It never feels inaccurate to call Rhizome Weaver’s sprawling texture-feasts “walls” even as they shift and splinter with a sinewy restlessness, because the essentials are all there: the crushing initial blast, the lush crackle interwoven with rumbling low end, the immobilizing hypnosis. This refreshing new German project from Silken Heart co-founder Lukas Gerhmann brings to mind several points of comparison—Kakerlak’s recent work, Nascitari’s Your Sewer / My Church, the cosmic crumble of Train Cemetery—but there isn’t anything else quite like it, which is the greenest of flags, especially these days. Amidst the hyperbolic (though endearing) release description for You Are Not Sorry Enough, one phrase stands out: “a sea of granite incrementally surging and receding.” The coarse, crystallized igneous rock is an apt analogy for the forces at work here. Each track is both monolithic and constantly in flux, breaking apart into the magma only to reform seconds later. “Urn Stock” is a great example. Settle in for its nine minutes and find that it never lands at an equilibrium point. This low frequency range falls out and then slams back in again, that high one trembles between the stereo channels, until it all sputters out into near-nothingness… and then “Arche Fossil” erupts and obliterates what’s left. Despite all the primordial imagery, however, the energy Gerhmann harnesses is not just the slow, indifferent flow of nature but also that of his own scrambling human hands, and the result is a raw volatility that I can’t get enough of. It’s hard to tell whether this material emerged out of an analog or digital setup (or some blend of both), but intense live footage makes clear that Rhizome Weaver is grounded in tactility, in all its smashing, crashing glory.

For the handful of heads who would name Yeast Culture, Small Cruel Party, Kapotte Muziek, and Damien Bisciglia (RIP) as the Four Evangelists of fringe cassette culture, the brief existence of Born Physical Form was life-affirming. Between 2019 and 2022, Philadelphia-based artist Tyler Games quietly released twelve cassettes by a motley roster of enigmatic aliases, all worth listing for those unfamiliar: C720, UVC, Winston 1, Bill Lewis Medicine Cabinet, Megawatt Mike, Eye Walk Eye, Van Gelder Skelter, Microphone Crumb, Mongo’s Head Disease. Except for flagship-ish moniker UVC, which also graced like-minded imprints Hologram, Irrational Tentent, and Regional Bears, these projects were one-shot exercises in elusive sound-making, each tape a singular variation on a base setup of tape and electronics. It’s hard to describe what exactly it is that makes this unassuming music so beguiling (I plan to write a longer piece on it at some point). For now, we’ve been blessed with this wonderful surprise that opens up the question to a much wider audience. Games’s return as Radio Species sees him shifting similar ideas in a new direction, and hopefully Compressed Knowledge is just the beginning.

The release description succeeds in verbalizing what’s going on here with its mentions of “broadcast without a source . . . hinting at formal structures while continually slipping away from them.” These nine short tracks are somehow at once sketches and final drafts, built on stumbling repetition that feels less like loop playback and more like a homespun series of cybernetic cells, the iterations near-identical but nonetheless novel. The delicate systems trundle along, deceptively complex and dependent on close attention. “Vastu” and “Apiary” evokes the humble process music of Takamitsu Ohta, but earthier, more reflexive to the noise that intrudes and disrupts—or does it come from within? The title track is something entirely new, a stuttering mashup of swung brush-drumming and chopped-up speech samples. Does it lose something in stepping out from under the veil of hermitic obscurity? Maybe. But it gains plenty too. Among the welcome new additions: the eager eclecticism, the sense that this time it’s not a one-off.

Copies of Compressed Knowledge are or will soon be available from Forced Exposure (US), Boomkat (UK), Soundohm (EU), and likely Tobira (JP).

With their 2018 self-titled debut tape, Double Goocher Shop established a definitive and compelling approach rooted in the space where the two members’ aesthetic interests intersect. Throughout their respective careers, Renato Grieco and Moss Hopkins have both plumbed the fecund depths of text-sound, concrète music, tape assemblage, and field recording to achieve singular ends—Grieco’s work brings to mind the complex, theatrical “cinéma pour l’oreille” of the tradition’s pioneering composers with a modern twist; Hopkins’s is more domestic, introspective, self-conscious—but their ongoing collaborative project proves how complementary those ends are. Radio Carrion is their first material since The Kaplan Text back in 2021 and sees the pair diving into the paranormal currents of their sound that had previously only been implicit. The technique of using shortwave radio to make contact with the dead (or otherwise ontologically displaced) is a familiar one, both in experimental music specifically and ghost-hunting in general, but here the artists engage with a meta dimension to the practice as they investigate the “anthropological hoax” of the concept of the supernatural itself. Though humbly distinguished with mere numbers, each “Finding” is a mesmerizing and well-structured shadow-world, a promising new lead in the duo’s cryptic investigation. #1 tugs at the veil with speech dissections, motheaten piano gloom, and wisps of electromagnetic interference; #2 lets us waltz through a flooded cathedral. The casual, assured sparseness of the compositions is what makes them so harrowing. A rustle here, a few footsteps there, and all the thick grey nothing in between. We create our own hauntings. #13 is like a nightmare with an oddly hopeful ending, capping off this stellar CD (that gets better with every play) with an invitation to stay forever.

Sick Days is music for the summer. Vacancy operator Jeffrey Sinibaldi’s flagship project wrests sleepy beauty from the heat-shimmered doldrums, the lengthy meditations leaving plenty of room to breathe. Since the release of the sprawling and eclectic self-titled double CD (a modern classic of DIY experimental music if you ask me) back in 2019, subsequent cassette documents like The Calm Before and Org Chert Baker have narrowed the focus to patient, droning collages of slurred field recordings, reticent improvisations, and everything in between. There’s an easygoing holism to Sinibaldi’s approach that makes for an understated yet irresistible atmosphere. He uses every tool at his disposal to cobble together unified soundscapes that feel ambiguous and straightforward, tense and languid, all at once. Even with such a high bar already set, Dress Entire offers up his most magnetic material in years. Each side grounds itself in drowsy tactility—A with lapping water and percussive shuffle that could be a washing machine, ghost-train traffic, or one of the project’s mysterious “live installations”; B with delicate precipitation tickles and distorted speech—and slowly but surely progresses with measured momentum. Nothing happens suddenly. New textures ease themselves in as if submerging into a pool on a sweltering evening, already deep in the mix before you realize what’s happening. Both the sweat on your brow and the cool cloth you use to wipe it off. The crickets and the condensation and the steam of life.

Though they’ve only been playing together for a year and a half, West Coast duo Sheep Ditch are already shaking things up. Foster Park Bowl / Perkins Cul de Sac comprises their first all-acoustic material, recorded outdoors in Ojai and Oxnard respectively. I know of both Jay Howard and Scott Miller from other projects, albeit ones drastically different and much louder—Howard of Circuit Wound  fame and Miller the original guitarist/vocalist of Cattle Decap—and there’s something extra special about this quiet, ambling tape coming from these guys. The two sides deploy the same laid-back, anything-goes approach to improvisation in distinct locations. For “Foster Park Bowl” it’s a deserted amphitheater, the curve of the hill carrying distant noises in to join the musicians as they make use of unidentified instruments and everyday objects. Guests Rob Magill and Max Pippin lend hands to “Perkins Cul de Sac,” an onsite ode to the titular dead end. Throughout the C60 there’s a soothing sense of wide-open space around and above the main event, dwarfing yet nestling. The stakes couldn’t be lower and it’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Moments of pure magic are peppered throughout: I especially love the bit about ten minutes into “Perkins,” when the quartet gets some full band electricity going and works up a sleepy brut-jazz racket with shades of Jackie-O.

For the nearly two decades now, infamous anti-music unit Penis Geyser have made it their sworn duty to reduce the already mangled corpse of shitcore to some elusive, accursed base state. Across a smattering of tapes, splits, and live shows that range from manic bursts of semi-rehearsed noisegrind to borderline performance art, the trio (a.k.a. Chad) have set a high standard for sonic desecration. Their new self-titled cassette on the venerable Gracious Host label is both a  culmination of all that unholy work and a great entry point for any new converts, willing or unwilling. Clocking in at around twelve minutes, it’s one of the longest things they’ve released, probably cobbled together from scattered sessions and sets over the years. The result is a patchwork of hazardous ideas, rancid chunks at different stages of decomposition Frankensteined together. It documents some of the band’s most abstracted material yet, with many of the tracks dwelling in the negative space between one bleurgh and the next (which may or may not come). This downtime is familiar to anyone who’s attended a PG gig—there are usually drum pieces to retrieve from somewhere in the crowd, after all—but here it’s a full trough of its own, rich with feedback and squeaking kit hardware and noodle notes. Much like Juntaro’s iconic ONETWOTHREEFOURs, the stick count-ins become near-meaningless intrusions into whatever is already happening of its own accord. The all-out blasts are rare and all the more cathartic for it. I’ve found myself reaching for this tape over and over these past few weeks, finding some new detail in the rotten muck each time. Czerkies killed it with the layout as always. Unmissable.

On his full-length CD debut as Robert Fuchs, Dean Fazzino summons his most minimal apparitions yet. The newly Queens-based artist’s best-known alias has gathered a substantial following from the strength of several tapes on New Forces, White Centipede, and his own in-house imprint, but the change in format for this digipak release on Usagi represents a similar development as Dogmono in that it marks a new high point for the project. The separation between the Fuchs and Spate material has always been somewhat clear—albeit muddied by loud, screeching live performances as the former that sound more like the latter—but never this pronounced. Where Spate has expanded into harsher and more complex realms, C.O.T.H. documents a burrowing inward, a descent into somewhere grey and shadowed. These seven tracks feel both assured and experimental, purposeful with regard to the approach taken but mercurial in terms of the directions they go. “A Number of Two Figures” is a mission statement of sorts, narrowing the focus to the haunted interiors of a motley electronics system. The familiar electromagnetic hum is agitated, shifted, and transformed by a series of discrete actions, shuffling steps along a path toward an elusive equilibrium point that’s never quite reached. Built-up tension discharges in the noisy seethe of “Small Molecule” and further decomposes into the spectral “Allele.” Fazzino’s work as Fuchs is memorable not just in itself, but also because of the range of reactions it elicits, and C.O.T.H. is no exception; a friend called it “almost… incidental, like it would exist without human intervention or observation,” while the website description muses that it is “restrained, somnambulant and perhaps even heartfelt.” “Pure” is a descriptor most agree on, though: this is abstract sound stripped of all context and pretension, neither cold nor warm, or maybe both. Ghost in the machine music.

The audio-travelogue is an underexplored tradition in abstract music-making. Montréal sound artists Christian Calon and Chantal Dumas demonstrated its full potential with their classic Radio Roadmovies, the first disc of which features on-the-go vignettes from a scattershot trip through the Canadian countryside, and now this new globetrotter joins them and a few others (Daphne X, Ezio Piermattei) in a modestly sized canon. The uncredited person(s) behind Opera Benezet—likely Zach, who we hear speak around the 19-minute mark—gives the following description of the tape: “The spark bardo passage of the bridge building Saint Benezet by a chance geographical crossover with a Delco man following a Paris power outage. A cross consciousness hallucination between Benezet and a foreign fan club trailing one man’s wheel path across France.” The supernatural aspects aren’t entirely overstated. The collage piece drifts like a dream, its progression more stream-of-thought than a single line across a roadmap. We find ourselves in bustling urban locales and sleepy liminal spaces with no knowledge of how exactly it happened, but it sure does make sense once we’re there. Overheard music from buskers and/or local concerts plays a central role, often clipped into echoing loops that add to the hazy atmosphere. Come to think of it, it’s a more accurate representation of a journey than a straightforward series of recordings could ever be. The traveler often ends up being a passive presence, caught in some other current that could never have been foreseen (in this case, a DIY tour de France). As listeners we too are just along for the ride, slack-jawed and wide-eared at endless mundane majesties.

Copies come with an 11″x17″ poster and a photograph and are available via email: postalswing.key@gmail.com.

One of the things I miss about Cincinnati (and Dayton too, of course) is the noise. That does have a dual meaning—for example, there were these beautiful train-brake squeals that carried all the way up the hill to Clifton from the Queensgate Yard—but here I refer to the music. It’s always great to hear about new things going on in the city, and right now I’m excited about Black Corolla and their label Clangor. Zach Collins and Lauryn Jones just released their debut tape in October of last year but are already generating plenty of buzz, sure to surge after their set at Ende Tymes on Saturday. For Lonely God they teamed up with head favorite Slacking from Pittsburgh, also with a highly anticipated slot this weekend, and the results are explosive. This C20 features what might be the best material I’ve heard from both projects. Slacking throws the psychedelic nightmare collaging honed on last year’s Sacred Heart of Reinvention into high gear for “Do What Thou Droop,” an anxious suite that never stops twisting into increasingly horrific knots. Each stage of the the cascade is stuffed to the gills with detail, all of it swirling in hallucinatory murk. The curse passes on to Black Corolla and their pall of contact-mic’d glass abuse, blasting from a dark corner into a room filled with ghosts. The duo is already fine-tuning their pacing and execution; a well-timed break (literally) takes the last third of the track to a new level, a plane of desolation that runs through the true center of the mind. The lights are off, Gonga’s a fraud, everything shatters into dust. Music for the ende.

Copies are available from Puke Pink as well as former Cincy stalwarts Torn Light, along with other Clangor titles.