_am_ is Muster’s follow-up to debut tape Find a City to Live in on (fittingly) Invisible Cities, an album I could have sworn I’d at least mentioned on the site before, but it turns out that not only have I never namedropped the duo of James O’Sullivan and Dan Powell, I’ve also never used the word “muster” in any context. (Which is strangely unsettling, given I’m close to a thousand posts and every single one is filled with my thesaura regurgita you all seem to not hate.) That ends today, clearly, because even though I loved Find a City enough to pick up the tape after one listen, I think I might like _am_ even more. The first three shorter pieces were improvised remotely, each consisting of a solo recording by both O’Sullivan (guitar) in London and Powell (electronics) in Brighton that were subsequently responded to by the other and then combined. The approach doesn’t erase all of the collaborative momentum that makes the band’s in-person live sessions so compelling, far from it, but the layers of separation allow for a sort of intricate aimlessness to set in, and it’s amazing. “Verser” might be the best example, a brief but meticulously detailed bricolage of hypnotic tonal resonance, impatient dial-twiddling, and assorted scratches and scrapes that are like the track’s pholcidae legs. “On the Hoof” is the only cut to have been performed in real time, and its more spacious, sprawling, mercurial application of similar ideas is a great counterpoint on which to conclude.

Sometimes the best walls are not the ones that immediately and loudly assert their full presence, but rather the ones that sort of creep up on you, and Reaching Needles’ first externally produced material on the promising new Death to Dynamics imprint is certainly the latter. At first blush the noise palette of Illwisher is muffled, limp, dead, swirling thickly but lazily like the dust from a dried-out bird corpse (the Ottawa-based artist has an aesthetic predilection for things in trees; see the terrifying profile image of their Bandcamp page for another example), dark and dense but lacking the force of life. It helps that the sole half-hour track is mastered rather low, stripping the sonic mudslide of any unearned abrasion and relegating it to the background. But, as I’ve already implied, there is more to this release than meets the eye, or ear (or nose, I suppose—think mothball-filled attics, sunbaked flesh, the unspeakable liquid concoction that collects at the bottom of trash bags). As the central drone burrows through the middle channel like an eager maggot, subtle details in its periphery begin to reveal themselves: chunky microtectonics deep within the core of the distortion cocoon, fleeting bits of buried hum that are often almost tonal, tremors and trembles where before there seemed to be only stasis. Perhaps death is not the end after all, and we get the privilege of remaining conscious as the earth reclaims our bodies. Illwisher is what the final stages of that would sound like. And it only takes 30 minutes! Efficient.

I’ve become quite fond of a specific subset of noise music that is, like so many of the other Pepe Silvia connections and conclusions I’ve mentioned here over the years, easy to identify but difficult to define. Examples are easy—Discrete Vacaction’s Dreaming Through Chlorine, :RAH:’s Songs of the South, Odd Pike and ЖЕРТВА’s recent split tape,​ and, just in the past week or two, great releases by Vampire Girlfriend and Peasant Farm—but when it comes down to specifying what it is that makes them similar, it gets murkier. And yet here, with The Noise Box, relatively new project Augurio Drama has created such a colorful, ostentatious prime example of precisely what I’m trying to describe that it can just do the work for me. This eight-track full length offers up plenty of noise, there’s no doubt about that, but where others sculpt theirs into mesmerizing currents, chop it into fragments, blast it with inhuman force, Augurio Drama allows it to sputter, screech, slough; more “squeezed” out than “slammed down.” The sluggish, almost careless wrangling of mono-favoring feedback torrents and distortion-smeared rumble; the snatches and shells of jarring atmospheric electronica that feel like fractured afterthoughts; the kinesis that feels just as much gestural as it does passive; the thoroughly comprehensive weirdness of it all—these things are not only the essential features of The Noise Box, but are also key elements of the sort of deconstructed, hollowed-out, ephemeral pseudo-PE that I can’t get enough of.

Formed in Ohio and now based in LA, Roller, the duo of Ross Caliendo and Jordan DiDomenico, has operated as a live unit with no recorded material for 15 years—until now, that is. Offed, a C38’s worth of formidably consistent material “[c]ulled from hours of live improvisation,” seems (albeit to a brand new fan) very much worth the wait. With roots in the “frigid warehouses of the mid-western noise scene” and a distinctly freeform and instantaneous approach to collaboration, Caliendo and DiDomenico’s music embodies the furthest remove I’ve encountered from the sacred, reliable rhythms of EDM that still remains firmly in danceable territory. Much of its strength lies in its seamless assimilation of electronic music tricks and tropes—countless samples of all sorts bent and buffeted, pounding patches with beats that bust open as soon as they hit, sawtooth synth transmissions—to the point that it might cast the illusion of careful composition and post-production, and yet its volatility is, after everything, what makes it so spectacular. It’s difficult to put together coherent thoughts about tracks like “Habit Man Zero” or “Homonculus” or “Endo” that check every box I didn’t know I needed, mangled Arca-style cuts over grooving bass slices and wet, stumbling mid-tempo techno and brutal four-on-the-floor broken and bitcrushed just the right amount. Can’t you tell? I’m in love. LISTEN TO THIS!

By this point I’ve witnessed a number of (but never enough) sound installations of all shapes, sizes, and substances, plenty of good and plenty of bad and a select amount of great just like any realm of art, but one thing they all have in common with one another is the creation of a new ambience. No matter how simple or quiet or minuscule its contribution is to its surroundings, no matter how much this “new ambience” mostly just comprises the old one, the soundscape is necessarily altered and—often beautifully—remade. And this is certainly the case for Focused and Found Routines, a performance-based piece by Littlefield, TX duo Wind Tide using various sound materials “moved around the gallery space over the course of the evening.” This release presents a 45-minute audio recording of the opening performance for the piece, a languid slice of abstract, hypnotic tedium that returns to the sublime discreet clatter of Journal 2020 after a few releases I wasn’t much into. Throughout the ambling drift, the raw synths squeal incessant smoke-swirls of piercing frequencies into empty space, the space that isn’t occupied by whatever is the sound of rushing water, and what sounds like at least a few radios (with some of the best grabs I’ve heard to boot) and old doorbells and small motors, and—a whole sink, that someone’s doing dishes in? And a blender? A microwave? I have no idea what the specific objects are, or if they were even actually in the room or just previously recorded, but nonetheless their cumulative semiotic aura is easily identifiable: this is domesticity displaced, the intimacies of home rendered in disassembled yet sensible form for . . . what? Examination? Appreciation? Both? Not all sound installations offer a just-as-compelling audio-only experience, but even then there’s always the alluring, unsolvable mystery of the gap in perception, the not-welcome question of “what did I miss?” to keep you occupied. And then this one. Wow. Have I mentioned that I love this band? I love this band.

Before even listening to the music, most could probably discern using context clues that galeophobia refers to an irrational fear of sharks. The cultural phenomenon of these unfortunately scary-looking animals being perceived as merciless killers is an interesting one, because the “evidence” can really only be found at two distant points: rare actual shark attacks, and then masterpieces of cinema like Jaws, Open Water, and The Shallows, of which the latter holds considerably more weight in general consciousness. But Galeophobia has little concern with sensationalizing shark attacks in such a way, instead leaning toward the dormant terror submerged beneath the small but persistent twinges of “but what if?” when you find yourself much farther from shore than you thought you were (yes, “you”—no swimming at beaches or open ocean for me, no thank you!). Captured live during a small private performance just after the new year hit, the more recent of Nehalennia’s two new single-track offerings mashes and slices “shark encounter footage” via various effects and faulty tape equipment, working up an ear-splitting racket of horrific harsh that cuts its fin right through whatever’s between the violent immediacy of a really good tabletop set and the queasy environmental psychedelia of laughs and screams heard from across a cavernous aquatic center. Shark-related source material is far from a novel concept in noise, to be sure, but Galeophobia (along with Acolyte of Narcissist Tendency, which preceded it) is a fresh and much more enjoyable take on the approach.

A particularly unruly gaggle of radios set up for a performance of a Cage piece acquire group-sentience and produce a “composition” of their own in Colagens, a rare new entry in the solo catalog of Portuguese artist and curator Filipe Leote. The music is pristinely rendered in full digital clarity, and yet this still very much feels like something contemporary-in-spirit with the most eclectic of the mail-art titans (indeed, other adventures in the same vein can be found in Gen Ken Montgomery’s recent Unknown Destination). After the brief opening fanfare of “Jingle,” Leote draws us into an enrapturing, narrative collage of everything from detailed car-horn symphonies and dense pseudo-concrète melanges to disaster alarm systems layered alongside irreverent synth-punk and speeches. At the risk of making too many comparisons—though the rich, indiscriminate approach taken here seems to engender such things—“Revolução Industrial” is very Negativland in its deliberate yet abstract pace and blurring of contrast and homogeneity. But, thankfully, that’s not limited to just that track; “Meddley” features even more unholy juxtapositions and a stretch of porno moan speed-switching that would make even Joseph Hammer blush, while “XTC” unfolds like a radio play of a carnivalesque apocalypse, all ominous rushing winds and helicopter blades and maniacal delirium and other assorted bits of chaos. By the end you’ll feel like you’ve walked a thousand miles, but perhaps (probably) only in a circle. Colagens is what we’ll hear when we finally spiral as far down as we can go.

December of what is now last year ended up being a formidable month music-wise, but I think my highlights were reasonably well-represented in the end-of-year coverage (thanks to everyone who read or shared, by the way), but my 2022, for better or worse, begins with one last decrepit relic from the rotten past. I’ve been a fan of Sour Tapes ever since I picked up Slacking’s Tape Cramp and Mallard Theory’s Duck Soundtracks, both entries in the label’s excellent ongoing Pittsburgh Noise series, in a random Discogs spree, but two new pairs of blasts from fresh-out-the-oven project Faces of Death, specifically 1977, have me more excited than anything else they’ve put out. Extreme stereo-field fuckery is something I’ve come across a lot of recently, and it’s something that’s so easy to mess up (and so often is), but both sides of this tiny tape totally make it work: the first sends percussive industrial blasts screaming from the left-confined void to counter the piercing squall of the right, while the second decays from a mesmeric sheet of full, high-pitched harsh and what sounds like distant vocal sources into a bifurcated, left-favoring nightmare. It feels so much longer than the less than eight minutes it is, and yet it’s so endlessly replayable, somehow always offering up new undiscovered quirks. $10 is a bit much for a tape in my opinion, but it is only a run of eleven, so if either or both of your connection to this music and your wallet are larger than mine, I say go for it. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Not unlike Sidon Coleman’s The Box, which I reviewed last month, Mansfield, OH newcomer TUSK’s digital debut is an eclectic, slipshod collage covered in countless sets of one person’s fingerprints. Though the album’s title might imply its contents are more subdued or drone-based (in the vein of Depletion’s Cotard Delusion, perhaps), Cotard, despite most of it not being overtly abrasive or frenetic, feels shifty and paranoid, always either crawling toward the next sonic episode with plenty of furtive over-the-shoulder looks or writhing within the current one to the point of complete exhaustion. And “exhaustion,” it turns out, is the name of the game here; much like the altered perceptions of those diagnosed with its namesake disorder, this release is anemic, artificial, torpid, dead. The unnamed artist behind the TUSK alias wields a reasonably diverse repertoire in the form of guitar, drums, samples, and “guts,” yet each of the nine tracks is a tightly contained, often oppressively claustrophobic exercise in raw auditory minimalism. The beginning of “Basement Couch” is a misleading bit of bubbling brightness before we make our slow but sure descent below ground, where TUSK manages to scrape up the most lifeless of textures: limp thrift-store amplifier worship on “Fuck Around n Find Out,” barely audible bass frequencies on “Subconscious,” paper-thin trash electronics on the lengthy “Focus on Yr Inner Beauty.” While the whole thing is great, it’s the last few tracks that truly seem like something special, particularly “One More Stormy Night.” I am God and He is dead.

After a thoroughly demoralizing week, this gorgeous debut LP from motley instrumental collective Old Saw came at exactly the right time. Guided by the meditative drifts of composer and sound engineer Henry Birdsey’s steel guitar (both lap and pedal), the sextet also features Ira Dorsett on fiddle, Bob Driftwood on banjo, Rev. Clarence Lewis on pipe organ, Harper Reed on guitars, and Ann Rowlis on bells. I briefly wrote about the elusive category of devotional music in my Dun Sug review a few days ago, and the introductory text to Country Tropics continues the conversation much more eloquently: “However, devotional music is not solely concerned with a skyward glance—what does it look like to raise up the rust, look upon fractured branches, gaze at the density of a low fog across a field? Instead of us looking up at the land, what if the land was looking back at us?” In this way, the delicate ambience woven by these skilled musicians is not simply made up of reactions to or harmonies with each other, but also individually and wholly comprises responses to the beauty of the world around them.

The liner notes again hit the nail on the head when they describe how “the crew stretches and bends chords to their resting place”; though these four loosely structured pieces ascend to great (yet still humble) heights with elegiac laments, subdued textural swells, and pillowy climaxes like the pale winter sun emerging from the grayness of the sky, they are all also profoundly anchored odes to the earth, peaceful appreciations for the rocks and plants and water and soil that will eventually become our resting place. What’s more, it’s as if each track is designed for each performer to shine: “Dead Creek Drawl” trusses triumph with Driftwood’s evocative rolls and thick beams of radiance from Lewis’s organ; “The Mechanical Bull at Our Lady of the Valley” draws primarily from the interplay between Reed’s fingerpicked nylons, Rowlis’s bells, and Birdsey’s seraphic phrasings; “Dirtbikes of Heaven, Grains of the Field” opens the skylight for Dorset’s emotional bow drones to soar through; and “Chewing the Bridle” is a unifying tour-de-force for all six musicians. Music for those who have ever hit a huge jump on their bike and briefly wished to remain suspended in the sky forever, but then immediately after that wanted nothing more than to return their feet to the ground.