Some artists’ material is better suited to the piecemeal structure of career-spanning anthologies than others’, but even within that group there are certain members whose work is significantly complemented by this sort of presentation. Italy’s Ghost in Mozambique is without a doubt one of these, and 2016 / 2022 is the only proof you need. It’s also the only proof in general (the only other thing by the artist I can find is “Vendetta”, a single released by Abnegazione in October of last year), but that is of little to no consequence—the music is so far-reaching and casually ambitious in itself that it vividly evokes the sprawl of half a decade of creating. The “ritual” descriptor is overused in extreme electronic music, but it’s 100% accurate here; every single one of the eclectic spread of tracks contains some shade of occult shadow, from the stuffy, delirious psychedelia of the chants and percussion on “Chicken Blood” and “Voodoo” and the chiming string plucks that temper the distorted crunch on “Snake Dance” to the trance-inducing cosmic electronica of “Urlo Psichico.” The collection’s clear centerpiece is the 26-minute “Incantesimo,” an impeccably crafted wall that feels like blasting at light speed through an endless astral wormhole, but all of the selections more than justify their respective inclusions, and by the time the grave-dirt dirge of “L’Ultima Notte” is over and the drugs have worn off and the sun starts to rise, nothing will ever be the same.

Nor are they possessions, vehicles, sources for consumer materials, soldiers, or fodder for sacrifice.

If it is medically, economically, geographically, and/or culturally possible to reduce or completely eliminate your consumption of animal products, why not give it a shot? If you aren’t convinced, try immersing yourself in these soundscapes; I hope they make a case for listening and respect over torture and slaughter.

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00:00. Jesse Paul Miller – Puego Puebo [excerpt] (self-released, 2005)

05:13. Abby Lee Tee – “Interior Construction” from At the Beaver Lodge II (self-released, 2021)

10:09. Saebyuk / Jelly Bark – “Whisper” from BARK, PARK! (self-released, 2022)

11:16. Daniel Löwenbrück & Marcellvs L. – second untitled track from Stallgewitter (Tochnit Aleph, 2014)

16:50. Graham Lambkin & Áine O’Dwyer – “Down by the Sally Gardens” from Green Ways (Erstwhile, 2018)

20:19. Thomas Tilly – “Around the Explosion: Rhinella margaritifera and Dendropsophus nanus [Unprocessed Phonography]” from Codex Amphibia (Phonotaxis) (Aposiopèse, 2021)

21:54. Matthias Urban – excerpt from A side of SiAl (Dinzu Artefacts, 2018)

30:39. AMK – excerpt from A side of The Perpetual Journeys of a Despotic King (Rainbow Bridge, 2013)

34:01. Melissa Pons – “Freita” from Wolf Soundscapes (self-released, 2020)

38:16. Daphne X – “Seabirds at the Fish Market, Essaouira” from d(ear) diaries (Eminent Observer, 2020)

I must have accidentally done a lot of good and/or virtuous things to rack up this much karma, because there’s no way it’s just happenstance that, after not even two months, 2022 is shaping up to be a positively legendary year for harsh noise and related genres. Between Phage’s Black Sand Desert double CD retrospective, Monolithische Aktion’s vulgar new batch, and the raucous return of Finnish newcomer Kobeuk, January was already filled with quality material, but February has already answered with instant classics like the latest splooge of pornographic causticity from Moozzhead on New Forces, the self-titled debut of Italian enigma Steve Urkel, and now this. Suitcase Body isn’t a project I’ve heard anything from before, and it looks like that’s because they haven’t put out any externally produced recordings beyond a few tracks featured on V/A comps—that is, until Star Bloom, a release so good that my entire first time through I was half waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it doesn’t; there’s just one giant steel-toed boot soled with spikes, and it never stops grinding your face into the dirt. Though every minute features a more-than-satisfactory supply of brutal feedback worship and lacerating scrap-metal maelstroms, structurally the full-length album is a flawlessly arranged mixed bag, some tracks tending toward sluggish and stagnant territory (“We Are Masters of Tricks and Treats,” “Infinity Within Zero [Lights of Thought]”) and others reinjecting ruthless energy with classic squall-‘n’-crunch thrash (“Avatar, Eternal Mind, Collective Mind,” “Living Mathematical Minds of Zero [Paradigm Shift]”). Again I ask: what did I do to deserve this? And how do I keep doing it??

Turku artist Rene Kita, whose “main purpose in life is to draw one million faces before [they] die,” has given me and presumably at least some others a splendid, joyous gift with Fraught Mackerel. Though it barely crosses the 11-minute mark, the release feels dizzyingly expansive, stuffed to bursting with the kind of sonic density that’s just the right sort of exhausting. Many of the bite-sized segments, despite being at their cores coldly digital, have a delirious woodland effervescence that I associate with a lot of the Finnish abstract music I love, and a few are straight up magical (just listen to “Feral Molochs”; I was not being flippant with my use of “joyous”). Both within each track and as a whole, the album is undoubtedly full of nonsensical chaos, and yet—whether from our brains, the actual music, or both—even on a first listen plenty of patterns emerge: bouncing rhythms shattered into sparkling shards that do their best to reform the whole, who-knows-how-many different melodies trying and failing (or succeeding?) to coexist. But for the most part…. “Such a pretty mess, don’t you think?”

Apart from listing that they’re based in Brooklyn, relatively new netlabel The Absorption Directory has an extremely cryptic web presence: their bio reads “Act III”; each release is tagged with the words “metallic,” “pristine,” and “shiny”; and there are no real names, external links, or context in general of any kind to be found. danceableas was the album that led to my discovery, and it’s also my favorite from the imprint’s catalog that I’ve heard so far. Like many of the other artists on the roster, crcfd owes a certain amount to electronic dance music, but here that influence appears as simply one of countless lenses through which radiant beams of computer music are refracted, the core stylistic elements simply specters on the outskirts of raw abstraction. While strange choices, the aforementioned descriptors certainly apply to this music, which feels smooth and mercurial despite its many tethers to recognizable grounding points (minimal techno bursts, eviscerated bubblegum pop, candied synthbient washes, industrial incessance). Here the sharp, crystalline sonorities of pure data output and digital mastication are a fluid fabric rather than an abrasive torrent, its constant undulations a wonder to behold. For fans of Network Glass, Bánh Mì Verlag, and Soulseek.

Moscow project Unfucked’s self-titled debut is just about as close to bedrock as one can get in the context of electronic music. Whether these five untitled pieces were generated using modified/cracked circuits, modular synthesis, or some obscure combination of both, the result is a series of mechanical yet intimate meditations with fully exposed innards, at once evoking the sensation of being in the actual room with the artist as they play and the strangely comforting hypnosis of aimless, exploratory tinkering. Any time the tactile processes of creating sound are presented alongside the sound itself there’s a unique but consistently immersive effect introduced (Giovanni Lami is the main example that comes to mind), and Unfucked is no exception; the metallic clutter of pushed buttons, flipped switches, and cables yanked and plugged back in gives the sluggish sci-fi pulses and rumbling drones a quite complementary sharp edge. More environmental artifacts cast their frail shadows on the music as the album progresses: distant voices haunt the pivot between I and II; III juxtaposes soft rustling, whispers, and whistles with dense, throbbing loops; the very walls and floor shake in V. Whether it’s a splitting of seams, a dissolving of delineations, or a blurring of borders, any kind of musical boundary transgression is always welcome, especially if it’s as intoxicating as this.

As complex as 佛笑伽羅 certainly is, it not only feels difficult but also somewhat pointless to write about, because it is so thoroughly visceral and immediate, simply music to be experienced and to recover from. Much of this scalding aesthetic intensity originates in the utterly unique improvisational dialect developed by saxophonist Chen Hong-yu and Logic wrangler DJ Wu Hun, joined on the second track of this debut tape by Lu Li-yang (they’re credited with “dub control”; I honestly have no idea what that is). On side A, which comprises a half-hour live performance in March 2021 at Meta Flexing Vol. 7, Chen and Wu sling jets of intricate abstraction toward each other like flung buckets of flaming coals, the former’s writhing ersatz arpeggios and subtly evolving phrases tangling with the latter’s heavyweight digi-percussion hits and caustic pure-electronics screech in a violent but colorful collision. There’s not actually any live processing of Chen’s playing via Wu’s Logic setup—the duo is just tuned-in and enmeshed with each other enough to conjure chaos that is at once unified and dichotomous. At first, it seems like the title track, a studio recording rather than a live one, is a more reserved and pensive affair; the repetitive minimalism Chen hints at on the previous side is now a key structural element, a lone sax swell forming the basis for steady dynamic and textural crescendos. But that steadiness is soon superseded by something more like barely contained explosive expansion, tectonic tremors seething under a clattering kettle lid while sublime steam curls in the air above.

RUIDO ASESINO VIENE ACOMPAÑAR LA IDEA TRANSFORMADA EN TRABAJO Y EL TRABAJO EN ACCION DE INFINIDAD DE PERSONAS QUE DIA CON DIA LUCHAN A FAVOR DE UN MUNDO MAS JUSTO, DE UN MUNDO MEJOR, POR QE ES UN RUIDO ASESINO OF PENDEJOS AND PENDEJADAS.
JESUCRISTO MENTIROSO
RUIDO SIN MANDATO, NI OBEDIENCIA

Being the bonehead monolingual murican I am, I’m barely able to understand any of the lyrics on Salamanca band Jesucristo Mentiroso’s new full-length Ruido Asesino, so it’s a testament to the strength of even just the vocal performances themselves that 1) a great deal of the meaning and sentiment still permeates my thick skull, and 2) there are more than a few parts that are impossible not to sing (or shout) along to. The title cut also opens the album, setting the spike-lined stage for what’s to come: multifarious, complementary assaults of ragged-throat screams, bottom-of-the-gut growls, and emotive straightforward speech; viciously technical meat-and-potatoes grind riffs played with dizzying speed and perfect imperfection; detailed, engaging songwriting that makes each track feel like its own self-contained spectacle of chaos. Classic metal covers are often rough territory for newer extreme bands, so I was a bit nervous for the rendition of Motörhead’s “Iron Fist,” but the raucous quintet handily pulls it off with a generous helping of traditional shred from guitarist Javi. And then the three miniatures following that are sheer lunacy, all of the mayhem spread across the preceding expanse now crammed into 90 seconds. The diaphanous bleakness of mood piece “Importancia” is a fitting closer, giving time to collect oneself after the thrashing just received.

While I enjoy my fair share of releases that are pretty much near-silent, Defektmensch’s – seems like a deeper burrow to musical nothingness than any of them. Resolutely minimal and subdued, the short two-track debut from the anonymous new German project was created using only tape, radio, and samples, a limited palette by most standards that still appears busier than what’s actually going on in the recordings themselves. I find myself thinking back to Iniciação, which to date is—lamentably—the only material by São Paulo artist Van Jack under that alias; with that album, too, I knew I had to write about it within the first fifteen-or-so seconds I heard of it. There’s something so sublimely null about the sluggish shuffle of almost-empty tape over corroded heads, the conspicuous presence of the medium itself (in the form of the hiss and low fidelity) impossibly amplifies and emphasizes the next-to-nil it contains. Even the steady if erratic trudge of the tape is subject to imposed emptiness; in “012622” it sputters and seizes as if stumbling to a finish line that keeps retreating, quietly evoking a futility that is ungrounded and abstract yet no less affecting. “020322,” recorded the same day the release was made available, is even more stifled, crumpled by a shifting weight that contracts to allow broken bits of antenna-snatched melody to leak from the sides. Is this the only honest “music” left?

I have previously written about the many ways digital-age artists are able to both preserve and reimagine the extreme, enthralling obscurity that once seemed exclusive to physical music, tiny homemade cassette editions or made-to-order CD-Rs that pass from ear to ear via record store bargain bins. Bangkok corner-lurker Tossapol first came to my attention with their short EP Plate back in March of last year, which I think I found while scouring the page for the “objects” tag on Bandcamp. P, however, is much, much more than just a novel curiosity (not to imply that any the project’s previous material was “just” that either). It rivals Tossapol’s past releases in its diminutivity, comprising just four short tracks “recorded by small objects with kids at Pichit province, Thailand at the end of the year 2021.” In a manner not unlike the approach Grisha Shakhnes has recently been perfecting, minimal sound cores of simple improvisation with various debris and knickknacks are surrounded by an environment seemingly indifferent to the small spot of participation at its center, and yet the two realms are very much in conversation with one another. There’s a clear partition between the shoreside gravel scrabble of “b” and the cardboard tube spun on the floor of an avian atrium in “b / b,” but the latter track both reconfigures itself and then blurs into the subsequent “s” without missing a beat, a structural fluidity that’s just one piece of P‘s humble, earnest commitment to constant boundary dissolution. For me, it easily joins the ranks of the select few musical works that captivate and comfort in a way that is completely unverbalizable.