Some of you may be noticing a pattern among my 2021 reviews: I’ve been especially concerned with releases of the harsh variety. This may be because the offerings at this particular time happen to be exceptionally excellent, or because I haven’t been to a noise show in over a year and miss them so goddamn much, or both, or neither—maybe I’m just broken. Beaten, defeated, laid out across the ground, we sink into the soft loam of the cemetery and past the subterranean network of interconnected crypts, from which emanates the sounds captured on A Hermetic Plot. There must have been a delicate process for exhuming this auditory gunk and preparing it for (living) human ears because that mezzanine murk still permeates every second of the two ten-minute slabs. Each lumbers with the rotting, earthy immobility of death while being shaken and ripped through by currents of life and pain as the armies of decomposers start in on their projects. The dense bricolages of rumbling gloom-choked distortion, contact mic intrusions like massive salivating jaws swinging blood-speckled jowls to and fro, and sporadic shrieks of feedback are at once punishing and alluring; many of you are probably familiar with the “appreciative grimace” response, but this is different—more like a capitulating look of faint horror and disgust. This is truly bleak, filthy stuff, bolstered by both its bloated stasis and its volatile disintegrations. “PLAY LOUD FOR ALL TO BE REVEALED.”

The most fascinating and consistently high-quality wall noise netlabel right now (correctly spelled A B S E N T     E R R A T U M but poor WordPress can’t handle it) is back with i’m not alive, i’m an echo, which is and always will be the sole release by 𝘸𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘸𝘦𝘱𝘵.𝘸𝘢𝘷. It begins with the delicate sounds of a personal tape recorder being turned on and a muttered monologue delivered with the accompaniment of distant crickets and chattering children. I have no idea what the person is saying, nor even what language they’re speaking, but the snippet nonetheless sets the tone of the remainder of the track (poignantly titled “forever shore”) to one of somber reflection or lament—to my ignorant ears the words sound as though they could be an intimate confession, a long-held secret, a dying wish. In the wider context of the genre, these sampled introductions only really work as precursors to successful walls if the transition between the two is executed perfectly, and this one sure as hell is: upon the completion of the preamble the tape recorder shuts off again, the force of the switch being flipped allowing the noise to surge into existence with an immensely satisfying immediacy. The soft, cotton-wisp crackle is initially confined exclusively to the left channel, and for a few moments it’s as though half the light in a room has been unceremoniously clicked off. The central drama of “forever shore” is found in that missing half’s slow seep back into being, an organic but deliberate duality that forces separate processing of each current even after their volume levels equalize, forming a fluid, interactive soundscape that gradually unifies itself. It’s wonderful releases like this that demonstrate not only how beautiful static noise can be, but also how much powerful meaning it can convey.

In my opinion, the best improvised music these days is the scruffy, squeaky tabletop tinkering that’s been steadily flowing in different forms out of places all over the United Kingdom: Ashcircle’s screeching “micro-concrète”, EGO DEPLETION’s artificial organics, en creux’s “faulty equipment” transmissions, to name just a few. Both the intrigue and the artistic success of these acts boil down to their do-it-yourself approach and a willingness to embrace the sonic possibilities of complete junk rather than avoiding those imperfections. Clayhanger, an alias of the artist behind the Expanding Foam project, throws their chipped plastic hat in the ring with Coal Press Dax Tongue, a release whose musical contents would probably be just as disturbing to androids or other electronic entities as the album artwork is to carbon-based ones. Despite the Bandcamp tags strongly implying these two nineish-minute tracks were created with a modular synth, Clayhanger frets and fumbles with patch changes in a magnetically slipshod manner that ends up sounding more like a clumsy, sausage-fingered circuit bending session. But the skilled artist still exercises a notable amount of control over their freeform gubbin-flinging without dulling the cut of the music’s rough edges: purposefully placed bits of buzz ‘n crackle converse with each other back and forth across your brain on “Rolling” while rising, shuddering tension coalesces into points of pressure like whirring power tools on “Pressing.” Coal Press Dax Tongue often settles into that paradox of ostensive superfluity or superficiality concealing impressive depth, and that is just one of the many reasons I love it dearly.

I’ve known for a while now that my personal dial for cozy music is completely miscalibrated (and only gets worse with time), but at least now I have hope that plenty of other squirrely needles behind busted glass may occasionally align with mine via the conduit that is this website. If you are the sort who often feels bathed or embraced in dense, enveloping distortion rather than buffeted and assaulted, then swivel yourself toward Flower Caravan’s Village by the River, a loud but ultimately languid display of dense analog abrasion. Along with the other projects whose music has been released by Flower Ark, which seems to document a more organic dimension of Melbourne’s noise scene (which I know absolutely nothing about, so it could be that this particular “dimension” actually comprises the entirety of the community), Flower Caravan pairs a classic pedal chain approach with an aesthetic that ranges from neutral to natural; Village by the River makes a firm first impression with its painted cover of what is presumably the titular location, framing its more incendiary contents with an organic softness. “Arcane Labor” lumbers with that fluid pseudo-stasis pioneered by progenitors of the wall genre like The Rita and Taskmaster, a sound that’s usually pretty hit-or-miss for me personally, but here the slightest currents of dynamic development provide just enough intrigue for the hulking slab to unfold with time-distorting ease before it sputters and chokes into silence. Malformed hints of melodic remnants lurk beneath the forceful squall of “BVLD” and “Bluefin” dips into the thick, sludgy marsh at the banks of the river, imbuing the second half of this digital release with as much perplexingly comforting warmth as the first. Neighbors too loud? AC unit rattling something awful? Cicadas already overstaying their welcome? Drown it all out and just feel the heat.

Haphazardly coalescing from the goopy remnants of beloved (not by me, if I’m being honest, but definitely by plenty of others) San Jose band HeavyHeavyLowLow, the newly formed Bone Cutter ushers in a new era of twisted, darkly humorous, mind-bendingly technical, and even danceable metallic hardcore with their debut self-titled EP. One can immediately see the profound irreverence hasn’t gone anywhere just based on the ridiculous track titles, and “My Wife Is a Dead Cat (Meow)” wastes absolutely no time getting into the thick of things with a tightly executed maelstrom of crushing blast beats, infectious four-on-the-floor groove interludes, and agile vocal trades in less than two minutes. The band has the unique position of being both (former) important progenitors and ardent revivalists of the harsher outskirts of the distinctive sass sound; even though Robert “Robbie” Smith contributes 100% of the vocals according to the credits, his disturbing lyrics are conveyed via a series of disorienting style changes (which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s heard a HHLL track), from guttural growls torn out of a much less sophisticated deathcore playbook to the iconic panicked, whining croons over bouncing dance beats. Even at an almost infuriatingly brisk six-or-so-minutes, Bone Cutter firmly lodges itself in one’s head. Whether it’s memorable lines like “But we’d be feeling lighter / If we didn’t have to carry these bodies” or the catchy gallop of “Peckinpah Leather Crackle” (thanks in large part to the indefatigable rhythm section that is the Fritter brothers) that form the irremovable hooks catching on the seams of our skull, those “in the know” must beware… once you start playing this thing it’s utterly impossible to stop.

There is little to no meaningful distinction between “hunting” and murder. This is something of which any sensible, compassionate person is aware. But without the monstrous institution of camouflage-clad morons strapping masturbatory arsenals to the backs of gigantic five-mpg trucks and taking out their deep-seated insecurities and aggressions on innocent animals, we wouldn’t have game calls. Is it worth it? Absolutely not. But at least now there are amazing releases like Silly Symphonies, Vol. 1 and Hansel’s Pies to soundtrack our consistently disillusioned and demoralizing lives. On the latter, just released digitally by the newly formed Cosmo Sonic Collective, Birmingham-based improviser Taylor Rouss embarks on a series of playful solo explorations on both tenor saxophone and human-made game calls. Each named after a different type of pie (with the exception of “Lament Pie,” one of only two segments that feature recognizable conventional sax playing), the sixteen fleeting tracks are brief but boisterous breath-sketches full of unpredictable squawks, quacks, cackles, hisses, and—occasionally—actual notes. Beyond the appealing novelty of Rouss’s approach and the addictive whimsy with which he executes it, the textural presence of the calls themselves is what actually makes Hansel’s Pies so enjoyable for me; there’s a simultaneous volatility and complete inconsequence in their minuscule tweets and titters, a tearing, exhilarating harshness tempered by almost cutesy exiguity. Based on Rouss’s own description of his modus operandi, he’d be equally pleased by listeners either laughing hysterically at his music’s ostensible triviality or hushed in awed silence. But if you ask me, a little bit of both is the way to go.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with the music of Italian reeds maestro Virginia Genta once one listens to The Live in Lisbon, a perfectly lo-fi recording of a 2008 performance with drummer Chris Corsano that’s nothing short of magical. It’s one of very few releases under Genta’s own name (her eponymous discography comprises a small handful of ensemble live LPs and a smattering of solo 7″s), but she certainly stays busy with other projects, which include the many iterations of the Jooklo collective, YADER, and Melting Mind. The latter, an ongoing, loosely structured collaboration with an array of electronics tinkerers, namely Michele Mazzani, is among the most abstract material from Genta in which she still utilizes her trusty supply of winds. The group’s latest offering, the partly self-titled Melted Mind, is an enthralling, difficult chunk of dusty atmospherics that keeps the listener at an arm-and-a-half’s length. All of the tracks besides “Frenzy Partner” were conjured by the core duo of Genta and Mazzani, the former switching between tenor and soprano sax and the latter contributing real-time synthesis as well as post-production processing. Anyone who listens to even a few seconds of the tape would hardly be surprised to learn that the Genta/Mazzani pieces were recorded in a barn; it’s not just the swathing analog hiss or appealing scruffiness of the recording itself that evokes a sense of confined removal or isolation, but also the music itself, which more often tends toward patient, brooding drones and atonal squawks and squeals rather than conventional jazz improvisation (with the exception of “SITB Pt. II,” a well-placed smattering of gestural scalar runs). With the lengthy “Bellatrix” Mazzani gradually begins to assert his presence, and the murky, garbled ephemera that begins “Through the Rusty Gates” and the B side—presumably created via on-site synth sludging, after-the-fact assemblage, or some combination of both—sounds like something right out of a Michael Barthel tape. Even with the added complexity of three additional musicians and a new recording location on “Frenzy Partner,” Melted Mind never abandons its refreshing, sublime removal; it’s a deep, buried hibernation both comforting and cloying.

As many are likely already aware, Nothing Will Get Us to Heaven is far from the only nostalgic love letter to late-00s Myspace scenecore that’s come out in the past half-decade or so, but I would venture to say that it’s one of the best I’ve heard. From the vibrant album cover and melted-lattice lettering to the pitch-shifted therapy sample intro with its lengthy, underscore-laden title and the vicious, bullheaded breakdowns complete with electrocuted-cat howls, The Queen Guillotined’s follow-up to last year’s demo is a throwback through and through, but the newly formed Buffalo quintet take themselves just seriously enough (and use adequately crisp production) for their debut to land with a more newfangled impact, appealing to fresh-faced fools and those still trying to rinse that last bit of neon green dye out alike. There’s also, surprisingly, not a single pig squeal to be found throughout the entire 13-or-so-minute run time, which makes the band’s self-proclamation of their style as “Real Deathcore” extra provocative. While they don’t have the brutal, manic stupidity of more familiar mainstays like IVEBEENSHOT, A Black Rose Burial, or See You Next Tuesday, the dual high/low screams and gang vocals of “Centipedes in the Senate” and stomping chugs of “No Redeeming Qualities” make The Queen Guillotined an act to watch.

Ever since Keith Rowe’s renowned deployment of the portable radio as a tool for abstract music, the family of devices has become somewhat of a staple in the arsenal of junk-drawer-diving improvised acts, but it’s rare to see it totally isolated. Aki Onda experiments with a prolonged capture that’s almost voyeuristic (A Method to Its Messiness), Daniel J. Gregory promotes it to both a producer of emphasized sound events and simply a piece of its environment (Heard Under Orphan Eyelid), and Alyssa Festa (a project now sadly defunct) plays with primordial beeps and background noise, yet none of the three rely as heavily on the compositional possibilities of real-time channel surfing, or at least certainly not as much as Promise Garden Frequency. Freshly released by what appears to be some new evolution of the prolific 7Form netlabel project, this digital-only album from Grounded is a murky, unpredictable, even hallucinatory descent into the fragile space of dead air, fragmented broadcasts, and jarring stylistic contrast. The 15-track suite plays like a single piece, evolving from live dial-scrubbing at first to accommodate increasingly complex layers; these post-recording interventions aren’t concealed or hidden in any way, but their presence doesn’t affect the half-exhilarating, half-sedating effect of the almost omnipresent frequency jumping. The artist’s well-tuned ear and hand coax a variety of significant emotional resonance: dazed catharsis in “Rationalise Stems”; dread and darkness in the densely packed static of “Sinking Deeper and Deeper”; electric anxiety in “Ringing Deep Now”; queasy, uneasy grandiosity in “Derelict Garden.” Promise Garden Frequency is a truly “plundered” release, much more so than most who claim the label for themselves, and is enthralling in both its stretches of atmospheric broodiness (“A Way Out”) and sublime pop-chop ecstasy (“Because I Am”).

So the other week I tried to burn two Waylon Jennings LPs to a CD so I could listen to them in the car, but something apparently went horribly wrong because every track on Dreaming My Dreams has been hiked up about 60 bpm and the entirety of Good Hearted Woman was reduced to an incoherent, eardrum-dissolving squall. I bring this snafu up because much of Level Repulsion, Universal Cell Unlock’s first release since 2017’s Fugitive Numbers, doesn’t sound too different from the latter malfunction. Mysteriously produced with what are only listed as “handmade devices” without any overdubbing or processing, the dense powerhouse of scathing digital harsh noise is always strangely apathetic toward its own abrasiveness—the incessant, looping onslaughts of auditory error codes and circuit torture seem just as likely to be spontaneously auto-generated as conjured manually by one or more artists. This could also be a case of extreme technophobia; in conjunction with the cover image, perhaps what we’re hearing is the sound of furious, vitriolic abuse of any and all electronic invaders. “Pollusiondeaths,” the closer, is especially spastic and violent. But if that’s true then whoever’s doing the abusing must also be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of these Frankenstein machines… knowing thy enemy or fraternizing with thy foe? I’m not sure, but who cares, because the results are spectacular. And I don’t regret hammering my phone into metallic paste one bit. I think.