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.

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.