The day might come when I finally shut up about 2021’s lucrative harsh noise offerings, but it probably won’t be any time in the next three or so months, so I hope it’s not too torturous. Even I were much quieter about it, the music all speaks for itself; though newfound scene-based stylistic renaissances are occurring everywhere, one the brightest beacons shines from Finland, from which originates a host of both old and new artists who even now are collectively finetuning a structurally agile but heavily psychedelic brand of freeform “crunch” noise—Umpio’s Kulotus and APRAPAT’s Born Rare are both good recent examples of this sound. But such appealing aesthetics are hardly ever fully location-restricted, so it’s not too surprising to see a new artist whose approach shares a great deal of kinship with that of the aforementioned releases crop up in Liverpool. Angel, the debut from Gauzed Wings (another anonymous project with no information other than location and a few genre tags), will immediately win new, unwitting listeners over with its sudden maxi-dose of layered, well-mixed distortion crackle, its pleasingly tactile edges curling and morphing as organically as if the artist were harnessing fire itself. There are some relatively more delicate moments throughout the opening pair of tracks, but with “Almost You,” one of two 11+ minute behemoths on the album, things shift over into full gear and the lightweight rollicks of flame become full, forceful blasts of bone-charring incineration, and even after that the breathtaking conclusion tops it all. “Echo” ends things strong with oscillating pulses and frail white noise façades that dies in desperate writhes and hisses. My kind of angelic!

To any of the select but noisy few who claim that the musical side of the avant-garde is losing its edge or running thin on the confrontational spectacle of old, I have plenty of counterexamples to present from this year alone: Barn Sour’s Belgian Gelding, Bent Duo’s Ramble, Human Heads’ In the Afternoon, etc. Not much unites these singular works of utter subversion other than fleeting, ephemeral similarities in texture, tone, tension—but something even more abstract they all share is an enigmatic yet assured conceptual and/or emotional deliberateness in even the most profoundly alien of the outer orbital reaches of musical convention. Maseira, as of now the only release from anonymous Berlin project CHAGO, belongs in this conversation as well; though its deepest origins lie in electronic music, both industrial and dance (as the “tracky bottoms tucked in socks” on the cover might imply—although what may or may not be a classic Reebok is submerged in water, an immediate and telling invocation of discomfort), what actually occurs throughout this suite of fifteen unnamed tracks is much, much stranger. Armed with basic digital synth patches, field recordings, and recipes for electroacoustic contortions that shred those past two elements into queasy loops and sharp, twisted slices of nigh-unintelligible sound. Chattering, slobbering speed-shifts in parts 2 and 3 resemble a pen of ravenous hogs, and then later on in 8 we hear the abrasive bleats and squeals of actual livestock. Thin, sickly traces of movement and melody begin to surface in 10 and 11, mezzanine reverb hisses and haunting plasticity enclosing them in frail but fatal embrace, a slow, delicate decay culminating in the bleak tedium of 15: cold metallic tinctures, subdued incessance, lateral swathes of sputtering concrète like Joseph Hammer raking his magnetic tape dental floss across a gunked-up reel-to-reel head. This is excellent and satisfyingly bizarre stuff that will (and probably should) slip under many radars… if interested, tune to the forbidden frequency.

I would kill for a behind-the-scenes look at this spectacular album; even though that’s not something I usually care about much at all, but I hardly know anything about Songs for Everyone, and the fact that Song for the Creature has the clean caustic sound profile of a heavily computer-based approach with the textural diversity, natural dynamics, and volatility of an analog setup makes me extremely curious as to what role each plays in the final mixture. Clocking in at just over a hundred minutes of searing atmospherics, this ambitious digital-only release (it’s also available, somewhat hilariously, on all popular streaming services for your on-demand convenience) captures and captivates with ease—movements and transitions are placed at exactly the right spots between stretches of psychedelic near-stagnation, creative instantaneous injections unseat the status quo or further harmonize with it, and on a macro level everything moves together so organically that it ends up not feeling nearly as long as it is. Despite some excellent starting blasts, the lengthy tracks blur together somewhat, which is not at all a bad thing for this type of music, and yet each section has its own eminently memorable events: a dense, jagged outer shell materializing around mono-confined feedback screech in part one, supercharged harmonic shifts and subtleties in two, shattered spatiality and stilted, scuttling near-silence in five and six. For those who have been reveling 2021’s endlessly bountiful harsh harvest, this is one that cannot be missed. I think I speak for Everyone when I say that The Creature is very pleased.

The debut declaration from transnational ensemble quartet Multa, composed of Americans Jorrit Dijkstra and Jeb Bishop and Mexicans Alonso López Valdés and Gibrán Andrade, is an intense, visceral, improvisation-heavy imagining of pieces by several jazz composers both within and external to the group. The opening suite of “Bird Call” and “Trickles”—the former by Bishop, the latter by the late Steve Lacy—is an immediate showcase of the immense talent and collective interplay at work here, and the way the band slips smoothly from carnivalesque big-band facsimiles and melodic head trades to incendiary chaos also persists through the entirety of the release. “In-house” composers Bishop (trombone) and Dijkstra (saxophone, lyricon, electronics) are the more seasoned performers here career- and age-wise, but more often than not the highlight ends up being the nimble tumbles of the rhythm section of Valdés (bass) and Andrade (drums), particularly the latter, whose expressive kit scrabbles, snare builds, and hard-swung accents make even the lively, whimsical “Papa’s Midnight Hop” a gleefully unstable, almost ersatz affair. What also helps not only Andrade’s hits but the rest of the musicians’ contributions really sing is the distinct approach used by recording engineer Emiliano Rodríguez: roomy and spacious yet still-hard hitting in a really physical way that make Valdés’s pizz plunks, the blaring unison horns, and the metallic, almost industrial clatter of Andrade’s frenzied cymbal work all land with the heaviest impact possible. And they couldn’t have picked a better conclusion than “Razorlip,” which is, in short, unforgettable.

It is extremely difficult to fully describe derealization to people who have never experienced it themselves. How do you convey the overwhelming revelations of falsity that seem to transcend the bounds of and boundaries between the “earthly” senses, the profound terror that is so terrifying precisely because it is fundamentally unconveyable? The answer to this, sort of, is to approach real-world representation in fleeting slices, deliberate angles: a dispassionate description of a particular mental image, a certain painting, a short sequence of sounds. The newest release from the semi-prolific London project Human Malice (6 digital albums were released in December 2020 alone, but only four this whole year so far—including Collective Trauma on the consistently excellent Gates of Hypnos) mostly fits into the auditory realm, of course, but it doesn’t delve into repetition-haunted, self-terminating loop structures or disorienting spatial collages; instead, it forms itself into a wall, of course, if you can even call it that, a makeshift monument to a final sickly semblance of reality hand-slopped from a puddle of Beckettian mud. An unintelligible soup of contact mic scuzz and distortion buffets overhead, slashing at what skin remains with jagged low fidelity like a frigid hailstorm, but with enough zoning out the seemingly atonal layers start to crumble to a solitary tone, buried yet there, the single, zero-dimensional strand of miserable existence you duped yourself into thinking was anything more. Derealisation doesn’t feel like half an hour… more like a brief minute, or a looming eternity. Which, unfortunately, tend to be the same thing.

Santos, Brazil trio Surra have been around for the better part of the last decade, but it’s been a while since they’ve released something as brutally concise as Ninho de Rato (Rat’s Nest), a new EP whose twelve tracks comprise less than ten minutes of runtime. Guitarist Leeo Mesquita’s verbose, ranting lyrics, often bolstered with unison-shouted support from bassist Guilherme Elias, are flowing at full force and fervor here, and one doesn’t need to be fluent in Portuguese to appreciate their impact (although a quick Google Translate scan, while granularly unreliable, is always a good idea); from the wake of the introductory snare roll in opener “No Lixo” (“in the trash”), a misanthropic anthem not just to Brazil but to humanity at large, the sprawling lines tumble over the frantic music with such velocity that they seem to blur into each other. Indeed, the subsequent “Motor da História” (“engine of history”) is one of the most infectious tracks from a vocal standpoint, as the boundaries of separation between successive succinct phrases start to dissolve with melded enjambments like “Replicando / O que eles querem” and “Sobre como / Os grandes Heróis.” The band’s “thrashpunk” self-description is accurate enough, but Ninho de Rato, somewhat unexpectedly, doesn’t have the hyperactive structural volatility of true thrashcore titans like Hellnation or Threatener—yet that doesn’t end up being a bad thing at all. Instead it’s traded for tight, focused songs that feel like efficient executions of single ideas; take “Brasileiro, Otário e Triste” for example, which maintains the same chromaticism, riff shapes, and transitional tension the first few seconds introduce throughout its whole length. Each half of the EP is also capped off by some well-done covers, first of Nuclear Assault’s “Hang the Pope” and then of Cruel Face’s “Convivência,” neither of which halt the unbridled, pell-mell inertia that remains reliably constant. Thanks Surra; I needed this today.

“Bold, Confident and Ambitious,” like many of the title phrases in the band’s subtly politically charged vocabulary, is presented with a clear sardonic bent, and yet it’s still true that the duo of Tom Macarte and Ciaran Mackle are churning out some of the boldest and most ambitious improvised music today (it sounds confident too, I suppose, in a way, but the fact is palpable confidence kind of depends on a human presence, and there is not much of that here). Dealing less in the miniature metal-plate industrial and alarm blare loops of last year’s Off the Cliff Edge and more in a new, reserved style based in raw pure tones and volatile hum extracted from cracked circuits, Burnt Out initially seems lifeless, methodically stripped of energy, and it’s only on successive listens that this central quality of the music becomes something to viscerally appreciate—the closest comparison (stylistically and experientially) I can make is the trajectory between Chris Fratesi’s Sound for Blank Disc and Red Lead. The business jargon and speechwriter buzzwords that are the closest thing we get to full conceptual lucidity pair well with the much more abstractly rendered improvisations, evoking something that’s neither anger nor despair when the crowded cells of bleeps, buzzes, and bit rot briefly resemble a ringing office phone or renegade smoke detector. The sounds at work here are so innately alien that being mostly certain about their origin—I used the exact same harmonic intervals as the ones in “Short-Term Solution” when I used to mess around with circuits—doesn’t blunt the edge of the mixture of uncanniness, tedium, and ersatz sublimity with which every Ashcircle release cuts deep.

Countless noise artists start out by using homemade tape loops as their primary sound sources for recordings and performances, but the structures, dynamics, and emotional nuances these small modifications make possible means many of those artists never end up needing to try anything else. What’s much more difficult is finding one’s unique stylistic niche, whether it’s traditional harsh noise or something more reserved, psychedelic, and indebted to the early days of concrete music that made these techniques so ubiquitous in the first place; if the latter, there needs to be some detour around or harnessing of the plodding languor inherent to brief sound-smears played back at standard speeds, which can end up dragging down any high-octane abrasiveness that may be attempted. Tatung’s Conflicted by Truth CDr, to my knowledge the first release by the Indonesian project, isn’t the most frenetic thing I’ve heard, but no one could listen to these tracks and say the use of loops is a hindrance. Rather than picking just one tincture to extract from the familiar element, the unnamed artist makes use of a diverse supply across the five pieces, from evoking creaking centrifuges and factory decay on the opener to hypnotizing whirlpool psychedelia in the crunchy distortion-storms of “Different Stage of Decay.” Though the ear-splitting heights reached by the more caustic tracks are certainly a thrill, the shorter episodes in between often steal the show, especially the hallucinatory babble of “Broken Spirit”: the sound of you voluntarily pressing your skull against a lathe. Thank me later.

The first release from Russian CDr imprint Shift Lines since 2019, Mgnovenie is the second release by mysterious project The Snail in 2021, and perhaps in any year, since I can’t find anything before Zaimka’s Vnevremennoe in April. It was most likely produced using a similar approach as that tape, which was “designed to periodically slow down the passage of time. The ability to stop and stare at the pixels of everyday life smeared on tape. The author of the project captures unique situational soundscapes. Recording is made directly to the master tape in an accelerated high-speed mode. Then the recording is replicated on cassettes in real time. No mastering is applied.” The normal, and therefore slowing (snail-ing?), playback of the material creates a multitude of strange effects that embed themselves deeply within wider currents: lethargic churns and lo-bit warbles the dense soup from which all other elements sluggishly surface. Many stretches of Mgnovenie tend toward the familiar sonic profile of wall noise, settling into moody, muddy, stagnant sewer slithers in between unpredictable disruptions of reverb-drenched clangs and hornets-nest hums. Something to get more than lost in: more like submerged, entombed, tar-fossilized. Also, if anyone knows what the hell that thing on the cover is (because I’m pretty sure it’s not a snail), please enlighten me.