The past two nights have brought the most lasting snow my city has seen so far this season, and waking up in the morning to my neighborhood blanketed in drifts of sparkling white is quite a calming experience. But there’s also a mysterious energy that pervades these winter landscapes, especially when it’s quiet outside, and the only sounds are the distant hum of cars slipping and sliding on the roads and your boots crunching on the sidewalk. Commuter is the perfect soundtrack for that lonely, frigid walk on a frozen road, all of the cars draped in fluffy white sweaters. The tape is the second official collaborative release from electronic musicians Howard Stelzer and Brendan Murray, the first being 2017’s Connector on the Helen Scarsdale Agency. The two artists paint brittle, suspenseful soundscapes using a mixture of ethereal drones and more concrete electronic sounds and recordings, the latter being the glue that holds even the 27-minute closer “Let the Children Guard What the Sires Have Won” together. Lethargic clouds of fuzz breathe in and out of “Molina,” a track that fits just right somewhere in between lackadaisical and driven and might just be the centerpiece of the tape. Commuter offers a lot regardless of how much attention and patience you pay it; inattentive background listening is rewarded almost as much as actively picking apart the countless layers carefully laid to create these compositions.

On Deux Soleils Pour Foncer, French percussionist Johann Mazé conjures up metallic, rhythmic sound worlds with a variety of materials. “Trois Départs Loin d’Imli” is heavily based on steady but complex rhythms played on metal objects and bass tom. There’s palpable energy behind every hit, and the beats almost approach a level of aggression comparable to industrial music, but they’re also restrained enough to a point where other elements can coexist in the galloping maelstrom. The end of the piece introduces a vocal motif—presumably performed by Mazé himself through a megaphone—that matches the percussion in its frantic stuttering, creating almost unbearable tension that is only released when the piece ends. This tension-building is the strongest point of Deux Soleils Pour Foncer, with Mazé demonstrating his ability to sculpt several sound sources together in a chaotic mixture that can barely sustain itself. It’s arguably even more apparent on the second track, “Je Contiens Des Multitudes,” which, despite starting much less conspicuously with some quiet rattles and rustles, escalates to a frenetic climax with accelerating bass hits and metallic cacophony. I’m reminded of that video of the washing machine with a brick placed inside that tears itself apart. Amazing.

A few months ago, I wrote about Damien De Coene’s tape The Present Is a Hostile Place on Geräuschmanufaktur, and its haunting focus on absence and silence even when it is surrounded by noise. Charles Razeur is a new project from De Coene, one that takes that subversive wall composing approach to new extremes on its self titled release. The first track is dominated by tape hiss, sparingly punctuated with cloying bits of static and low rustling. It is unlike any other wall I’ve heard, both in its presence and construction. Every element of the incredibly minimal composition contributes to a feeling of isolation and fear. It’s not fear in the visceral, confrontational way, an emotion that is frequently evoked by wall artists; instead, De Coene approaches elusive feelings of ghostly presences and old rooms pregnant with the souls of those that came before. “I” rewards listening to its full duration more than most other pieces I’ve heard; its unique atmosphere and unpredictability almost seem to imprison me. “II” retains the sparse textural palette, but with a much more liberal application of the crackles over top of the hiss. It’s a great foil to the first, and while I think “I” is definitely the centerpiece of Charles Razeur, the tape is overall a fantastic and singular debut release.

Philadelphia ‘gutter punk’ maniacs Bandit snuck this new EP out right before the end of last year, and as a result it went unnoticed by many people, including me (okay, I don’t know if ‘many’ is accurate, I just want to project my obliviousness onto others). But all it takes is one listen of Warsaw for it to lodge itself inside your head. The short eight-track set expands upon the chaotic grinding punk cocktail the band cooked up on their last major release, Self Inflicted, in virtually every way. From the four count blast beat that topples into “Lomza,” the energy never dips, and every single track is short and fine-tuned. Songs like “New Rochelle” and “Satisfaction Denied” introduce a hint of a mathcore element with the chunky guitar chugs and rhythm changes, but thankfully there are no indulgent breakdowns or sludge meanderings to be found; any periods of slowness are almost immediately ground up and pushed into a wood chipper. Warsaw falls short of even as many minutes as songs it has, but there is a formidable amount of creativity and emotion poured into these songs, with plenty of badass lyrical moments (“In my mind I’ve watched you die countless times” comes to mind). Nearly three minutes of the EP’s run time is reserved for an excerpt of what I’m pretty sure is Irena Santor’s “Ej, Przeliciał Ptaszek,” a fittingly contrastive outro that feels more than earned—and by the end, I’m ready to listen all over again.

“The hopeless romantic, dreaming of the guillotine.”

Admittedly, I use the word ‘spellbinding’ quite often—it’s a great word. But with Rituels, there are few other words that better represent how much the music draws you in. Belgium-based improviser and field recorder Ludovic Medery, also known as Fissures, combines the synthetic, glinting rays of sound so often found in acousmatic music with a host of more recognizable, tangible recordings, creating a unique, varied sound world that is every bit as dark and mysterious as the underwater forest on the cover. The piece progresses and expands naturally; there’s definitely a central idea, with material sounds such as churning gears, dripping water, rustling leaves, and the creaks of old boats interacting with a set of more processed elements. It’s interesting that the composition is so firmly based in physicality; even in its most ethereal, withdrawn moments there is always a hint of concreteness. Above all, though, the beautiful soundscape formed by these recordings (collected in Perpignan, France in September 2015) is powerfully immersive, and conjures an abstract environment all its own, tied to but distinct from the source material.

The harsh electronic improvisations of In the Wood are a far cry from both the reductionist works I associate with Durrant, such as Dach with Thomas Lehn and Radu Malfatti or Open with Matt Davis and Mark Wastell, and the more composed, glitch-plagued noise produced by Borisov. Instead, the two artists seem to meet somewhere in the middle of their extreme styles, translating the piercing tones and buzz of the electronic devices used into fluid, freely played pieces. It’s mostly unclear who’s making which sounds, or even what is making those sounds, but to me it sounds like modular synthesis and circuit bending, with each musician able to produce both unpredictable flurries and sustained drones. There’s hardly ever any silence; the most reserved that In the Wood gets is during moments like in the beginning of “Part 4,” when the clocking of a modified circuit is left running on its own, and even then it’s soon interrupted by some of the most violent interplay on the whole record. Despite the abstractness of the sounds, In the Wood is persistently loud, intense, and confrontational, with every blast of glitches adopting almost disconcerting levels of tactility.

I first encountered the music of Ushinawareta Tamashī on his split C120 with Warui Yume, one of Lurker Bias’s last releases in 2018. Though both walls were great, Tamashī’s really sucked me in. The dark soundscape of “Runessansu,” formed by an oppressive rumbling and a distant, persistent scraping, is claustrophobic but natural, and before I knew it I’d listened to the whole 60 minutes. Shinda Yuki is a less overtly wall release, with both tracks consisting of largely unmanipulated nature recordings, but the meditative, stagnant atmosphere is still present. The first part presents a much less compressed palette of textures than “Runessansu,” capturing the soft, tactile sounds of falling rain and rustling branches. Both tracks are recordings of storms, and as such the howling of the wind plays a significant role in each; in part one, the wind is a distant presence, occasionally creeping in the sides of the mix, while in part two, the gusts are much more isolated, cast into clarity by the muffling of the rain sounds. My favorite thing about Shinda Yuki is how much movement it evokes without, in a manner of speaking, going anywhere; even in subtle ways that aren’t immediately apparent, like the barely discernible crinkling noise amidst the din of part two.

This split C20 from two new California hardcore bands came out on the first day of 2019, and I love the idea of Potion’s “Sentenced to Death in the High Court of Judith Sheindlin” leading into “David Blaine Trapped Under Ice Pt. 2” being the first thing someone hears in the new year. Because oh boy, the A side of this tape is one of the most viciously intense grind I have heard in a while. The impossibly shrill vocals are like a dying animal, presumably being killed by whatever the fuck is making the contorting, dizzying electronic sounds that form Potion’s instrumental backbone (member Hunter Peterson is only credited with guitar, bass, and keyboards, so there must be some Ichirou Agata level craziness going on). The drums are just as brutal as everything else, all slamming double bass and furious blasts, until a sample from what sounds suspiciously like an episode of Xavier: Renegade Angel abruptly leads into Car Made of Glass’s side. Which—surprise!— is just as heavy. Here we get some (relatively) more straightforward grind-violence, frequently interrupted by bizarre interludes. The drums on the B side, both the way they’re played and how they’re recorded, are the driving force behind the insanity. Unfortunately, both bands end up relying way too much on samples, to the point where the flow is just disrupted, but everything else is so crazy I almost just don’t care.

Both Potion’s and Car Made of Glass’s sides can be downloaded from their Bandcamp pages, and a preorder for the actual tape release can be found here.

This tape came out almost immediately after I began my review hiatus for the month of December, an unfortunate circumstance because all I wanted to do was write about it. Double Goocher Shop is the self-titled debut release from the duo of Matthew P. Hopkins and Renato Grieco; the solo work of the former I am very familiar with, but I cannot say the same about the latter. The tape is a playful but dark romp through mysterious speech, nocturnal concrète ambience, and a distinct penchant for unseating and altering its already haphazard sonic constructions. By this I mean that even the most abstract moments on Double Goocher Shop are never immune from interference, whether it’s the disarming intermittent playback of the spoken nonsense that begins “#1,” the intrusion of silence and slow disintegration of what appears to be a live performance recording on “#parole,” or the bassy clunks that disturb the fragile atmosphere of “#3.” While there are many other elements to the music than just the words, they are what make me remain mesmerized by the tape on every listen. The way each line progresses into the next, how certain words or phrases are repeated several times, the almost uncomfortably hypnotizing effect; Double Goocher Shop belongs amongst the greats of the text-sound medium.

With a frigid Midwestern winter fast approaching, the temperatures are dropping, the wind is picking up, and the sun is going into hiding. Needless to say, I need all the happy music I can get. Luckily, the new album from long-running pop outfit Bingo Trappers, Elizabethan, is exactly that. The Amsterdam band, despite being active since 1995 and having a style that’s undeniably indebted to 60’s sunshine pop, sounds as fresh as ever. The songs are deceptively simple, with complexities that only make themselves apparent after repeated listens. One of my favorite things about this record is how the drums fit in with everything else; the bass and guitars are thuddy enough that they’re percussive in their own right, and it took me a while to notice that “Signs of Comfort” doesn’t even have any drums until midway through. The frequent slide guitar adds a sense of motion and direction as well, though it’s more fluid than rhythmic, winding in and out of the other instruments with evolving melodies and smile-inducing solos. Waldemar Noë’s lyrics are unsurprisingly fantastic, drawing equally from the frank storytelling of country music and more abstract sources (according to the band’s website, the song “Don’t Steal My Line” is largely based on the 1966 film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Coupled with the cheerful, whimsical arrangements, I can’t help but be reminded of The Deep Freeze Mice and their masterpiece Hang on Constance, Let Me Hear the News, which, I think, is one of the best compliments I’m able to bestow.