It is almost invariably a good sign when one or more performers on a release are credited with contributing “barking and chains.” However, the next thing that caught my eye after that was the fact that the San Francisco–based Zebra Secrets are a trio, so who are Argus and Leica? Oh. Right. And honestly, it’s great, because the fact that the pets of the members participate in the recordings is directly indicative of the project’s philosophy and approach to improvisation: anything goes, boots (or paws) on the ground, plenty of organic looseness and abandon. John Alderman, Brent Johnson, and John Seden tracked the two ambling pieces that comprise HTCH 221 at the San Francisco Art Institute, nearly 400 miles northwest on I-5 from where the many cross-eyed hydra heads of the Los Angeles Free Music Society continue to rear, and yet the energy of the latter is very much present in the former. Anemic but effervescent electronics, scattered clomps and skitters of percussion, thrift-store electric guitars thumbed and shredded, and all sorts of other carelessly psychedelic doodads and vapors (there’s even a mandolin in the mix at one point) are the only guideposts in this stumbling march of lavender-hazed revelry, but whether you’re bumping into every single one or sliding between them like a smooth, sly snake, the contact high will set in soon.

The clattering straight-to-microcassette improvised music of Dart Drug, a new duo of nausea. operator Angelo Bignamini (also known as Inés Wiarda, Lucifer Big Band, Billy Torello, and now apparently LKL as well) and Marcello Groppi (who so far has released two superb solo works that are available digitally, one also on nausea., as ATRX: Phase Two and Third Report), is a perfect merging of the two Italian sound artists’ singular interests. I associate both with textures and sonorities often considered useless or undesirable—extreme low fidelity, moth-eaten recordings, grimy basement shuffle—so this humble but memorable excursion into the gloriously tinny, toddling aesthetics of mono-only, extra-thin microcassette tape is a quite natural development. Groppi’s table is piled with electric string instruments in addition to the playback rattle, knob-twiddling, and auditory scene-splicing that occupies much of the nearly half-hour run time, presumably prepared guitar and bass that manifest as muffled, plodding plucks and metallic clamor. The interplay here is at once clumsy and calculated, two sources becoming one current in the cramped single channel. For me, the best moments on both sides is when vocal elements are used: echoing, static-soaked radio chatter near the end of side A amidst delirious, almost psychedelic toy-industrial drone; slurred speech tripping over itself and sliding into sludge midway through side B. Best to just open your ear-hole wide and let it all drain in at once.

If, like me, you were unaware what the initialism ECT stands for with regard to construction, it abbreviates “edge crush test,” which determines how much force the side of a piece corrugated cardboard can resist before crumpling. This information isn’t important to anyone not in a field where regular purchases of cardboard pieces or boxes with varying strengths, but it does also provide the unusual artwork for the brand new Brooklyn wall noise project of the same name’s debut, and since there’s not much of anything else to go on, every detail counts. “Detail” is also the name of the game in the 75-minute ECT1, a thin but loud slab of static built from expansive, membranous crackle currents that are simultaneously muffled by low fidelity and bejeweled with complex textures. I’ve discussed how the general “motion” or kinesis of a wall is often an important, even an essential aspect, but it’s hard to pin down exactly where the endless flow of cacophonous plasticine rattle originates and terminates, even in the abstract sense: it seems to lean in like twin bowing tidal waves curling from both channels, rise upward in a self-replenishing geyser, and fall from a fixed point as a constant sheet of precipitation all at the same time. But this absence of a consistent form to latch onto and follow somehow makes ECT1 even more hypnotic than it would (I imagine) be otherwise; to listen is to drift unmoored somewhere there isn’t anything to moor to in the first place, the surroundings both embodying and resisting reality all the while. And to cap it all off, later on in the piece there are also some unexpected variations that will have you questioning your sanity. You’ll have to just experience that on your own.

The two tracks that comprise CCTK Music being named for lacquers (the physical master materials used to mass-produce individual units in runs of vinyl records) is fitting. This LP collaboration between Arizona sound artists James Fella (Gilgongo owner/operator, Soft Shoulder) and Gabriella Isaac is extremely mechanical and process-based in both sound and execution: “[t]he duo incorporates each other’s material in real time [on side A], cutting the content onto 6 singles-sided reference lacquers. The lacquers were used to assemble a collage in a performance setting in late 2019, and again in a studio setting for side B.” As improvisers and performers in general, both Fella and Isaac tend to at least hint at the loud and abrasive side of things, if not lean into it completely, but whether the loudness and abrasion came from each musician’s individual contributions, their mangling of the other’s, the process itself, or some combination of all three is of little consequence here; “Reference Lacquer” and “6 Lacquer Ensemble” are both masterpieces borne of an agile, magnetic amalgam of glitch, industrial, and noise that is neither instantaneous nor composed—or perhaps both at once. Detailed metallic textures like intricate machine automations, creeping feedback, and restless live-electronic squall stake an expansive but ultimately ephemeral claim on the first side before being assimilated into something more dense and linearly dynamic on the second, and in both cuts the incredible sound design supports a vivid spatiality that’s impossible not to be enthralled by.

The U.K.-based Outsider Art label continues to consistently impress with both musical curation and visual aesthetic (I’ve written before about how tired and casually offensive the classic “noise art” style has become, so it’s great to see it refreshed and repurposed in such an appealing way) with their most recent batch of releases, which dropped on October 29—and though there’s not a dud among them, my favorite of the new tapes has to be Tired Out, the short but savage duo collaboration between Aylesbury “object botherer” Daniel J. Gregory and OA veteran Playworker. To me, Gregory’s greatest strength is the nuance and micro-drama with which he imbues his restless, chaotic movement of whatever pile of tabletop- or floor-strewn miscellany is the current flavor(s), and it’s not much of a leap to assume these idiosyncrasies may be lost in the caustic torrent of maxed-out-levels junk noise, but that assumption would be wrong. Opening cut (and that word choice is much more apt than usual) “Torn Out” immediately demonstrates the double-edged blade of complexity and brutishness that’s in store for anyone who puts this tape on with its gloriously grating squall that sounds like an industrial blender full of loose machine parts shredding itself to pieces while someone below (or above?) works on the motor with a power drill. For all of its brash cacophony, though, Tired Out has a well-implemented quieter side that surfaces in the downtime of longer tracks “Ripped Out” and “Tired Out,” cold electronic tones and gently agitated scrap metal that make the inevitable return of the noise (whether that’s in the form of the next track or the first as you replay it over again) even more cathartic.

Water Source, a new project based in Portland, seems to be deeply concerned with distance. Besides the fact that distances from water sources are significant pieces of information for architects and planners, the artist’s visual and auditory aesthetic evokes it more in a sense of removal or detachment: brightly colored sledders and a barn through the wintry expanse of a cloudy-day snowfall, a yellowed old photograph bordered by simple white fabric, quotidian transmissions played back on a janky deck surrounded by the pressurized swell of silence. Tape music in this style is already interesting on its own, all languid blur and noisy nothingness, but when placed within a larger environment, whether real or artificial, casts it in an exquisite new light (UVC, Emily Eigner, Muddy Pussy). While the first part of the brief We Went for a Swim and Parted Ways is steeped in the warm comfort of passed time and memory, with fractured melodies and chord progressions twirling shakily on sticking spindles that thread between sparse object fiddling, the two following it seem to align with the subtle maritime theme hinted at by the title and artwork. II is a fleeting sketch of docked seafaring vessels bobbing against their restraints fused with a sputtering stem of shattered speech, and III, perhaps the most eclectic section, dances an erratic broken-toy waltz through tangentially theatrical episodes of no-fi concrète loops, ponderous piano, and clumsily bowed cello. Yes, much of We Went for a Swim takes place “far away,” no binoculars are necessary, not even a slight squint; there is beauty in the beyond.

Natural Temple’s self-titled reminds me quite favorably of some of the weirder stuff I’ve stumbled across on both Free Music Archive and Youtube—Recordings, Disk 01; Multi-Channel Analysis of Naive Doppler Simulation; Dial Up—but also has the added bonus of being just a bit more discoverable (we have all seen over and over that, when it’s done well enough in the first place, accessibility does not cheapen obscurity). This mysterious, ephemeral little release is one of only a few digital-only albums currently uploaded to the Louisiana net label Lab Rat’s page, and it’s also my favorite so far, even setting aside my affection for eponymous debuts from reclusive or otherwise anonymous artists. Each minuscule track is sparingly formed with low-fidelity digital interference like bitcrushed shortwave signals or corrupted sound files, often rendered in an unexpectedly tactile form via microscopic sound design, processing, and arrangement. It’s pointless yet still entertaining to compare these completely detached, abstracted textures to familiar real-world sound events; for example, “Underneath” could simultaneously be a reticent, hermitic extended-turntable improvisation, a close amplification of liquid sizzling on a hotplate, a proximal hydrophone voyeurization of a crowd on the boardwalk above. The artist experiments with silence and reductionism as well, paring down their already minimal sonic palette to barely more than a ghost-in-the-machine whisper on “The Signal (Long Lost),” which despite its profound artificiality somehow manages to evoke the same spectral nostalgia for nonexistent futures as the most organic of hauntological works. Looking up the barcode on the cover doesn’t answer any questions; the numbers, at least, are the EAN-13 for the eight-pack of BIC Velleda 1721 whiteboard markers. Maybe you’re supposed to chow down on them while you listen. Worked for me.

Chock-full of sharp, scalding sounds as coldly synthetic and casually incendiary as the unsettling artwork, Matt Hex’s newest tape under his Gospel alias is a rapturous caustic nightmare. Shrapnel, true to its title, plays with textures that could just as well have been wrested from rusty machinery, slaughterhouse tools, or an overheating furnace chamber than a chain of pedals, objects, and effects. The opening “Incineration Angel,” perhaps the name of the seraphic figure featured centrally on the cover, is a brutal, uncompromising introduction that sets the stage for the particular sort of noise we’re dealing with here: artificial and lifeless, the passive abstract residue of industrialization and militarism rather than gestural blasts revealing the presence of their deliverer, and yet still tearing to life, or whatever it is (and staying there) with the vicious force of a whole network of volcanic eruptions. “Pivot Pin” is what initially brought slaughterhouses—things I usually prefer to avoid thinking about—to mind; its uncanny slowed utterances and distorted electronic interference already feel plenty gory and pestilential, but to top it off the short track concludes with a skittering loop of what sounds like a slim blade being sharpened by a shaky hand. “Hand and Hoof” seems precariously balanced between digital and tactile abrasion, a volatile, vivisected current of shuddering static and scraping, scratching scrap metal, and the whole tape seems to lead up to “Barbaric,” which builds from what sounds like a mashup of a particularly active Haters set with disaster footage clips to an extraordinarily loud, searing conclusion. Intense, violent, and unfeeling: BE NOT AFRAID.

When Florian Hecker and Oswald Berthold’s proto–net label fals.ch began making the material released during its original 1999–2003 tenure available for name-your-price download on Bandcamp a few years ago, I could never have imagined that we would soon be getting new stuff on the imprint as well. But now the glorious, esoteric tradition extreme computer music lives on in the 2020s through this established channel as well as countless more recent sources. It’s somehow fitting that the single phrase from which every single heavily abstracted sound in this new work by Susanne Kirchmayr (as Electric Indigo) was drawn is “To let noise into a system is a kind of fine art in both cybernetic terms and in terms of making music, too.” Live coding, software-based processing and manipulation, digital concrète and synthesis, and other techniques one often sees in this area are all approaches that consist of both precise interaction on the part of the artist and volatile unpredictability on the part of the “instrument”—in other words, no matter how meticulous and antiseptic a piece of computer music is, some “noise” must always be “let… into the system.” This is certainly the case for Morpheme, the audio portion of the Vienna DJ and sound artist’s 2015 multimedia performance of the same name; the swarms of microscopic, granular textures are jagged and rough-hewn, full of cloying artifacts and viscous remnants from the organic context out of which they were ripped, sometimes surgically, other times brutally. Despite these delectable, messy imperfections, and the strict limitations of using only a single speech fragment as a basis for something much longer, Morpheme is staggeringly complex and diverse, jumping from ersatz prog-electronic to formless insect-chatter glitch storm to minimal industrial techno stomp over the course of its final three tracks (“SI”, “TM”, and “EEM”, respectively). Even if one only looks at this and Kirchmayr’s LP from last year on MEGO, Ferrum, it’s clear the future is bright. Whoops! Nope, sorry, it was just my laptop screen. But I have faith.

Auspiciously introduced as “some histrionic bitch ambient for the ego,” the newest release from 218, my newest favorite label is just as ambitious, adventurous, and aspirational as one could possibly expect. Twentieth Day, Tenth Month, Thirty-Eight Minutes, Forty-Seven Seconds is the first and perhaps—so far—the only piece of music put out by OMS, a project about which there is absolute zero further information (other than the implied descriptors of “histrionic” and “bitch,” I suppose), and though I honestly anticipated the opposite, the barebones innocuity of the straightforward title is not at all reflected in the track itself, which is positively bursting at the seams with complexity, abstraction, and meditative maximalism. Despite evoking plenty of glorious, tranquil lethargy with its soft sweeps of expressive piano and plasticine new-age washes, “Autumn, Anno Domini” moves quite quickly, twirling and tumbling leisurely like a densely mosaicked sea turtle in a rushing ocean current; the first time, I was more than halfway through before I even really processed what was happening. There are some sharp edges here and there—sprouting boils of screeching dissonance, a jagged chunk of indulgent electric guitar noodling, hallucinatory vocal incursions—but everything always resolves in these beautiful intermittent structural wells into which the clashing, myriad assortments cascade and out of which sublime major-key distillations flow. A therapeutic think tank (the aquarium kind) for the thickheaded.