Stylistically located somewhere quite near another fantastic release I wrote about this year, Springboard’s Midwest Radiator Sessions, this new tape from the fledgling Industrial Hazard project from Full of Hell member Spencer Hazard offers an array of abrasive but strangely welcoming texture collages, mining everything from rainfall rattling a metal duct to hulking, clanging machines for its ample stockpile of source material. The commonality across all the sounds used on Submechanophobia, however, is that each is a different type of “metal or machinery being submerged or exposed to water in various ways,” a crucial piece of the release’s central focus on “the fear or anxiety caused by man-made objects being submerged under water” (hence the title). Hazard’s creations have both the massive, threatening size of gigantic oil rigs belching flames into the dark ocean sky or the rusted carcasses of wrecked cargo ships half-buried in a seabed and the apathetic yet intoxicating peace of open water; concluding cut “38.7924° N, 75.1586° W” illustrates this duality well, at once capturing the awed terror of witnessing something huge slowly sink below the surface and the oddly comforting security that the scale of such an event often instills, the panicked scramble to plug gushing holes in the hull and the morbid serenity of giving yourself over to the dark depths. I’m pushing five listens of Submechanophobia now and I’m still not sure whether I should feel anxious or soothed by this music, but I think I’ll end up settling on the latter, because it’s nowhere near as terrifying as the actual ocean and the things it hides.

It’s been too long since I listened to an album that immediately elicited an evil grin and an admiring “what the fuck,” but my favorite reaction was back with a vengeance in response to For the Living, a barbed-wire knot of punishing metallic hardcore filtered through mechanisms borrowed from breakcore, flashcore, drum & bass, and other EDM subgenres. Instrumental opener “One Day” is by far the shortest track at only 43 seconds, but it starts things off in a big way by introducing the unhinged dynamics that will feature heavily in the impending gauntlet with a concentrated shot of sonic violence: disorientingly technical drum scrabbles, clipped screams, general cut-up chaos. The unusual stylistic fusion at work here is both virtuosic on its own and complementary to both of the realms it unifies; the heavy-hitting breakdown plods and deranged vocals aren’t rendered as abstracted textural extracts (unlike Hermeneutics of Fear of God et al.), instead landing with even more forceful impact, as if the limbs of the mathcore beast at the heart of this music are being puppeted by a massive metal exoskeleton that gives them even more tremendous speed and strength. The closing one-two punch of “Compromised” and “Death to Me” is spectacular, and the full power of this singular formula is more comprehensively displayed as the drop-heavy, stop-and-go structures of the electronic influences take over and restrict the cathartic moments of extremity to a sparser configuration, which only further boosts the intensity once they actually do hit. Another brand-new 2021 project with a ridiculous amount of promise, drumcorps has me by the ear.

For the most part, the Bandcamp description of God’s Love has already done my job for me, eloquently introducing the new album from Alberta artist Magnus Tiesenhausen (as S. Wurm) abstractly as “a study of sequential precipices, the yearning singularity of fire, desire’s flaying and consuming spiral” and more concretely as “a composted composition: hollow stalks of solstice flower, the tallying of traincars, faltering documentation of field thaws, buoyant insect clouds, and northern-Albertan extractive industry captured by decaying third-rate tape equipment.” Thankfully, the music lives up to and beyond the expectations evoked by these words, delivered in two thirteenish-minute halves of bleak atmospherics, juxtapositions of gritty analog against digital clarity, and fleeting but dense swarms of intricate static noise. On “Ligularia (Horn of the Sun),” detailed insect-colony symphonies and low-end growl lay webbed groundwork for the track’s centerpiece element: what first sound like “Neukoln”-esque harsh saxophone laments but are actually produced with a single dandelion stalk. It’s funny that these blaring tones originate in the most organic of S. Wurm’s source materials, yet they often manifest as the most synthetic of sonic ingredients, clumsily clawing with (lo-)bit nails at the gain limits of the capture device. “(Slumped on Horseback) God’s Love” disguises itself as a relatively more stable meditation, slowly coagulating into a wet mass of graveyard-swamp electronics—think the halfway point between Yeast Culture’s IYS and Hermetic Plot, that Serrater tape I reviewed a few months ago—before tapering off to a bizarre coda, whose bizarre textural dissonance works well as a microcosm for what makes God’s Love so intriguing as a whole: its boundless eclecticism.

In a year without an overwhelming quantity of standout metal releases, it’s nice to be won over immediately for once—and I’m confident Prygla’s eponymous debut will have a similar effect on most readers. The short “Praefica” introduction is humble but also dense and full of portent, in retrospect foreshadowing many of the distinctive idiosyncrasies that make the rest of the tracks so great. There isn’t much in the way of information about the project itself, so for all we know Prygla could either be a quar/quintet or a solo project; at first, I deemed the latter more likely, since the opening moments of “Serafernas Song” feature some blurred hi-hat blasts that sound quite programmed at first, but then the drums start hitting a lot harder with hard-grooving halftime breaks and propulsive gallops heavy on the ride bell, and at that point it starts to not really matter what exactly is making the sounds. The vocals are at their best when they’re higher-pitched and shriek-y, but the guttural growls work well too, especially when the riffs get extra thrashy and chromatic on “Rit” and “Vider,” or when the pace picks up into energetic melodicism for the tentatively hopeful “Ögat.” I found Prygla via the “raw black metal” tag, but the guitars are surprisingly clear and clean-cut; perhaps the rawness comes from somewhere deeper than the surface of the music itself.

Pick up CD copies via Cryptorium’s Discogs page.

I’m not yet sure what to call this style of superpowered, complex, often maximalist form of electronic and electroacoustic improvisation that has been cropping up in various unlikely places this year—Beauson’s first two releases and Concrete Gazebo’s Peacock Juice Box, to name a few—but I do know I’m digging it. Kamon Kardamom is a (presumably) new trio consisting of Hungarian musicians Bálint Bolcsó, Orsolya Kaincz, and Máté Labus, and for Chronic Euphoria, their inaugural full-length they route toy turntables, sewing machines, amplified objects, and other doohickeys through a system of analog effects and digital processing that converts inconsequential clunk and clatter to flexible, high-velocity electronic tendrils. After the hyperactive density of the first two tracks (“Baby Robots’ Dance” turns out to be a more fitting title than one would think), “Just Distancing” begins with a hearty helping of fecund emptiness, an empty but well-tilled field out of which formidable stalks slowly begin to snake: long, stretching strands of sheening plastic; effervescent electrical discharge; pressurized spouts of various fumes and gases. The way this piece evolves from sparse, ephemeral atmospherics to immersive tactility is quite amazing, and it somehow happens both gradually and all at once, like poured water simultaneously filling and disintegrating a hole dug in the sand. Brief snatches of voice also play a minor role in the trio’s unique interactions, adding to the feeling of sieved and sculpted totality that permeates the entire release: there’s so much to discover within each and every moment.

In the wake of the stadium-sized disappointment that was Eli Keszler’s most recent record, I’ve been on the lookout for new skittering ambient jazz fixes, and have found them in individual fragments and semblances across various releases—e.g., the ongoing Jusell, Prymek, Sage & Shiroishi series, Jelinek & Johannson’s puls-plus-puls—but never in a full-fledged form that hits the same spot. below the river above the air, the first recording from this trio of Indianapolis musicians MOS FET, Eustress, and Solid Squares, drifts lazily in the same humid dream-city of shimmering oil-slick rainbows and prismatic vapor as the aforementioned works, but it has little to tangibly ground it other than the occasional swish of brushes dragged across drum pieces or puffs of breath hissing through brass valves. The physicality that keeps things interesting comes in sparing pinches and splashes: crackling artifacts crumbling off the edges of gelatinous synth sweeps, tinny beat loops and warbling shortwave twiddles heard from far off, crowd noise and car horns suddenly too close for comfort. The fluidly organized tape feels extremely narrative, a quality that makes the music seem like it passes faster than puddles evaporating off asphalt on a hot day, and yet this crucial current is never too conspicuous, obscured enough by countless steamed-up panes of stained glass that anyone can imagine their own story. Without the constant presence of anxious drum set trembles, Geomag’s debut is much more of a glide than a stumble, and I can’t imagine it would work as well any other way.

Everyone should have a hip holster stuffed full of “musical EpiPens”: short releases, preferably those which can fit cozily on a 3″ CD with room to spare, that can quickly fill any sort of temporary low-stimulus period with glorious, ambience-canceling sound. I’ve been closely following Ukraine’s Full Logic Control Recordings and their fledgling yet also extremely well-curated catalog since I reviewed Luxury Mollusc’s DEFENCELESS RECIPIENT OF OVERTURES right at the beginning of the year, and both before and after that tape they’ve issued plenty of concise cassettes that fit the unusual classification described above, most recently meatcreamcompoundingpharmacy (which you must pronounce with no pauses—and, if you can help it, no defined syllable breaks either) by Amsterdam project sitbQ. The title track immediately lulls with a false promise of comfortable detachment from vicious volume levels that’s unseated almost as soon as it’s evoked as the distance-muffled distortion grows louder and louder before exploding into an all-out assault. Like many of their labelmates, sitbQ makes effective use of the oft-offputting mono recording approach, feeding so much white-hot fury into the capture device that the noise overflows out of the center channel and subtly bleeds into its next-door neighbors’ yards on both sides. The titular “pharmacy” is ostensibly represented by this first chunk, but “late night news and entertainment” sounds even more like the cold, bleached tedium of neatly organized medication shelves and prescription pickup counters, spiraling into piercing insanity from a smattering of barcode-scanner beeps. For maximum effectiveness, firmly jam into neck, bicep, or thigh.

Like fellow dial-twiddler and object-botherer Daniel J. Gregory’s album Heard Under Orphan Eyelid, Пустая Волна’s self-titled debut tape (the name, appropriately, translates to “Empty Wave”) feels simultaneously active and passive, participatory in the most understated and innocuous of ways, small but noticeable kinks injected into apathetic everyday occurrences. “Пустая Волна,” the eponymous multi-part piece that comprises the majority of the release, is an extended radio improvisation that feels densely physical, as if we’re placed inside the car or small room in which the dead air and garbled voices are actually located. Interludes such as “Код 112” provide spatial and textural diversity between the successive segments, turning the lens toward wider public areas and hints at more sweeping expanses before diving back into the static-soaked sarcophagus. Parts five through eight may be the strongest slice of the extended centerpiece track, each individual fraction uniquely illustrating the amazing, diverse sublimities that can be coaxed from such a simple process: empty frequencies hypnotize ghost-tones and other hallucinations into unsuspecting heads, a motorcycle ignition is briefly fiddled with, and just about all of language itself breaks down, all within the confines of the aforementioned vessel, the identity of which likely to remain unknown. The “Звуковой Объект” (“Sound Object”) series brings further complexity to the table, and it’s the first section that provides the most enduring contextual basis for the whole release: Пустая Волна, whomever they are, is both portable recorder–toting field recordist and active musician, creating their own self-contained, imperfect environments that tightly focus even the most inconsequential of sonorities, whether they are produced, observed, or both.

The explosive revival of Myspace metallic hardcore aesthetics and musical styles in the past few years largely manifests in two distinct forms: exhumation (e.g., collectible reissues by Wax Vessel, Tomb Tree, Zegema Beach, and others) and, obviously, continuation. While Why Im Dead, a new band out of Indiana that’s most likely a solo project, mostly belongs in the latter category, there are plenty of instantly recognizable tributes drawn directly from classic scene releases that work tremendously well as catalysts for more modern elements to take shape and remain sturdy. The most noticeable example of this is the vocals, which are undeniably reminiscent of Richard Lombardi’s distinct abrasive yowls atop the impatient chaos of beloved quartet The Sawtooth Grin. Unlike genre touchstone Cuddlemonster (which recently received an amazing remaster for its vinyl reissue that enables the already violent music to hit ten times harder), though, How to Handle the News, While Sailing Through the Confusion has a smelly foot planted squarely in contemporary metalcore, whiplashing between low-end sludge chords and fretboard-scaling dissonant stabs just as often as it grinds and growls. “Tribal Tats & Backwards Hats,” besides evoking the magical time that was the mid- to late-2000s just with its title, bulldozes eardrums with snappy Tower of Rome snares and dense guitars to culminate in a ridiculously heavy-hitting just-on-the-verge-of-deathcore breakdown, and while you’re still recovering from that it launches into “Cage Caster,” whose anthemic surges and eviscerating coda provide an epic conclusion that makes the diminutive EP feel more complete than one could have ever imagined. Make sure to check out myspace.com/noisenotmusic for more sick tunes and talented goons.