At the heart of Clinton Green’s latest is the humbly bewitching sound of several broken Walkmans looping over themselves and each other in a jittery, microscopic dance. According to the Shame File star himself, “Loose internal speakers from the Walkmans are positioned between the spindle and play-head. The parts cling together magnetically, yet are agitated by the turning spindle, creating not-quite-regular rhythms punctuated by magnetic/electronic interference.” It’s an approach that has a lot of potential despite its minimalism, a potential that is explored in depth throughout. But in a surprising turn of events (literally; beware the jump scare), the textures and twitches of the miniature motorized network are just one element of A Conduit, especially in eclectic opener “Allegations of Ventriloquism.” I already thought it was a great title, but the lengthy track—described as “a psychodrama; an opera”—delves into said allegations in  a much more concrete manner than I expected, introducing a paranoid narrative via beamed-in speech scraps (provided by Michael McNab, Allan Stewart, Michael Zulicki, and Green himself), slurred tape delirium, and abstract turntable tactility. This last element acts as a kind of structural glue for the loose-strung collage, harmonizing with the miniscule rattle of the Walkmans as the skips and clunks respond to the bass and color of the sampled bits. The much briefer “Emucounter” is stripped down but no less mysterious, bringing the unmistakable buzz of an electromagnetic swarm to the foreground while guitars and reeds cavort upstage. And “Stopcock (Alleged)” is an almost scientific meditation, examining the effects of different placement configurations in a patient lead-up to a twist ending. I would be interested to hear a release that focused on the Walkmans on their own, but they also work so well here as both vital organ and connective tissue.

Ciutats, for all of the meticulous composition that went into its production, has the spirit of station-surfing as you cruise around on a lazy afternoon. Lès Modernos (Noiseau sound artist and DJ Loïc Ponceau) makes use of an eclectic range of source material for this short suite, each piece a loosely assembled skeleton of soulful loops, spectral dissections, and rebellious harmonies. “Lacques 1” immediately introduces the fleeting, fragile intrigue that drives the brief collages, its fractured rearrangement of a darkly dramatic folk song echoing the haunting palette of Arca’s Entrañas. The various loop fragments have both the stuttering physicality of analog tape and the freedom of digital decontextualization, darting around each other in circles and zigzags, a waltzing sonic shadow-play. “Soleil pour toi” and “Habitat 1” are more overtly synthetic tracks, finding uncanny beauty in the contrast between dusty, delicate melodies and processed vocal samples. The frame narrative of an aimless drive is ever present in the way some sounds are heard directly and others seem to be playing from the dashboard speakers as we sit in the backseat, the notes struggling to slip through despite an imperfectly tuned radio dial. Everything—especially the abstract patchwork of “Au cabanyal”—leads up to “Lacques 2,” a lazy whirlpool of sublime, surreal murk that beckons you to submerge yourself in its humid embrace.

Music for Two Flutes is one of those numerous documents of modern composition with deceptively humble titles. Both Ceòl Meadhonach and SLUB, the pair of pieces presented on this digipak release from Hideous Replica, are certainly written for and performed by flutes, but what each actually sounds like transcends (yet does not hide) such a minimal approach. I’m revealing my own inexperience when I admit I have always associated the instrument with an almost saccharine whimsicality, all delicate twitter and flutter. Artists like Olencki and Cocks, however, are recent fixtures of an extensive avant-garde flute tradition: from Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5 (1936, rev. 1946) and Luciano Berio’s Sequenza I (1958) to Toshio Hosokawa’s Works for Flute (2021) and Lao Dan’s bamboo flute improvisations, I have a lot of catching up to do. But one doesn’t need that knowledge to enjoy this music, which almost seems to answer my naïveté with a confident Oh, just wait.

Ceòl Meadhonach (Olencki, 2021), literally “middle music” in Scottish Gaelic, takes inspiration from the traditional bagpipe genre of the same name, and its tones and timbres couldn’t be further from my initial expectations. The composition unfolds in the form of repetitive drone-phrasings powered by breaths so forceful they overwhelm the instruments’ normal capacities, the metal bodies rattling and buzzing in a controlled cacophony that would make a purist cover their ears in dismay. But Ceòl Meadhonach isn’t about noise or aggression; like its partner piece, it strives toward a charged meditativeness, hypnotic and electric. Recorded in the same sessions back in July 2021, SLUB (Cocks, unknown year) explores form and physicality in a similarly subversive textural domain (“As an instrument activated via buzzing, the flute’s scales and acoustic systems are reconfigured; SLUB is the act of submerging into the instabilities of this reconfiguration”). In a subdued flurry of atonality and precise extended techniques, the topographies of the flutes themselves are sketched out in increasing detail, every curve and key lit up by sonic contrast dye.

Offering the irresistible deal of two Ashcircle sessions for the price of one, Yet More Warnings / Object Permanence is some of the best material yet from London’s most incorrigible sampler spammers. I dub Mackle and Macarte as such affectionately rather than accurately; over the past few years they have developed a musical flow and language that is anything but random. The sound-species they have neatly chopped up and rendered as readily accessible custom soundbanks range from physical instruments like winds (Level Up Everywhere) and guitars (Doubling Down, just released on Hideous Replica) to noises made by their kids (Dadcircle) and heavily processed concrète fragments (Off the Cliff Edge, its name taken from the duo’s stalwart Cliff Edge concert series at Hundred Years Gallery). The way they play is both erratic and focused, volatile and thoughtful, the nuances of the spontaneous interaction changing in response to the quirks of each arsenal of audio. Yet More Warnings seems to be cut from a similar cloth as Level Up Everywhere, except this time the strangled shreds are rounder and more colorful, the addition of brass squawks making “Spirit of Cooperation” and “Ever More Acidic” resemble big band free jazz played by a handful of wind-up robots. I love the way the musicians exchange fleeting roles: one sets up a looping thread for the other to fray and unravel; the other fills space at the surface while the one breaches it with a hectic array of more targeted tones. Object Permanence has the plasticky blips and yelps of squeaky toys and other bargain-bin trinkets, perhaps a synthetic companion to Jamison Williams’ game call improvisations. This is the joy of letting a rogue circuit burn itself out, a circuit constantly reconfigured by raw creation.

Part and parcel of the STUMPED process is “shallow listening”: a modus operandi less weighty and austere than the oft-invoked “deep listening,” but one that doesn’t forego the appreciation for the subtle beauties of sounds usually dismissed as mundane or trivial (to be clear, “shallow” is not meant to connote the level of artistry at work here). Adam Buffington (Pennsylvania) and Page Swanson (Berlin) always keep seasoned ears out for tidbits and trimmings—out of doors, over the radio, buried in closets and corners—to mash into the alluring paste from which the duo’s recordings are ladled, the completed tapes only emerging once there is a sufficient supply to be plundered. Following up 2022’s From the Thaw, the similarly screen-printed, O-carded, and obi-stripped Shallow Buoy embraces an even more eclectic range of materials and moods throughout its four tracks, crudely assimilating snatches of everything from birdsong and wind distortion to canned speech and frankensteined surf samples. Both the reliance on analog gear and the aforementioned approach to source-reaping make these collages as earnest as they are enigmatic; “Surfin'” plays like a waterlogged love letter to the soggy coast, while the jarring shifts of “Litter on the Beach” evoke the humble majesty of a barnacled boombox still spluttering forgotten tunes as its circuits fill with brine. For a remote collaborative project, the fact that the immediacy and intent of both member’s contributions survive so fully in the finished product is a real feat; for STUMPED, the whole Atlantic might as well be a peaty puddle.

Order a copy from either Buffington or Swanson via the inquiries email listed on the Corephone Sound website.

From the earliest developments in digital synthesis to the advent of the laptop and beyond, those who operate within the tradition of “computer music” have always confronted its uniquely symbiotic balance of manual and automatic soundmaking. Vancouver’s Stefan Maier is an artist who refuses to restrict his methodology to one or the other, instead electing to “[walk] the thin line between barely controlling a sound and accepting that it has its own inner life.” As a listener I tend to prefer extremity in this genre, a quality that is more often than not associated with direct artistic input; Maier’s work, however, utilizes the aleatoric dimension as a fertile space for his pure electronic topologies to interact and complexify—letting out some slack in the leash, so to speak—without sacrificing any intensity. The appropriately titled Nervous Systems presents a succinct example of this schema, its twenty-two minutes charting an organic evolution of inorganic substance: thick tendrils of humming glitch textures are unwound by flickering tonal photons; sonorous dissonance dissolves into a sparse yet spacious environment that could be natural, artificial, or both (the release text dubs the observational aspect of Maier’s approach “expanded field recording,” a descriptor that captures this delicate dance of intention and indeterminacy well). Though audibly more composed than the most unruly generative Party Perfect!!! material (Ryu Hankil’s Envelope Demon and Hunter Brown’s Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞]), Nervous Systems is an exciting and fitting new addition to the label’s gleefully posthuman purview.

One of two new full-length CDs officially declaring the existence of FIM Records, the record production arm of the prolific concert series of the same name, Blessed captures the unruly quartet machinations of in-house curators Caleb Duval (bass guitar) and Luke Rovinsky (electric guitar) in session with Ben Eidson on alto and James Paul Nadien on percussion. Though it was recorded at The Record Co. studio in Boston, the lengthy album is filled to bursting with the electricity and irreverence of a raucous live performance—a memorable moment occurs at the beginning of “Some Joyful Sound,” when Nadien yells “Do it to ’em! Do it to ’em! Do it!” as Rovinsky works up an infernal racket with a radically pitch-shifted guitar. Seeing the mix and master both credited to Oakland’s Nathan Corder was no surprise; Stalwart’s heavy yet lively interplay very much belongs to a thriving new school of improvised music that transcends state (and national) borders, distilling both the silliest and most serious aspects of the wider tradition’s six-plus decades of existence into an exhilarating, ever-diverse tincture (of which Corder’s records with Tom Weeks, as well as with other projects like Mechanical Bull and Monopiece, are also excellent examples). The longer tracks on Blessed are its best, especially the eighteen-minute burner “All Bad News (Variable Red Pitch Modulation Device and Four Gunshots)” with its effortless shifts between sparse, anxious skitter and full-force surge, but there’s not a single throwaway cut here. The shorter ones bottle fleeting bits of brilliance: serpentine pseudo-rhythms in “A Rare Glimpse,” muscular call-and-response jerks in “Electric Powered Memorial Candle.” A common talking point in free improvisation “theory” is knowing when not to play. These four are well past that—they always know when not to not play.

Many, including me, are drawn to cut-up for not just the exhilarating pace and gestural kinesis, but also the intentionality; few other noise subgenres are as directly reliant upon the artist’s mastery of their own equipment and the musical vision they set out to accomplish. But what happens when the wracking blasts of distortion and cross-stereo jumping become more incidental than intentional, as if the gear itself is internally disintegrating, spitting out the textural equivalent of catastrophic error codes through overblown speakers? This is no hypothetical—Dépaysement’s new C20 Tulpa fully embraces such a messy, volatile approach, the assaults of crunching harsh constantly cracking under their own weight and crumbling into swaths of pensive nature recordings and sighs of fraught ambience. It’s one of those tapes that is strangely satisfying precisely because it seems to outright reject any sort of conventional satisfaction: the loud parts are gone as soon as they arrive, the quieter stretches refuse to resolve or climb toward a climax; listening is like trying to scale a jagged, landslide-prone mountain that actively resists your very presence. But at the same time there’s a certain logic at work, one that reveals an aesthetic purpose not immediately obvious. It’s about unpredictability, the excitement of being completely uncertain what will happen next. That bubbling brook/contact-mic shuffle duet in “Skin” draws ears into a false stasis that exists only to be broken, while the delicate drone of the latter half of “Visage” does the exact opposite, leading up to something that never actually happens. As much frustration as there is fulfillment: a lost art in noise these days.

The jailer flinches when the prisoner slams against the steel, reaches through the gaps in the bars, howls and harangues. But the true terror sets in when they hear the cell’s occupant begins to move quietly, methodically: “They walked in a space even smaller than the confines of the cages made necessary, moving in an area just barely the length of their bodies. A few steps up and turn. A few steps down and turn.” A plan is in motion—one antithetical to the jailer’s wellbeing. Pacing Animal captures that steady seethe of pooling resentment and righteousness on their self-titled debut tape, wrangling heavily distorted textures that writhe and rattle with the patient fury that only a cage can create. There is no fancy digital hardware within these unforgiving confines, only a latrine that’s always overflowing and a filthy food bowl that’s never full; the new Hudson Valley project restricts their palette to the warm-blooded roar of a ragtag analog chain, riding dense torrents of rumbling heavy electronics intermittently gouged by pained yelps of feedback. At time the sound resembles a disintegrating diesel engine, at others an foundation-shaking quake—always brazen and brutal. Slow-burn harsh noise that does not hesitate, but rather bides it time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

Copies are available via email: pacinganimal@gmail.com.

“This work’s namesake is a coal mining pit in Bohemia turned into a museum. The ghosts of Mayrau still hang in the changing room, where the workers’ street clothes were hung high above the floor to serve as a visible sign that their uniformed selves were still down in the pit. The chain and pulley system has grown rusty, and its squeaks have become one of the voices in this piece.”

Mayrau is a 3″-length electroacoustic piece that examines the sonic ecology of the Mayrau Mining Museum in Vinařice, Czechia. One of six new “filecast” entries in the ever-expanding catalog of Lloyd Dunn’s multimedia project nula.cc (both an alias and a URL), it might be my favorite release so far. The descriptive text reprinted above explicitly introduces a paranormal aspect, which is then explored further in the actual music; the scrapes and shrieks of the time-gnawed pulleys soar and then fade in a sweeping expanse of darkness, conjuring a haunting atmosphere that lingers long after the track is over. The composition is built upon field recordings that are both presented in original raw form and digitally processed into shifting shards that contort and complicate the soundscape, reaching toward and occasionally coaxing out the intangible currents of a location marked by hardship and pain. Mayrau is an excellent example of interpretive phonography in how it both depicts and deconstructs the physical environment, achieving a rare strain of hypnosis with its carefully sculpted industrial churn and paranoia-inducing signs of human presence like voices and applause. “Rich” is a word that keeps coming to mind… there is so much detail here, the kind that rewards any level of engagement, whether one just puts it on in the background or listens closely for a deeper investigation of how much of a place can really be preserved, and what that “preservation” does (or doesn’t do) to the things people leave behind.