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.

I’ve written extensively about Everyday Samething on the site, so there’s little I could say here that I haven’t already said… other than that 2024 is almost over and they’re still killing it. In love with this new batch.

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Unknown Artist – James Blunt Documentary

Have you seen the new James Blunt documentary? Yes, it’s a documentary about English singer-songwriter James Blunt. Yes, the guy who did “You’re Beautiful.” Yes, I could think of a few things your hour and a half might be better spent on. For example, you could play this single-sided cassette called James Blunt Documentary four times (with room for rewinds). No, it’s not just remixes of “You’re Beautiful” (as far as I know). Yes, it’s an ambiguous glitch-strewn nightmare, structured around warped digital noise that twists and shivers with all the anxiety of a 21st-century pop culture enthusiast. Yes, the man himself makes an appearance in the form of a muffled, awkward interview, likely an excerpt from the documentary itself—if you weren’t aware, Blunt is classically trained in the obscure ancient tradition known as “self-deprecating humor.” Yes, it is yet another superb anonymous entry in the Everyday Samething catalog that blends analog obscurity with internet-era despair. No, you won’t regret listening to it. Yes, you will regret being born.

Belisimo – The Release Is Printed on an Edition of One Custom Thimble

Going off precedent, the title of this new work from Belisimo could very well be an actual fact, but what’s more subversive than subverting subversion? Ironically, an unhearable anti-music object version (à la Seth Cooke’s Selected Works concrete cube, perhaps) would be less of an affront than whatever this is. Buried somewhere at the center of this loathsome web of half-formed textures is the human voice, but that knowledge alone isn’t enough to affirm it as reality. Beneath communication breakdown lies communication death. “The sensation of suddenly realising you have wet hair in a public place.” Singing is no more artful, no less useless than sighing. The synth-soaked kitsch of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” lands somewhere between embarrassing faux pas and repulsive taboo in the context of abject nonsense. Scrabble and scrape, mutter and melt… it feels both too long and too short. The Release Is Printed on an Edition of One Custom Thimble.

Though I’m definitely a fan of his solo work, Liam Kramer-White excels in improvised duo contexts, whether with Stella Silbert as Beige, with Arkm Foam as LMFAO, or most recently with Dean Fazzino as Winter’s Treasures. (It also shouldn’t be overlooked that there’s something about Massachusetts that continues to draw like-minded oddballs to set up their tables across from one another… for more subversive jams try on Lean, Variant State, or Foom & Foam for size.) Packaged in a gorgeous screenprinted clear case, Out of Reach and Useless feels like a breath of fresh air. Fazzino is up to his usual tricks—the scattershot circuit wrack will be immediately familiar to fans of the lovely Robert Fuchs roster or the first few Spate releases—but here they’re controlled and thoughtful. The two artists play a good-natured game of tug-of-war with the intensity of their collective conjurings: in “Born Yesterday,” feedback and sine tones temper a white-hot electrical fire, which subsequently engulfs everything to kick off the raucous “Law School.” It’s an excellent tape front to back, but the real standout is the surging closer “Loss of Member Support.” Kramer-White and Fazzino strike a perfect balance between responding to each other and simply working up a racket. I can’t stop replaying this one.

Copies are available via email: phons.sound@gmail.com or robert.c.fuchs@gmail.com.

With two tapes under his belt as Wasauksing Sniper, a project dedicated to the legendary Ojibwe marksman Francis Pegahmagabow, Winnipeg’s Bret Parenteau had already set a precedent for gritty, glacial heavy electronics steeped in the sediment of history and the dust of recycled tape. But Ghost in the Trenches, a follow-up to Western Front (which also gave the artist’s in-house imprint its name) takes things to a new level. These new recordings are dynamic and deliberate in their structures, in a way that past releases weren’t. That’s not a dig, don’t get me wrong; I was a huge fan of the seething slow-burns well before this one made it into the deck. There’s just a lot more to sink your teeth into here, without compromising the lumbering, almost pensive pace. In “Into the Ground,” Parenteau raises a swirling twister of feedback from the ravaged earth of no-man’s land and then minces it into a brutal, crunchy wall, terraforming the blast sites and foxholes like churning tank treads. The plod pays off, too, when ripping distortion drags the rumble into higher registers—now the air is on fire. The next two shorter cuts make room for concentrated texture worship: “Plunder at Night” is some of the harshest material yet, and “A Shot from the Hole” plays with repetitive swells before collapsing into all-out howl. And then there’s the title track, which takes up the entirety of side B and reaches blood-boiling levels of intensity. I don’t want to spoil too much… you just gotta listen. I have a feeling this is a tape that will find a lot of new ears.

Copies are available via email: wasauksingsniper@outlook.com.

Interviewed by Max Eastman in Puke Pink, mail art and cassette culture titan Gen Ken Montgomery offers some eternal advice: “I encourage people to listen deeply. Listen alone and with others. Listen to yourself, listen to others, listen to rivers, trees, rocks, and birds. Listen to the voice in your head and the noise in the world and observe where it takes you. Sound is a form of transportation.” The Guanajuato-based Instituto de Psicogeografía takes this credo to heart—to listen to their tapes is to be submerged in another place entirely. To the ears, a location’s true essence is more than just the sounds that are heard; it’s also the sounds that aren’t, and el Instituto duly portrays the noise of the streets and the currents surging through the skies with equal reverence. The A side of II, their most recent release, is a languid mélange of earth and electricity. Abstract musical threads spool outward from a variety of sources and then melt into embraces from the natural world: radio chatter dissolves into insect swarm, emf sputter meets anxious footsteps. So much care was taken in assembling these collages, acts of respect and admiration for the world in all its imperfections. I’m reminded of Frenchbloke & Son’s legendary Bruit dans l’intéret de musique mix, a work I adore for the same reason. Things get a bit more tense on the B, with garbled commentators narrating a nighttime drama of birdsong and obtuse electronics. Already looking forward to the next adventure from this promising new initiative.

From a secluded outpost near the cities of Lodi and Piacenza, Angelo Bignamini raises entire worlds from the surface of a table. In an interview with Zoomin’ Night operator Zhu Wenbo, who released his tape Take a Seat early last year, he describes his process as harnessing small-scale interactions between “found objects ([such] as small stones, woods and plastic components), pre-recorded stuff on tapes and CDs, and small feedback devices.” A guitarist at heart—he has also put out a few solo guitar recordings and played in avant-rock duo The Great Saunites—Bignamini displays an equally musical ear for the possibilities offered by these unconventional materials, especially on Rebelò​t, a new cassette collecting what is now my favorite material he has released under his own name so far. There’s a restlessly eager sonic lens at work throughout the eight active fragments, homing in on microscopic whirs and flits before racking back to sweep over a lush life-sized scene. The field recordings are simply one of many elements on the same footing, mere tools for finding fleeting contrast and/or harmony… they flash into earshot in full crystal-clear focus before cutting out just as quickly. The most affecting moments are those brief, unstable synergies: the graceful duet between winding tape and creaking floorboards in A3, the dissonant clusters of natural and synthetic sound blown into glinting glass sculptures in B2. A real gem from an artist and label who consistently offer the best that contemporary electroacoustic music has to offer.

Making noise that’s truly colorful is harder to do, and even harder to do well. A synesthetic dimension that’s evoked by both relevant visual aesthetics and the psychedelic intricacies of the music itself, color is even more subjective and slippery than most other ways we might assess the essence of a work. Looking to recent examples, rainbows can blossom from the right combination of gear (e.g., the fecund modular contraptions of White Widow or Total Sweetheart), an abundance of visceral emotion (Spate’s Dogmono), or decadent textural feasts (Kakerlak’s Obdormition). Vivid cover art doesn’t hurt, either (see Form Hunter’s Overripe). At the intersection of all these potential sources of sonic vibrance stands Spore Spawn’s new CD Okoranaideto, a saturated chunk of phantasmagoric intensity that marks a new peak for the Niigata project. “Ahaha” sounds all too familiar at first, resembling countless tiresome sets I’ve seen that consist of a droning ambient undercurrent punctuated by episodic blasts, but it soon reveals itself to be an engaging and progressive crescendo. Spawn doesn’t use traditional loops, and yet he does structure these tracks around repeating motifs that always promise (and deliver) a satisfying resolution. Cyclical contortions in “Ichiichi” conjure a kind of meta-rhythm, to the point where one can almost predict the shape and trajectory of the next writhing manifold before it even occurs. None of the three peter out or end with a whimper; anticipation levels remain high through the final seconds, which are perfectly punctuated with one or more last-ditch spasms.

There are few things in this world better than a slab of overblown, in-the-red analog harsh. Both Johan Strömvall Hammarstedt (J S H, Gamiani, etc.) and Edvin Norling (Peking Crash Team, Pollutant) already deal heavily in sonic extremity via their various projects, but there’s something cathartically simple about their work together as Hingst. First shredding eardrums with a string of excellent self-released tapes—all three of which are collected by the Ska vi älska så ska vi älska till Wall Riders compilation CD on Abhorrent A.D.—they now present their official full-length debut on Hammarstedt’s own Ominous Recordings. Absolut Hingst, its blue washout cover sporting yet another mustachioed leather daddy, offers up some of the duo’s crunchiest material yet, mastered so loud it’ll tear your speakers a new one. The main thrill of these two tracks erupts from the interplay between the densely packed mid-range smorgasbord and the high-pitched squalls of feedback that slice through it; the noise already feels like it’s always on the edge of collapse, and those desperate screeches make the chaos even more volatile. “Hingst på Böda” is by no means lacking in low end, but “Hingst blåser 2,0” spreads an even thicker bass layer beneath the pedal-driven mincemeat. The second half of the ten-minute scorcher is absolutely crushing, a brutal blender-blast of writhing distortion that smashes together every frequency plumbed thus far. This is what they call “the good shit.”