It’s difficult to tell whether the so-called Jørgen Brønlund Quartet is actually made up of four individuals; based on the often extreme minimalism of their music, I might be inclined to assume that’s not the case, but multi-member bands like Shots prove that sparseness can be deceiving. “Best played at moderate volume,” the five pieces that comprise Landscapes III seem culled from the same forest as is featured on the cover, bubbling brooks and crunching leaves and auditory constellations of birdsong. There’s definitely some contact mics and/or hydrophones at work in segments II and IV, which sieve delicate, microscopic texture recordings through what is either subtle threads of auxiliary electronic processing or simply unusual sound-capture techniques (or both) to yield meditative rustle-scapes, the hidden organic hustle and bustle revealed when one turns over a partially buried rock. In contrast, the more spatially generous I and V swirl blending long exhales of wind and water in fluid arabesques, not quite the almost overwhelming physicality of some of Jerman’s more immersive nature evocations (I’m particularly reminded of his track on Underwater) but instead viewed from a comfortable distance: a waterfall of cascading spray observed from the safety of the hiking trail, ripples and rapids rushing by beneath a sturdy wooden bridge. As if I didn’t miss autumn enough already.

Nairobi musicians, artists, and community builders DJ Raph (Raphel Kariuki) and Sophia Bauer team up for an eponymous debut as Citysynthesis, the latest in a series of collaborations the pair have undertaken involving each other as well as sound enthusiasts from all over the populous Kenyan city in the interest of mapping its sonic characteristics and geography (read more about these ventures, particularly the World’s Loudest Library and Sound of Nairobi, here). Despite Kariuki’s musical background in beat-centric electronic music, “Pulpit” begins the digital-only EP in a rather formless, abstract manner, setting the stage for the sort of urban soundscape dissections that are used throughout: fragmentary, volatile, textural, but not to the point where a single iota of natural atmosphere of is lost. This is especially apparent on the following “Sitaki Kuongea Mob,” which seems to simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct some sort of street performance, the jarring jump-cuts and splitting rhythms woven together with persistent speech. Then, on “Trio,” it’s the voices that become the object of structural recontextualization, floating ephemerally around a seething center like the beating heart and lifeblood of the city itself. The many paradoxes upon which Citysynthesis is built extend to the actual effect it has as well; one feels as if these meticulous assemblages convey more potent information about what it means to live in Nairobi than simple unaffected field recordings would, and yet it’s difficult to say exactly why that is. My theory is that with passionate residents Kariuki and Bauer acting as deeply involved sonic filters, anything they create will be imbued with the same love and appreciation for their city as is held within them.

I was, as the kids say, “today years old” when I discovered the Geel, Belgium–based Dadaist Tapes. They’re “funded by a cycling allowance” to give away editions of 25 free tapes in the interest of “discouraging product sales,” which is a goal with which I can definitely get on board. Though the label most likely remains incredibly obscure from any standpoint, one could say it is known by enough people since, according to their simple website, each and every copy of the nine tapes they’ve released have found a home. I’m glad to be introduced to this gem of a venture via Urall’s On Broken Stairs, a condensed suite of moth-eaten tape music that strikes the same deep dust-covered chords as Termite Acropolis and Darksmith. Swaddled in lumped-up layers of scum and fuzz, a range of disoriented emotions make attempts to break the oil-slicked surface: almost sunny no-fi drone psychedelia cracking under dizzying industrial collaging on “Melting Hands”; warbling, uneasy tranquility delicately distilled for “Everywhere We Look”; and, finally, complete, terrified delirium on “Taking Turn,” hoarse cries into the void as all around you it crumples into cold mechanical doom. All five tracks are superb compositions in their own right, each using the rich, fecund emptiness of blank (or mostly blank) magnetic tape to its fullest textural possibilities. I’ll be listening to this—digital downloads of Dadaist releases are, unsurprisingly, also free—as I sit at my computer constantly refreshing their website until I can grab the next one.

Midwest Radiator Sessions marks Chicago musician Joe Cavaliere’s 25th release as Springboard, and yet the vast majority of his work does not get anywhere near the amount of recognition it deserves, which is why I don’t mind writing this even after covering “The Coward” a few months ago. In almost direct contrast to that album’s eclectic array of disparate sound sources and hyperactive, impatient pacing, this new tape from Structures Without Purpose is an entrancing series of moody, grime-smeared industrial phantasmagorias. Even behind the fuliginous curtains that shroud most of the pieces, Midwest Radiator Sessions often seems to be above all else a search for textural sublimity within that which is stubbornly unmusical in its pragmatism—something it achieves quite frequently, whether it’s the pestilential ambience like a squelching symphony of microscopic decomposers on “Rustler” or the humming mechanical monotony of the following “Boiler.” Much of the lumbering assemblages end up somewhere between the material-detail experiments of Small Cruel Party and the indiscriminate manual chaos of classic Haters, both beautiful and crude in an entirely unassuming, almost completely neutral manner. The sluggish “Conductor” offers a change of pace in the form some good ol’ melted-junk noise that sounds like it was extracted from tape buried under ten feet of earth, and “Dweller” wraps things up with a mildewy whirl of gouged frequencies and hisses of decay. By the end I’m not sure whether I want to go urban exploring or curl up in a dark corner.

In noise music, well-executed tributes, whether explicitly identified or arbitrarily ascribed, tend to be applauded and appreciated at a much higher rate, perhaps higher than any other genre with a similar breadth of history. From my view there’s an easy explanation for this: because the tradition is so distinct from conventional and even other unconventional musical approaches in its stripped-down, confrontational viscerality, it often flips the usual script of sound 🡲 emotion, supplanting the instantaneous impact of its extreme volume, presence, and timbre over any other more complex point of analysis one might make—thus creating the very immediate “you like it or you don’t” quality. This happens occasionally with specific songs or albums in any genre, but it’s significantly more consistent in noise, and allows for fans new and old to hear recent acts like Wolf Creek or Berserk and be swept in right away, heads nodding and eyes scrunched up before any thoughts of “hey, this is definitely in the vein of older stuff,” and by that time one is ready to finish that sentence with “…and that’s okay.” This discussion is quite relevant to Yamagata artist Ugogg’s new release 涛涛 (pronounced tao tao), which not only takes plenty of cues from classic Japanese pedal stalwarts in the music itself but is also tagged with the “japanoise” descriptor. Much of the succinct release has that merciless high end that seems to grind and screech at the same time as masses of electronics flash, flicker, and fracture in the lower ranges. “壺壺” starts out violently loud and only grows more intense as massive sonic caverns open below the caustic crackle, shifting with tremendous weight like tectonic plates made of dark matter; “線線” is like the searing metallic squeal when the dentist goes overboard with the drill (and the pain that comes along with it); “礬礬” and “拷拷” both feature ruthless virtuosity and buried vocals that make me want to hear it blaring at an unhealthy volume from speakers in some cramped back room and with my own eyes watch this merciless mangler bring silence to its knees.

Besides the initial serendipity of their sharing a name with one of the greatest unsung hardcore punk bands of all time, Croatian quintet Wasteland first caught my undivided attention with the bestial power of vocalist Morgoth’s screams, which combine the hoarse, raked-across-a-razor rasping of old with a fresh fervor as clear as a mountain spring, often double-tracked and layered in a way that makes them resonate even more. Mora, from both an instrumental and lyrical standpoint, is uncompromisingly pagan, not in the neologized sense of simply incorporating folk flavors and an appreciation for the natural world, but rather the original definition, which from a Slavic perspective harkens back to pre-Christianization when the spread of western religion led many European groups, notably the Narentines in southern Croatia, to become even more obstinate and zealous in their nature-centric and polytheistic belief systems. This historical atmosphere comes through most saliently in the words of the incendiary opening track “Ledene Duše,” an intensely apocalyptic and anti-Christian disaster story, and “Pokolj,” which embodies the fearful but ultimately courageous Nordic forces that fought off their evangelist invaders. Throughout these vivid evocations runs an unyielding current of superbly executed black metal bells and whistles, from percussion that seems to shift between programmed and live kit drums (or, perhaps, programmed and better-programmed) to memorable melodic guitar licks and well-placed In the Nightside Eclipse synths, all of which come together on magnificent closer “Zvijer II.” With all of the nauseating, fascist nationalistic ignorance so deeply embedded in this genre’s chronology and culture, it’s always immensely refreshing to find and enjoy something that understands what we should actually love about our “nations”: the awe-inspiring, terrible beauty of the land itself.

It’s been less than a month since I last wrote about something from Flower Ark, and yet I am already compelled to do so again for Seep. There’s always something more appealing about harsh noise artists and labels that don’t make a big deal out of their material or aesthetic but still take themselves seriously enough that one is actually inclined to listen; Fishing Boat and the other acts I’ve come across via the Melbourne web imprint fit that description perfectly, presenting very little aside from the music itself. There are no clues as to how literal a role the aquatic/maritime imagery plays other than a release-specific “electroacoustic” tag, which may indicate a primitive concrète approach to water-related or even undersea site recordings a la Thousands of Dead Gods or David Gatten’s film What the Water Said. Identifying the true source of whatever sounds lurk beneath the barbaric processing on these three tracks would be an impossible task, however, because much of Seep, especially opener “Wildlife Water Source,” is an uncompromising Charybdis of no-fi pedal crunch, crammed into glorious, punishing mostly-mono for maximum baptism efficiency. Like all good tracks in this style, the 17-minute introduction is at once distant and oppressive, a sustained slab of roiling distortion that constantly breaks and reforms itself. I would’ve been happy with another one of those to complete the album, but Fishing Boat guarantees I’ll be on the lookout for their name in the future with “Powerline,” a breathtaking junk-glitch masterpiece that summons a razor-edged psychedelia with a cauldron of piercing electronic pulses and fractured frequency serrations. And while you’re still reeling from that, “Failed Dam” combines the two in a heaving mass of broken, stuttering static that seems to permeate every inch of one’s head. Pick this up and experience the overwhelming terror of open water in the warm, dry, leviathan-less (I hope) comfort of your own home.

Any band would be hard pressed to successfully follow up the short, slamming dose of thrashcore fury that was the Connecticut four-piece’s 2020 demo, but Kidnapped is hardly “any band.” Either they’re ingenious prodigies or they listen to even more hardcore than I do (or both) because there are countless moments throughout Nowhere Is Sterile that briefly remind me of other fantastic bands—Iron Lung in the way the blurring blasts and elastic tempo changes of opening track “Bled” feel at once boneheadedly brutal and artfully intricate; Aerosols in the strangely infectious harsh-vocal motifs and gunked-up gallops; even (at the risk of making your ears bleed from hearing about them too damn much lately) Gulch in how basic power chord plods are used in a manner somewhat analogous to breakdowns—but even as I’m writing the comparisons down they feel somewhat tenuous, because Kidnapped’s style is not just entirely their own, but also tightly bound into a seamless package of musical aggression, allowing them to pull off things like the vicious, chugging 7-time coda of “Circling the Drain” or light-speed cacophony of bite-sized closer “Unwound” without fraying at the edges. I might be imagining things, but the drums seem to have markedly improved for this first full-length effort, mapping the serpentine skeleton of the dizzying riff arrangements on “Pedestal” and pulling together “Herd” for a thrashing close that I’m surprised hasn’t resulted in any holes in my wall (yet). The whole thing is over in barely ten minutes—but it will remain ricocheting around your skull long after that. Best hope you don’t have too much brain for it to tear up.

The music found on Sketches isn’t the flesh-and-blood creature that slithers out of that ominous archway set into the rock, but rather the reality-bending mass of cold, grey ones and zeroes that seeps into your vulnerable brain when you look at the image on an electronic screen. It has just enough tangibility and uneasy familiarity to pass itself off as homemade clutter-concrète, but much heavier processing in the form of gelatinous synth slaps, damaged artifacts from extremely low sample rates, and silicon-sheened frequency extracts is pervasive, poisoning even the most earthbound tracks like the queasily ritualistic “Spinal Drop” with skin-crawling artificiality and necrotizing bit rot. An odd optimism emerges on “49,” which contrasts bleak, faltering text-to-speech laments with conventional, if slightly chilly harmonic ambience, yet any true resolution is again unseated by stubborn imperfections: chopped-and-stitched creaks spread like a digitized rainstorm, cloying currents of spectral decay. The careless, largely uninteresting percussion experimenting of “Mechanomics” is an unfortunate low point, but the singular appeal Shotty Jon introduces without full commitment returns with the closing track, a moody collage of dross, doldrum, and distance whose pairing of piano elegy with muffled murk and domestic abstraction echoes the addictive melancholia of trans-Atlantic colleagues barn sour. Won’t you crawl on in with me?

It seems intuitive that the more one writes about, assesses, or analyzes some sort of esoteric object that innately tends to defy description, the more language itself will start to fail, its limitations exposing the gaps in linguistic representation between two things that are clearly different yet don’t appear to be “on paper.” But it turns out it’s the opposite; one doesn’t just discover new words and syntactical structures that provide more outlets for accurate conveyance, but also previously concealed nuances and implicit currents that lurk and work well below the sentence level, which can often only be deployed instinctively via a deep, holistic personal appreciation for the topic at hand. I refer, of course, to wall noise, a genre with which I’ve come a long way in terms of satisfying review coverage—hell, these days it’s frequently the only thing I can seem to bring myself to write about, or even find new material in the first place. Several years ago I certainly would not have had the capacity to communicate what precisely I enjoy about Suffering to Sovereignty, the first full-length digital release from Massachusetts duo Fuct as Punk; it is, ostensibly, “typical” near-stagnant harsh noise fare, for the most part just crunchy analogue pedal distortion doing its thing. But what really prevent these two tracks from being at all forgettable are their consistent anchor points, spots of palpably physical interaction by the musicians that affect the noise somehow: briefly halt it, strip it down to an isolated frequency, force it in a new direction. The approach is such that the thick electronic squall is not dynamic, exactly, but not static either, rather a brutal, deadlocked battle of incremental assaults between an unyielding pile of screaming junk and its makers (who, appropriately, are never quite satisfied with what that screaming sounds like). Grounded by these tangible exchanges of blows, Fuct as Punk’s walls climb to the sooty heavens in an escalating feedback loop of violence, culminating in spectacular messes such as the hyperactive delay pedal glitching in the title track. Both exhilarating and exhausting, Suffering to Sovereignty is not the most conceptually compelling wall noise release we’ve seen this year, but there’s always a place for crude sonic annihilation, especially the sort that gives rise to things within ourselves that we’d rather stay buried.