / En polvo,” but they stick the landing with the more concise “Toffee / Muroidea.”

Of the many fondly remembered projects that made up the legendary LA harsh scene in the early to mid-aughts, Moth Drakula was one of the most prolific, putting out close to 30 splits, tapes, CDs, and even a 2xLP on iconic labels Callow God, Troniks, and Chondritic as well as Evan Pacewicz’s own small-batch imprint Swampland. Much like the rest, their fire fizzled around 2006, but after nearly two decades they revealed themselves to be not dead, but simply dormant. For whatever reason—the doldrums of the pandemic, perhaps, or the general feeling of a renewed interest in US noise, which may or may not be the same phenomenon—both members have resumed activity in a big way. Pacewicz helped put together a retrospective Roman Torment 2xCD for Phage and has revitalized Swampland, releasing printed matter as well as new solo work, while Josh Stewart, formerly of Genius Females and Bedrooms, is back at it as Ex Jesus. And, of course, together they’re breathing new life into Moth Drakula, which brings us here to Metal Arcade. Though just a brief 20-minute CD-R, it’s the first comeback material that jumps out as just as good, if not better than their original run. MD always had a sloppier, sleazier sound than their contemporaries, and that’s still the case here: the two pedal-slingers prioritize crudely sandwiched effects and brute-force impact over fidelity and precision (the production, muddy in the best way, helps too). Distortion-drenched samples build tension that is subsequently ripped apart by swipes and slashes. Warm melodic extracts bookend “Mirror Rejection,” the midst of which is overrun by writhing feedback screeches; the white-hot abrasions of “Shut Out and Crushed” drop into a loose-slung hypnosis loop. If you were waiting on an excuse to put in a Swampland order, this is it (plus the Roman Torment discog comp is only $10).

Following 2019’s L’impatience directe des corps CD on Glistening Examples, Stay Still is the newest release from French poet and sound artist Erell Latimier. The LP comprises two extended pieces commissioned and composed within the last few years that continue her exploration of the web of connections between voice and sound. She’s far from the first to embark on this voyage—see last month’s review of Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt—but both “Ils seront silencieux après” and the title track display a more focused and singular trajectory than her previous work. The former is a spellbinding drama of both text and texture, making use of jarring junctures between lulling concrète vignettes and unaccompanied speech to imbue the narrative with a haunting dislocation. The spoken delivery of the tale of a profoundly removed woman (many thanks to the artist herself for providing a translation so I could follow along with the French) is at once forlorn and detached, as if the speaker is grasping onto these memories one last time before letting them go forever. It turns out that this process is audible too: the sentences begin to echo, then fracture as they’re laden with distortion and tape slur, before finally dissolving into a fraught harmonic coda. Latimier spotlights the spaces where distinctions are difficult. “Ils seront” ends with a dry bubbling noise that could be the rattling of undecided vocal cords, while “Stay Still” enlists a cast of guest speakers—Camille Belhoradsky, Eric Cordier, and Will Guthrie—to stitch a rotting lattice of half-formed phrases and abandoned thoughts. The artist’s own words are once again the unifying element, here doomed to be vivisected into jagged glitches. There’s a moment around the 13-minute mark, so fleeting you’ll miss it if you’re not listening closely, when a rare wail of raw emotion cuts through the murk and is immediately, mercilessly silenced. How horrific it is to break… or rather, to be broken, because there is indeed someone else here: “They noticed it and came to watch us. They stocked us in a large room and kept telling us: don’t move, don’t move—and after, louder, stay still.”

If you weren’t already aware that Albuquerque’s Ryan O’Connor, the man behind Ineffable Slime, is an avid reader and devoted independent bookseller (dig Alarum), you could probably surmise as much from the numerous literary allusions and arcane homages scattered throughout his modest but steadily metastasizing discography. Through recent releases on Fusty and Tribe he’s homed in on a distinct aesthetic steeped in European/Anglospheric avant-garde and esotericism, sharpened to a fine point with his two full-length CDs on the Milwaukee-based Virtues label (run by Alex Kmet of Climax Denial and Sexkrime fame), Stalking the Sphinx and now Deep and Desperate Fictions. The inscriptions and imagery run right off the yellowed pages of a dusty tome, and yet O’Connor’s sound is more sterile than ever. Had I not seen him play before I might assume a heavily modular rig, or maybe even some laptop, but listening closer it’s clear it’s all about the pedals—despite the crystal-clear surgical sound, the noise is too brash and beefy, its kinesis and dynamics too gestural. It’s less contrast, more amalgam due to the eclectic setup: the samples deploy via microcassettes and tape loops add agility, all while synth boxes and glitch delays work up caustic storms. Conceptually too it feels like a more serious outing than previous ones, which featured track titles such as “Quantum Suicide of the Satanic Guido” and “Liturgical Dunce Conniption”; here, ominous phrases like “Cartesian Errata” and “Casting Leaden Eternity” evoke a cold, clinical pessimism fitting for these deep and desperate times.

Kiera Mulhern and Sydney Spann’s set at the Stone Circle back in March still stands as one of my favorites of the year. Prior to that, I’d seen both artists perform individually, Mulhern in an installment of Tone Glow’s Quarantine Concerts in 2021 and Spann for the opening of her Cow, Cow, Cow, Rabbit, Recalcitrance, Bunny, Dog, Dog, Dog installation at the Center for Performance Research in 2022. Unsurprisingly, their live collaboration was a direct extension of their respective bodies of work, but it also introduced a more grounded dimension. Imperfect instantaneity; the pushing of pedals; the messy, mercurial forms of base utterance. Their duo project is now known as Iris Our and has issued a lovely recorded debut with Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt, which delves deeper into that earthy realm. Structured, as always, around voice, the short five-track suite roams complex caverns, brushing by patches of “raw pink flesh.” The sense of organic space and blurred ontological boundaries are reminiscent of Mulhern’s marvelous De ossibus 20, but where that record was introspective, Victual is universal, the free-associative conduit between the two poets swelling ever outward. Ensconced in echoing piano and murky electronics, their exchange in “The Columns of Echo’s Lymphatic Library” is a thematic invocation for the CD’s focus on “femininity understood through diffusion”: “the mouth of it / wound / wound / mouth / splits open / wound / mother” (I’m paraphrasing; many of the words are spoken simultaneously). Even with the lush sound-collage instrumentals, much of Victual boils down to just great poetry. “Debris Promise” traces rent threads via rhyme—”torn sheet, or something shorn”—while “Splits and Wants” favors textural over literal meaning with its wordless birdsong chorus. In “Erections of Angels Directed at Me,” their singing (and flute-playing) is defiant light in droning mechanical darkness. Iris Our stand in a rich continuum of subversive feminine poetics encompassing everything from Tender Buttons to Dictee, Katalin Ladik to Asha Sheshadri. Abstract as it is, Victual splits the vortex of horror with a fleeting yet concrete mantra: “weather / together.”

Copies are available from Recital and various distros: Forced Exposure, All Night Flight, Soundohm, etc.