Of all the strange music I cover on this site, people I know both in person and online seem to be the most intrigued, or occasionally baffled, by my interest in wall noise. Why this is the case is obvious: they are confused and perturbed by the idea of music that is intended to not only be harsh (in the traditional sense at least) but also largely the same throughout its duration. I default to an explanation I’ve probably brought up a dozen times here, where I compare a wall track to an abstract visual art piece that never physically changes yet nonetheless yields greater depth and emotional resonance the longer it is looked at. But there’s another dimension to wall noise that this analogy doesn’t accommodate: though there’s nothing preventing listeners from prematurely ending their observance of a particular track, but there is certainly significance in the fact that the artist chooses a specific time frame for the consumption of their creation. Thus, the duration of a wall is as much an quality to be considered as what it actually sounds like.

A release as visceral as Elettronica Ultras’ Opposta Fazione doesn’t necessarily require such a pedantic preamble, but the acknowledgment of the importance of length allows me to articulate part of the reason I enjoy this tape so much: it’s short. The new artist, whose only other release (that I can find) is last April’s Oltre Tutto e Tutti CDr, presents two slabs of raucous, smoldering harsh noise across the C13, and true to such brevity the sound is intense and punishing. Restricting these incendiary blasts of crunch and crackle to six and a half minutes each not only makes them digestible but also imbues the music itself with a powerful immediacy, a quality that makes Opposta Fazione stand out from other harsh releases that place more emphasis on the extended reverie that such deafening stagnancy can induce.

When it comes to speech-related elements in music, it’s almost easier, or at least less daunting to work with the nonsense ranting, abstract utterance, and rhythmic repetition of sound poetry or text-sound rather than straightforward spoken word. As listeners we’re trained to resist transparency; nothing grates at the ear more than painfully unsubtle lyrics or any other elements that are too direct to be at all effective. Mark Groves’ murky mutterings that comprise much of his contributions to Red Wine and Sugar (which also features sound artist Samaan Fieck) are lucid and intelligible, but it’s less about what he’s saying than the things his words evoke, the way they sound within the soundscapes the duo craft, the deliberate pacing and placement of certain statements. Lake / Wildflower doesn’t even reach 20 minutes but its presence is one of spindly, spidery sprawl, sketching out strange and surreal environments through the use of woozy electronics, sparse recordings, and the pregnant spaces between Groves’ ramblings. The atmosphere that seeps into both pieces is dark and uncertain, but it doesn’t draw from the moth-eaten scuzz of Lindus or the hiss-filled suspense of Letters to Friends of the Late Darcy O’Meara, instead occupying a space much more cold and synthetic. The subversive proceedings aren’t without warmth, however; it just requires a bit of digging to find it. I’d suggest starting your search amidst the ringing negative space near the halfway point of “Lake” or the tactile ennui that rustles itself into existence once “Wildflower” begins—both instances are moments that seem grey and sterile at first, but focus on them long enough and small slivers of light shine through.

“Should I have just kept my mouth shut? The ambiguity is… distressing.”

Barcelona-based sound artist Daphne Xanthopoulou finds beauty not only in the mundane sounds of our everyday lives, footsteps and chimes and ringing telephones captured with wildly varying fidelity, but also in the intense, noisy glitch-scapes she coaxes from extensive processing of those recordings, presenting two dimensions of reality simultaneously—though moments on To Be Brave that feel like “reality” are quite sparse. Unlike September’s Jaguar 100%, the heavily altered auditory acrobatics of Xanthopoulou’s text-sound ranting is at least not perceptible on this new release, and instead the buzzing digital abstractions are woven throughout ennui-vignettes, the two often coexisting as on “New Moon” where the alien pulses of the former lurk beneath the meditative object percussion of the latter or on the blasting opener “Warm Milk” for which the opposite is the case. This coexistence occurs with differing amounts of unease, often undergoing a drastic change within a single track, as is the case with both of the aforementioned tracks; “Warm Milk” evolves from harsh to hypnotic, “New Moon” from soothing to sinister (the wet smacking noises used near the end really could be some heavily processed mouth sounds, I honestly have no idea). The stretch of cryptically numbered miniatures in the second half of the album, preceded by the equally diminutive title track, embark into deeply physical sound-object arrangements that further blur the divide between the thumps and bumps of reality and the electrical storm hanging above. I’d be lying if I said To Be Brave wasn’t intense, but it’s so concise and well put-together that the more discordant elements are digestible. Even if it doesn’t sound like your thing, you should try it; this is a very special and exciting new album.

Own Pace is not only New York MC Medhane Olushola’s first LP since 2017’s Poorboy, the only album (so far) from his collaborative project Medslaus with producer Slauson Malone; it’s his first full-length solo release, following on the heels of the self-released EPs DO FOR SELF (2017) and Ba Suba, Ak Jamm (2018). Like many of his fellow NYC undergrounders—MIKE, Pink Siifu, Standing on the Corner, Adé Hakim, Mavi—Olushola proves his miraculous ability to deliver a universally accessible hip-hop album that utilizes the wordless ad-libs, adventurous sampling techniques, and lushly nostalgic atmosphere that make this developing style so unique. Own Pace is clearly a very special project for Olushola; he “went thru the most” while making it, a level of personal involvement that seeps from every emotion-soaked second. The young rapper’s lyricism is at a new height here, especially on “Stranger,” which like “The Mint” on Some Rap Songs is made one of the album’s strongest tracks by a great feature from Navy Blue (as well as impressive production from the mysterious AFB). Over shuffling percussion slivers and a smooth melodic sample Olushula admits “faith been a stranger to me / it ain’t strange when I bleed / wasn’t able to see / the other side where it’s greener / over the fence that’s between us / hope is what I need but the sun don’t shine every day,” a simple yet evocative series of lines whose carefully constructed inner rhyme schemes make them nothing short of magnetic. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the only moment of introspection on Own Pace, an album that as a whole is heavily steeped in solitude, memory, and internal conflict, but it’s one of many examples of how Olushula conveys even the barest confessions with remarkable charisma.

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.