This is coming a bit late since Cemetary [sic] is clearly a heavily Halloween-themed release, but this week my mind was occupied by… other things. And anyway, this amazing cover art and its tremendously well done object-font used for the band’s name are enough for this short album to be appreciated year-round. This is the closest thing Potion has come to a full-length since their debut on a split tape with Car Made of Glass early last year (both bands consist of former members of tech-sass quartet Antarctica, whose penchant for both fragmented interlude abstractions and lunatic-hardcore certainly lives on, uniquely, in each), and since Bandcamp user horsesofallston commented, “please please please release a full-length. no other humans can make these noises. (trust me I’ve tried),” but it’s not new material. In fact, all six tracks were recorded long before the project’s official declaration of existence: the first three in 2016, with Cammie Berkel on vocals and Quade Ross on drums, and the final three in 2017 with Quentin Salmon lending some piercing screams (which end up sounding sort of like Chip King’s thing, but way better and not annoying) to the first of the two “Dog Jail” tracks. Hunter Petersen is the constant member in all of these slabs of dizzying technicality, which makes the marked eclecticism of the short set even more astounding: “Trib.al/tech_support” and the ensuing two fellow shorter tracks are a nightmarish hell-scapes of tortured shrieks and relentless shred-blasts, while the title cut and “Dog Jail 2: Deja Blue” are like slightly unhinged 80s stadium-jam worship, the latter complete with harmonica. One for the ages.

In their hopefully ongoing series of live albums (of which there are three so far, all released on different labels), Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda always evoke strange and wonderful worlds to escape into, a distracting immersion that’s exactly what I need after this hell-week. The two Japanese sound artists operate in only slightly overlapping areas in their solo careers, but together their auditory instincts are nothing less than symbiotic, and the freshly released gi n ga is, unsurprisingly, yet another example of this consistently fruitful creative collaboration. The recordings that comprise what I believe is only Hasana Editions’ second CD are sourced (in order) from June 2014, April 2017, and May 2014; thus, chronologically, this collection falls both between and ahead of the preceding ma ta ta bi (ORAL, 2014) and ke i te ki (Room40, 2018), which were compiled with material from 2013 and 2015, respectively. Despite that connection, however, it’s difficult for me to say whether there’s any meaningful linear trajectory of the duo’s improvisational output; to me it seems like the two musicians are so reverently devoted to the particular situation, circumstances, location, context, etcetera etcetera of a performance that they will always end up with something unique, regardless of what came before. You’ll certainly pick up on each of their preferred palettes: in the opener, “na ki sa,” alone we hear a fuzzy tape loop of crashing waves, no doubt Onda’s doing, while Suzuki’s unmistakable Analapos whirls its spectral song in the background. I couldn’t tell who contributed the vocal elements or the almost-rhythmic flute stomp in this piece, the latter of which had me unconsciously tapping a loose tribal beat underneath it. The following two tracks tilt further toward the abstract and serve up more of the texturally lush yet slightly brooding, even ominous soundscapes that made ke i te ki so enrapturing. Of these, the concluding “sa na ki” (you may notice that the titles are simply three of the possible combinations of the original syllables) is probably my favorite, unfolding like a director’s cut of the daily activities on the floor of a miniature industrial plant.

Active Listeners Club, a new netlabel “dedicated to active listening” through releasing abstract experimental music by Tehran’s sound artists and forward-thinking musicians, caught my attention early this month with the bizarre sonic palette, complete contextual obscurity, and eye-catching cover template of their inaugural release: Ben & Jerry’s Formant Fry (the collaborative musical debut from label founders and operators Ramtin Niazi and PARSA), an impressive array of sensory-overload sample collage, some of the contents of which appear to be extracted from video games. Things, ALC’s second offering, is also Tehran artist pantea’s second—that is if you don’t count AA0011, a brief set of two tracks put out digitally in 2018. I enjoyed this one a great deal more than the preceding everydaymeal, which came out on Czsaszka earlier this year; here the Iranian musician and photographer largely leaves the recognizability of the real word behind, instead delving deep into granular dissections and dense, physical arrangements of high-velocity tones and razor-sharp remnants, transporting us to the inside of an atom smasher gone haywire. The impossibly agile contortions of “Patu (blanket)” rival the impressive sound design of glitch-storm experimenters like Florian Hecker or Jeff Carey, but the following “N.E.W.S & ESX,” and the mangled carcass of a dance track it tosses in our laps, reminds everyone that pantea has her hands much deeper in the innards of the cadaver of electronic music as all of these talented sound-surgeons perform its autopsy—all the way up to the elbows, in fact; I think club music would be located pretty deep in the chest cavity.

The first track on De ossibus 20, sound artist Kiera Mulhern’s debut full-length, is like a slow submerging into a bath of perfectly warm water. It proceeds through a murk of churning haze with ease: languid spin cycle drone, ghostly chatter, tactile shift. The extra-soft rug is soon pulled from under our feet, however, for Mulhern’s own voice finally surfaces after an unceremonious snatching-away of that fragile fog-scape, rising in layers of wavering vocalizations that twitch with distortion, skips, and shudder as they begin to thicken and coalesce before ultimately ceasing to let some muffled coffee shop ambience to close out the track (McCann describes the LP as “burying a microphone in a book”; I’m not sure if he meant it literally, but here it certainly sounds as if we’re closed out of something yet still near enough to hear it). Mulhern’s superb ear for the extremely abstract poetics of the voice-in-place is no fluke, for the remaining tracks on De ossibus 20 continue to offer up a plethora of delightful texture-stew, from the seething, organic effervescence and lush garble of “Self-auscultation 5/24/20” to the paranoid whispers and ambiguous spatiality of “Sow”; from the hair-raising sound-web and unfinished statements of “Signs in the memory” to the deeply immersive sonic environment and tentatively blown recorders of the concluding “Syrinx.” Works that are truly abstract while also feeling extremely intimate are rare, but Mulhern’s singular explorations, despite their constant elusiveness, strike emotional chords far, far below one’s conscious radar.

From my limited experience with the discipline, I’ve gradually gathered that there are three types of producers: those who excel when composing for other artists, those who excel when composing their own work, and those who excel at both. Norfolk-based beatmaker and sample sculptor RODEOGLO definitely belongs to that last group, able to reserve the most lush and garish soundscapes for his own mind-bending tracks while also creating instrumentals that function much better as complementary backing for other MCs. BLVCKHEVRT, released by newcomer label Dismiss Yourself, is RODEOGLO’s first full-length solo set, a surreal dreamscape of rattling hi-hat patches, vocal excerpts and hooks autotuned to near-unintelligibility, and endless layers of sheeny synth textures and enveloping bass to get hopelessly lost inside. The first few tracks are mostly instrumental aside from the heavily processed vocals, yet handily succeed in whipping up a joyously frenzied atmosphere of thick smoke and saturated color. “AK-47” puts Sematary to shame with its excellent sluggish trap crooning, the pounding percussive energy of “ETHEREAL” seethes underneath a fiery verse from Lil Pablo, “EAST SIDE SWAG XXX” swaggers along with a gritty Memphis-esque bounce—and those are only three of the twelve equally fantastic songs on the tape. The handful of features are distributed with panache, from the aforementioned electricity of the Lil Pablo track to the almost somnambulistic-sounding contributions from LZA and Krone on the hazy “SLIDE.” RODEOGLO handles almost all of the production on BLVCKHEVRT, co-producing on two tracks and handing the reigns to NXSTA for “TWEAKER,” which with its hilarious Mario samples and artful bitsmashing ends up being one of the tape’s most memorable. A singular and exciting official debut from this talented artist.

I have a strange relationship with baseball. I played for a few little league teams when I was a wee lad, I’m always up to play some catch, and I will probably go to a few more games before my inevitable death. But overall I see baseball as something deeply wrapped in nostalgia, both my own and that of the collective United States (it is “America’s Pastime,” after all), and in my mind it’s become an institution that I am more just grateful exists at all rather than one that resonates much with me personally. A large part of that gratitude comes from the staggering range of art that baseball and its singular sentimentality—”Pafko at the Wall,” The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., The Sandlot, that legendary scene in High School Musical 2—something that has been present my whole life growing up in Cincinnati. The Reds seem to hold an even more fervent intensity of reminiscence than many teams, and among all sorts of people. Zack Kouns and Rick Weaver team up once again on The 1990 Cincinnati Reds to pay their own brand of homage to one of the two legendary seasons in Reds history (the first was in 1900, as you’ll learn in opening track “Billy Hatcher”). This is no faithful historical reenactment or revival; the pair of Tennessee weirdos instead embark on an irreverent, surreal reimagining of these people and their lives, an approach that could conceivably be seen as disrespectful and yet just… isn’t. It’s similar to what Barthelme did with Robert Kennedy, I think, and I’m sure there are more examples that aren’t coming to mind at the moment. Kouns contributes the spoken aspects of the album, which tell tales of death, the cosmic, the supernatural, “a young Colombian girl with six arms to crush the heads of the wild and wicked and the pure-hearted alike” (who is none other than Mariano Duncan)… it’s quite the adventure. Weaver, who I learned of through his band Form a Log, builds intricate, hallucinatory rhythmic backing for Kouns’ often unrelenting deadpan delivery, plasticky drum patches and sheeny synths and quirky electronic burbles that make this phantasmagoric album even more of a compelling curiosity. The 1990 Cincinnati Reds is not nearly as (properly) educational as one might expect, but it will probably still teach you a lot of things—things you may not want to know, perhaps, but willful ignorance has never helped anyone.

“This one belongs to the Reds.”

Blattaria gets it. Every chill of enveloping existential dread that has run down your spine, every onslaught of unbearable misery and grief, every modicum of self-hatred, misanthropy, nihilism, and complete despair you’ve ever felt—they give name, and sound, to it all. The solo project of Oklahoma-based multi-instrumentalist Manuel Garcia, Blattaria weaves labyrinthine networks of dissonant, angular riffs, disarming meters and unconventional arrangements, and fluid drumming that never seems clinical yet aligns perfectly with every stab of chromatic climb or half-time transition. After “Intro” begins the new record Dream, Dwell, Die, I doubt a more fitting opener than “Web of Thoughts” could have been selected; not only does the mental image the title evokes mirror the spidery complexity of the music itself, but the lyrics move beyond the vileness and vehement loathing for humankind common in almost all black metal of this sort into a realm of deeply personal confession: “The walls are melting, / my vision is distorted, / anxiety attacks in waves, random memories appear before me. // I am suffocating in a massive / web of thoughts. // Perception is poison, / a curse that cannot be removed, / unless you kill the mind.” Beyond giving me flashbacks to a particularly horrible acid trip that nearly ended in me taking my own life, these words lend a new level of hatefulness to Blattaria’s music, making Dream, Dwell, Die a strong contender for the project’s best work yet. I’ll be coming back for the gloriously unhinged chaos of “I Hear the Insects…” alone many, many times.

Entire years are dense, complex, nonsensical things, and usually ascribing to them generalizations such as the following is something that should be reserved for some much more enlightened point in the distant future. But with 2020, I say we just grab and wrestle down whichever tentacle of the awful beast you can reach and put any label you want on it. Thus, the soundtrack to nearly 300 miserable days and counting: Staffers’ In the Pigeon Hole, overstuffed and delirious and self-referential and emotionally turbulent and kind of exhausting (sound familiar?). The newest full-length from D.C. renaissance man Ryan McKeever’s solo project is over in a flash brighter than its garish cover art, but its addictive hooks and essence that’s somehow simultaneously apathetic and ardent will keep pretty much anyone coming back again and again. After what appears to be someone talking about a particularly shoddy Wurlitzer knockoff, followed by a bit of lively carousel music presumably featuring the “cheap” puffs of the ersatz organ, “On Staples” bursts into existence with a raucous blast of energy, and acts as a proper introduction for the short album in more ways than one: on multiple occasions it prematurely quotes melodies and lyrics from upcoming micro-anthem “Fuck the Brixton,” one of the most memorable and infectious tracks that makes me miss the grotesque yet awe-inspiring spectacle of angry drunk people. McKeever is no siren, but as David Byrne said, “the better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying”; any sort of sugar-coating would distract from the honesty of the intimate storytelling, existential paranoia, and general anxiety. I often have to just sit back and humbly appreciate just how much great music is packed into these unforgettable 26 minutes—the stretch from the cathartic jangle romp of “Getting Thinner” to beautiful closing slide-guitar ballad “Just Another Tuesday” alone is stuffed with entire track list’s worth of dynamics. Use this amazing, earnest gift of an album for those all-too-frequent times when things are tough and an escape is needed, but you don’t want to forget misery entirely.