Being the Contents of an Unsigned Letter is one of those rare wall releases that is both so loud and intense that it drowns out not just external sound but brain activity as well, and so seductively hypnotizing that it just seems to fade into the background at times. These paradoxical effects often occur simultaneously, somehow; I find myself so mesmerized by the detailed auditory craftsmanship by the trio of Scott Kindberg (A Woman’s Glove and others), Sean E. Ramirez-Matzus (Pallid Mask and others), and Thomas Puopolo (Forests of Brittany and others) that I lose track of time and eventually even the fact that I’m listening to it, despite the fact that my ears are being mercilessly ravaged all the while. All three artists are associated with the Pittsburgh-based Black Leather Jesus collective, but here the S&M imagery is traded for something more enigmatic and poetic in the invocation of the “unsigned letter” idea: thoughts and communication externalized, physicalized, but without an explicit source. The exact aspects of meaning lost as a result of this omission certainly vary from case to case, but a clear universal casualty is the remote channel of intimacy that letters open between correspondents. To reclaim any semblance of that would require either deducing the true author or attributing the message to someone else entirely, both options being processes that often involve examining elements of the letter beyond its contents: the ink and stationery used, handwriting, the return address (or lack thereof), etc. This compact digital release is plainly attributed to The Lethal Temple, so it in itself cannot be the titular letter, nor can the tracks themselves since they are also identified as “contents.” Is the rest—the analog to the aforementioned superficial characteristics—just the things that happen in our heads as we listen? Do the blazing stampedes of crunching distortion fuse with the bizarre brain patterns they incite to form some sort of intangible, Derridean communicative construction, which must be unsigned because each person who hears the music is themselves both author and recipient? Probably not. This is some fantastic noise though.

Edited and mixed earlier this year by Jim Lemanowicz (an artist, improviser, and curator from Massapequa, NY, whose sparing musical presence on the internet seems to spread like a thin spiderweb out from the Troubled Belief Program Quartet page), the recordings that would eventually comprise Standing Forever at the Front Door were begun more than a decade ago in 2008, then revisited in 2017 and 2018. Though the digital liner notes do not hide the fact that the original chamber abstractions were spliced together in Ableton rather than simply presented as-is, the resulting music ends up mining something from both sides of its ambiguous form and character, retaining plenty of the instantaneous, interactive energy that can only flow between musicians performing simultaneously yet gaining new flexibility from the meta-alterations executed later. Other than Lemanowicz, the three remaining string players are Ralph Dar, Emily Fulton, and Joachim Kovač, none of whom appear to have participated in any other releases despite the clear virtuosity of their collective technique implying seasoned careers; I have no idea who “GF” is or what tragedy would prompt a loved one to state that they “didn’t have to die”; nor do I much of any inkling of the reason for this material finally being released now. But little to none of that matters, because even words themselves lose their footing during moments like the drift of the rhythmic legato dirge that surfaces behind the thorny tangle of Bradfield-scrabble and atonal arco squawks in “Not Ready to Be Unwrapped.” Listen!

As someone who was deeply affected by being assaulted by the boys in blue during my own mental health crisis, Letchworth Garden City project Wilbury Scum, described by the artist behind it as “a way of trying to get to grips with [the] experience” of being “sectioned by the police and taken to A&E,” truly resonates with me. In the aftermath, they heavily manipulated sounds and spaces captured in the immediate area of the incident via DAW to produce the recordings that comprise 136, an engrossing tour-de-force of brittle, fractured wall(ish) noise whose microscopic, insectoid texture worlds rival that of actual insect recordings (see Jana Winderen’s The Noisiest Guys on the Planet, Dave Phillips’ Insect, Tom Lawrence’s Water Beetles of Pollardstown Fen). To experience such brutal, callous treatment and violence while in such a vulnerable state is a profound violation, a perceptional and emotional fracturing that leaves an already compromised mind even more damaged; Wilbury Scum’s lengthy chain-link quilts of seething statics and caustic, surgical processing are a mesmeric but no less harrowing embodiment of that painful state, in a way immortalizing it in a safely external vessel. As it crunches and crackles like cold blue flames over dry wood, 136 can be whatever you want it to be—though I do adore the music, I don’t wish it being what it is for me, or for the artist, on anyone else.

Just since last year, Kolkata producer and musician Revant Dasgupta has already accumulated an impressive and eclectic discography as Haved Jabib, dabbling in everything from full-on psychedelic harsh/power noise (Animal Rites, Mother Eats Her Food with a Straw) to searing cut-up collages (Table Manners) and feedback-wracked brain-bash noisecore (Royal Canin). The ominously titled Skin Weights arrives as one of the first releases by the promising new ONNO Collective, also based in the West Bengal cultural hub-city, and offers a dark, heavy, often theatrical dark ambient phantasmagoria filled with distorted speech, groaning industrial machinations, and well-placed moments of punishing noise. The first four tracks on the digital-only album all seem to based around extracts of varying sorts taken from one or several unnamed records: many of the voices seem to be sourced from the wax, and in the background—and occasionally more prominently when things are quieter like at the subdued outset of “People Talking, Airplane House”—lurks the familiar undercurrent of crackles, pops, and stylus-skipping. It’s an interesting choice, and one that might give unaware listeners the impression that the digital master is just a vinyl rip, but several moments where the analog imperfections are noticeably absent, including the entirety of the concluding title track, make it clear that’s not the case. It didn’t take very long for the near-omnipresent texture to grow on me as a deliberate artistic choice, because the way Dasgupta shrouds his multifarious masses of sonics in oppressive fuzz and gloom evokes the dusty sputter of an old film projector, its weak window of light broadcasting something unfamiliar and abstract yet nonetheless deeply unsettling onto a dirty basement wall.

Conceptually speaking, London sound art collective Mute Frequencies’ first release firmly situates itself in reference and response to “times of pandemic,” but unlike many other creative works I’ve seen, heard, read, etc. with the same topic, Echo Chamber has a timelessness that will endure long beyond the times in which life is still significantly changed, or even when those changes either last and become old hat or disappear into faded memory. The (re)new(ed) poetic interest in daily tedium recently embraced by artists of all kinds has delved even further into the unutterable truths hidden within our routines than we all already have in the process of experiencing the paring of our lives down to very nearly them and them alone, and this gorgeous 15-minute piece is just one of many artful odes to domestic mundanity that wordless remind us that the banal is not to be taken for granted; not necessarily appreciated, or derided, or avoided, but simply not neglected. According to the trio of Ilia Rogatchevski and Laura and Kitsuné Rogatchevskaia, the more abrasive textures—seething emf clouds and cranked-up radios set to dead air—“periodically interrupt” what often presents as tranquility in an effort to “remind the listener of the unfortunate global context” that inspired the music, but to me, admittedly someone who is quite partial to “abrasive textures,” the intrusions play several important roles in supporting the familiar sounds of bird chirps, babbling children, and playground equipment in the breeze, none of which turn out to be so negative. Beyond their “periodic” nature providing a loose, abstract sort of rhythm to glom on to, and their sharper edges engaging in compelling contrast-interplay with the outdoor field recordings, the sudden surges and swarms of electronics act as up-close, almost confrontational channels through which to experience the overall soundscape, much more tactile and therefore graspable than their ephemeral partners. I’m sure everyone will find their way to their own meaning via these conspicuous conduits, but the purpose behind Mute Frequencies’ work here will inevitably surface, somehow, in any analysis; the eminent neutrality of their auditory lens leaves room for subjective interpretation, even as its very existence affirms the impossibility of these base, innate things ever being fully explained. Round and round we go.

Shame File creator and curator Clinton Green is far from a new name in weirdo music culture, but his formal solo efforts are a more recent development, with the record-wrack and turntable exploitation of In Situ (2015), Turntable at Dawn (2016), and Young Women of Asia (2019) alongside the hallucinatory tape-theater of Thylacine (2018) and now Here? / Secret embodying a strong praxis evolved from the previous role of simply giving a voice to new music—although, with how eclectically sourced these collages end up being, in a way he still is. This newly released two-track set makes no attempt to conceal the ugly, knobby seams and blemishes inherent to physical media and fusions or exhumations thereof; like a zealous dig through the bargain cassette bin at your local thrift store—old answering machine archives and sound effects collections and obsolete dictations and forgotten world music thrown (in)discriminately into the “yes” bag—“Here?” stitches an abstractly (yet disturbingly) coherent sequence from voices mangled to oblivion and harsh analog ephemera, while “Secret” plays with sputtering negative space, radio squawks, and sporadic bursts of raucous, chattering chaos made even more gleefully caustic by the hiss and screech of the low-fidelity playback. Moments of warm beauty also lurk quietly in the marshes of both halves, only briefly emerging when absolutely necessary to avoid wasted impact: a flutter of buzzing drone like a ray of light through the dust, a snatch of familiar innocence amidst bedlam. Lovely stuff.

Daktyloi ostensibly began in 2020 with its first release The & in December, but so far 2021 has been the mysterious Tallahassee project’s open season; nine albums (including this one, Succade) of approximately the same 16–17 minute runtime have been published digitally since January, each comprising two suites of “Weaponized nostalgia, ecstatic headphone daymares, hauntological sound design, [and] anxiety engines,” the suites themselves made up of shorter tracks/fragments apparently cobbled together out-of-order. Each “side” is labeled A and B, but no actual tapes seem to be available… production delays, possibly? Or perhaps Daktyloi’s music entices with but does not deliver on its implicit promise of physical presentation in mischievous contrast to the laundry list of tangible tools and objects used behind the scenes: everything from bulky analog equipment and modular synthesizers to air pumps, sleigh bells, televisions, and voice. Haunting audio is also added via 16mm projector and VHS tape manipulation, casting the other elements in a cinematic, sometimes even narrative light, easing the squeaky wheels of transitions between disparate tracks with a filmic grease. Daktyloi’s stuffy, hallucinatory worlds of melded memory are somewhat reminiscent of Martin Tétreault’s work on La nuit où j’ai dit non, but all the empty space and structural impermanence of the former makes each concise collection a different kind of beguiling.

From Kemialliset Ystävät and Avarus to Destrucktions and Kansanturvamusiikkikomissio, Arnaut Pavle and Vermilia to Tsembla and Uton, Finland will always be an important country to me musically whether I ever get the chance to visit or not. After the amount of praise I’ve already heaped on several noise tapes from the screeching DIY basements of the Land of a Thousand Lakes, it should be no surprise that the hype train is continuing, this time for a digital reissue of a tape released almost exactly a decade ago. Playing with Too Many Sticks is one of just a small handful of tapes from Hockey Night—the ensemble quartet of Jonna Karanka, Arttu Partinen, Sami Pekkola, and Jaakko Tolva—and the inimitable improvisatory style it captures almost reflects and even justifies the group’s sporadic release schedule: their dexterous, exhilarating interactions are played fast and loose, fleeting and squirrely, impossible to pin down. With the consistent backbone of Tolvi’s restless, erratic free-jazz drumming, the single 35-minute set unfurls spectacularly in droves of amateurish guitar, smears of crude tape manipulation, squawks and buzzes of toy instruments, and more, all of it coalescing into a rickety but nonetheless intact amalgam of carnivalesque delirium. The title is more than fitting because the music is all frenzied scrabble and scramble, futile graspings, ersatz excess; like when you’re carrying too many groceries and drop them all, but instead of sitting on the floor in defeat you just appreciate your own little piece of chaos you created. The end of the performance is met with eager applause, but it’s not the startling conclusion that a sudden audience sometimes creates, because everything that precedes it feels like applause too, in a way: a unit of talented but unhinged musicians celebrating the beautiful process of making noise. And that will always be a formula for success—in 2011, in 2021, in whatever year we get to before Mother Earth washes herself clean of us.

The many multifarious iterations of the 7Form netlabel and artist collective have yielded some of the strangest and most exciting music of the last half-decade, and though it can often feel next to impossible to even find the new mutations, much less keep up with them, it’s worth it to hear one-in-a-million works of art like Anti-Mass Spectrometer. As the title and cover artwork imply, samples extracted from the Half-Life games feature prominently throughout the two lengthy “iterations,” from dialogue fragments and shuffling footsteps to blaring menu sounds, explosions, and incessant gunfire. Unlike Graham Dunning’s Panopticon, however, this music is neither spatially confined nor sonically dependent on the game’s engine; in addition to the scrabbling frenzies of screams, shattering glass, slews of bullets, and other Source-sourced effects there are constant musical invasions both harmoniously atmospheric and jarringly out of place. Though these garish plunderings often seem randomly beamed in from some other dimension, the editing work done on many of them (such as the disconcerting isolation of Taylor Swift’s vocals from “Love Story”) shows their addition is more surgical than that, which mischievously implies some hidden meaning that will evade even the most desperate pursuers to the ends of the earth. Another mystery arises in the many similarities between the tracks as well as the fact that the second iteration is exactly 1.5x the duration of the first (elements also frequently recur in slowed-down form), which suggests they’re simply the same material played at different speeds… except they aren’t. I checked! Bizarre, fascinating stuff that I won’t soon forget.