I’ve been a middle-class teenager my whole life, but oh how I dream of one day becoming a rich teenager: even more privilege and less accountability than I already have, parents who don’t give two shits about me, my very own sports car to drunk-drive at top speed through the side of an orphanage and shrewd lawyer to get off scot-free. On Sardanapalus, the self-proclaimed Rich Teenager makes a convincing case for the enlightened paradise that is their existence with a fruitful offering of completely useless, utterly unengaging sounds—because at the heart of the fleeting, saccharine “happiness” of great wealth is a yawning emptiness only temporarily filled by the joy of new consumer appliances, vehicles, or tax breaks. After the miniature UFO chorus of “Topsite Theme,” a nearly 20-minute reverie of sonic castoffs and leftovers takes shape in the meandering title track, constant churning tape static stripped of its meaningful contents and microscopic shreds of electronica blending with a distant warbling whine to produce a piece that is intensely engrossing in its unyielding ennui-scape. The following “E.E.O.” feels like a clump of junk of a different sort, much louder and more active, yet retains the strange subversive quirks that make this tape what it is: uncompromising repetition, unexpected deconstructions, a general disregard for appeal of any kind. “Jazz Entre Amigos” unfolds like a recording of a chaotic fire drill in a large office building played backwards, “Tushy&” like a troubled robot having a very public breakdown (along with an ending sample both hilarious and unsettling), “This Eminence of Guilt” like someone just stuck their grubby hand into the innards of a Casio and mercilessly groped around. As you can probably see, the fanfare of the rich teenager is the highest form of music, effortlessly towering above the so-called “notes” and “rhythm” of the commoners and even the self-congratulatory bourgeois avant-garde. Sorry peasant; don’t talk to me until you’ve evolved.

Since the release of The Gland Canyon in 2007, Raub Roy’s ongoing project Horaflora has increasingly moved toward an organic approach to quotidian improvisation that melds seamlessly with its surroundings, the two entwining and interacting to produce unforgettable phantasmagorias of colorful textures. Eaves Drop is Roy’s first non-live solo LP since 2012, but such a significant gap does not at all translate to a lack of inspiration or improvement upon what came previously; this lovely vinyl edition offers three new tracks that are, without a doubt, Horaflora’s best work yet. Each piece breathes like a living thing, slow inhales and exhales churning the flow of sound into languid eddies and currents, moving between ever-unpredictable racket generated by various tabletop configurations and deeply immersive environment recordings (accompanied by some other bells and whistles along the way, of course, such as brief snatches of saxophone or the plunks of a cheap plastic synthesizer) with breathtaking ease. As with Shots’ Private Hate last year, there is certainly a distortion of participation and pure perception occurring here, but on Eaves Drop these blurred boundaries are simultaneously more defined and harder to actually make out—take the concluding “Motorcycles Were Suddenly Observed at All Hours,” for example: were one to hear the spacious binaural capture of a massive, humming warehouse and the screeching string creak-drones that follow it separately, it wouldn’t be at all difficult to discern which was performed and which was simply observed, but when placed in such close proximity each casts a shadow of ambiguity upon the other. There is also humanity aplenty throughout, overheard conversations and laughter of playing children and the soothing swish of bustling traffic, just one of the countless layers of this album that are seemingly allowed to grow, intermingle, and flourish on their own.

Releasing your work anonymously—and, by extension, all degrees of personal/authorial removal, whether it is credited to an artist or not—is an artistic decision in itself, with its own benefits and drawbacks. The main issue one encounters is that pretty much all of us, being human, want to feel emotion from things, and for most of us, being lovers of humans, instinctively want to see or hear or feel the creator come through in their creations. But unclaimed collages like Sensitivity Training and this pleasingly spooky sample suite from an unknown source on Tribe Tapes have proven to me that not only does the lack of an attributed arranger have a palpable effect on the material, but it also functions differently for different works. While Sensitivity Training bypasses both the grotesque indulgence and the unethical exploitation of Buyer’s Market—in part due to its anonymity and in part due to the much more compassionate and purposeful compiling—to open the gates for true emotion and empathy, the half-campy, half-unsettling tales, tunes, and textures of Campfire Tales gain a complementary obscurity from the omission, and with the saturated black ink xeroxed onto orange paper the album becomes something intoxicatingly mysterious. The ordering of the sounds sounds both episodic and cohesive somehow, as bits of distorted guitar or pounding piano, the ominous trill of crickets at night, and various audio-horror vignettes (including the “hook man has escaped” story; what does it say about me that the first thing I thought was, Is this from Scream Queens?) that never reach the tense, terrifying conclusions they seem to be barreling toward, leaving us with unfinished business in our heads that often carries over to whatever bizarre segment is up next. It’s a wild ride, for sure, and perfect if you are into the hermetic Halloween thing: Pumpkin Witch, Cursed Pumpkin and all of the “pumpkin synth” projects (yes there are quite a few), or even A Cool Dark Place to Die.

There are very few noise artists that provide a double-dose of eclecticism and quality across their various projects at the same intensity as Peter Keller. The Seattle stalwart has previously graced the pages of Noise Not Music with his wildly disparate Bacillus and Dirac Sea outlets (the former is focused on brash, dirty, abrasive harsh noise with themes of disease and contagion, while the latter transposes wall noise textures to a realm of infinite cosmic beauty), but until now I was unfamiliar with Condo Horro, another wall alias that seems to be almost entirely focused on examining themes of gentrification, segregation, redlining, and other forms of the grotesque racism that plagues urban planning to this day. The ambitious Thin Red Line box set has nothing to do with Terrence Malick’s 1998 war-epic and everything to do with the titular process, which is directly defined on the cover of the release as “the systematic denial of services by government agencies and commercial institutions to residents of black [sic] and other minority neighborhoods or communities.” As we’ve seen from the past decade alone, the relatively restrictive conventions of the wall noise genre have paradoxically allowed a level of diversity and creativity to flourish among artists who work with them, and this release is just another example of those curious and fascinating implications. Conceptually, Thin Red Line couldn’t be more direct—the cover features a planning map of Dayton, OH (a city not too far from me, actually, and what I think may be Keller’s home town), the aforementioned definition, and heavily expository track titles—but the same directness doesn’t seem to be present in the relationship between that concept and the music. At least, not at first. But just like the countless Dirac Sea albums I’ve heard, these walls take time to fully unfurl, time that often extends beyond their actual run times. The opening two tracks on the C10 blast with incendiary fury, while the following pair on the C30 draw back a bit, eventually revealing that they are not at all homogeneous, instead borrowing a linearity of progression from the field recordings that are subtly incorporated, occasional artifacts buried in the outskirts of the stereo field constantly expanding the breadth of the seething static. “Legacy of Racial Deeds and Covenants” is almost achingly stagnant and detached, a consuming yet understated portrayal of the ever-unutterable, while closer “Exclusionary Real Estate Development” combines punishing distortion with a profound emptiness that stubbornly refuses to be filled. Such an abstractly symbiotic relationship between concept and content is what makes Condo Horro, and Keller’s work in general, as magnetic and valuable as it is.

After Tuesday’s review of Raven Chacon’s new album, the gloomy water-filled grey skies of today’s edition of The Slog™ bring me to examine another recent work by a sound artist with a sporadic release schedule. Though Henry Collins has a formidable arsenal of aliases and side projects credited to him, since 2013 he’s only put out a few things under his own name: a couple of splits with fellow UK noisemaker Robin Foster, the sprawling Astral Projecting on S.S Great Britain on Treguard, and a pair of fascinating sonic redaction/erasure works on Seth Cooke’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Music of Sound, which consists of the audio of The Sound of Music, and The Masters, which features recordings from the BBC broadcast of the titular golf tournament; both sources have had any speech, music, or other impurities removed). It’s clear that Collins doesn’t shy away from either totalism or absurdity—indeed, the two often come inextricably hand-in-hand—in developing the conceptual basis of his art, an open-mindedness that makes his music some of the most fascinating I’ve ever heard. Prepared Rain, to my knowledge, is something new, less focused on direct defilement or fundamental alteration of relevant sources/mediums and more on, unsurprisingly, active preparation. Playing back the audio of a movie with all of the voices and songs scalpeled out is a relatively passive creative role, but for the 55 minutes of this new tape Collins is ostensibly always moving around, rearranging various elements of his haphazard “drum kit for the sky” as well as repositioning the microphones capturing the sounds of the raindrops hitting it. For the completely passive role the rain has in this process, it acts as a surprisingly astute agent of dynamics and pacing, sending the makeshift soundmaking spiderweb—comprised of what could be anything from plastic bowls and cups to elaborate metal contraptions and Rube Goldberg machines—into a lushly cacophonous blanket of percussive textures at the outset of the album, slowly easing its weight and breadth as the track progresses, then following up this faltering frenzy with a sparser and more rhythmic B side. This is music for rain at any time of the day, or even to provide the sound of rain when it’s desired but can’t be found. As Mark Anthony Pierce says in the foreword, “I hope you get thoroughly soaked listening to this.”

“Deeply introspective, Chacon’s work rests at the root meaning and intention of experimental practice. It is the outcome of an action that, at its inception, responds to a question for which the answer is unknown. In his hands, sound is a raw, democratic material, with a near infinite number of possibilities and sources—sometimes found and encountered, others self-generated—reformed into an image that refract the notions of humanity and being outside of themselves.”

This short paragraph does more to properly introduce the sonic tour-de-force that is An Anthology of Chants Operations than I probably ever could. Rarely does one hear a work so intensely devoted to the primordial traditions of “sound art”—installation, performance instructions, constrained improvisations—and yet still so personal and emotionally resonant, beyond the “pure,” textural beauty of the sounds themselves. I highly recommend digging deeper into the write-up on the release’s Bandcamp page, as it offers titles and astute description-analysis captions for each of the LP’s nine pieces, which together unfold like episodic suites despite being composed or conceived separately. The territory Raven Chacon explores here is immense (almost as immense as the breadth of his work across countless other art forms): intimate, almost abrasive physicality; sustained meditation; innocence, tentativeness, cultural disconnect (“MVHS”); collage and combination; the list goes on. Violent rushes of air forced from an unknown source, twittering squeaks and bubbling warbles land somewhere squarely between artifice and nature, discrete but sprightly cacophonies of rustling tendrils swarm a space as tectonic shifts groan ominous below. Rather than homing in creatively on a limited formal or stylistic focus, Chacon looks to them all to find the most effective outlet for what he wants to do—and succeeds each and every time. An Anthology of Chants Operations sees the Diné artist at the peak of his powers in the auditory plane.

“Filled with life, vitality, and the curiosity that follows, Raven Chacon’s An Anthology of Chants Operations presents a wildly expanded and revitalized notion of experimental practice that stretches far beyond the potentialities within which it is normatively conformed. A deeply human music, asking after the effects of place on who we are.” (again, better than I could ever do)

The title of the first of the four pieces that comprise Flock, “Cohesion,” works well as a succinct summary of these two musicians’ approach to their inaugural recording. Patrick Shiroishi’s virtuosic saxophone is entirely assimilated into Eldar Tagi’s arsenal of modular synthesis and amplified objects as both adjunct and source, the uneasy scalar runs or non-musical extended technique meanderings seeming to seamlessly morph from being solitary elements into the dense layers of loops, effects, and other processing in real time. But if such a description implies that this tape is in any way homogeneous, think again. The adventurous duo examines every possible angle of this collaborative setup, constantly exploring the various forms this unusual hybrid of improvisational “hierarchies” can take, from the initial chaos and successive cathartic swell in “Cohesion” to the broken sound bits and fractures writhing in the bottom of a deep abyss in “Herebefore” and the sparse spider-leg textures of “Fragments of I.” This latter track, which closes out the just-under-30-minute release, is probably my favorite, and demonstrates the most compellingly evasive results of Shiroishi and Tagi’s singular instrumental arrangement while also somehow being the most palatable. This is a tape that seems to be over too soon; each segment drifts imperceptibly into the next, and within each one the clock seems to be changing faster than it should. Beware: compulsive relistening will almost certainly ensue.

Though Illicit Relationship was an unknown name to me when I came across Walk Before You Crawl, I was already somewhat familiar with Bryan Lewis Saunders, the avant-garde multimedia artist who, among other bizarre and both physically and emotionally taxing projects, is well known for composing a self-portrait every day of his life, including a stretch of 11 days in 2001 during which he consumed a new psychoactive substance every 24 hours to examine their effects on his art. Nearly two decades later, he’s apparently still truckin’, here collaborating with the Houston duo (composed of Austin Cooley and Carol Sandin Cooley) on the A side of this LP via “dreamspeak,” i.e., half-nonsensical mutters, mumbles, musings, etc. that serve as both textural and directly meaningful elements. The way this unfolds—as Saunders’ stream of partially formed thoughts and constant trail-offs swirls into a hallucinatory sludge of additional vocal contributions by Sandin Cooley, assorted birdsong, tense electronic hum, feedback, and various effects—reminds me of the somnambulistic delirium of releases like Automatic Writing or the much more recent Undercovers. It hovers somewhere in that general no-man’s-land between intelligibility and gibberish, yes, but “Walk Before You Crawl” does so in a manner that allows voice, even mostly-decipherable speech, to exist as something much more abstract, gestural, and psychedelic. This continues with the two pieces that comprise side B, “Fever Dreams” and “Where Does It Go?,” both slopping layers of answering machine messages, monstrous growls, screeching industrial squall, absent-minded thinking aloud, and slurred swathes of dusty slime onto a slow-spinning lathe of groan and gloom.