Jason Crumer - 2025 - Lake Of Fire

 

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-101  932.83MB FLAC  932.83MB FLAC

Lake of Fire is issued on both LP and a six-panel digipak CD, formats large enough to give Nicole Chambers’ drawings and Matthew Revert’s design room beyond a thumbnail. The visual presentation does not attempt to make Jason Crumer’s noise appear technologically sleek. Drawn lines, physical packaging and the division of nine titled pieces emphasize that this is a constructed album rather than an anonymous file containing an uninterrupted wall. Its forty minutes have been sourced, mixed and edited from material Crumer produced between 2022 and 2024, including live recordings captured at S.A.N.S. by JK and Tim Gick. Brent Lambert’s mastering gives those varied sources a unified scale without sanding away their abrasion.

Described as Crumer’s eleventh studio album, Lake of Fire continues the compositional direction that has distinguished his work from noise based only upon duration or endurance. Immense blocks of harsh frequency are present, but they are arranged through interruption, contrast and unstable perspective. A sound may begin as a narrow electronic wound, expand until it occupies the full stereo field, then expose a lower layer that had been hidden beneath it. The violence is immediate, yet the album’s structure reveals considerable patience. Crumer knows when to add pressure, when to sustain it and when a sudden removal will make the remaining sound feel even larger.

The title carries religious punishment, geological catastrophe and rock mythology at once. A lake of fire is a final destination, an environment with no safe edge, but Crumer does not translate that image into forty minutes of uniform maximum volume. Fire changes matter. It burns surfaces away, causes structures to collapse and produces light as well as destruction. The album behaves similarly. Distortion is used as a transformative force, converting recognizable texture into something molten and unstable. Moments of startling beauty become visible inside that process without offering rescue from it.

“Crux St. Clair” begins with a title that sounds like a person, location and religious object compressed together. “Crux” identifies a central difficulty as well as a cross; “St. Clair” suggests a saint, family name, street or county. That uncertain naming establishes the record’s method. The pieces are specific enough to imply stories but refuse to supply complete narratives. Crumer gives the listener evidence—titles, pressure, fragments of atmosphere, changes in scale—while withholding the event that would explain them.

The title piece reduces the duration to just over three minutes, but its compactness makes the sound feel concentrated. Harsh noise can appear limitless when sustained for an entire side, yet Crumer frequently works through song-sized forms. This is part of the album’s claimed rock-and-roll spirit. There are no riffs in the conventional sense, but there are entrances, gestures, collisions and endings designed with the physical timing of rock music. Noise arrives like an amplifier stack becoming the entire room. Dynamic changes function as breaks or chord shifts, and distortion carries emotional force rather than acting merely as surface damage.

“Grand Gesture” makes that connection explicit. Crumer’s walls are decadent because they exceed necessity. They are deliberately too large, too bright and too physically insistent. The grandeur is not clean or heroic; it is swollen, unstable and close to collapse. A grand gesture can be sincere, ridiculous, manipulative or desperate, and the music seems to hold all four possibilities. Its excess becomes a form of emotional exposure.

The titles continually mix transcendence with ordinary damage. “A Pill Called Heaven, A Pill Called Home” places religious longing beside pharmaceutical relief. Heaven and home become two names printed on imaginary medication, suggesting that comfort can be swallowed, prescribed or chemically simulated. “County Search Ends in Tragedy” sounds like a local-news headline stripped of personal detail. Someone has vanished, authorities have searched, and the ending is already contained in the grammar. Crumer’s sound does not illustrate those events literally. It creates the emotional architecture of dread, escalation and irreversible discovery.

“Camouflage” introduces another central tension: whether density reveals or conceals. A wall of sound appears to show everything because it fills the available field, but its fullness hides the individual sources that compose it. Inside Crumer’s noise, live capture, electronic signal, environmental residue and processing become difficult to distinguish. The surface functions as camouflage for its own construction. Repeated listening does not necessarily uncover a single correct layer; it reveals how many different movements can coexist inside what initially seemed like one blast.

“Crustlord” interrupts the album’s solemnity with a title that is filthy, comic and self-mocking. That humor matters. Harsh noise can become trapped by its own severe presentation, mistaking constant seriousness for intensity. Crumer’s work retains the possibility of ugliness being pleasurable and even funny. Brutality is not presented as moral purification. It is also excess, sensation and play with equipment pushed beyond polite use.

The album’s most direct connection to Crumer’s past arrives through “Street Sweeper on Memory Lane.” The piece was originally written and recorded in 1998 by Aluminum Noise, the project of Crumer and Hobbs, then covered here by Crumer with Joseph Hammer. Calling it a cover is unusually meaningful in noise, where the identity of a piece cannot depend upon a melody and lyrics alone. The new version revisits relationships among source material, timing, texture and gesture. Its title imagines memory being cleaned by force: recollection as a street covered in residue, then crossed by machinery that removes, redistributes or grinds the past into finer particles.

That backward glance does not turn Lake of Fire into a retrospective. It shows that Crumer’s present method is connected to nearly three decades of accumulated practice. The live captures from 2022 and 2024 are not preserved as documentary performances; they become raw matter for subsequent mixing and editing. Memory is treated in the same way. Earlier work can be covered, altered and placed within a new sequence until it belongs simultaneously to 1998 and 2025.

“Morbid Calculations,” the album’s longest piece, closes the record by turning death into a problem of measurement. Calculation suggests control, but morbidity guarantees that the conclusion cannot be escaped. The extended duration permits Crumer’s layers to gather with greater deliberation, giving the finale the weight of an ending without offering conventional resolution. What remains after the last sound is not silence as peace. It is the room recovering from sustained occupation.

Lake of Fire succeeds because its brutality is shaped rather than merely accumulated. The record can be played loud enough to become bodily, but volume alone does not reveal its construction. Beneath the obvious force are editing decisions, concealed sources, live fragments, historical references and sudden openings where beauty appears scorched but intact. Crumer builds noise with the scale of cinema and the timing of rock music, then lets both forms burn inside the same enclosure.

XT + Anne Gillis - 2025 - AnimauX veGeTal

 

Infant Tree – IT039  784.73MB FLAC

AnimauX veGeTal occupies two CDs housed in a digifile sleeve, with one long performance placed on each disc. “AnimauX” lasts 39:06; “veGeTal” lasts 35:46. The division is not merely a solution to running time. It gives the two blocks separate physical bodies while presenting them as one organism. Anne Gillis supplies the calligraphy, Seymour Wright the images, and the oddly emphasized letters in the title make the words themselves appear manipulated, grafted and interrupted. Before a sound is heard, the object introduces the release’s central question: where does one form of activity end and another begin?

The personnel credits deliberately resist normal instrumental certainty. Gillis is responsible for “sounds/noises,” Wright for “actual and potential saxophone,” and Paul Abbott for “real and imaginary drums.” The joke is precise. A listener may recognize air passing through Wright’s alto saxophone, a drum surface struck or scraped by Abbott, or some bodily action from Gillis, but recognition rarely remains secure. Each performer works around the threshold where an instrument stops behaving like its accepted identity. The saxophone can become valve motion, breath, pressure or friction. The drums can appear as objects, surfaces and electronic events. Gillis’s noises move between voice, body, material and unidentifiable action.

That uncertainty has been cultivated over several years. XT—the London duo of Wright and Abbott—began collaborating with Gillis in 2018. Working remotely from London, Brussels and Paris, the three developed Our/s Bouture(s), eventually broadcasting it through Cafe OTO in 2021 for both an audience in the room and listeners online. It was released by Art Into Life in 2023. Further performances at Cafe OTO and Brussels’ Q-O2 in 2022 allowed them to cut into, extend and redistribute elements of the broadcast and its accompanying film. AnimauX veGeTal emerged only after all three finally met again at XTUDIO in London in September 2024.

The language surrounding the collaboration repeatedly draws upon horticulture: planting, grafting, pruning, seeding, growing and blooming. These are more than decorative metaphors for improvisation. A graft joins living sections that retain their individual origins while developing as one body. Pruning removes material so that future growth can take a different shape. Gillis, Wright and Abbott treat earlier performances in a comparable way. Material is not preserved as a stable composition to be replayed. An existing gesture may be cut, relocated, allowed to mutate or used as the rootstock for something that no longer resembles its source.

“AnimauX” immediately refuses the familiar model of free improvisation as three musicians engaged in an equal conversation. The sounds do not politely take turns or announce which performer is speaking. They overlap, obscure and partially imitate one another. A wheeze may belong to lungs, bellows-like saxophone action, electronics or an object dragged under pressure. Dry crinkling and scraping can resemble skin, paper, reeds, drum surfaces or amplified debris. Sharp percussive attacks stab through soft areas, but even these fail to establish a stable meter. Rhythm appears as a bodily reflex, then vanishes before it can become a pattern.

Wright’s idea of “potential saxophone” is crucial. The instrument’s potential includes everything that might happen before or after a conventional note: inhalation, embouchure pressure, a key touching its pad, saliva, resistance inside the tube and the unstable point at which air begins to produce pitch. His playing investigates those border states. A recognizable saxophone cry can form, but it is only one possibility among many. The horn is not treated as a heroic solo voice standing above the ensemble. It is a complicated acoustic body with valves, cavities, leaks and muscular demands.

Abbott’s “imaginary drums” expand percussion in a similar direction. A drum can be heard without a decisive strike. Resonance, vibration, skin tension and electronically mediated impulse can imply an instrument whose physical outline is absent. Abbott often works with triggered and amplified percussion, allowing tiny actions to produce disproportionate results. On AnimauX veGeTal, percussion may arrive as granular movement or compressed impact rather than a visible drummer’s sequence of strokes. The imaginary kit is assembled inside the listener’s attempt to identify it.

Gillis brings a different history of physical sound and performance. Her work has long treated the body neither as a vehicle for singing nor as a theatrical character, but as a source of involuntary-looking actions, repeated sounds, breaths and private rituals. Here she avoids the commanding role often assigned to a guest vocalist. There is no front position. Her presence can feel extremely close—mouth, throat, air, contact—then disappear inside XT’s compressed acoustics. Human and nonhuman signals continually exchange properties. A noise seems animal because it gasps or twitches, then vegetal because it curls, spreads or remains rooted.

The second disc, “veGeTal,” does not provide a calmer natural counterpart to “AnimauX.” Plants are not passive. They extend, split, coil, invade, harden and respond to light, moisture and damage. The performance grows through accumulation rather than linear development. Textures take hold in one register, send extensions into another and then collapse under competing activity. Some passages feel densely overgrown; others expose bare gaps where the smallest movement becomes disproportionately vivid. The trio’s restraint matters as much as its intensity. Silence and thinness are not pauses between important events but conditions that permit new forms to emerge.

The animal/vegetal division therefore does not classify individual sounds. It describes two approaches to motion whose boundaries keep failing. Animal movement appears quick, muscular and reactive; vegetal movement seems slow, distributed and persistent. Yet a sustained saxophone pressure can grow like a stem, while an electronic texture may suddenly recoil like an animal touched unexpectedly. Abbott’s percussion can spread through the stereo field like roots and then snap into reflexive attack. Gillis moves between all of these states, making the title less a biological opposition than a record of continual transformation.

Rory Salter recorded the session and joined the trio in mixing it, while Taku Unami handled the mastering. The recording preserves extreme detail without arranging the performers into conventional foreground and background positions. Close sounds remain tactile, but the total space is difficult to map. At moments the trio seems compressed into one unstable object; elsewhere the room opens and each scrape, exhalation or impact occupies a separate zone. This shifting distance makes the performance feel simultaneously documented and impossible to reconstruct visually.

AnimauX veGeTal is demanding because its seventy-five minutes offer few stable names to hold onto. It is free improvisation stripped of familiar rhetoric: no solo succession, no dependable instrumental roles and no simple march from quiet opening to explosive climax. Instead, the two discs preserve a day of growth at XTUDIO. Three distinct practices touch, interfere and develop temporary tissues between them. Some gestures survive long enough to become structures; others wither almost immediately. The finished object does not contain two representations of animals and plants. It captures musicians behaving like living matter—sensing, recoiling, branching, grafting and producing forms that could not have been planned before they began to grow.

Incapacitants - 2025 - Achilles Tendon Rupture

 

Coherent States – CS-53  763.81MB FLAC

Few names in noise music have remained as instantly recognizable, or as consistently uncompromising, as Incapacitants. For more than four decades, Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai have pursued a version of harsh noise that is simultaneously overwhelming and strangely joyful, replacing the grim severity often associated with industrial music with something closer to ecstatic overload. Achilles Tendon continues that trajectory while demonstrating why Incapacitants has never been simply another harsh noise duo. Even after forty years of recordings, their music still feels unstable, excessive and alive.

The album arrives as a compact LP containing two extended side-long pieces, "Achilles Tendon" and "Artificial Purgatory." The presentation is direct. There is no elaborate conceptual packaging or dense explanatory essay attempting to frame the listening experience before it begins. That restraint reflects one of the defining characteristics of Incapacitants. Their recordings rarely hide behind theoretical language. The music announces itself immediately through physical sound, leaving interpretation to emerge afterward rather than serving as an instruction manual for listening.

The title Achilles Tendon introduces one of the oldest metaphors for vulnerability. The Achilles tendon is among the strongest structures in the human body, capable of transmitting extraordinary force, yet it is also capable of catastrophic failure. One damaged point can collapse an otherwise powerful system. That paradox resonates throughout the record. Incapacitants has always explored sound at the threshold where equipment, hearing and bodily endurance threaten to fail. Their music repeatedly asks how much pressure a signal can withstand before it tears itself apart.

Unlike many harsh noise artists who construct dense, nearly static walls, Incapacitants approaches noise as movement. Their recordings surge, recoil, accelerate and collapse. High frequencies race across the stereo field while lower electronic masses push beneath them. Feedback does not simply remain fixed in place but bends, spirals and collides with rapidly shifting layers of distortion. Even at its loudest, the music refuses paralysis. It behaves more like weather than architecture, continually reorganizing itself while maintaining enormous overall pressure.

This quality has distinguished Mikawa and Kosakai since the project's beginnings in the early 1980s. Both maintained ordinary full-time jobs for decades, famously balancing careers in Japanese corporations with one of the world's most influential extreme music projects. That contrast shaped the group's identity. Incapacitants never embraced the mythology of the isolated avant-garde genius existing outside society. Instead, noise emerged alongside ordinary daily routines, suggesting that overwhelming intensity could exist beneath the surface of seemingly conventional lives.

Their live performances reinforced this perspective. Rather than standing motionless behind tables of electronics, both members developed intensely physical performance styles, throwing themselves into microphones, shouting, twisting controls with frantic energy and treating the performance space itself as another instrument. Those bodily gestures were never theatrical decoration. They demonstrated that harsh noise is not only an electronic phenomenon but a physical act involving lungs, muscles, hearing and exhaustion. That same physicality remains audible on Achilles Tendon even without seeing the performers.

The opening title composition establishes this immediately. Layers of feedback seem to chase one another rather than merging into a single monolithic texture. Short bursts flash across sustained tones before disappearing beneath new eruptions. Small changes become disproportionately important because the surrounding density amplifies every shift. A slight alteration in frequency can transform the entire perceived shape of the recording. The listener begins hearing motion inside what initially appears to be total saturation.

Incapacitants has often been described as maximalist, but their work depends just as much upon contrast. Quiet passages rarely appear, yet relative openness continually emerges inside the density. One frequency recedes, allowing another to occupy the foreground. Abrasive textures suddenly reveal surprisingly delicate oscillations hidden beneath their surface. The experience resembles staring into violently moving water until previously invisible currents begin separating themselves from the larger flow.

Vocals remain another defining element. Kosakai and Mikawa have never treated the human voice as something distinct from electronic sound. Screams, muttering, laughter and fragmented speech dissolve into distortion until language itself becomes another unstable texture. These vocal eruptions resist interpretation. They function less as communication than as evidence of bodies existing inside the electronic storm. Machines are not replacing humans here. Humans are becoming inseparable from their machines.

The second side, Artificial Purgatory, shifts the emotional atmosphere without abandoning the group's characteristic intensity. Purgatory traditionally represents temporary purification rather than eternal punishment, but attaching the word "artificial" destabilizes that religious image. If purification is artificial, then perhaps suffering itself has become technologically manufactured. The piece unfolds as a prolonged negotiation between persistence and collapse. Thick electronic clusters repeatedly approach complete breakdown before reorganizing into new formations. Resolution remains permanently deferred.

That refusal of conclusion has always been central to Incapacitants. Their recordings rarely end because they have solved a compositional problem. They stop because the physical medium reaches its limit. Vinyl imposes approximately twenty minutes per side, giving each composition an unavoidable ending determined partly by format rather than purely by musical logic. When the stylus reaches the runout groove, the listener is reminded that even overwhelming sound ultimately depends upon material constraints.

The album also demonstrates how radically the meaning of harsh noise has shifted over four decades. During the 1980s, recordings like these occupied an almost invisible international underground, circulating through mail order catalogs, handmade tapes and word of mouth. Today, noise exists within an enormous digital archive where listeners can instantly compare generations of artists separated by continents and decades. Yet Achilles Tendon avoids nostalgia. It neither recreates early Incapacitants recordings nor attempts fashionable modernization. Instead, it sounds like musicians who remain curious about what electronic sound can still become.

That curiosity explains why Incapacitants continues influencing younger generations without becoming trapped as a historical institution. Their recordings never rely solely upon reputation. Each new release continues testing relationships between body, electricity and perception. Noise remains a question rather than a settled style. How much variation exists inside apparent chaos? At what point does overwhelming sound become strangely beautiful? How does repetition continue generating surprise?

Achilles Tendon does not answer those questions definitively. Instead, it enlarges them through forty minutes of relentless transformation. The title evokes a single vulnerable point capable of bringing immense strength to the ground, while the music continually demonstrates the opposite possibility: instability becoming resilience. Feedback bends without breaking. Distortion threatens collapse yet discovers another direction. Incapacitants once again reveals that harsh noise is not simply the pursuit of maximum volume. It is the art of sustaining impossible pressure while allowing every crack, fracture and unexpected opening to become part of the composition itself.