When I left the Lightning Bolt show I attended at Cleveland’s Grog Shop (opened by Aaron Dilloway) in 2018, I was holding half of a splintered drumstick and had more than a few drops of blood that didn’t belong to me on my shirt—just a few clues as to the kind of hell the Brians raise. No, it wasn’t my blood, but it definitely could have been, because for several songs near the beginning of the set I was right up against the stage, just inches from the razor sharp edge of Chippendale’s battered cymbal (several of his had chunks taken out, can’t remember how jagged this one was) which several times came close to giving me at best a nasty case of tetanus and at worst a facial rearrangement. But memories like this remind us that violence—the controlled, consented-to kind that is—is a crucial element of the catharsis that live performances of extreme music provide, not just in the actions of the crowd but in the playing of the music itself. What a powerful thing it would be to successfully recreate that dangerous physicality in a studio recording, right? Some records have, but the unhinged, unpredictable volatility of being a physical witness is often obscured. Loxe, a new band from Tokyo, lays waste to this challenge with the brutally abrasive approach they took to recording their debut album Prosa Poética, which allows the guitars to not just chug, but pound; the already filthy-sounding harsh vocals to resemble someone coughing up blood and bits of metal; the cymbals to assail the ears with junkyard blade sharpness. There’s little to do other than close your eyes and enjoy the sensation of being crushed; like fellow Japanese shredders Friendship, the music has the same punishing, overwhelming force whether it’s blasting at full speed like a turret-mounted machine gun or beating the floor with merciless sludge breakdowns. Perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise that Loxe appears to have formed during a time when crowded pits aren’t exactly a possibility, especially in their country; I don’t think I even want to know what they can stir up.

Do you ever stay up way too late and run out of things to do before you’re tired enough to go bed so you just sort of sit in the darkness and dissociate, all the slight sounds of the dead world around you sort of blurring into one dull roar? The static noise of Georgian project ცოდნის მფლობელები is the perfect music for that situation. ყოველდღიური რჩევები, the second release from the mysterious artist whose moniker loosely translates to “knowledge holders,” is a 25-minute slab of oppressive nocturnal sludge composed of that murky, lo-fi distortion pedal rumble that makes me nostalgic for bad rips of old Taskmaster or Werewolf Jerusalem tapes and a barely perceptible layer of muffled voices that adds a subtle current of paranoia. It’s one of those walls that truly “imprisons” you, but not in any startling or alarming way; instead it slowly and patiently creeps over its victims like a giant mud-amoeba, hiding its true nature until the prey is warmly swathed in trash-goo and can be safely incapacitated (think of the orcs digging up the Uruk-Hai like horrible writhing turnips in the first LOTR movie). John Cage loved the sound of traffic; this is the sound of traffic while you’re buried below the bustling street or smeared across the side of the sewer over which countless cars and pedestrians pass every day. Immured interiority paired with a tantalizing yet ultimately inaccessible promise of externality.

DEFENCELESS RECIPIENT OF OVERTURES (by the way, you have to pronounce this by shouting it; that’s not always true for all-caps titles but it is for this one. I don’t make the rules) doesn’t lay all its cards on the table until about two-thirds of the way through its first track, part one of “CAULDRON.” Up until then all the shredded concrete crackle and washes of feedback are shrouded beneath a sickly membrane, bubbling up taut against the slimy skin of this Jello-shell but not quite breaking through. That is, until around the three-and-a-half-minute mark, when a finally successful materialization of all the false teasing crescendos that sputtered and died before rips through the mix with overwhelming volume and harrowing unhingedness. It’s difficult to tell for sure whether or not there are vocals buried beneath this hideous, rusty chain-link tapestry of noise (although there is a brief bit of what is almost certainly speech at the beginning of “ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT THE INCREASING COST OF FUNERALS”), but whether literal or otherwise the end of “CAULDRON PART 1” is for all intents and purposes a scream—the desperate, agonized, reality-tearing scream of someone being submerged in molten metal. Overall, this new tape in the relatively small discography of long-running Irish project Luxury Mollusc remains reticent with its all-out abrasion, electing to keep a grease-soaked boot planted firmly in the atmospheric, which gives listeners the gift of vicious harshness drenched in softness, echo, and open space—like a much dirtier backyard-shed version of Love & Noise.

Would it be possible to find a more fitting artist for my return to regular reviews than Calgary newcomers readymade music (for listening)? I mean, these guys must get right down to business—their efficiency is promised right there in the name. And in fact they sample the Bachman-Turner Overdrive song “Taking Care of Business” in “taking business man turns to take care to take care,” along with cameo appearances by several other songs you’ve heard way too many damn times: “Jump,” the infamous “Bitter Sweet Symphony” sample, a two-second micro-blast of “My Sharona,” absent-minded humming of “Ice Ice Baby,” and a half complete piracy half “creative” reimagining of “Seven Nation Army” on “seven black and white people” that made me laugh so hard I had tears in my eyes. perfect music (audio) is the true debut work by the duo of artists known only as Andy and Shamus, a less than six-minute digital release that includes all of these cuts of irreverent dada pop-culture corruption and sloppy basement recording jams, each flitting by at lightning speed to compensate for the duo’s scattershot attention span. readymade music (for listening) has the hyperactive and deconstructive tendencies of boio™ but is both bolstered and bogged down by commodification, tedium, and triviality. Thankfully, those of us without such talent for cutting cultural critique are given a fast and easy solution: for making, a companion album that very helpfully provides two inspirational speeches and backing tracks (which are essentially just all of the pop songs borrowed for perfect music without the band’s contributions) for budding musicians looking to cut their teeth on what the real pros play. The second track even has a metronome for those struggling to keep up. Ring in 2021 with probably the most annoying shit you’ll hear all year!

Everyone’s favorite microphone magician and landscape perforator Audiosmogg returns for a second album with Home Office Ambience. Don’t let the title fool you; expect some sort of corporate/domestic ennui-scape a la The Wig and you’ll be left flat on your ass. The unusual release is more of an abstract exclamation from the pit of social lockdown than any accurate portrayal of Márty’s daily routine (although I’d bet it’s not too far off). “Transmission” immediately sets the cells on edge with teeth-on-tinfoil feedback noise (ironically, there’s a cover of legendary Boredoms opening track “TV Ramones” at the end of Home Office Ambience, whose minimal but quite conspicuous entrance is nonetheless echoed by its actual opener), “We’ve Only Just Begun” crafts a deliriously anachronistic radio play with pandemic-era news samples and grabs from the original broadcast of War of the Worlds, “Meaningful Pause” sounds like the inside of the bird room at a zoo, and “Time to Get Ill” remains low-profile with a tremoring chorus of appliance clatter and minuscule mechanisms—yeah, and those are just the first four tracks. Through all that we still remain somewhat centered in the “home,” however; it’s just that things we already see and think about here are magnified into intriguing unfamiliarity. Distracted, pressing an ear to the exposed window screen to get a closer listen of the storm; those dissociative moments when you pay too much attention to your own breathing our stare at your fingers while typing; et cetera et cetera. More of an optimistic and eclectic take on quarantine isolation than my Cooped Up mix, but no less bizarre and unpredictable.

I know as little about Kal Spelletich as I do about the “custom made machine/robot instruments” they designed and built that generate the entirety of the sounds on The Blessing of the ZHENGKE ZGA37RG. From what I can tell, the cassette is the sound artist’s first solo release, at least under their own name; according to Discogs, Spelletich was involved in a project called Seemen in the late 80s and early 90s, and with legendary performance collective Survival Research Laboraties during its tenure, but this limited run of Bryan Day’s superb Eh? imprint is the only proper recording solely credited to Kal Spelletich I can find. I hope that changes soon though, because these immersive soundscapes of assembly line whirs, the hum and grind of powerful electric motors churning gears and other knickknacks, low-register industrial rumble, and hypnotically looped discrete sound events are utterly addicting. Somewhere between the palpable physicality and passive complexity of Jean Tinguely’s audio-sculptures, the more agile collective improvisations of Day’s Seeded Plain project (in which both he and Jay Kreimer perform with handmade abstract sound devices), and the unusual use of robotics in Dirch Blewn’s stuffy Care Work tape, each of Spelletich’s compositions are unique toyboxes full of everything on your parents’ workbench that you weren’t allowed to play with as a kid: random circuit-board guts of broken appliances, boxes of spare screws, drills and clamps and scrap metal cable-and-pulley systems and… how the hell did an entire milling machine fit in here??

I was initially prepared to review Running Me Down, the new solo CD from sound artist and writer Russell Walker (Charcoal Owls, The Teleporters) with an in-depth reading of the actual fiction piece of the same name that his infectiously deadpan voice relays over the course of five unique instrumental accompaniments. But this proved difficult, for when attempting to closely listen to his words my attention inevitably melted into simply perceiving all of the elements at once; plus, there’s no official original text or transcript provided, at least not with the digital download, so I’m inclined to believe that while Walker’s story is the focal point of this release, it is not its sole or even its primary artistic identity. The False Face Society has previously manifested as the trading-off collaborations of Walker’s fiction with backing from James Tranmer and Tom Scott, but here only the latter contributes to one entry in the pentalogy of ten-minute (give or take a few) parts; each of the others were provided by unique musicians as well.

Paul Watson’s dark, churning phonography soundscape that writhes beneath part one sets the stage well, imbuing the already slightly sinister mundanity of the narrator and Gideon’s conversation with a powerfully ominous undercurrent, before complementing a subtle volta in the text with its own jarring textural shift. We only descend deeper into the darkness after the two friends have a run-in with some “gits” and Gideon confesses that he expects his wife, Nina, to “stab him in [his] sleep” any day now, an alarming confession that does not seem to surprise the narrator at all. The character of Tox (spelling?) introduces a stronger element of social and political commentary as the rugby jersey-clad man’s man rambles about hating immigrants and which families in the presumably upper-middle class neighborhood are the “best,” even echoing the States’ own lame duck fuck with the weighty inclusion of the word “shithole.” Tom Hirst/Design a Wave’s skeletal but relatively conventional rhythmic electronica adds a curious contrast: where the previous track bolstered Walker’s speech both sonically and thematically, part two’s almost obscures it. Such a juxtaposition has its merits, I think, but I found myself liking this section the least simply because of the instrumental itself. It does, however, contain a fascinating turn: the nameless narrator, referred to only as “Toni’s boy,” refers to his own writing as his “sons,” an interesting choice of metaphor considering the author he frequently discusses with Gideon is named Toni Parsons, and at one point Gideon even makes a joke about the narrator being “on the same page as Parsons,” which to me seems like it might not be a joke at all. Perhaps this tear in the piece’s textual confines is what results in the intermittent abstract incoherence and singsong rhyming that permeate the remaining parts, a sort of structural or even ontological unraveling. Between confused verbal simultaneity and progressive dissolution of narrative detail, plot fragments and threads wind together out of linear order (e.g. an email from Nina is mentioned by the narrator in part two but does not actually appear until part four) and incessantly repeat, Walker’s voice flits between fidelity levels, and the story becomes a blurry ouroboros of both self-reference and temporal circularity. By the end, we still have no answers to the many questions and mysteries that have been raised, yet upon its conclusion there’s an undeniable sense of completeness.

“He talks a lot of sense, but no one wants to hear it.”

One of two inaugural releases by Anne-F Jacques’ new imprint presses précaires, Fog and Fragments is the newest entry in the sparse discography Chinese sound artist and improvisor Zhao Cong (not to be confused with the much more famous, and unsurprisingly much less interesting, classical musician), continuing their series of various collaborations with frequent creative partner Zhu Wenbo. I first became aware of Cong through her Amplify 2020 piece Homework, which I believe was incorporated due to Yan Jun’s astute curation in the Eastern realm of the sonic avant-garde, but the 17-minute wisp of non-musical insubstantiality wasn’t really my thing; this tape, however, very much is. The two sides of the C26—its cover, along with that of Gudinni Cortina’s tape as well, adorned with a geometric sketch that appears to have been drawn with a mostly dried-out washable marker, an aesthetic choice with which I was quick to fall in love—present reticent vignettes of théâtre d’objets, breath, and silence. Cong’s minimal contributions of “sprays, voice, poker card, poker card shuffler and some other objects” are spare but sparkling flecks of gold in a cozy darkness, unfolding in a way somehow at once organic and sporadic. It’s impossible not to become engrossed in the detailed miniatures of shift and shuffle; whether Cong is exhaling a wet hiss through bared teeth, squeezing a fine mist out of a plastic bottle, or simply observing the brooding, meditative hum of her mundane surroundings, every second feels purposeful and saturated with significance. I’m particularly drawn to the alternating interplay between the soft tactile textures and conspicuous digital silence in the second part.

Black metal has long been one of the most useful and evocative musical vehicles for conveying the deepest suffering; while it’s certainly true that not all artists work from that specific emotional basis, I don’t think it can be argued that the conventions of the genre are not uniquely complementary to the conveyance of dread, isolation, misery, depression, agony, etc. Now, however, a new trend emerges within this realm of darkness, one I’ve began calling “void worship”: an intense and punishing yet sweepingly atmospheric approach to instrumentals; howling unintelligible vocals that relay the fear, panic, and defeat of a human consciousness exposed to true endlessness; an overall sense of impenetrable density and unimaginable terror. Several incredible examples of this style—Decoherence’s LPs Epkyrosis and Unitarity, Vessel of Iniquity’s Void of Infinite Horror, Entropy Created Consciousness’s Impressions of the Morning Star, Hexal’s Epistemology, etc.—have been brought to the world by various labels across the globe, but I can’t point to a single imprint who has become more a defining outlet for it than the Germany-based Amor Fati Productions. Many of the label’s recent releases have come from the enigmatic and elusive Prava Kollektiv, whose membership and location is (to my knowledge) entirely unknown, a shrouding anonymity that only makes their prolific output more powerfully mysterious. Last Wednesday, Amor Fati dropped four full-length albums and one 12″ split release, each by one of the five Kollektiv bands. I couldn’t settle for reviewing just one, so I elected to write about all of them.

Arkhtinn / Starless Domain – Astrophobia

Arkhtinn and its members are said to be the founders of the Kollektiv, but their sound is anything but archetypal. The sprawling “Astrofobi,” their contribution to this split LP with U.S. project Starless Domain, is a pitch-black yet startlingly infectious descent into cosmic annihilation, building a propulsive rhythm with shuffling drum machine and a winding melodic synth loop that gives way to the cathartic blasting doom we all came for about three minutes in. The droning guitars are deliciously augmented by near-buried keyboard chords whose tentative harmonies introduce a fragile hope amidst the opaque gloom. Starless Domain’s “MUSE” is a (relatively) more traditional slab of ambience-tinged blackness, holding its own alongside the formidable A side with superb anguished wraith-shrieks and virtuosic drumming.

HWWAUOCH – Protest Against Sanity

I listen to a good amount of extreme metal, but few bands speak to me the way HWWAUOCH does. I couldn’t quote a single lyric, mind, but it’s not really about that. Their exquisite approach, almost painterly, allows vicious dissonance and textures to unfold organically like ink ballooning in a glass of water; the murky soup of mangled riffs and delirious screams articulates the true nature of pained nothingness in a way I never could with lowly words and sentences. Both their 2018 self-titled debut and last year’s Into the Labyrinth of Consciousness are among the most disturbing and hair-raising examples of this time-honored tradition, so Protest Against Sanity has big shoes to fill, but I believe it handily succeeds in doing so with dizzying angularity and what are probably the band’s most unhinged vocals yet, which vary from the squalls of a demon-infant and cries of an individual in unimaginable pain to the low growls of an ancient beast.

Mahr – Maelstrom

You’re not ready for this record. I’ve listened to it like five times now and I am still not ready. Maelstrom somehow surpasses the enrapturing doom-black depths of 2018’s Antelux, already a superb work in its own right, and reaches entirely new heights of horror and devastation. This is a tormented transmission from the not-so-Great Beyond: the swirling spiral of eternity into which all deceased souls are helplessly swept, a neverending onslaught of merciless spiritual torture. Depressing, yes, but there’s no other explanation for what could have created these impossibly nightmarish soundscapes other than profound existential despair. Despite its undeniable bleakness, there’s an inexplicable magnetism to Mahr’s cacophonous “musical” vortices, as if the earsplitting silence of the void is calling out to you, embracing you with its infinite invisible limbs and never letting go.

Pharmakeia – Ternary Curse

Pharmakeia is probably the most “traditional” band in the Kollektiv, but that descriptor clearly doesn’t say much. This new release is definitely the most aesthetically cryptic of the five, though, which IS saying something. Ternary Curse comes bellowing up from the depths of subterranean caverns bathed in a sinister green glow, all thundering double-bass onslaught and obliterating doom riffs and animalistic utterances. The unusual track titles could be the results of some mathematical-phonetic operation or simply representations of verbal incoherence—or both, or neither. The only certainty is the music itself, which howls into existence full of palpable hatred and evil.

Voidsphere – To Sense | To Perceive

Both in name and in explicit conceptual approach (“Voidsphere is worship of the void. It is that, and only that”), Voidsphere perhaps come closest to representing the true meaning of my aforementioned artificial subgenre. The production on To Sense | To Perceive is spectacularly muddy and overblown, swathing the lightning-speed blast beats and eviscerating tremolo tendrils in a cloak of fuzzy distortion. Any vocal elements that are present melt and bleed into this homogeneous mass, the end result being a single thick tornado of sound that is somehow simultaneously meditative and violent.

Had it been released earlier at various times, Ghost, Don’t Scream would probably have appeared on Broadcasts from Elsewhere, certainly The Outcast on the Ivories, and possibly even Transmissions, three mixes I’ve posted here in the past; but then I suppose I wouldn’t be able to see its unique place at the exact center of whose collective cloud of thematic and atmospheric essence. For the virtuosic (Lithuanian?) artist Martin Rach pulls from all directions to produce the sparse soundscapes that comprise his newest release: various schools of classical piano or amorphous improvisation, the quiet violence within the “spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming”¹ howls of radio static, the jarring tonal agility and piercing textures of circuit bending, and various other little things that go bump in the night. On first listen, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about the interplay between the grandness of the piano and the minuscule grasping claws of the electronics as “First Apparition” began, but I was immediately sold about six minutes of the way through when the desperate, sterile wail of a rewired audio wire half-harmonizes and descends with the keys—a truly spectacular and memorable moment. To be honest, I’m not sure I get a “ghost” vibe from this, at least not directly; to me it sounds more like the paranoid half-knowledge of something beyond our field of view and experience but not quite being able to grasp it, forever living in obsessive fear. Or maybe that’s just me, because there’s a lot of other narratives one could ascribe—a lone concert pianist playing a final concerto to nobody in a world ravaged by technological apocalypse, a forgotten service robot trying to make music by rearranging its hardware along to a dusty recording it found on the ground. What I really mean is that Ghost, Don’t Scream is lonely, but it isn’t scary, even if you’re scared of loneliness (I certainly am, to an extent), because the sadness with which this soundtrack to humbling isolation is saturated is nothing except beautiful.

¹ Eula Biss, “Time and Distance Overcome”