There’s an important distinction to be made between “spooky” music and “scary” music. The former is the fun, festive tunes you hear come Halloween season each year—BOR-ING. Druuna Jaguar’s newest release Memória Aumentada is an example of the latter, the sort of music that deeply unsettles, sends inexplicable chills down the spine, evokes horrible isolation, fear, and existential despair. Unlike other notable instances of this (Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” Dolden’s “Below the Walls of Jericho,” etc.), Memória Aumentada is much more reserved, forgoing harrowing blasts of overwhelming discordance and hair-raising dissonance for creeping drones and cloying aquatic textures conjured entirely from manipulated field recordings. It is certainly a “dramatic pivot from visceral noise as a focal point” as stated in the description, but the extent to which the music stirs the deepest, unnamed emotions is not at all compromised. One feels intensely disconcerted by the contrast between ethereality and the uncomfortable closeness of the water recordings, the latter of which are almost presented as invasive violations. The final moments of “Musée Des Yeux Clos” produce intense dread via a tense drone that eventually dissolves into a confusing cacophony of delay-effect feedback and eviscerated human speech. The piece ends, however, with yet another appearance of dripping, sloshing liquid, further cementing its role as a successful counterpoint element. “Tillandsia” seems to tap into the subterranean underbelly of the Earth, summoning a bassy, barely perceptible seismic rumble, later complemented by the light, flitting textures of a field recording played backwards. If you’re looking to feel like whatever is happening on the album cover, like your soul has been ruthlessly dissolved and escapes your body through your face in horrific tendrils… fulfillment definitely awaits.

Though DETERRITORIALIZED ZONE was the first album by mysterious Tampa project précède l’essence that I discovered, fans who have been listening to the artist prior to its release might be a bit taken aback by its drastically new style. Whereas previous documents were experiments in various electronic dance music subgenres and other more generally palatable areas, DETERRITORIALIZED ZONE is an all-out harsh noise assault, a deafening bitcrushed maelstrom of disparate sound materials mangled into the most punishing auditory forms imaginable. For an ostensibly digitally-generated album it has all of the visceral density and tactile crunch as the meatiest of analog pedal sets, adopting a hyperactive dynamic approach that consistently engages. The tracks dive and whiplash between lushly-panned stereo destruction and brief, unpredictable stretches of mono error tones, feedback squalls, and electronic squelch, with track two presenting some of the most enthralling textural hodgepodges I’ve ever heard in harsh noise, assimilating everything from looping, fractured samples to what sounds like dead air from an FM radio. précède l’essence is clearly a newcomer to this type of music, but if on their first attempt their ideas and techniques are this refined, I hotly anticipate future works.

If you’re anything like me and are pretty much always fiending for some loud, violent harsh noise, you’d be forgiven for expecting that on Cotard Delusion based on its description: “A continuing descent into the metallic void. Heavy electronic squall. Oppressive machinery. Melancholic currents.” However, Martyn Reid’s solo project Depletion is more concerned with the words “void,” “machinery,” and “melancholic” rather than “metallic,” “heavy squall,” or “oppressive.” The four pieces on his most recent tape slowly spread like spilled oil on a warehouse floor, evolving from modest beginnings into lush, multifaceted soundscapes. Any of the sounds Reid uses might sound cold and artificial on its own, but when they coalesce in this patient, gradual way, something much more organic is achieved. The title track manifests a puddle of hum, draft, and crumble like a mixture of condensation skimmed off surfaces of different industrial appliances, while “Mirror Image” sounds more like it originates in the innards of those devices, with intersecting tendrils of dissected electronic transmissions and other mechanical ephemera. Rounding out the tape is the side-long closer “Trauma,” a delicate yet seething current of menacing drone and crackle that always threatens to tip over into chaos—but instead concludes in a completely unexpected way. Cotard Delusion is a release entirely in gorgeous greyscale, and thus a perfect addition to Invisible City’s established aesthetic.

Truly disparate fusions of abstract music and pop/folk conventions that are actually successful are few and far between. Musique concrète masters Jérôme Noetinger and Lionel Marchetti lent their talents to experimental rock collective Soixante Étages, but their electronic contributions are still largely overshadowed by the standard lineup of guitars and drums; the sneeze awfull and IT IT crew frequently intertwine odd textures and diverse samples with their music; Áine O’Dwyer blends mundane environments with her own voice and organ dirges. However, none of these projects have the immediacy nor the intimacy of the music of O Yama O, the duo of Japanese-born, London-based sound artists Rie Nakajima and Keiko Yamamoto. Their recordings and performances pair Nakajima’s phantasmagoric toy improvisations and handmade machinery manipulation with Yamamoto’s haunting voice and more harmonic contributions such as flute and recorder. Both their 2018 self-titled debut and the newly released Awadatete Yoku Arau both feel impossibly fluid, as if the music is simply being sighed or exhaled into existence. Yamamoto’s words are not bolstered (in this case, I believe a better word might be limited) by any conventional rhythmic structure or repeating phrases; instead, they breeze forward with the same freedom and frangibility as the whining melodica or clunking objects. I think I like this new EP even more than the duo’s debut, because rather than feeling like sketches or excerpts these tracks are more fully fleshed-out and memorable.

The first music by Thomas Tilly that I loved was also the album that introduced him to me: 2018’s Codex Amphibia on Glistening Examples, which was both a crucial introduction into the world of exploratory phonography and one of the first Noise Not Music reviews. Since then I’ve devoured his many spectacular releases—A Semiotic Survey, Stones, Air, Axioms / Delme with Jean-Luc Guionnet, Script Geometry—but nothing has truly amazed me so intensely and immediately as Le Vent Relatif, his most recent album. These pieces were produced in a metal workshop long ago for a documentary, and it boggles my mind that Tilly has sat on these absolutely superb, fully fleshed-out compositions for nearly a decade. Harnessing an assembly line’s worth of machinery, tools, scrap metal, and other industrial ephemera, each self-contained track is an enrapturing episode of tactile immersion, submerging the listener in a cold yet comfortable world of whir, spin, scrabble, and scrape. The fluid agility of the performances and processing, coupled with a subtle undercurrent of sizzling electricity, reminds me a great deal of Andrea Borghi’s VHS—an esteemed comparison I was unable to justifiably make until now. Le Vent Relatif is an indirect love letter to everything that is so magnetic about machinery noises: the neutral, apathetic tension; sublime overtones emerging in a seemingly static din; the pure and always slightly unsettling beauty of detachment.

Applause is really a weird thing when you think about it. It’s so ingrained in our social existence that it’s one of the first gestures a child learns, a universal human reflex to show appreciation or support, an unmistakable sound of numerous single sources melded into one. As a texture in abstract music—that is, when it’s element triggered, intended, or purposefully highlighted by the artist—it always struck me as sort of austere, overly weighty, like it just shouldn’t be there. But the communal sublimity of Green Ways completely changed that opinion, and since then I’ve encountered several examples of interesting and effective use of injected applause; one that immediately comes to mind is Astor’s wonderfully strange The Aubergine Dream cassette (Mark Harwood’s recent work in general is a treasure trove of fascinating structural distortions). A new “live” release from Tomutonttu, the sprightly solo project of Kemialliset Ystävät founder Jan Anderzén, is an unexpected but welcome addition. On Elävänä ullakolla EP, presumably as an acknowledgement or exploration of the May 8th performance’s lack of physical audience (Anderzén played the set for the Musa Ullakolla 5 Online Festival), various recordings of collective claps, cheers, and other crowd-conjured cacophonies are woven together with the usual Tomutonttu toolkit of agile electronic noodling. Once each piece really gets going it eventually settles into the stumbling melody-messes and futuristic new age flavors I’ve come to expect, but Anderzén’s family of cheerfully bizarre “folk” music is a pillar of my taste for a reason, so Elävänä Ullakolla EP is yet another new favorite, and the applause splicing is pretty unforgettable.

Lettere Animali is the debut release of the Milan-based Rosso Polare, a duo composed of multimedia artists Cesare Lopopolo (Caesar’s Psycho Machine) and Anna Vezzosi. Their creative collaborations take the form of masterfully deconstructed and abstracted Mediterranean folk flavors, relying on accessible melodies while mercilessly distorting conventional forms and structures. The musical sessions out of which Lettere Animali grew were freely improvised, and the instantaneity that introduces is retained even after the many instrumental tracks are combined, layered, and subtly manipulated. On the first few songs, this heavy electronic aspect is largely imperceptible, but “No. 3” changes that with its dense, kaleidoscopic arrays of acoustic instruments, processing artifacts, horns, and distorted electric guitar. These pieces may not be “live” in the traditional sense, but they certainly feel like it; “No. 19,” with its incessant pounding drum and escalating dynamics feels like a tribal ritual deep in the woods, while “No. 9” heavily relies on binaural field recordings to set the scene for a nature-filled, lazy summer afternoon jam. Though Lettere Animali’s very minimal cover is a deep red, its simplicity and uniformity evoke serenity for me more than anything else, something of which there’s plenty to be found throughout this delightful record.

The elusive Tinnitustimulus has been one of my favorite modern harsh noise projects ever since I first heard 2017’s Punct / Contrapunct on Monorail Trespassing. On that tape as well as subsequent releases, a dual appreciation for both enveloping, crushing textural mash as well as high-pitched feedback manipulation, electronic error-glitches and blips, and other more piercing, minuscule sound objects. In contrast to the prolificacy of many noise artists, Tinnitustimulus usually only puts out one tape a year, so when that happens you’d best believe it’s an event to be celebrated. 2020’s Soft Rains takes a spellbindingly deep dive into everything I love about the project, starting things off with a single track A side that twists itself in and out of a razor-sharp sonic birdcage prison of punishing, sterile whines and shuffling microsounds, trading time with a full-throttle noise assault. About halfway through the 15-minute piece the latter takes over and one is left to languish in the deafening din of distortion, which culminates in an amazing conclusion. The following three shorter tracks are maelstroms of howling analog winds, caustic drones, and meaty crunch that really put this talented artist’s skills on display. Will a Tinnitustimulus release ever not be excellent? Only time will (hopefully not) tell.

Sound for Blank Disc is yet another birth-name debut from a beloved experimental artist on Regional Bears; however, unlike New Sounds of Nature, which was Blue Chemise mastermind Mark Gomes’s first release under his own name and the London label’s most conventional release yet, there are no new age comforts or bubbly synth baths to be found on this cold, caustic album. Gathering the first material credited to Chris Fratesi, who usually records and performs under the alias Gene Pick, the minimally adorned Sound for Blank Disc is a fresh, modern entry in a long-running canon of blank media (and specifically blank CDs) as source material. I was immediately reminded of Yasunao Tone’s Solo for Wounded CD, whose alien rhythmic blips were created via actual modification and augmentation of the playback surface, but in the case of the first track especially Fratesi’s experiments are much more abrasive. Other than the title, there isn’t much information about the methodology used, but unlike Wounded CD the digital whirring, microscopic clicks, and unpredictable howls of noise are more than captivating enough without the conceptual transparency. Each five minute segment is a searing slide through a different compartment of a white-hot, mortally malfunctioning machine.

The music of Marijn Verbiesen under her Red Brut moniker is an important piece of evidence for a claim I often make: that amateurishness (or at least the appearance of it) is not an inherently negative attribute, and its presence can even elevate the quality of the work in question. I most frequently appeal to this in the context of more conventional genres, but Red Brut’s lo-fi tape experiments demonstrate its importance in the field of experimental and abstract music as well. Cloaked Travels is a multifaceted expansion upon her self-titled LP that was released by KRAAK in 2018, embarking on two extended four-part suites with the help of a delectable palette of sticky fuzz, queasy warble, and steamy warmth. Even more fascinating on this release is the increased prevalence of a phenomenon of “obscured simplicity” that often lurks at the heart of the tracks; there never seems to be too much going on in a Red Brut piece, but at the same time it’s usually pretty damn impossible to tell how exactly the sounds are being generated. Verbiesen is clearly utilizing the tried-and-true practice of magnetic tape manipulation, but her approach to it is a deceptively singular one that doesn’t turn too much focus toward any single aspect of the medium itself (fidelity, looping, delay, etc.) on its own. Instead, it’s more like it unspools with an unexpected fluidity, mobile and malleable despite its almost plasticky clunkiness, soft wobbling waves of spinning reels and forgotten instrumentals flowing into the humid morning air.