Renee Willoughby – 33 (Irrational Tentent, Feb 10)

This is the third time I’ve written about this tape, yet I’m discovering that I doubt I’ll ever run out of praise for it. You can read the text from my mid-year list or the original review for the usual pontificating. The bottom line is that 33 feels like an answer to a question you’ve always had. Not some painful epiphany but more of a reminder, a hazy window to the other side as a gentle hand guides you back to ours. Willoughby makes a strong case for this new, powerful form of music-making as invocation with a performance that must have been transcendent to witness in person, and that we all our lucky enough to be able to hear again and again.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio – Northwoods Sleep Baseball (Worried Songs, Oct 27)

Ever want to hear the soothing sounds of a baseball game over the radio without the commitment or stakes of a real-life matchup? Enter Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, a free podcast that provides this exact service, complete with made-up teams, players, and ad spots for nonexistent products and services. UK label Worried Songs were such big fans of the idea that they released Northwoods Sleep Baseball, a double-cassette set housed in a handsome wooden box that comprises a single game played by the Tomah Tigers against the Big Rapid Timbers. As music this is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of “focused ennui,” the commentator chatter and muffled roar of the crowd blending into bliss.

Met Glas – Crooked Like a Dogs’ Hind Legs (Pube Provisional Society, May 7)

Something that I end up having to explain rather frequently is that while it’s not hard to make harsh noise, it is very hard to make good harsh noise. There’s so much more intent and skill involved than most would expect, and while you don’t necessarily need the latest top-of-the-line gear, a certain amount of technical knowledge and experience is also required. Canadian newcomer Met Glas is a project that takes the tradition seriously, but not too seriously, and of the several excellent tapes he’s put out this year (Moody Brooding, Out and Out and in Favor of Anythiing with THRTDSPLY, Speed Museum), Crooked Like a Dogs’ Hind Legs has ended up the clear favorite. Get a hold of a physical copy if you can, or at least listen through speakers.

Áine O’Dwyer – Turning in Space (Blank Forms, Nov 10)

For anyone who’s been listening to O’Dwyer since Church Cleaners, it’s clear that Turning in Space, her most developed and ambitious release to date, has been a long time coming. The nearly two-hour triptych set (composed of sections titled Motorwave, Playing Place, and Slipstream) marks a new breakthrough in her ongoing research into soundscapes and their strata, each of the many individual pieces a sketch of swirling colors and boundaries, either restless with tension or warmed by light, always fluid and free. This is one that seems like it would be easier heard piecemeal, but I recommend taking the time to listen front to back.

T. Jervell – A Love Letter to Coco (Take It Easy Policy, Nov 18)

Jervell first caught my attention earlier this year with the short but sweet 2nd Two, one of many excellent entries in a busy year of output. But his most recent,  A Love Letter to Coco, is a real step up, something truly special. The tape’s loose, abstract concept/narrative serves as a stage for the Norwegian artist’s assimilative blend of ambient, glitch, and concrète approaches to ascend to new emotional heights. Though still knotted with digital cracks and shudders, there is breathtaking beauty to behold here; “The Warmth of Your Hand as it Brushes Against Mine” alone is one of the most gorgeous pieces of abstract music I have ever heard.

Luigi Bilodo (Vacancy, Aug 8)

“Low-stakes sound art” is a phrase I’ve found myself using more and more to describe a form of experimental music that consistently interests me. This debut tape from the elusive Luigi Bilodo is a perfect example; the approach is both artistic and scientific and the results are delightfully inconsequential. One side offers the hypnotizing percussive texture of rain hitting the top of a cardboard pizza box, the other the rich yawn of a lawnmower trundling across a green, sun-drenched scene—and, together, both are a hastily but lovingly scrawled love letter to backyard shenanigans, the joy of just listening. Original review

Puddle – The Gift That Keeps on Giving (Minimal Impact, Aug 9)

As was hopefully implied by its presence on my Favorite Labels list, Brisbane’s Minimal Impact had a particularly strong 2023. I would’ve had several answers to the question of which was my favorite tape of theirs throughout the year, but the one that seems to have stuck around most is The Gift That Keeps on Giving, the first release by Brisbane project puddle. Advertised as “[taking] influence from the glut of contemporary Americanoise, citing Worth’s Blinder LP as as well as classic Japanoise such as C.C.C.C.,” it follows through on its promise, delivering a lush bout of dynamic harsh with a fury that burns through the six feet of grave soil it’s buried beneath.

Aaron Dilloway – Bhoot Ghar: Sounds of the Kathmandu Horror House (Hanson, Jun 2)

Dilloway’s visits to Nepal have generated several great field recording series over the years, but Bhoot Ghar, which documents a family trip to the eponymous haunted house in Kathmandu Fun Park, has to be the best yet. Though not overbearingly so, the tape is structured so as to allow the listener to join in on the journey, from the entrance and surprisingly scary (and physically hazardous) halls of the attraction itself to other environments in the park like the bumper cars and Ferris wheel. The Hanson honcho has a knack for making his appreciation for the sounds he captures clear without it getting in the way, and thus Bhoot Ghar is an account of a memorable experience than is memorable in itself.

Tupperware – Summer Tour Tape ’23 (self-released, Jul 18)

Though physical copies were only available on the actual tour and somehow there was not a single date in any NYC borough—so I’m still in the market for one… hint hint—this list would be amiss without the latest recordings from the most tape-bound band in hardcore right now. As fast, minimal, and punishing as always, this new round of seven songs are some of the trio’s most rough-edged and unpredictable yet, from the breakneck blowout of “Intro” to the equally whiplash- and headbob-inducing tempo changes of “Memo.” Still holding out hope to see them play someday, which will no doubt leave my eardrums as maxed-out as the machine these tunes were tracked to.

John Collins McCormick – Healthy Alternative to Thinking (Eh?, May 9)

Tactility is the name of the game in McCormick’s work. No matter how concrete or abstract the sources he happens to be utilizing are, there’s always a distinct sensation of one’s head being massaged by physical actions. Healthy Alternative to Thinking is one of the more literal manifestations of this that the Detroit-based artist has released; after a diverse set of four tapes on his new self-publishing arm Garbage Strike, here he returns to the familiar basics of trivial object interactions, this time driven by agitated surfaces (by way of stand-mounted subwoofers) rather than direct manipulation.

Heat Signature – Wired for Intrusion (Head Meat, April)

This eminent US-based duo is well known for their technical and thrillingly fast-paced live approach to direct-action harsh noise, but Wired for Intrusion sees Tandy and Griggs experimenting a bit more on the studio side, wrangling source material contributions from scrap metal maestro Ahlzagailzehguh on A-side cut “Packed with Plastique” and stitching together the loose collage of B’s “Blown to Hell.” None of the usual intensity is sacrificed, however; both tracks have an unrelenting momentum to them that holds up throughout the intricate layers of detail and distortion.

Ezio Piermattei – Rosume (Joy de Vivre, Mar 29)

Piermattei has developed a distinct and singular sonic language with his past few releases, and Rosume feels like a culmination of it in a lot of ways (though I’m sure I’ll be saying the same thing, with even more enthusiasm, about whatever he does next). Since Gran trotto the textures have grown more anxious and the environments more claustrophobic, and here we descend into dream territory with tape-based arrangements that give a semi-intelligible voice to lost trinkets and dark empty spaces. With Piermattei, any given sound—no matter how ephemeral or bizarre—is always leading into another, and the resultant narratives are filled with shadow, suspense, and a strange sort of sense.

There are no narratives so loud and encompassing as decline, negativity, doom… which is why Noise Not Music is resolutely concerned with currents flowing in the opposite direction. While I never aim to ignore or neglect that which is undesirable but no less real, I always hope to spotlight progress and promise rather than downturn or failure. I always hope that those who come here for support leave feeling supported. I always hope to be more amplifier than noise.

Here are the active initiatives that deserve our support, the noises whose amplification is well-earned.

[Majazz Project] مشروع مجاز (Palestine / UK)

It is difficult to focus on much at all, let alone art, when a genocide is being carried out. We should all be spending every possible moment doing what we can to spread awareness of and stop the zionist entity’s active extermination of the Palestinian people. But one need only look to the voices of Gaza and the West Bank to see that art, and specifically music, is one of many ways those so far removed from the suffering can enter into universal solidarity with those experiencing it. Mo’min Swaitat founded Majazz Project, also known as the Palestinian Sound Archive, not only to share the sounds of his nation with the world but also to preserve a history that is under direct threat of being intentionally erased. Reverently curated to preserve a culture determined to resist but not solely defined by such, the Archive makes available archival material that ranges from protest music of the First Intifada (Al-Fajer Group, Riad Awwad) to recordings of wedding band performances (Atef & Qassem, Ahmed Al-Kelani) and spoken word poetry.

Buried in slag and debris. (Nova Scotia)

In addition to regularly publishing handsome cassette and LP editions of work by sound artists based in Canada and beyond, Buried in slag and debris. is also behind the (relatively) widely read Untitled zine, a semiannual full-size periodical that collects essays, interviews, and reviews by a revolving cast of contributors both familiar and new. Even in a world where pundits have been declaring the death of print for decades now, the noise community unsurprisingly retains its fair share of physical publications, with new ones seeming to pop up left and right. But Untitled fills a gap that Rocker (which just saw its first issue out via the hard work of the No Rent team) and A Wall of Text (edited and produced by Sven Kay, wall noise aficionado and Absent Erratum operator) don’t in that it’s less personal and more anthological, providing a neutral, composite platform where bubbles are broken and ideas are shared. That’s not to say the zine overshadows BISAD’s musical arm, because both are formidable; 2023 alone saw a total of twelve new releases, no two of which sound alike.

Krim Kram (Cork)

After staking out a sizable slice of the underground landscape with one of the stronger inaugural batches in recent memory, Krim Kram has kept things consistent with each drop since. This year saw three rounds, and each continues to be more eclectic yet inspired than the last: first Cyess Afxzs, Rick Potts, and LDNS & Yakkida in May; then Ted Byrnes and Maggiore & Speers in August; and finally (with a jump from KK-11 to KK-15, a sign that another tripartite drop is in the works) an impressive swan song from UK outsider mainstays Usurper in the form of a colorful six-panel digipak CD earlier this month. The forces behind the already venerable label clearly have a love for abstract music that is not just deep, but holistic, and there’s a tremendous amount of care put in to faithfully representing drastically different approaches and spheres of the global avant-garde zeitgeist, to honoring longtime legends while simultaneously giving new blood a leg up.

Minimal Impact (Brisbane)

Fiercely committed to immortalizing the diverse, often hazardous transmissions burbling up from the Brisbane scene, Minimal Impact is also of a final bastion of tape labels with a radically DIY ethos and aesthetic. When utilized effectively, low fidelity is not a gimmick but a governing principle; the psychoactive aura of tapes like Gypsobelum’s Chitinous and CC & Tiles’ Subaru Is Somehow Related to the Pleiades is only catalyzed by the layers of dust and grime that swathe them. There’s definitely a unifying focus on noise and its various mutations, luckily for me often tending toward shit-fi harsh (Puddle’s The Gift That Keeps on Giving is one of the best recent examples I have encountered, and the collaboratively produced Enjoy Our Last Century on Earth / Armenia split forges ties with like-minded imprints in Ecuador/US and elsewhere in Australia) or no-fi motheaten scuzz worship (S27E152’s A.D.T.F.), but MI also keeps things interesting with lighter, melodic digressions such as Cristian Usai’s Lily’s Memories.

Black Editions (Los Angeles)

One part of a threefold partnership along with Thin Wrist Recordings and VDSQ under the Black Editions umbrella, Black Editions oversees some of today’s most exciting and important archival music projects. Thin Wrist initially caught my attention with their devotional remaster treatment of Surface of the Earth’s debut last year, but BE really stepped it up in 2023, concretizing avant-garde history in both the US and Japanese scenes with posthumous documents from Milford Graves, Shizuka, and Masayuki Takayanagi.

Party Perfect!!! (Chicago / Queens)

Getting their start in the final month of 2022 with a superb four-way split, Party Perfect!!! really hit stride this year with releases that exemplify their focus on radical computer music. Technical Reserve’s Personal Watercraft presents the winning combination of TJ Borden and Other Plastics, Envelope Demon / For David Stockard digs deep into the conceptual side of things, Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞] makes process composition fun for the whole family.

Everyday Samething (UK)

An excellent rule for a label is to not release anything that follows the rules. Everyday Samething, along with its artists (Garden Path, Perrier and Rigg, Positive Paranoia, and some who are not even named) are dedicated to subversion; their flagship website is a noninteractive static page, their choices of physical format are often deliberately inaccessible, and the music they peddle is like nothing anyone has heard or will ever hear. Heroes.

pan y rosas discos (Chicago)

Even if they didn’t put out material as fascinating as they do, Chicago’s pan y rosas discos get plenty of points in my book for maintaining an independent distribution platform for digital music free of both price and formal copyright for over a decade now. Over three hundred releases later they’re still going strong, spicing up the scene with unruly works ranging from duo free improvisation (Crossings, Wasserläufer) and outsider electroacoustic (Fifty-One Aural Selfies // Real Time) to sensory-overload samplefuck (Psionic Youth).

Jackie-O Motherfucker – Manual of the Bayonet (Feeding Tube, Feb 24)

Of all the artists and acts either directly or tangentially related to the “New Weird America” movement, Jackie-O Motherfucker has always seemed the most “American” to me (less in the sense of some nationalistic allegiance to the empty signifier of the country itself and more relating to the wealth of culture and tradition that happens to have occurred here). Listening to JOMF’s music is like taking a delirious stumble through history while at the same time hearing something distinctly new. Manual of the Bayonet, an unreleased album from the band’s golden age of 1999–2001, is no different; here are the same currents of forgotten folk and mystic spirituals filtered through a ramshackle improvised framework, generating such magic as the hallucinatory plod of “Breakdown” and the electric revel of “Red Slipper Ritual.” Original review

Various Artists – The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969​–1972 (The state51 Conspiracy, Oct 6)

In some cases, documents like these are mere historical curiosities rather than engaging collections of music in their own right. This is not one of those cases. Featuring newly unearthed work by S. C. Sharma, Atul Desai, Gita Sarabhai, Jinraj Joshipura, and I. S. Mathur along with a piece by renowned composer David Tudor (who also facilitated the formation of the electronic music studio itself), The NID Tapes immortalizes a brief but fertile period of creativity and experimentation, the enthusiasm behind it bubbling out in every short track. Most of the individuals involved produced both full-fledged compositions and exploratory sketches (e.g., Sharma’s “After the War” and “Electronic Sounds Created on Moog,” respectively).

Blackout – Lost in the Underground Pt. 1 (Trill Hill / Snubnoze, Aug 19)

Memphis hip-hop, in the classic sense, is timeless. Not only do countless heads across the world still listen to tapes that are more than thirty years old now, but the scene and coextensive genre continues to assert its influence in modern trap, lending practices and aesthetics even beyond the now-ubiquitous triplet flows it pioneered.  Blackout is a figure standing with one foot in the past and one in the present, exemplified by his frequent archival projects (don’t forget about the fantastic Dreamworld sequel released last year) and his still-frequent production credits. Lost in the Underground Pt. 1 collects some of his most compelling beats paired with bars by usual suspects Lil Slim, Lil E, and Terror, documenting how high of a level Blackout was operating at as early as ’93. Though there has been no explicit promise of more material in this vein,  the inclusion of “Pt. 1” gives me hope. Original review

Joel Stern – Glasgow 2001 (scatterArchive, Mar 20)

It’s only through retrospection that certain individuals stand out amidst the bustling improvised music renaissance that was the early 2000s, and by now there’s no doubt that Joel Stern is one of these. From his sublime duo collaborations with Anthony Guerra to the eternal impact of Sunshine Has Blown, few artists juggled technical innovation and emotional resonance with the same ease or intensity. Glasgow 2001 captures a rare solo performance with an approach drawn from Stern’s interest in both field recordings as a compositional ingredient and gestural tabletop improvisation, humbly facilitated using minidiscs and binaural microphones.

David Gilden – Texas Pillbox (Fusty, Jul 18)

First released in a limited edition as a set of sixteen cassettes housed in a steel ammunition box, more copies of this sprawling discography treatment of one of US noise’s most significant voices will reach eager ears next year in 18xCD form. Spanning the years between Gilden’s first solo recordings and those with Richard Ramirez as The Siamese Model to his final opus Depress / Regress, Texas Pillbox comprises the most complete and definitive collection of the Texas Chainsaw Dopefiend’s influential body of work thus far—and likely ever.

Yellow Swans – Left Behind (self-released, Nov 17)

What’s more surprising news in 2023, the release of previously-unheard Yellow Swans material or a semi-coherent promise of upcoming brand-new Yellow Swans material? I’d have to say the latter, but the former is still something special. The aptly titled Left Behind presents roughly half an hour’s worth of the classic late-period palette of euphoric harmonies and resolutions buried beneath suffocating layers of hulking, distorted psychedelia, with some pensive guitar noodling woven in for good measure. “For JR” is a new favorite track of mine and proof that even the castoffs of the band’s discography are still a head and shoulders above other projects’ best work.

Milford Graves – Children of the Forest (Black Editions, May 19)

Seeing Fundamental Frequency, a posthumous exhibition of the work of Milford Graves at Artists Space in downtown New York, is one of my most treasured experiences of the past few years of my life. An artist in every sense of the word, Graves was and is a fixture of the very soul of contemporary jazz and improvised music, a fact exemplified by these incendiary 1976 sessions with Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover. Comprising recordings from three dates (the first with both Doyle and Glover, the second with only Glover, and the third solo), Children of the Forest and its revelatory percussive lifeblood could never be mistaken as having been produced by any other hands than Graves’.

Ali Farka Touré – Voyageur (World Circuit, Mar 10)

Even close to two decades after his death, the music of Ali Farka Touré remains distinct and eternal. Infused with both Songhai tradition and the soulful grit of Western blues, the Malian legend’s virtuosic yet understated guitarwork is rendered in enthralling clarity on Voyageur, a compilation of both full-fledged songs and impromptu jams recorded between 1991 and 2004. The tracks featuring Wassoulou phenom Oumou Sangaré are especially mesmerizing, from the hypnotic pentatonic vamp of “Bandolobourou” to the horn-led “Sadjona.”