The HNW series of Jan Warnke’s Geräuschmanufaktur label has been regularly churning out tapes filled with some of the most innovative work in the genre. Most releases have a unique approach or style that it explores (e.g. Constructionis, which I reviewed here a few months ago, and 2017’s Clavilis Muri, which pairs dark static with piano). But none have hit me in the way that Damien De Coene’s tape The Present Is a Hostile Place did. Loneliness, whether meditative solitude or aching desolation, is a feeling frequently elicited by wall artists, but “Homesick Orphan” makes me feel completely isolated, like I am in a dark hole by myself and can barely make out the things passing overhead. This profound stifling is accomplished through the masterful use of stereo space; amidst the crackles — which on the left crumble into a deep, earthy rumble and on the right stay in a higher range — is a gaping hole, a complete absence of sound that calls as much attention to itself as the noise beside it, a physically oppressive darkness. “The Benefits of Destructive Behavior,” beginning with an odd synth sample, adopts largely the same structure, but with enough variation that it is distinct yet just as hypnotic, along with some muffled glitches that subtly disrupt and distort the wall. The Present Is a Hostile Place will put you into a trance; the 60 minutes feel so much shorter, and at the end it’s like stepping out of a pitch black cave into the sunlight.

And the award for the grooviest, angriest hardcore record of 2018 goes to…

Good to Feel sounds every bit as fiery as the graphic album cover. The guitars, while chunky and full with plenty of low end, have a sharp flaming edge to them that blasts right through the mix, only matched by the furious vocals. Though Candy largely abandons the beatdown-indebted sound of previous releases, Good to Feel still slams unfathomably hard, with each track offering fast-paced punk pounds, invigorating mid-tempo chugs, and deliberately slow breakdowns that drip with sludge. The latter element is probably the record’s standout feature: the breakdowns are fucking amazing. Unlike many more metalcore-informed bands, when Candy slows down the anger doesn’t; even during the most sluggish sections a palpable, electric fury remains. Because of this, the longer tracks like “Distorted Dreams” hit just as hard as the brief blasters such as “Burning Water.” Good to Feel is only 17 minutes, so it doesn’t have time for mercy. Whether you’re banging your head furiously to thrashing hardcore or more slowly while that distinctive “oh man this is heavy” expression spreads across your face (I challenge you to listen to “Human Target” without doing so), Good to Feel drives a hot metal spike straight into the amygdala.

Despite being arguably the most personal and innate instrument, the human voice is hard to master — and it’s even more difficult to surpass mastery, and venture into uncovered, original musical territory. Rodrigo Ambriz is an improviser whose control over his voice is astonishing. He uses it to create drones and form surreal clouds of nonsense verbalization, gagging and contorting his mouth in almost horrifying ways. On Una silueta se precipita en arcadas, Ambriz also makes use of auxiliary devices, like tape machines and miscellaneous electronics, to extend these unfamiliar timbres even further. In this regard he is not dissimilar from other, equally masterful abstract vocalizers (Yoshida, Junko, etc), but Ambriz’s approach is uniquely aggressive and passionate, much more focused on visceral assault and clashing textures. His ragged breaths are the listener’s only repose, especially on seemingly effect-less pieces like opener “Trayecto subterráneo. Espejos, dientes, sedimento.” At other times, he layers and builds loops for more patient progressions; “Páramo agreste, área exclusiva para digresiones fatigosas” is like a restless pit of unspeakable monsters, struggling and fighting each other to escape, until the whole thing eventually boils over. And “Despojado al fin por su propio soplo,” probably my favorite cut, initially sounds like a kid making sound effects while playing with action figures…but then you begin to realize how sinister and violent it sounds, like Ambriz isn’t just imitating the sound of some horrific scene but instead it’s being played through him, like a speaker or something. Needless to say, Una silueta se precipita en arcadas is a wild ride. I once read someone say that after listening to Derek Bailey the guitar becomes “an incredible alien artifact of immense power.” Similarly, after Ambriz, I’m looking at my vocal cords in a very different way.

Ecce homo! Behold the man! Having just read Tom Kristensen’s novel Hærværk a few weeks ago, it’s a phrase that’s been on my mind recently. A sarcastic and sardonic one nowadays, when our shortcomings, vices, and darknesses are at the forefront of our lives; behold us in all our imperfections and evils. Ipek Gorgun’s new record, also titled Ecce Homo, is said to explore “the lighter and darker shades of the human psyche, behaviour and existence, and humanity’s ability to create beauty and destruction.” The latter pair dominates Gorgun’s musical approach in a variety of permutations: beauty through the destruction of the crushed and gutted sounds that form “Tserin Dopchut,” destruction of the beauty that the musical samples of “Neroli” might once have held. Gorgun’s compositions follow our disastrous path as a species; nature is bulldozed into screeching mechanical constructions, those constructions break apart and fold on themselves, until reaching a climax in “To Cross Great Rivers,” described as the embodiment of humanity’s eternal greed and imperialism. Without context, the sonic palette of Ecce Homo is painful, unsettling, immersive; when paired with these unfortunate truths, it becomes excruciating, terrifying, way too close for comfort.

“Let me give you a revelation: they are in control.”

Texas goregrinders Intestinal Disgorge have come a long way since the release of their debut full-length, Drowned in Rectal Sludge, in 2000. After a lot of stylistic exploration, they are honing in on a sound that bonds the unhinged noise blasts of their early work with a more refined, but still hideously brutal death grind format. Everlasting Fractal Nightmare picks up right where last year’s Sonic Shrapnel left off, and it’s pretty much the culmination of what the band seems to have been working toward. The drums keep every single track barreling at an uncompromising pace; I don’t think the bass drum ever lets up for more than five seconds at a time, it just beats you into the ground and keeps you there. The vocals are as unpredictable and disturbing as ever, climbing from down-tuned gurgles to piercing shrieks atop the putrid atmosphere whipped up by the guitars. Intestinal Disgorge have completely mastered the conjuring of a dark, horrifying sonic environment, which is brewed at the forefront on texture-focused tracks like “Shambling Cyclopean Terrors” and “Where They Breed” and presides over the rest of the album with pestilent persistence. Yes, 35 mins seems long for an unrelenting gore record; I thought the exact same thing. But Everlasting Fractal Nightmare is paced perfectly, and by the end there’s not even a hint of the exhaustion I normally get from too much of this sort of stuff. If you can’t tell, I’m super excited about this release.

Preorder the physical CD here.

Usually, I don’t have to listen to an album very many times before I feel like I can describe and express what I enjoy about it. With Care, things happened differently. I listened to it once, and afterwards I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I listened another time, still ambivalent. I only knew that I wanted to hear it again. Now, after five or six times through, I can confidently say that Care is one of this year’s most enigmatic and elusive releases…and one of its best. Sound artist Klara Lewis and composer Simon Fisher Turner team up to create blissful, dense soundscapes with metallic edges. Opener “8” traipses across a wide map of textures, somehow feeling gradual and sudden at the same time; the swirling, airy drones flow in and out, their distance and intangibility lulling you into a trance — and then whiplashing flashes of samples and processed noises force you back to earth. This is a sonic relationship that the rest of the album continues to explore, to amazing results. The sound these two artists have achieved resides in some inexplicable middle ground between calming ambience and industrial punch, though overall the effect is calming, not so far off from the soft pink gossamer strands on the cover. A truly impressive, unique release, one that requires a lot of time to fully decipher (at least it did for me).

No Hell is a record that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time. These three musicians, whose work outside this album I unfortunately know nothing about, take the listener on an angry odyssey through ambitious style experiments, atmosphere building, and incendiary blasts of all-out aggression. No Hell could easily have fallen apart at the seams, overstuffed with the staggering amount of stuff that gets thrown at you, but it doesn’t. Not even close. Each time the final notes of beautiful closer “Good Old Way (Reprise)” arrive, it feels like the album just started a few minutes ago. “Loup Garou” is a fiery start with labyrinthine songwriting, “No Gate to Close” adds almost black metal-esque flavors with its fast-picked guitars and driving drum blasts even as the anthem “there is hope beyond these teeth!” is called out, “No Hell” delivers more scalding fury in under a minute than many artists can introduce in ten, “Days Gone” slowly crushes with its patient texture layering and false crescendos…and that’s all in the first six tracks of the LP, about twenty minutes! The sheer eclectic density and the cohesive package in which it is presented is what keeps me coming back to No Hell pretty much every day since its release.

One word stuck out to me in the short summary of Metaforma on the Mahorka Bandcamp page. It’s a favorite word of mine, one that often sticks out no matter what the context, especially in regards to music: primordial. Ancient, primitive, primal, visceral…I would use all of these to describe Metaforma, but it embodies those words in a subtle, unusual way. Produced with field recordings, modular synthesis, and various instruments, side A of the tape plays with bright, shimmering layers that are thin but dense. The way the sounds are mixed together avoids highlighting each individual element; instead, they come together to produce these light-filled constructions, rich yet homogeneous — which probably explains their density. The pieces amble along slowly, floatingly, and it’s easy to get lost in the movements of these sounds, even when rhythm is introduced. Side B, made by combining harmonic generator tones with two tape decks, maintains the lethargic pace, but these textures are much colder than the ones before. Not mechanical, nor metallic, just icier; it’s not difficult to imagine falling snow and gnarled icicles. Despite my focusing on them, Ab Uno’s unconventional methods don’t distract from the music, but it’s interesting to know how such unique noises were created.

A lone trumpet croons notes, rough noodling hovers somewhere between melody and atonality. Will this just be another solo trumpet album? Not that I’m complaining, I just expected something more effect-heavy. I wonder — WHAM. A wave of feedback-encrusted fuzz accompanies the next flurry, as trumpeter Espen Lund and his wall of amplifiers blasts you into oblivion. Blow. Amplifier thrives on its own unpredictability, drawing equally from improvisation and punishing metallic drone, exploring the possibilities of this unique conversation between clean and distorted. The eponymously titled opening track unfolds like a wordless debate, as the unaffected trumpet meanderings lull the listener into temporary solace only to crush it with another slab of vicious distortion. Without this track, it would be easy to forget how the album’s sounds are being produced; the short interlude “White Mass” and the massive conclusion “The Great Equalizer” both abandon their origins almost entirely, focusing on the manipulation of the trumpet’s sounds. The latter conjures similar feelings of submergence and volume worship as when I saw Boris last year; no small feat for music created only with an electric horn instrument. Blow. Amplifier is an experiment to be sure, but undoubtedly a successful one, and god knows what Lund can accomplish with this formula in the future.

Lots of incredible albums came out last year, but few can claim the same amount of scope and ambition as Jürg Frey’s massive L’âme est sans retenue I, released as a five disc set on Erstwhile. Anyone intimidated by that composition’s nearly six-hour run time may find a more digestible presentation of similar concepts and ideas in 120 Pieces of Sound, which comes out next month on Erstwhile’s newly formed sibling label elsewhere. The disc presents two performances of Frey’s compositions. Stylistically, “60 Pieces of Sound” and “L’âme est sans retenue II” aren’t exactly similar. The former, composed in 2009 for an indefinite amount of performers, is a string-based piece performed by Frey on clarinet with the Boston quartet Ordinary Affects, and consists of 60 chords interspersed with pauses of silence of roughly equal length. The chords range from beautiful and calming to tense and unsettling, with the silences providing pregnant anticipations as the musicians ready their instruments to play the next chord. “L’âme est sans retenue II,” similar to the first installment, is performed solely by Frey using field recordings accompanied by bass clarinet. The sounds are different but the structure is almost indiscernable from “60 Pieces of Sound,” giving the two pieces a wonderful kinship, with the murky beauty of the “L’âme…” segments complementing the heavenly, tensile drones of “60 Pieces of Sound.” This is by far one of my favorite works I’ve heard from Frey, hitting the same spots as 2010’s Weites Land, Tiefe Zeit: Räume 1-8; and while it obviously doesn’t compete with “…retenue I” in scope it’s a wonderful release for new and old appreciators of the composer’s work alike.