I first saw John Collins McCormick play in December of 2017, and his fiveish-minute “set” (as well as his recommendation that I check out Rie Nakajima) has lived on in my head and heart since. Part improvisation, part installation, most of the performance consisted of him placing objects on a speaker-agitated surface and adjusting the array of warm incandescent lights illuminating it. There was an ostensible “start” and “finish” to the main action, but it never really began or ended, at once blurring into the space/its occupants and taking place without much concern for it/them at all. World War I Fighter Jets in Action, a work from 2015 that comprises one of four recently released tapes of both old and new material (just $15 for all of them!), accepts the impermanence of performance in a similar way. The liner notes state that McCormick “performed this perfect recording of [Fighter Jets] many times, sometimes alone, sometimes for an audience who would walk out and [he] would be alone again”; together with the sound of the piece itself, how the swirl and pop of the turntable playback during silent sections feels almost as loud as the sweltering rattle of exhaust-choked engines that seem to nearly tear the speakers apart, how the planes zoom by and fade into distant, ghostly trajectories, it’s a lovely synthesis of concrete and abstract experience, a mashup of form and function. In a literal sense it scratches the same itch as other loose-slung documentations/reapplications like Drag Boats World Championships, Slick Flicks Tricks and Licks, or Ace Combat. Excellent stuff.

I’m not yet sure if this is my favorite of the four tapes, it’s just the one I had the most to say about. All of them are worth your time. And everything else he’s put out too.

Though Detroit mainstay Andrew Coltrane has previously dabbled in the level of prolificacy often associated with noise artists—from 2008 to 2010, among other activities, he produced and distributed more than two hundred tapes of his own work on his homemade imprint Hermitage—he hasn’t put anything out under his own name since 2016, which makes Self-Amputation a bit of an event. True to form, however, nothing about the release suggests such significance; from the banal gruesomeness of the cover to the cheap equipment used in the recording, this is a no-frills noise affair, soft and longform enough to rumble in the background yet crafted to a level that rewards active listening. I’m not sure whether both cuts are a single take split in two or distinct sessions, but either way they both feel like the culmination of so many different techniques—that is to say, only someone who’s been in the game for this long could track this eclectic tabletop array (ARP synth, tapes, contact mic, sine waves, tape delay, drum machine) to a shoebox and make it sound so lush. There’s a really nice, almost cozy improvisational fluidity to even the most passive crumble, and I can foresee myself putting this tape in for many morning coffees to come.

To whomever deserves to be so inclined,

We are being held captive in an undisclosed location. Below is a list of demands that are to be fulfilled within specified deadlines. If our wishes are not respected, we’ll have our rations cut, and we will burn the deed to our estate. The implications we refer to are as real as pain. If, however our demands are met in a timely manner we’ll be able to relinquish our captors of their duties and transfer the funds directly to your bank account. Furthermore, instructions to the locations of the incriminating photos will be sent to an unspecified mailing address.

The repeating sample that frames the unsettling, nested interview threads of “What Does the Future Mean to You?” instructs anyone within earshot to both “listen closely” (once) and “listen again” (thrice), the irony of course being that Ransom Note consistently seems to mock the very idea of anyone actually hearing it. Much like Rich Teenager’s similarly brilliant Sardanapalus, the first public message received from the captive(s?) known as Ermes Marana is a multimedia tract of surreal, bleak late-capitalist tedium—the kind of “posthumanism” that doesn’t give the silicon dung-heaps of humankind the dignity of having any sense made of it. Worthless samples loop ad nauseam, news broadcasts and self-help tapes melt together in a flaming trashcan, radio grabs collapse into noxious clumps of noise. Many more comparisons could be made based on the way the album plays with speech and electronics on surface level, but none would capture the cynicism, paranoia, and total detachment that radiate from the void at its core. Music that makes you wish you never learned what a wish was. “…that’s the real fear, right?”

Stream/download lossless files here. I have been told a physical edition was in the works; when I know more info I will update “whomever deserves to be so inclined.”

Perhaps part of the reason why the music Scotsman Iain Findlay-Walsh makes as Klaysstarr is how rarely new material shows up—meaning that when it does, you know it’s been either meticulously crafted or at least well thought-out, or both. But the thing is, this one-of-a-kind sonic language is so open-ended and holistic that it feels unfinished in some fundamental, beautiful way. I’ll still be singing the praises of the 2019 Entr’acte disc w/hair ph<> n mus|x when I’m well on the way to my grave; I have never heard music so sublime and so singular, and I’m starting to doubt I ever will… until there’s a new Klaysstarr release, that is. Which brings me to Fifty-One Aural Selfies // Real Time. The significance of the minor name change escapes me, but deliberate, playful obscurity is indeed the project’s modus operandi (just look at the cover). Maybe it’s a reference to the way Findlay-Walsh’s very direct field recording collage technique seems to unfold and collapse the dimensions of the environments it captures, or how in that act of capturing there’s so much that slips through. All of the familiar ingredients are here—restless jingling of keys, zippers, leashes; claustrophobic expanses; jarring structural movement—and even another moment of serendipitous pop music ambience much like that of “b|rn wa|king on”, albeit this time with a much more recognizable song. Absolutely no one else is doing it like this right now. Not even close.

In the (unlikely) event my thoughts and prayers are totally inconsequential and none of the Big Five suddenly go belly-up and instantly cede all of their misused capital to the countless small presses gasping under their boots, the beloved Internet Archive may not be long for this world. As growing global efforts to restrict, surveil, and outright prohibit free internet use become impossible to ignore, making a racket is more important than ever. And that’s exactly what May Your Days Be Few is: a racket, and at that one well suited to act as a scorched-earth death knell for open-access information. The titular curse might be directed at anyone or anything the listener chooses, the antiseptic sear of the harsh and repetitive soundscapes applied to wounds large or small, metaphorical or literal (not counting the ones it’ll leave on your eardrums, of course). I never expect intense glitch-noise in this vein to be that varied, but 281-330-8004—before you ask, no, as far as I know our lord and savior has not returned to lend us His holy ear—keeps things diverse on this short debut release, dropping to some cutup-esque lulls in “Hell Prisoner” and draping the screeches of “Screams from the Below” in cavernous reverb. For fans of SW1n-Hunter, Pigeon Discrimination, and Daniel Iván Bruno’s Brazo. Let this be your motivation to make a racket of your own.

Though I don’t own many myself, I have to say a 12″ lathe is a fitting format for what might be Max Nordile’s best release to date, music and medium sharing a crude, homespun charisma. The famed Oakland-based junk-sound purveyor is usually working on multiple collaborative projects at any given time, but his most memorable work is often solo under Hair Clinic, his own name, or both, and in many ways Copper in the Arts is the culmination of all of it. All the usual suspects—wailing, broken sax ditties; dingy drones; tape-muffled clatter of knickknacks and doodads; fleeting environs—show up in spades across both distinct yet complementary sides of the slightly oversized slab, and while I’m not 100% sure which side is A (“Rats Are the Souls of Dead Landlords”) and which is B (title track) I can still say both are wonderful. The choppy lo-fi recordings seem specifically designed to blur and blend with the churning distortion of the lathe cut, often to the point of sounding like it’s stuck on a locked groove before some subtle new element starts to creep in. It’s both a tragedy and a blessing that this edition of fifty hasn’t sold out yet—go forth and support one of the best artists and one of the best labels doing it at the moment!

The most recent—and my favorite—of the four downloadable albums Pentode has already released in 2023, Ambiens is in many ways the opposite of my surroundings today. The air is warm and the people moving through it even warmer, yet these eight exactly-four-minute tracks are cool and crystalline. But their stochastically generated, near-static presence is distilled (and nonintrusive) enough to be either undercurrent or contrast for the heat they don’t possess themselves: a rare breeze in the scorching dryness or the freezer you recline against when the AC isn’t cutting it. Though there is some amount of artistic input with regard to the quantity of recordings and their uniform length, mostly the automatic output is left to its own devices, the start of each section marking a subtle shift in atmosphere, temperature, or tonality. In one of the best examples of this, the final bit ditches the digital crackle for smooth, soothing tones tied in a loop of lulling rhythm, fit to either put one to sleep or the exact opposite. A great option for anyone looking for stasis that doesn’t demand patience.

Though Italy is home to a seemingly endless list of pioneering sound artists, any stylistic homogeneity among them is practically nonexistent. The work of Turin’s Adriano Cava illustrates well the general emotional and cathartic approach to concrete music that makes the country’s role in the global scene impossible to overlook; leading up to Lineology, the artist has been steadily refining a simple palette of muffled tape recordings, melody, and subtle processing, and perhaps here more than anywhere else they coalesce into a haunting, delicate sort of ambient electronica whose layered beauty sacrifices neither ease nor edge. Though both “Digital Lines” and “Magnetic Lines”—each a four-part, 25ish-minute suite—tend more toward a synthetic atmosphere than an organic one, there’s a profound human element present, a deep but nonspecific nostalgia that lets the soundscapes resonate far beyond just their dynamic movements and textural intricacies. The final section of “Magnetic Lines” is a fantastic conclusion, somehow delivering the album’s most conventionally pretty moments through spectral shimmer and bit-rotted digital loops. As if anyone needed yet another reason to support Mahorka—one of several labels that puts out music as both quality physical copies and free Creative Commons downloads—but here’s one anyway.

This LP was a lovely surprise in light of my having heard Adam Matschulat’s previous two releases (credited only to his surname), Ulterior and Cutting the Stone on Resterecords, almost five years ago. Though I enjoyed those, Formosa, named for the region in Goiás, Brazil where the artist and his family spent childhood summers, is on another level entirely, its complexity and depth reflecting the nearly decade-long (and transcontinental) span of source recordings arranged in two meditative side-long pieces. According to Matschulat himself, much of his memory of Formosa is associated with the “safety” he felt there, a headspace reflected by the placement of the sounds themselves: so much of the familiar, soothing textures of leaves rustling, creatures calling, music being played, and vehicles puttering away are heard from a comfortable distance, leaving plenty of space for any listener to stretch their legs and/or ear canals. Our position in the soundscape is mobile too, though—no footsteps or other concrete signs of movement are audible, and yet the lens melts into new milieus with ease whenever it deems necessary. First it’s to better hear a concert; then it’s a humid trudge through the foliage while whining fly-buzzes orbit in a binaural halo, a sticky tension beautifully broken when we breach the treeline and cool off to the soundtrack of an impromptu vocal duet. It might be this moment that most reminds me of Ezio Piermattei’s Gran trotto (a disc with very few peers) in the way it celebrates the sublime in the mundane. The B side makes use of some of my favorite domestic sounds—the gurgle and hiss of a drip coffee maker—to introduce a lovely kitchen-based composition complete with crowing rooster and other birdsong drifting in through an open window. Anyone who follows this site knows how strongly I advocate for field recording as a vehicle for intimate personal expression, and anyone who listens to Formosa will not be confused about why.