Anyone who knows a gen-alpha kid is well aware of the massive presence Roblox still has. The dissonant combination of creativity (players design and share their own games) and exploitation (Roblox Corporation, which reported $3.6 billion in revenue last year, profits off that unpaid labor) is already emblematic of the horrors of late-stage capitalism, but the other day I discovered a new aberration when a young library patron asked for help logging in to the game. I immediately saw that the barrier was the most convoluted CAPTCHA I’ve ever come across. It instructed the user to click through a series of ten images to select the cup with the most liquid that also matched the given symbol… TEN TIMES. It took me, a grown adult (debatable, I’ll admit), several minutes to figure it out, during which time something we’ve always known but tend to ignore became unignorable: we are now human data feeders for predatory algorithms. This absurd reality is the impetus for CAPTCHA, an audiovisual collaboration between multimedia artist Berto Herrera, producer Manao (a.k.a. Oswaldo Rodríguez), and graphic designer Shamma Buhazza. It’s one of the more ambitious submissions that’s come into the inbox this year, and while I’m usually turned off by fancy press releases and headshots, it’s great that the concept was taken so seriously and this much work was put in.

The composition itself is a single hour-long suite of bleak repetition and synthetic atmosphere, owing its lurching pseudo-rhythms and digital intricacies to Rodríguez’s background in club music and its emotional dynamics to Herrera’s eye (and ear) for abstract sublimity. It’s part mood piece and part main attraction, at home in both the background and the foreground—which, in fact, represents the same blurring of boundaries as the “endless shadow economy” it critiques. Those contradictions abound throughout all elements of the project, whether it’s the dark beauty we’re reluctant to recognize in the music (that’s inevitably torn apart by a recurring synthesized voice instructing us to PLEASE TYPE THE NUMBERS YOU HEAR) or the dual consumerist/aesthetic urge to purchase the physical editions of the release: twenty tapes with handmade collage covers and seven handmade hollow “river stones” housing SD cards, both of which feature Buhazza’s visual contributions. I’m reminded of the packaging for Seth Cooke’s Selected Works for No-Input Field Recorder, and I’m also led to ask similar questions—and acknowledge a similar futility in trying to answer them. CAPTCHA strikes back against the descending big-tech boot with a glimmer of hope for “a return to spaces of silence and human connection”… but is a glimmer enough? It sounds like it, at least.

Ah, the C10. A format/length that’s incredibly easy to fill up but incredibly difficult to actually pull off. When it’s done right you get the perfect mix of densely packed quality noise with the inevitable desire for more… but there isn’t any more, so you just have to flip it over and play it again, and again, and again. As Scathing, Kenny Brieger is no stranger to well-executed brevity (his various C20s over the years on New Forces, Narcolepsia, and Cruel Symphonies, as well as a previous C10 on Oxen, attest to that) but the quietly self-released Venomous Blossoms / Carnivorous Blooms is a different kind of beast, born from a hefty chunk of raw material that he hacked, sculpted, and faceted into a razor-sharp jewel. Needless to say, there’s not a single second of wasted time. Brieger has always thrived off both an abundance of ideas and an agility in moving between them, and even with the extensive editing, the explosive momentum of his live sets also comes through. I often associate Scathing with an interest in screeching, upper-register frequencies that other artists would use merely to contrast the low end; he, on the other hand, jumps into those treble-storms headfirst, anchoring the noise high and then diving down. But all that said, neither of these two tracks are anywhere near that simple. There are always three or more things going on, layers gnashing against and twisting into each other, squeals and wails answered by skull-shaking crunch. Any time there’s even a hint of a lull, a new wrench gets thrown in. “Venomous Blossoms” is already ridiculous before it crashes to earth with one of the most life-affirming loops I’ve ever heard. At first, “Carnivorous Blooms” almost seems tame in comparison before it reveals itself to be more of a slow burn, until… well, I won’t spoil it. This is truly top-shelf harsh, the kind that leaves only ash in its path, and all you can do is yell “FUCK!” and—you guessed it—play it again, and again, and again.

Copies will soon be available from Scream & Writhe, or direct from Brieger.

To open up a new Clearance release is to assail oneself with stimuli. Colors, textures, contrasts; images, narratives, mysteries; relevance, irrelevance, everything in between. Old hat, maybe, to those of us trained by gas station screens and FYPs… but it’s also different to be confronted by the physicality of the information, the evidence that the items and ideas were assembled by actual hands rather than the algorithm, the possibility of there being some puzzle to solve, some answer to know. This futile human hope that we can figure it all out is what Zac Davis’s project is all about—in his own words, “when rhetoric is all we are force-fed, in the absence of proper logic we create new grammars which sort of act as a map for the nonexistent logic, which can’t be illustrated.” The “logic” of Life Hack is more intimate than The Seeds That Were Silent and less apocalyptic than Information Warfare, summed up from the get-go by the juxtaposition of a bright orange box of fabric softener sheets on a washed-out inkjet collage insert. Reach inside the bag to find some title pages, a sheet of handwritten prose, and a comprehensive list of favorite Dead shows. What a spread! As easy to get lost in it all as in the music itself, which you have to crack open the Bounce box to get at. Davis deploys his usual arsenal of crisscrossing frequencies and tape feedback at full tilt: layers constantly phase in and out, transmissions scramble for a place to land, garbled propaganda fights to convince. Much like his live sets, the material feels more like jams than compositions. We can hear knobs being turned, patches being activated, and the dial of a handheld radio—always a welcome presence, and here harnessed to great effect—being tuned. The electric clouds are agile enough to bend around much more obtuse elements, like the Dead song in the final track, which actually ends up seeping into the soundscape both sonically and conceptually. The airtight ziplock and secondary cardboard protective shell is crucial for preserving the fidelity of the most fried sounds in existence, so ask yourself before you open this can of worms… Do I really want to know?

Copies available via email (doublebindhotline@gmail.com), Discogs, and various record stores.

Is the tribute album a lost art? Was it ever an art to begin with? If it wasn’t, it is now. This deconstructed love letter to Napalm Death’s cornerstone grind record redefines what it means to pay tribute to a work of art: to celebrate the reasons it’s so important to you while also injecting your own ideas, to tease out subtle undercurrents and extrapolate them into full-fledged reimaginings. Foreshadowed by “Reading the track list for Napalm Death’s ‘Scum’ into a broken tape recorder” off 2018’s Totally Corporate!, SCUM is perhaps what Joe Murray’s decades-spanning work as Posset has always been leading toward. The Newcastle dictaphone wizard details his “forensic” approach to this massive undertaking in the release notes: “…considered listening, pen in hand, marking up file cards for each of the twenty-eight songs. What was I hearing here? What stood out? Was it dynamic tension and release, sharp changes in velocity, a rare disembodied guitar solo or a grumpy mammoth hum? The more I listened, the more I imagined I heard the band’s hidden structures and intentions; small cells of ideas moving from song to song.” He then stitched the tracks together from their dissected pieces, each one a miniature sonic Frankenstein’s monster, a self-contained universe of free-associative antilogic. The eclecticism at work is immediately apparent from the first few tracks: “Multinational Corporations” is classic Posset, complete with lip smacking and hissing analogy humidity; “Instinct of Survival” is a straightforward (albeit ramshackle) rendition with vocals and acoustic guitar; and “The Kill” is somewhere in between. The curious are likely to jump straight to “You Suffer,” and will be surprised to learn that it’s the longest track on the whole disc. Because this is not a collection of covers, but rather the blackened remnants left behind if Scum were boiled on a greasy stovetop—a reverse distillation, a makeshift magnifying glass put to what Murray cites as the essence of the iconic LP: “a moment of existential terror bathed in the weak Midlands sunlight.”

Copies are also available from Blacksound Records (AUS), adhuman (UK), and direct from Index Clean.

The word “minutia” almost always appears in its plural form, “minutiae,” a collective designation for any number of things so small or trivial that they evade a first or even a second glance, or are intentionally ignored. In opposition, Ted Byrnes’s new tape goes beyond mere “attention to detail” and celebrates the specifics. If you follow him on social media, you’ll have seen numerous examples of the prolific abstract percussionist’s humbly research-based approach to his craft: countless clips of work with new objects, setups, and constraints, including one from the recording sessions that became Minutia. Here, the focused explorations have a domestic feel, warm and close by. The first track is a new favorite and a great example of how he can whip up a racket with a snare and a modest handful of noisemaking knickknacks (in this case, a wooden paddle ball toy and a couple of pinecones). The textural surprise near the end is cathartic in a raw, simple sort of way, revealing a reverent ear for progression even in such stripped-down contexts. Some of the meditations are more restrained, such as the fifth and final, which sees agile hand strikes and rolls sparring with the natural reverberations of a metallic vessel—a great example of what Byrnes describes as “my love for the incidental sounds that the objects I use create, and how to try to control those sounds while giving them their space.”

Copies are sold out from the label, but will soon be available from Byrnes himself, Scream & Writhe, and others.

With how unassuming their setup is (one alto saxophone, one sampler), no one could be faulted for expecting Breathing Heavy’s music to be similarly reserved. But that’s just their cover, a strategic misdirect to throw off rivals in the running for the Most Likely to Give Your Grandmother a Heart Attack superlative. I’m spearheading a retrospective reevaluation of the word “skronk”… did it really mean anything until this shit came around? Perhaps even more incessant and uncompromising than anything the two subversive improvisers have done previously—whether Ciaran Mackle’s work as Ola Nathair (solo) and NNM favorite Ashcircle (with Tom Macarte) or Sam Andreae’s raucous collaborations with David Birchall and others (check out the Steep Gloss tape with Yan Jun)—not bad streamlines and then supercharges the approach they debuted with Heavy Breathing on Infant Tree last year. While the duo’s looping exchanges of shiver and squawk are definitely not reserved, they are restrained in a noticeable way. The tight interplay never takes off into full-fledged jamming, instead sticking to a precise frequency of agitation, like an overloaded circuit that slowly but steadily burns itself out. Mackle’s pre-loaded woodwind bites and Andreae’s controlled live spasms always seem to anticipate each other, feeding into the demented circularity of it all. The title cut has to be my favorite of the four; who among us hasn’t been in an aviary and thought, yeah but what if this sounded way more fucked up?

No artist’s oeuvre exemplifies the variety and radical creativity of Beijing experimental music culture than Yan Jun, so it follows naturally that his humble label Sub Jam has become a crucial platform for both established figures and newcomers. The new batch presents material by cross-genre veteran 李维思 (Li Weisi), young but already well-accomplished 孙一舟 (Sun Yizhou), uncompromising neo-Fluxus performer 阿科 (Ake), as well as a gorgeous archival field recording by the late 刘惠润 (Li Huirun). All of the cardboard-housed documents deserve their own appreciation and analysis, but I chose the debut cassette by 日常 (Nichijou) to focus on because of how it captures the diverse sonic and aesthetic interests that make this ever-burgeoning scene so exciting. The newly formed duo of 羊库库 (Yang Kuku) and 赵子毅 (Zhao Ziyi)—the latter of whom also just released his first solo album, 恨你—was almost a noisegrind project, but the musicians quickly pivoted to a very different, stripped-down approach that celebrates the “noise from everyday life.” This two-tape set runs the gamut of all possible definitions of that “noise.” 一 comprises direct recordings of trivial actions, first “扔被子” (“throwing carpets”) and then “拆台” (“dismantling”). Each minimal performance is percussive in its own incidental way: the former draws its momentum from both the muted thumps of the heavy fabrics making impact and the empty space in between; the former from the accidental rhythms of clatter, clicks, and yanks as devices are disconnected and taken apart. There’s a sense of good humor to these mundane proceedings that’s even further realized in the irony of “拆台” directly preceding 二, both sides of which are filled with dense, surging currents of electricity. Fittingly, C-side track “演奏” is a rendition of a composition of Yan’s; its presence here honors his career-long incorporation of electronic feedback systems into the organic, humdrum acoustics of the quotidian.

All of the new Sub Jam releases include thoughtful ​interviews with the artists (in both Chinese and English). I recommend reading every single one!

Melbourne’s Arek Gulbenkoglu has been honing an elusive but distinct approach for the past two decades, a trajectory that began with his earliest guitar-based material in the mid-aughts and telescoped with the release of cult classic The Reoccurrence in 2014. The past few years alone, however, have seen the sound artist’s most refined and purposeful work yet. Much of what I wrote about fissure, fissure, fissure applies to Swan in the Past, the third entry in Eamon Sprod’s inspired KINDLING series. Here again are the episodic vignettes of unassuming materiality, percussive punctures that have weight but no mass, blocks and smears of self-contained stasis. But KINDLING’s print element provides a new dimension for understanding Gulbenkoglu’s work, even if it introduces just as many questions as answers. The cover of the booklet (Sprod conspicuously calls it a “newspaper”) features the word “paradise” in green text, rendered in both English and various classical languages. The ten inner pages contain a series of images: individual curiosities in a seemingly random arrangement, a baffling clean-cut montage sequence somehow both more and less than the sum of its parts… sound familiar? It’s like a visual representation of what Gulbenkoglu is getting at with his music, an invitation to make connections between the unconnected, to draw conclusions from the inconclusive. It helps that the sonic aspect of Swan in the Past is more eclectic and unpredictable than ever. The first five-or-so minutes are radically minimal yet proceed with purpose, at least for a while. Digital obstacles—stalled process loops, computer concrète, clinical hum and whir—complicate things. Even when a piano creeps into the mix and hints at some shred of organic tonality, it soon reveals itself to be coldly synthesized. Later, unseen hands fumble with a tape deck before kicking off a lengthy drone that feels like a drill straight through the skull. The burbling coda is a relief, a cliffhanger, an epilogue: What was that? What now? Plan, not to scale, of the rooms in the social sciences building, Duke University?

Also check out The Greek Tape from earlier this year as well as the equally excellent first two KINDLING releases by Éric La Casa & Taku Unami and Seth Cooke.