The sounds from which Comfort is constructed all come from “everyday objects,” but the stuttering, stabbing rhythms Dmitri Zherbin (who adopts the percussive brevity of his surname for musical endeavors) coaxes from these innocuous items using ear-piercing distortion and shuddering tape loop layering are anything but everyday. The first few tracks glue together haphazard bits of restless clatter, each of the elements repeating on their own cycle like clockwork, and all together the result is rumbling cacophony made even more chaotic by the little bits of order it’s made up of. “Tshts” takes things in a bit of a different direction, ramping up the density to create a seething, stormy mass of wreckage. As with almost all of Comfort it’s still quite harsh, but “Tshts” is beautiful in a way not so much like the visceral catharsis of blasting feedback/effect noise but more in a Modern Jester sort of way, where a deafening mass of tape racket overpowers and immerses but all of its shifting parts can be observed, letting you appreciate its formation, how the scuzzy, scattered scraps of detritus and wrack are pulled together into that sublime maelstrom. Comfort is comprised of just 12 short tracks, each digestible miniatures that nonetheless feel fully developed and wondrously lush. Past “Tshts” we wade through churning gears and machinery, harrowing howls of reverb-coated sonorities, aquatic bubbles and churns, and the punishing static-plagued explosion of “Tshsh.” Zherbin’s newest release is imaginative, concise, and raucous when it needs to be.

“With a haunted look in her eyes, she said, ‘It’s comin’ for us…’ ”

Rorcal is yet another well-established band of whom I only became aware after hearing their 2019 release. The Swiss quintet has been around for over a decade now; their first EP came out in 2006 and Myrra, Mordvynn, Marayaa, their debut full-length, in 2008. Since then they’ve been honing a style formed from equal parts cavernous black metal and atmospheric sludge riffs, and Muladona is the latest remarkable entry in the continuum. Subtitled A tale by Eric Stener Carlson performed by Rorcal, the LP opens with a passage from the original Muladona, the 2016 Tartarus Press novel, read by the author himself. As Carlson sets the scene for the supernatural horror soon to occur against the bleak backdrop of a post-WWI Texas town ravaged by the Spanish flu, the musicians of Rorcal translate the tension and pervasive sense of impending doom into a seething rumble of noise out of which grow destructive but deliberate avalanches of unison hits. This first track, “This Is How I Came to Associate Drowning with Tenderness,” contains only a hint of the formidable power that Rorcal harnesses over the course of the album, where the massive, dense guitar mudslides coat hypnotic blast beat sections and the unified sludge slams conjure terrifying strength from the shadows. “Carnations Were Not the Smell of Death. They Were the Smell of Desire” is a concise and hard-hitting amalgam of everything that makes Muladona so fantastic, forcing heads into motion as its stretch of repetitive blasting culminates without warning into a crushingly cathartic sludge climax. The samples of Carlson’s reading throughout, whether it’s amidst the rubble at the end of “I’d Done My Duty to My Mother and Father. And More Than That I’d Found Love” or is set right in the middle of the chaos of epic closer “I Was the Muladona’s Seventh Tale,” gives Rorcal time for crucial moments of mood building and provides valleys of meditative yet harrowing respite before the deafening evil forces its way back in—and then retreats for a surprisingly optimistic conclusion.

“Every day since then has been a gift.”

Mare di Dirac is the duo project of sound artists Luca Di Dato (better known as Poseitrone) and Lorenzo Abattoir, the latter of which has produced much of my favorite music in and outside of 2019, from the new Psicopompo (Abattoir & Hermann Kopp) LP Seven Sermons in Stone on Alien Passengers earlier this year to legendary static noise explorations LACH (self-titled cassette by Abattoir & Clive Henry) and Your Sewer / My Church under the alias Nascitari. The two musicians have also collaborated as Meconium, a conceptual piano exploration, but as with all of Abattoir’s collaborative efforts the music of Mare di Dirac is an entirely different beast, combining electroacoustic processing with rhythmic, spiritual traditional musics. In their words, Mare di Dirac is “based on the fundamental principles of quantum physics applied to field recording of ritualistic practices from different traditions,” an arcane mission statement that becomes much clearer once you hear Ophite Diagram. From the first moments of “Preludio” this focus on that strange duality is realized; the band establishes a dark, foreboding atmosphere within which their detailed dissections can occur, a construction that on this track specifically is helped along via the contributions of clarinetist and fellow sound explorer Mauro Sambo. Ophite Diagram is sure to be a strange and fascinating journey for listeners, especially if they have experience with ritual ambient music, because this is certainly unlike anything under that descriptor I’ve heard. The deliberate, plodding, hypnotic rhythms of tribal percussion occasionally crop up as familiar handholds on tracks like “Cista Mystica,” but such moments are always surrounded by the shifting clusters of processed recordings, buzzing and creaking and crackling and tumbling like some impossibly complex, kinetic collage-sculpture of metal, wood, and drum skins. The deeply deconstructive nature of the album is additionally reflected in the track titles themselves, from the vaguely promissory “Evocation ov Something” to the subversion-acknowledging “Serpent’s Hologram.” Though bathed in pitch black dread-drones and yawning chasms of reverb, Ophite Diagram is uniquely tactile and fragmentary, simultaneously evoking and dissecting the mysterious religiosity that this sort of music so often evokes.

The well-documented and well-love hardcore subgenre commonly referred to as “mathcore” holds a very special place in my heart. Exemplary artists like Hayworth, Gaza, Inside the Beehive, Arms, and others reach absolutely spectacular and soul-crushing heights through their unholy marriage of extreme, teeth-gnashing breakdowns, hardcore energy, and technical experimentation. It is perhaps the last artist I mentioned (Arms) to which the singular style of newcomer band Kucoshka comes closest; both share the melodic post-hardcore inclinations and complex, prog-indebted arrangements, but where BLACKOUT was a claustrophobic descent into dense, dark, noisy depths, this new project’s first (though maybe second?) full-length Women and Police Everywhere sprawls itself across a much wider area. The vocal performances are endlessly various, ranging from the Infest-esque tough-guy shouts (which themselves have an amazing versatility, from screaming “I’m a fucking physicist, bitch” on cacophonous opener “Young Turks to adorning the bizarre, swinging pub-punk at the beginning of “Info Wars”) to disarmingly clean, ersatz melodic hardcore breaks to unhinged shrieks. Though the production style isn’t the cleanest, it was a great choice for this album despite its emphasis on technicality, as much of the enjoyment of listening to Women and Police Everywhere is getting hopelessly lost amidst the chaos; and trust me, there’s plenty of it.

So what are the chances that I mention Vessel of Iniquity (the solo moniker of multi-instrumentalist A. White) in a review of similar-spirited music and then the day after discover they’ve released a new album? They seem pretty slim, but who cares—because it happened. Hot on the heels of the Void of Infinite Horror LP released earlier this year on Sentient Ruin (which was a hair’s breadth away from appearing on my midyear top ten list) and the self-released Conjuration of the Fire God last month, Star of the Morning continues with more of the project’s harrowing descents into shadow and caverns of nocturnal terror, auspiciously opening with the ritualistic percussive buildup of “Maledictum” before the blast beats first appear in “Deo Non Estis.” The expectedly formidable, atmospheric maelstrom of guitar and keyboard is less clean this time around, the densely packed layers instead plagued with rot and oppressive lo-fi smog. “Stella Matutinam,” despite it translating to the album’s somewhat optimistic-sounding title “star of the morning,” is definitely one of White’s most disturbing tracks yet, plowing through a shroud of consuming darkness with propulsive, thundering programmed drums whose unpredictable rhythms both temper and contribute to the chaos. The drum machine isn’t anything new for the project, and I usually don’t welcome such a choice of instrumentation in this sort of music, but once again White proves his mettle at making the synthetic rhythm section sound anything but, imbuing the crashing cymbal cacophonies with razor sharp bite and the pummeling double bass stampedes with bone-crushing weight. White’s agonized shrieks are also in top form here, tearing up from the pit of despair and melding with the tumult of pitch-black distortion. With a strong finish in the form of the extended nightmarish havoc of “Descende,” Star of the Morning is yet another excellent release from Vessel of Iniquity.

As an avid consumer of experimental art, I come across a lot of music in the form of abstract sonic amalgamation, much of which is constructed from quite disparate sound objects. That being said, though, few pieces have made me as strangely unsettled as “Wellness Policy,” the sparse introduction to Gentle Illness, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Curtis-Brignell’s newest album as Caïna. There’s nothing particularly immersive or captivating about the track, which is perhaps why it’s so effectively disturbing; in and around the relatively unassuming sounds of what sounds like an old therapy session recording and somber piano lies that loud, grating, completely emotionless cloud of electronic squall, deafening and defiant in its opacity, which makes the sudden excursion into much more conventional black metal once “Your Life Was Probably Pointless” hits even more startling. Between Curtis-Brignell’s furious bouts of shadowed growls, layered guitar lines, and surgical drum machine blasting (the latter of which definitely reminds me of Vessel of Iniquity’s brilliant Void of Infinite Horror from earlier this year) are more in the vein of those elusive atmospherics, but something the entire album is concerned with is the careful construction and release of tension, from the cathartic assault after three minutes of building unease in “Your Life Was Probably Pointless” to the synthetic, rhythmic mood piece of “Canto IV” and fluid dynamic structure of “My Mind Is Completely Disintegrating.” Buried beneath the noise are largely indecipherable lyrics with subject matter “ranging from the UK’s lack of mental health provision to extraterrestrial psychics via demonic possession and the metaphysics of suicide,” but the overall tone of despair, anger, and horror is more than intelligible.

In 1998, the debut album by Validine Chronus (hereafter VC), Ultia, became the first release on Cyclene, a community and label for producers of experimental electronic music (other VC releases on Cyclene include Tofu, Cellulose, Agar [1999, CYC-002] and Quinto [2006, CYC-021]). I don’t know much about what happened in the time between those releases and the recent 20th anniversary reissue of Ultia in March of last year, but I do know that VC’s career has now restarted in earnest, with wonderful releases like Transdermal and now Blood Moon. VC’s penchant for textural ingredients like soft, brooding drones that often emulate the otherworldly transmissions of shortwave radio; buried tactility; and metallic, subtly melodic synth cells is quite pronounced on Blood Moon, a C66 whose six patient compositions occupy a particularly dark and brooding milieu. There’s somewhat of a nautical theme present, and not just from track titles like “Shipwrecked” and “Storm”; in fact, it’s on “Mission Control (Concern)” that we observe the first palpable sign of this element, as the unmistakable rattle of metal cables and aquatic flow of shifting static evoke a strangely synthetic maritime environment. The second part of the staggered “Mission Control” suite is the tape’s most overtly tonal excursion, forming itself around a dense cluster of progressive electronic arpeggios before its structure collapses into the foggy, menacing tension of “Storm.” In my opinion this is the tape’s best track, a slowly shifting mass of pitch-black thunderclouds and oppressive murkiness that flows into the reserved but still somewhat terrifying “Consequence.”

Since the release of La Stanza di Fronte, Treviso sound artist and cassette tape lover Carlo Giustini’s debut album, on ACR at the beginning of last year, the young musician’s music has traveled along a clear trajectory. The spectral drones and use of fidelity/absence-as-sound that dominated that curious tape have remained steadfast elements in Giustini’s work, but as he progressed through various releases on labels such as Bad Cake, Purlieu, and No Rent the presence of melody and other more traditional ambient qualities have become increasingly prominent. Custodi, his second release on the Rohs! Records imprint Lontano Series, is perhaps the furthest removed from the ghostly abstractions of La Stanza di Fronte, for almost every track—excluding perhaps the best one, “La sala più a Nord”—has a clear harmonic backbone that weaves throughout the familiarly fuzzy field recordings and reverb-soaked ennui. Profoundly nostalgic, Custodi attempts to answer a particularly difficult question: “Is it possible to capture the sound of a state of being, of a memory, of a past sensation? Is there a possibility to translate [sic] a thought which once was into vibrational waves?” Magnetic tape, especially in cassette form, is often heavily associated with memory, from the murky sonic qualities of the medium itself to the things it frequently captures: thoughts, conversations, etc. But portraying the “sound of a state of being” is more complex than just replaying a concrete auditory keepsake, something Giustini obviously understands judging from his abstract approach. The three tracks on side A of the album are gorgeous meditations that make use of guitar and keyboard along with Walkman/microcassette recordings, and like last year’s Non Uscire there’s a soothing evocation of winter folded within the music’s dreamy drifts. But the essence of Custodi is best represented by the aforementioned “La sala più a Nord,” which combines deeply domestic recordings with soft environmental textures and is the only track that does not include musical instruments. Such a beautiful vignette perfectly communicates the incommunicable feeling of home, going about a routine in the comforting silence of your own dwelling, mundane moments whose significance isn’t known until they’re long gone.

Art made by humans has long been concerned with ideas of oases, sanctums, or convergence points that lie at the heart of mysterious environments. Often at the heart of these fantasies, whether consciously or otherwise, is the concept of a singularity, the point at the center of a black hole where matter possesses infinite density (but this definition can also be extrapolated to any point where the discernible qualities of an entity become indistinguishable from one another). But what does it sound like when we get there, when we finally reach the mysterious room at the center of Stalker’s Zone, or when Percy Harrison Fawcett stumbles onto the “lost city of Z” hidden somewhere within the sprawling jungles of Brazil? Million Brazilians, in this instance a trio composed of Grant Corum (The Orchardist, Mummy Dust Trippers, Gili Gili Men), Suzanne Stone (White Gourd), and James Shaver (Beyond), attempt to portray the latter through Strange Oasis, their newest full length. Its unique brand of colorful, aquatic avant-exotica is a brave stylistic approach to problem because its strangeness is seemingly both too much and not enough—i.e. too bizarre for conventional audiences but not sufficiently singular to represent an “inverted oasis” where flora and fauna become “a unified harmonic tissue of organic matter.” But Million Brazilians have shrugged off the solution that seems obvious to me (the ultra-dense synthesis of projects like Yeast Culture or Rudolf Eb.er) for a reason. The barely-there ghosts of tribal rhythm, bubbling tropical synths, the spectral gusts of voice and reed instruments like the sweaty chill of humid air… it’s more than just a representation of a place where dividing lines cease to exist. Strange Oasis is actually about the journey along the way, most likely the true form of such a place; where there’s no single spot in the depth of the jungle where abundance becomes oneness, but instead only the slow disintegration of sanity and perception as one travels deeper into an ever-darkening pocket of excess, the eventual inability to properly process or identify the overwhelming stimuli that surround them.

The minimal graphic on the cover of Plays, established abstract turntablist Maria Chavez’s interpretation of Stefan Goldmann’s Ghost Hemiola, reminds us that on the surface of the seeming flat discs we place on record players every day have rolling peaks and valleys, towering landscapes too tiny for us to see or even notice (apart from the sounds they encode). Chavez is well-known for her experiments with and unconventional presentations of the vinyl medium, from solo improvised performances to educational workshops to ambitious interactive installations, but Plays, her first full-length release since 2004, is something else entirely. Contained within its 60 minutes and 27 seconds are those same peaks and valleys and landscapes, this time in the form of heavily processed sound objects sourced from the customizable lockgrooves of Ghost Hemiola’s pair of prepared blank records. Chavez cited the curious concept of “something from nothing” when describing the work, an idea that many artists have explored, but none have delved into this particular—and highly unusual—knotted paradox of mediums. We know that “digitization liberated content from its physical carrier. [Then], Ghost Hemiola liberate[d] the physical carrier from its content.” And now, Plays hovers its spectral, synthetic form somewhere within that elusive neutral space; the sounds are audible but irreconcilable, only existing because of the sounds that are made when emptiness is lifted from the object that contains it, or when that now noisy emptiness is translated into the digital space. Amidst the meticulous excursions into stretched sonics, pseudo-industrial rumble, alien electronic pulse, and stretches of careful reductionism or even silence exist fundamental questions about the relationship between audible sound and physical media, questions that Chavez has been asking and attempting to answer for quite a while now—but no work, hers or anyone else’s, has dealt with the massive array of intrigue and uncertainty that Plays opens up.