Vibraphenomenology + The Rita - 2024 - Wave Crack Fold Formations 2xCD

 

Phage Tapes – PT:481  501.07MB FLAC

Wave Crack Fold Formations arrives as a six-panel digipak containing two discs, each occupied by a single piece lasting almost forty-five minutes. The physical construction already belongs to the work’s central idea. The package unfolds, the recording divides into two nearly equal surfaces, and each disc carries a prolonged mass of sound that can be entered at any point without revealing an obvious beginning or conclusion. This is not simply a long harsh-noise collaboration expanded to fill two CDs. Vibraphenomenology and The Rita use duration, repetition and small internal changes to examine how one continuous force can produce waves, folds, fractures and repeating patterns of damage.

The project developed through extended live recording sessions accompanied by discussion. Its conceptual direction came partly from accounts of contemporary shipwreck survivors who became fixated on the same broken forms of ocean waves appearing day after day. That image gives the album an unusual psychological center. A person stranded at sea does not experience the ocean as picturesque scenery. Water becomes an endlessly repeated condition, continually changing while refusing to provide meaningful difference. Each crest resembles the previous one, yet any individual wave may contain enough force to overturn a vessel, break a hull or erase the boundary between passenger and ocean.

Vibraphenomenology and The Rita translate that condition without using field recordings of surf as obvious illustration. The sound is electronic, compressed and materially abrasive. A Soma Lyra-8 synthesizer, Soma Ether wideband receiver, vintage radio and gated fuzz effects provide the primary tools. Each device introduces a different relationship to instability. The Lyra-8 behaves less like a conventional keyboard than a network of interacting oscillators whose behavior can shift according to touch, feedback and internal connection. The Ether receiver turns surrounding electromagnetic activity into audible material. Radio brings fragments of distant transmission. Gated fuzz repeatedly opens and closes the signal, cutting continuous noise into impacts, pulses and broken rhythmic edges.

These sources allow the record to suggest water without imitating it. The noise rises, folds over itself, breaks and recedes, but it never becomes a peaceful environmental recording. Low pressure gathers beneath sheets of rough static. Midrange bursts strike the surface and disappear. Higher frequencies flash like foam appearing briefly along a dark crest. The wall is present, but it does not remain perfectly immobile. Its texture changes through repeated compression and release, producing the sensation of a mass whose surface is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt.

The gated effects are especially important because they prevent density from becoming featureless. A sustained signal is divided into short openings and closures, making the electronics resemble a wave repeatedly hitting a resistant object. Each impact appears similar, but the material receiving that impact is gradually changing. In a boat hull, stress may begin as a nearly invisible fissure before widening through repeated pressure. On the album, a small rhythmic interruption can similarly grow into a dominant structural feature. What initially sounds like a flaw inside the wall eventually becomes the pattern organizing it.

The title joins three processes rather than offering three synonyms. A wave transfers energy through movement. A crack records the point where material can no longer distribute that energy safely. A fold allows material to change direction without necessarily separating. The recording continually moves among those conditions. Signals flow, bend, collide, divide and remain connected. Noise becomes a way of hearing matter under pressure before, during and after rupture.

The first disc establishes an extended field in which repetition is never completely trustworthy. Broad sections can appear nearly static, yet close listening reveals unstable borders. Pulses do not always return with identical weight. Radio residue briefly contaminates the electronic surface. A rough oscillation may recede enough to expose another layer that had been hidden beneath it. These changes are not arranged as conventional events leading toward a climax. They resemble variations in a wave field, where local disturbances appear inside a much larger system that continues regardless of any one movement.

The second disc does not function as a sequel or resolution. It returns to the same problem from another position, extending the listener’s exposure until the distinction between repetition and change becomes increasingly uncertain. After enough time, the ear begins inventing landmarks. A particular crackle, low surge or gated rhythm seems familiar, though it may never have appeared in exactly that form before. This mirrors the survivor’s fixation described in the project notes. Under prolonged isolation, repeated waves stop being anonymous. Small variations acquire enormous significance because the surrounding condition refuses to end.

That psychological dimension separates Wave Crack Fold Formations from a purely formal noise experiment. The two long pieces can be heard as studies of texture, but the shipwreck framework turns texture into an environment of threat. The ocean does not need intention to become terrifying. It is dangerous precisely because its force operates without recognizing the person subjected to it. The electronic wall has a similar indifference. It does not dramatize fear through screaming voices or sudden cinematic shocks. It continues. The listener must adapt to its scale rather than expecting the recording to adapt to ordinary musical attention.

The wideband receiver and vintage radio deepen this sense of isolation. Radio normally promises contact: a voice, signal, station or message traveling across distance. Here transmission is absorbed into the larger noise body. Any suggestion of communication becomes unstable and incomplete. A shipwreck survivor might imagine rescue in every distant mechanical sound, but the signal may be atmospheric interference, damaged equipment or nothing capable of answering. The Ether receiver makes the invisible electrical activity surrounding the session audible, revealing that an apparently empty environment is already crowded with forces that human perception ordinarily excludes.

The collaboration also fits The Rita’s long investigation of harsh noise as concentrated texture. Sam McKinlay has repeatedly built work around specific physical surfaces, movements and obsessions, treating the wall not as generic extremity but as a method for examining materials under pressure. Wave Crack Fold Formations extends that approach through Vibraphenomenology’s interest in vibration, reception and phenomenological attention. The result asks not only what a breaking wave sounds like, but what prolonged exposure to breaking does to perception.

The references to folds add another layer. A fold does not destroy continuity; it creates complexity by turning a surface back through itself. Inside these recordings, noise repeatedly hides and reveals its own layers. One frequency covers another, rhythmic gates carve temporary openings, and distorted signals overlap until their origins become inseparable. Texture is produced by those relationships rather than by a collection of isolated sounds. The wall becomes a stack of folds held together under pressure.

A cracked hull offers the inverse image. Its lines show where cohesion has begun to fail. The exterior mark is evidence of forces moving through the material, often long before total breakage occurs. Vibraphenomenology and The Rita make that evidence audible. Their noise is full of seams, abrasions and narrow gaps that seem to trace the internal stress of the larger mass. The cracks do not merely interrupt the wall. They reveal how it was constructed.

Across nearly ninety minutes, the album refuses the relief that might come from reaching land, receiving a message or watching the storm pass. Its length is not excess added to a simple concept. Duration is the mechanism that transforms the concept into experience. A few minutes can demonstrate a texture; forty-five minutes forces the listener to inhabit it. Repeating the process on a second disc turns habitation into endurance and makes microscopic variation increasingly important.

Wave Crack Fold Formations ultimately treats harsh noise as a form of material thought. Wave, hull, crack, fold, electrical signal and human attention are placed under the same pressure. The recording does not explain shipwreck or reproduce the ocean. It builds an electronic condition in which repetition can become obsession, texture can become evidence and a nearly static wall can contain continuous breakage. The two discs do not lead out of that condition. They keep folding it inward until the sound resembles both the force striking the vessel and the fractured surface left behind.

Violent Onsen Geisha - 1996 - The Midnight Gambler

 

My Fiance's Lifework Productions – none  443.99MB FLAC

The Midnight Gambler arrives in the deliberately reduced packaging associated with Pure, the RRR Records subsidiary that issued a remarkable run of experimental CDs during the 1990s. Instead of a conventional jewel case crowded with explanatory notes, the disc was housed in a black wallet sleeve, closed with a rough multicolored label. It looks less like a professionally marketed album than an unidentified object retrieved from a drawer, its surface offering few instructions about how the music should be understood. That anonymity suits Violent Onsen Geisha perfectly. The name suggests a group, but the project was essentially the work of Tokyo artist Masaya Nakahara, whose recordings repeatedly scramble the boundaries between noise, collage, comedy, popular music and domestic accident.

The absence of proper song titles strengthens that effect. Twelve pieces are presented without descriptive names, ranging from fragments lasting less than half a minute to two long constructions exceeding sixteen and twenty-two minutes. The listener is given duration but almost no narrative guidance. There is no convenient sequence of titled compositions to interpret and no stable genre structure to follow. The album must be entered as a field of events: voices appear, sounds are damaged, rhythms form and disappear, and stretches of apparent organization are interrupted before they can become comfortable.

Its opening twenty-two-minute piece provides the album’s central statement. Rather than developing one theme, Nakahara condenses a tremendous quantity of incompatible material into a rapidly mutating collage. Found voices, distorted music, crude electronics, bursts of feedback and pieces of mass culture collide as though several damaged radio broadcasts were being transmitted through the same frequency. The edits are not clean enough to feel like virtuosic studio demonstration. Their roughness is essential. Sounds are allowed to scrape against one another, producing a physical sensation of tape being stopped, restarted, accelerated or pulled sideways.

This is why describing Violent Onsen Geisha simply as harsh noise misses much of what makes the project unusual. Noise is present, sometimes in punishing quantities, but it is only one substance among many. Nakahara can place a sentimental melody beside screaming, throw a comic voice into an abrasive electronic passage or let a recognizable rhythm stagger forward until another sound knocks it apart. The method resembles plunderphonics stripped of its academic neatness. Recorded culture becomes a junk pile in which television, pop, advertising, conversation and accidental noise possess equal value.

Humor is central, although it rarely arrives in the form of an obvious joke. Much of it comes from timing. A threatening wall of sound may collapse into something trivial; a tiny vocal fragment may be repeated until it becomes ridiculous; a passage that appears to be approaching a climax may simply stop. The shortest pieces function like abrupt edits left exposed between larger constructions. Lasting twenty or thirty seconds, they do not behave like interludes designed to help the record flow. They puncture the flow, making the listener reconsider whether the preceding section was serious, comic or both.

That uncertainty separates Nakahara from the heroic image often attached to extreme noise. The Midnight Gambler does not present distortion as a demonstration of masculine endurance or technical power. Its violence is unstable and frequently embarrassed by its surroundings. Feedback can be overwhelming, but it may share space with kitsch, foolishness, cheap effects or mundane voices. Every attempt at grandeur is vulnerable to interruption. The record seems suspicious of any sound that presents itself as important, including its own most ferocious passages.

The longer sixteen-minute piece pushes this approach into a more suspended form. Where the opening feels densely compressed, the later construction gives individual materials more time to establish an atmosphere. Repetition becomes more noticeable, and the spaces between events carry greater weight. Yet stability remains temporary. Nakahara’s collages are governed by the expectation that any environment can be invaded. A voice, burst of music or abrasive edit enters not because it completes a pattern but because it damages whatever pattern has begun to emerge.

Across the second half, the pieces become shorter but not more conventional. Four-, six- and three-minute sections briefly suggest separate compositions, though their shared vocabulary keeps them connected to the same unstable world. The album behaves like a collection of recordings found on mismatched tapes rather than a carefully unified studio statement. That apparent disorder is deceptive. Nakahara’s strongest work depends upon close control of contrast. The impact of an eruption comes from what surrounds it; an absurd sample becomes funnier because it has been placed beside something severe; a weak or degraded sound becomes expressive when it interrupts a fuller recording.

The final eight-minute section introduces live material, allowing the collage method to collide with the pressure and uncertainty of performance. In a studio, even the crudest edit remains a decision preserved on tape. Live noise is less secure. Room acoustics, equipment overload and audience presence become additional materials that cannot be completely controlled. The result does not resolve the record. It leaves it open, as though the earlier private constructions have escaped into a public space and begun dismantling themselves.

The Midnight Gambler appeared during an especially active period for Nakahara. In 1996 alone, Violent Onsen Geisha also released Nation of Rhythm Slaves and Teenage Pet Sounds, while Nakahara worked on remixes for artists operating much closer to Japan’s pop and alternative mainstream. That movement between underground noise and recognizable popular culture helps explain the album’s breadth. Nakahara did not treat pop as an enemy standing outside experimental music. It was already inside his work, available to be sampled, mocked, damaged or momentarily enjoyed.

His fictional mythology around Violent Onsen Geisha extended the same attitude into the project’s identity. Nakahara encouraged stories that the name represented a real band whose members had died one by one, leaving him as the survivor. The invention transformed the ordinary fact of a solo recording project into a grotesque show-business legend. Like the music, it used fragments of familiar culture—band histories, tragedy, publicity and underground rumor—then rearranged them into something obviously suspicious but difficult to dismiss completely.

Nearly thirty years later, the album still sounds unruly because it refuses the stable signs by which experimental records are usually classified. It is too fragmented to become pure harsh noise, too abrasive to settle into comedy, too impulsive to resemble formal electroacoustic composition and too strange to function as simple satire. The black sleeve and anonymous sequence preserve that refusal. The Midnight Gambler offers no clean account of itself. It opens a container filled with damaged entertainment, domestic sound, electronic violence and bad jokes, shakes everything together, and allows the collisions to become the composition.

VA - 2024 - F.L.A.W. 2xCS

 

No Label – none  624.27MB FLAC

Tracklist:

A1 Psywarfare – TURN IT UP!A2

A2    Kakerlak – Perdurable Introgression

A3 FLESHLICKER – Hair Love

A4 Skin Graft – Endurance

A5 Paranoid Time – Total Nonstop Blackouts (Slit Throats Cut)

B1 Aaron Dilloway – Major Flaw

B2 Knifedoutofexistence – A Moment Leaves Its Mark

B3 Body Carve – Striated Anterior Blowhole

B4 OVMN – Anti-Fascist Warning Alarm

B5 Hypertrophy – Big Strong Men

C1 Leah P – Mire

C2 Form Hunter – Rotten Structure

C3 The Rita – Resin Toe Razor Cutting

C4 Heat Signature – Two Layer Trap

C5 Perfected Grave Vault – Forget Laws and Warrants

D1 John Wiese – CPP

D2 Unsustainable Social Condition – Fidrych

D3 Parasite Nurse – The Burning Desire to Fade Into Obscurity

D4 Black Leather Jesus – This Mouth at Play

D5 Shredded Nerve – Precipice

F.L.A.W. is constructed as both a compilation and a physical record of an event. The two professionally duplicated cassettes are housed together in a black polypropylene case, accompanied by a twelve-page booklet and a miniature poster. That amount of printed material gives the release the density of a small festival program rather than an ordinary tape compilation. Zac Reinhard’s visual work extends across the package, while the severe black housing makes the set feel sealed and utilitarian, like equipment prepared for transport. It is an appropriate container for nearly one hundred minutes of exclusive material by the twenty artists assembled for Final Live Audio War, held in Cleveland on October 12, 2024.

The title immediately establishes a useful contradiction. A flaw is an imperfection, but the initials expand into something far more declarative: Final Live Audio War. One meaning suggests damage, error and weakness; the other promises confrontation, volume and collective force. Noise has always occupied the space between those ideas. What conventional recording attempts to eliminate—distortion, overload, faulty signals, mechanical friction and unstable amplification—becomes the central material. Across these four cassette sides, the flaw is not corrected. It is isolated, enlarged and allowed to consume the surrounding structure.

This is not simply a sampler of interchangeable harsh-noise tracks. The lineup brings together several generations and methods of American and international noise practice. Aaron Dilloway, John Wiese, The Rita and Black Leather Jesus appear beside Skin Graft, Shredded Nerve, Unsustainable Social Condition, Leah P, Fleshlicker, Form Hunter, Knifedoutofexistence and other artists whose work carries the form into different physical, conceptual and regional territories. The compilation’s importance comes from those differences. Each contributor operates inside a shared language of abrasion, repetition and damaged sound, but each places the pressure somewhere else.

Roman J.’s audio and visual curation gives the collection its larger shape, while Wyatt Howland’s mastering keeps radically different recordings at a consistently forceful level. Mastering a compilation like this involves more than making everything loud. Some pieces depend upon thick, nearly motionless walls; others use sudden cuts, exposed voices, high-frequency detail, tape loops or rapidly changing clusters of sound. If every recording were pushed toward the same surface, their individual structures would disappear. Here, the transitions preserve contrast without turning the collection into a sequence of disconnected demonstrations.

The first half establishes a broad vocabulary. Psywarfare’s opening command, “TURN IT UP!,” functions almost as an instruction printed inside the music. From there, the compilation moves through Kakerlak’s decayed electronics, Fleshlicker’s more erratic collisions and the heavy endurance suggested by Skin Graft. Paranoid Time and Aaron Dilloway bring forms of interruption in which repetition never produces security. A loop may return, but each return makes it less stable. Voices become objects; recognizable sounds are worn down by recurrence; silence and sudden impact become tools for controlling the listener’s attention.

Dilloway’s presence is especially appropriate because his work has long treated magnetic tape as something more physical than a neutral recording medium. Loops drag time in circles, preserving small accidents until they become the center of a piece. That sensibility suits the cassette format itself. Listening to F.L.A.W. requires turning tapes over, moving from one side to another and hearing the slight mechanical character of playback. The format divides the compilation into four bounded stretches. It prevents nearly one hundred minutes of noise from becoming a single undifferentiated digital stream.

Elsewhere, the set reveals how many different meanings can hide inside the phrase “harsh noise.” Knifedoutofexistence allows emotional weight to enter through sustained abrasion. Body Carve compresses violent texture into a shorter attack. OVMN’s “Anti-Fascist Warning Alarm” makes alarm both a sound and a political position, while Hypertrophy’s “Big Strong Men” turns its title toward the posturing that can accompany extreme music. Leah P’s “Mire” suggests entrapment rather than forward movement: sound as a substance that surrounds the listener and makes every gesture heavier.

The Rita represents another extreme of concentration. Sam McKinlay’s work has repeatedly narrowed noise toward obsessive surfaces, particularly the nearly static pressure of harsh noise wall. In this context, “Resin Toe Razor Cutting” does not merely add another loud piece. It changes how motion is perceived. After cut-up material and volatile transitions, an unyielding texture can make tiny fluctuations feel enormous. Heat Signature and Perfected Grave Vault then continue the compilation’s movement between layered confinement and more aggressively signaled structures, preventing any single noise vocabulary from claiming the entire program.

John Wiese’s brief “CPP” is the shortest contribution, but its compactness matters. Wiese’s editing can make a small piece feel crowded with internal events, demonstrating that duration and density are not the same thing. Unsustainable Social Condition, Parasite Nurse, Black Leather Jesus and Shredded Nerve carry the final portion into increasingly bodily territory. Black Leather Jesus brings the history of American group-based noise performance into the set, while Shredded Nerve closes with a title—“Precipice”—that leaves the listener at an edge rather than offering resolution.

The festival behind the tapes is central to their meaning. Noise recordings can be produced alone through careful editing, but live noise depends upon bodies, rooms, equipment and shared tolerance. Final Live Audio War placed twenty distinct practices into one Cleveland event, creating a temporary community around sound that often seems hostile to ordinary ideas of community. The “war” was not simply artist against audience or volume against hearing. It was also a collision between approaches: composition against improvisation, movement against stasis, private obsession against public performance and individual control against malfunction.

The word “Final” adds another layer. It gives the event the atmosphere of a conclusion even when the artists and their practices continue. Underground events are temporary by nature. A room is secured, equipment is carried in, sets happen, merchandise changes hands and the gathering disappears. Documentation can preserve names and sounds, but it cannot reproduce the pressure in the room. F.L.A.W. does not pretend otherwise. Its exclusive studio and recorded contributions become a parallel object: not a transparent recording of the festival, but a physical collection built around the same participants.

The booklet and mini-poster therefore matter as much as decoration. They restore faces, names and visual identities to music that can become anonymous when reduced to digital files. The double cassette asks to be handled, opened, reversed and stored. Its physical divisions turn a huge compilation into four encounters, while the black case gives those encounters a single body. F.L.A.W. captures a wide section of contemporary noise without trying to smooth out its contradictions. It presents the scene as a field of competing methods held together for one date, one city and one concentrated act of listening. The result is not a correction of noise’s flaws but a celebration of everything those flaws make possible.

Morton Feldman, Judith Wegmann, Andreas Kunz - 2021 - For John Cage

 

ezz-thetics – ezz-thetics 2-1036  382.18MB FLAC

The physical division of For John Cage across two CDs is a practical necessity, but it also creates an unintended threshold inside Morton Feldman’s ninety-minute composition. The first disc ends after 44 minutes; the second resumes for another 46. Nothing in the music behaves like a conventional first and second movement, yet changing discs briefly returns the listener to ordinary time. A hand reaches toward the player, the room becomes noticeable again, and then Judith Wegmann’s piano and Andreas Kunz’s violin reopen the quiet space they had been constructing. The interruption makes the scale of the work tangible. This is not background stillness or an enlarged miniature. It is an environment that must be entered, left and entered again.

Feldman wrote For John Cage in 1982 for violinist Paul Zukofsky and pianist Aki Takahashi, and it was first performed during a concert celebrating Cage’s seventieth birthday. The dedication carries the history of one of twentieth-century music’s most important friendships, but the piece does not attempt a musical portrait of Cage. There are no obvious quotations, jokes or demonstrations of chance procedure. Instead, Feldman seems to consider what Cage made possible for him: a freedom from inherited ideas of development, climax and resolution, and permission to treat sound as something worthy of attention before it becomes part of an argument. Feldman and Cage reached different musical conclusions, but both changed the listener’s relationship with attention.

This 2021 recording gives that attention an unusually spacious acoustic body. Recorded at the Mazzini Stiftung in Grenchen, Switzerland, it places Wegmann at a Bösendorfer 280VC while Kunz plays with a Baroque violin bow. Those details are not decorative specifications. The Bösendorfer possesses a deep, lingering lower register, while the lighter Baroque bow allows Kunz to produce violin tones that can appear without the continuous pressure and polished projection associated with a modern concerto performance. Neither instrument is pushed toward brilliance. Their sounds bloom, hover and withdraw into the room, leaving resonances that sometimes seem nearly as important as the notes that caused them.

Wegmann and Kunz take slightly more than ninety minutes, considerably longer than many recorded performances of the piece. The tempo does not feel stretched for effect. It feels as though each sound has been given enough room to complete its entire physical existence. A piano chord is not finished when the keys are struck, and a violin tone is not limited to the movement of the bow. Both continue changing after their initial appearance. Overtones separate, vibrations weaken, and the surrounding silence slowly absorbs what remains. The performance listens to those changes rather than rushing ahead to replace them.

The opening establishes the work’s materials with deceptive simplicity. Small piano figures are followed by restrained violin responses. Sometimes the order reverses; sometimes the two instruments overlap or briefly seem to occupy the same line. The relationship is conversational, but not in the dramatic sense of two personalities debating. Feldman wanted the instruments to inhabit the same space, almost as though violin and piano were parts of a single composite instrument. Wegmann and Kunz achieve this without sacrificing their differences. The piano has weight, attack and decay. The violin can sustain, bend and alter its pressure from within a note. What joins them is not matching tone color but matching concentration.

Patterns return throughout the piece, although repetition in Feldman is rarely exact enough to become a dependable cycle. A compact figure comes back with one pitch displaced, a pause lengthened, an accent softened or the instrumental roles exchanged. The listener recognizes something without being able to say precisely what has been recognized. Memory begins to operate imperfectly. After forty or sixty minutes, a phrase may feel familiar because it appeared earlier, because it resembles another phrase, or simply because the entire work has taught the ear to recognize its particular shapes. For John Cage gradually becomes its own unstable memory system.

This uncertainty distinguishes the piece from minimalism built upon a clearly audible process. Feldman does not give the listener a machine whose operation can be followed. Nor does he use quietness to create passive serenity. The music contains unease, weight and occasional darkening. Low piano notes can make the room suddenly seem larger and less secure. A violin response may resemble a sigh without becoming an expressionist gesture. Closely spaced pitches create momentary friction, and the musicians sometimes move through stop-and-start passages whose hesitant articulation feels almost physical. The surface remains restrained, but the emotional temperature is continually shifting underneath it.

Kunz’s control is especially important because the violin can too easily introduce theatrical emotion into such exposed writing. He avoids exaggerated vibrato and refuses to turn sustained notes into declarations. His playing can be pale, grainy, tender or slightly resistant, but it never treats Feldman’s fragility as prettiness. The Baroque bow helps give individual tones a finely tapered shape. They enter the acoustic like narrow threads and then meet the heavier strands of Wegmann’s piano. Feldman’s interest in handmade Middle Eastern carpets is often used as a metaphor for his late music, and here it is particularly useful: recurring figures resemble patterns woven from materials whose tiny irregularities keep the design alive.

Wegmann’s performance is equally free from ornamental sensitivity. She does not announce every chord as a precious object. Some sounds arrive almost neutrally, while others carry unexpected depth because of register, spacing or resonance. Her restraint allows the Bösendorfer to speak without turning its richness into Romantic grandeur. Even when a low interval acquires mournful force, she does not underline it. This produces one of the recording’s central paradoxes: the less the musicians insist upon expression, the more emotionally exposed the music becomes.

For John Cage asks for a form of listening that modern life steadily erodes. Its duration cannot be reduced to a few representative minutes because its meaning lies partly in what happens to perception over time. Early in the performance, silence appears to separate events. Later, it becomes part of the same fabric, holding the fading piano, the suspended violin and the listener’s uncertain recollection together. By the end, ninety minutes have passed without a conventional destination being reached. The piece has not told a story, built a monument or delivered a final answer. It has altered the dimensions of the room. Wegmann and Kunz make that alteration feel patient, intimate and complete: two instruments gradually becoming one space, then leaving the listener alone inside it.

Lettera 22 - 20254 - Blue Telepathy 7'' & CS

 

Dead Mind Records – DMR62  368.98MB FLAC

Blue Telepathy is built as a small archive rather than a single recording. The folded box contains a black 7-inch, a cassette, a sixteen-page full-color collage booklet, an A3 poster and a sticker, with only 150 copies assembled by Dead Mind Records. That collection of objects immediately changes the way the music is encountered. The 7-inch holds the two short pieces, each lasting about four minutes, while the cassette contains two longer works of nearly twelve minutes apiece. Playing the complete release therefore requires a change of format, machine and physical pace. The needle must be lifted, the record turned, the cassette inserted and the mechanism engaged. Blue Telepathy cannot pass through the room as one frictionless digital stream. Its construction continually returns attention to surfaces, playback devices and acts of handling.

That arrangement suits Lettera 22, the northeastern Italian duo of Riccardo Mazza and Matteo Castro. Their music is assembled from concrete sound, field recordings, analog instruments and tape manipulation, but those categories do not remain neatly separated. An environmental recording may be edited until its original source becomes unrecognizable. An electronic signal can acquire the irregular texture of something found outdoors. Mechanical rhythm appears without becoming percussion, while tape hiss makes the supposedly empty background audible. The duo does not present field recordings as transparent windows onto particular locations. Places enter the work already altered by distance, memory and recording technology.

The title suggests communication without ordinary language, but the telepathy in this box is neither clean nor instantaneous. It arrives through interference. Signals have been recorded, transferred, cut, layered, damaged and divided between vinyl and cassette. Whatever one mind attempts to send to another must cross noisy material territory before it can be received. The word “blue” gives that transmission an emotional temperature: cold, nocturnal, bruised and melancholy. Blue Telepathy feels less like reading someone’s thoughts than intercepting fragments of a message after the person who sent it has disappeared.

The 7-inch concentrates this idea into two compact sides. “I” and “II” last 4:25 and 4:01, durations that demand severe editing when the raw materials include environmental recordings and slowly changing electronic textures. The result is not miniature ambient music. Each side behaves like a sealed chamber in which several layers are placed under pressure. Tape noise, distant impacts, electrical movement and distorted surges crowd together without becoming a simple wall. Space remains inside the density. Sounds can appear very close to the listener while another layer seems to be occurring far beyond it, creating the impression of simultaneous rooms or landscapes occupying the same piece.

Vinyl gives these shorter constructions a hard physical boundary. A side begins when the stylus enters the groove and ends when it reaches the runout. Lettera 22 can build ambiguity inside that frame, but the medium itself remains decisive. The two pieces arrive like transmissions that have been forcibly cut off. Their brevity also sharpens the contrast between detailed quiet and sudden electronic pressure. When distortion enters, it does not merely make the recording louder. It momentarily destroys the depth that the duo has constructed, flattening distant and nearby material into one overloaded plane before the space gradually opens again.

The cassette allows “III” and “IV” to behave differently. At 11:52 and 11:44, these pieces have time to establish environments, obscure them and leave behind altered remains. Tape is not simply a container here; its hiss belongs to the compositions’ atmosphere. The medium supplies a continuous veil through which individual events must pass. Small noises seem less like isolated studio effects than objects located somewhere within a larger terrain. A low pulse can resemble machinery operating beyond a wall. A scraping texture might be metallic contact, an insect-like vibration or the residue of an earlier sound stretched beyond recognition.

Lettera 22 repeatedly approaches rhythm without settling into a beat. There are distant repetitions and mechanical exchanges, but they do not organize the pieces into predictable measures. Rhythm appears as evidence of activity: something rotating, signaling, striking or attempting to restart. These traces suggest abandoned infrastructure that has somehow continued operating after its human purpose has been forgotten. The machines do not become characters, yet their interactions carry a strange behavioral quality. One pulse appears to wait for another. A signal repeats as though expecting an answer. The title begins to make sense as communication occurring between devices as much as between people.

Blue Telepathy also avoids the soft reassurance often attached to immersive environmental music. Its spaces are not designed for escape, meditation or healing. The field recordings do not lead toward untouched nature, and the electronics do not open a polished science-fiction future. Everything feels weathered and partially inaccessible. Even when the volume recedes, the quiet remains watchful. The listener is placed inside a landscape whose history cannot be reconstructed, surrounded by fragments that imply events without revealing what happened. Memory exists here as texture rather than narrative.

The printed matter extends that uncertainty beyond sound. A sixteen-page collage booklet and large poster require a different scale of attention from a conventional cassette insert. Images can be examined, unfolded, placed beside the playing objects and reorganized by the viewer. Collage is the visual equivalent of Lettera 22’s editing process: materials removed from their original contexts acquire new meanings through proximity, cropping and collision. The package turns Blue Telepathy into a portable exhibition, with the record and cassette functioning as audio components among the paper evidence.

That completeness makes the limited edition feel purposeful rather than luxurious. The box does not inflate thirty-two minutes of music with unrelated merchandise. It divides one idea among several materials, each with its own type of memory. Vinyl preserves sound as a visible spiral. Cassette tape hides it inside a shell and physically transports it from one reel to another. The booklet fixes fragments into printed sequences, while the poster enlarges the visual field beyond the dimensions of the box. Every object communicates differently, and none delivers the entire work alone.

Blue Telepathy ultimately describes transmission as an imperfect material process. Mazza and Castro do not imagine two minds meeting in pure, silent space. Their signals travel through hiss, distortion, magnetic tape, vinyl grooves, printed images and the acoustics of whatever room receives them. Information is lost, but the loss produces atmosphere. The missing explanation becomes more powerful than a completed message. Across four untitled pieces, Lettera 22 creates a shadow world in which machines continue exchanging signals, landscapes retain traces of vanished activity and memory returns as damaged sound. The box does not decode those transmissions. It gives them enough physical forms to keep circulating.

Eric Lunde - 2012 - Localized Noise Induced Transitions The Athens Survey

 

Traitmediaworks – tmw32+ cdr1, tme32 CDR3/4  860.43MB FLAC

Localized Noise-Induced Transitions arrives as a numbered and signed CD edition of 200 copies, accompanied by an image of the equipment used to produce it. That photograph is important because Eric Lunde’s Short Range Acoustical Device does not resemble a neutral documentary tool. It suggests a portable apparatus built to interfere with the place it records. The release is based on field recordings made around St. Croix Falls and Rhinelander, Wisconsin, but Lunde does not simply collect the sounds already present at those locations. He introduces signals, captures environmental responses, degenerates the resulting material and passes it through what he calls reduplication processing. The field becomes an active system rather than scenery waiting to be preserved.

The eleven pieces retain their geographical labels, including several recordings identified with St. Croix Falls and its coordinates, 45°24′43″N 92°38′20″W. Coordinates ordinarily promise exactitude. They claim that a sound can be anchored to one measurable point on the earth. Lunde undermines that promise immediately. Knowing where a recording was made does not explain what is producing its hiss, vibration, clatter or intermittent feedback. The location is precise while the event remains uncertain. Longitude and latitude identify the listening position but cannot restore the chain of causes that created what passed through the microphone.

That tension separates Localized Noise-Induced Transitions from conventional nature recording. Birds, voices and wind can occasionally be heard, but they do not occupy a clean foreground. They exist inside a larger electrical and mechanical atmosphere. A stretch of environmental quiet may be interrupted by a narrow, burning frequency. A distant human sound emerges only after a mass of static withdraws. Clicks and knocks suggest objects being handled, machines switching states or the recording apparatus reacting to its own output. The recognizably natural and recognizably technological do not alternate politely. They contaminate one another.

Lunde describes the material as field recordings made with the Short Range Acoustical Device, a portable degenerator, reduplication processing and found or stolen recordings. “Stolen” changes the ethical and conceptual position of the record. A found sound may be treated as an accident or gift, but a stolen recording acknowledges an act of appropriation. The microphone removes an event from its original situation and converts it into portable material. Lunde does not pretend that recording is passive. He emphasizes the intrusion, then compounds it through copying, processing and displacement.

The Short Range Acoustical Device also echoes the language of the LRAD, the Long Range Acoustic Device used for communication, crowd control and sonic intimidation. Lunde produced a separate release directly addressing that technology, but the smaller device named here brings the politics of projected sound into a more localized scale. Sound does not merely describe territory; it can occupy territory, disturb bodies and alter behavior. By transmitting and recording within a limited area, the apparatus turns each location into a temporary feedback network. The environment receives sound, changes it through distance and reflection, and sends it back to the microphone.

The resulting music is often remarkably static, although static does not mean motionless. Lunde builds fields that remain within a narrow range while undergoing constant internal fluctuation. Hiss thickens and thins. Feedback approaches a threshold without always crossing it. A stable mechanical drone reveals tiny irregularities once the ear stops waiting for a dramatic event. These are the transitions promised by the title: not necessarily large changes from silence to impact, but shifts in the perceived state of an apparently continuous noise.

In scientific language, a noise-induced transition occurs when random fluctuation helps push a system from one condition into another. Lunde treats that idea less as an illustration than as a working method. Noise is not the unwanted substance to be filtered out so that information can be recovered. It is the force that reorganizes the information. A field recording begins as evidence of a place, but the added noise pushes it toward abstraction. Feedback makes an outdoor environment resemble an electrical interior. Wind against the microphone becomes indistinguishable from processing. A human voice may initially seem documentary, then dissolve into grain, cadence and distance.

This is where Lunde’s history in American industrial music remains audible without turning the CD into a nostalgic imitation of his work with Boy Dirt Car. Since the early 1980s, his recordings have repeatedly treated sound as unstable material subjected to erasure, repetition and mechanical deterioration. Localized Noise-Induced Transitions applies that language to geographic space. Instead of building songs from metal, percussion and vocal aggression, it allows environmental recordings to carry the abrasion. The landscape itself becomes the damaged medium.

The Wisconsin settings complicate the familiar industrial atmosphere. St. Croix Falls sits beside a river, cliffs, trails and wooded land rather than the stereotypical factory district associated with industrial music. Rhinelander carries its own mixture of town, forest, road traffic and machinery. Lunde does not force those places into a single romantic image of the rural Midwest. A country performance, bird activity, wind, refrigeration-like hums, unidentified motors and electronically produced tones can all belong to the same regional sound field. Rural space is revealed as already technological, traversed by amplification, engines, ventilation, radio signals and human speech.

The tenth piece introduces the release’s clearest spoken material, including the sound of an academic lecture. Placed among environmental recordings and degraded signals, the voice no longer possesses automatic authority. Speech becomes another localized emission competing with air movement, room tone and mechanical vibration. The lecturer may explain something, but the recording process prevents explanation from mastering the surrounding noise. Language enters the field and is reduced to one event among others.

Because the album avoids spectacular volume for much of its duration, it rewards attention to thresholds. Noise listeners expecting continuous punishment may initially hear restraint, while field-recording listeners may find the electronic intrusions unusually hostile. Lunde holds the CD between those expectations. Feedback rises but frequently remains just short of eruption. Environmental detail appears but is never allowed to become picturesque. The pieces feel suspended between documentation and sabotage, each one preserving a place while simultaneously damaging the possibility of hearing it clearly.

Localized Noise-Induced Transitions ultimately presents recording as a physical encounter among device, operator, environment and listener. The CD does not offer Wisconsin as a set of recognizable sound postcards. It preserves the friction produced when a particular apparatus was activated at particular coordinates. The limited, signed object extends that specificity: one of 200 discs carries copies of sounds that were themselves copied, stolen, repeated and degraded. What remains is neither the original place nor a completely artificial composition. It is a transition state, fixed temporarily on a compact disc—the noise of a location changing under the pressure of being heard.

The Day Of The Antler - 2025 - Rural Industrial 2016 - 2020

 

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-100  1.77GB FLAC

Rural Industrial 2016–2020 gathers four years of The Day of the Antler’s scarce, handmade cassette releases into a four-CD clamshell box. The format changes the scale of the work immediately. Recordings that originally circulated as small, separate objects—Kumpujen Yöstä, Music From the Celestial Body, Monumentti, Veri, Tuli, Kuolema and material from the Juurimusiikkia Teknologian Jättömailta split—now occupy four consecutive discs accompanied by a sixteen-page booklet and a foreword by Pyry Ojala. Satatuhatta chose the collection as its hundredth release, giving a formerly elusive Finnish project the physical weight of an established body of work.

The box preserves the divisions between the original recordings rather than flattening twenty-nine pieces into one chronological stream. Each disc maintains a distinct climate. The changes are gradual enough to confirm a recognizable identity, but substantial enough to show that “rural industrial” is not a fixed genre formula. Across more than three hours, the project moves through ritual drone, raw noise, primitive electronics, kosmische drift, corroded rhythm and almost orchestral accumulations of pressure. The music can suggest stone, soil and forests in one passage, then tracks, engines and armored machinery in the next.

“Rural industrial” initially sounds contradictory because industrial music is commonly imagined through factories, cities, surveillance systems and urban decay. The Day of the Antler relocates that vocabulary without removing technology. Rural Finland is not presented as wilderness untouched by machines. It contains forestry equipment, agricultural labor, abandoned structures, metal tools, electrical infrastructure and roads cutting through wooded land. The music recognizes that industry continues beyond the city, often becoming more isolated, physically exposed and closely entangled with weather and soil.

The first disc, Kumpujen Yöstä, establishes the project’s connection to Finnish language, landscape and buried memory. Its titles invoke night, departure, incantation, northern stars, life and death. The music responds through long forms that feel ceremonial without imitating a reconstructed folk tradition. Drones move like low weather systems. Rough pulses emerge as if produced by distant work rather than by a drum machine. Metallic sounds do not remain cleanly identifiable as percussion or machinery. They become part of a larger ground tone in which human activity, natural force and electronic treatment are difficult to separate.

The antler in the project’s name provides a useful emblem. An antler is grown by a living animal, shed, found and then preserved as an object. It can be a weapon, trophy, tool or branching structure resembling roots and trees. That movement between organism and artifact parallels the music. Sounds appear to begin in the material world but are removed from their sources, processed and arranged until they occupy an ambiguous position between nature and manufacture. Nothing feels entirely untouched, yet the electronic work never erases the sensation of physical matter.

Music From the Celestial Body shifts the second disc toward a more openly cosmic and melancholic atmosphere. Its English titles describe black corridors, fog, scissors, dreams, snow and nearly motionless sadness. Shorter pieces pass like glimpses between the longer zones, giving the disc a fragmented, nocturnal logic. Synthesizer tones and stretched resonances seem to look upward, but this is not clean, weightless space music. The cosmic elements remain attached to wooden floors, metal edges and cold ground. Space is imagined from a rural location where the stars are visible because artificial light has receded.

That mixture of earth and cosmos gives the project unusual emotional range. Harsh noise frequently treats beauty as weakness, while dark ambient can polish fear into attractive scenery. The Day of the Antler allows abrasion and beauty to remain mutually dependent. A distressed tone may carry grief rather than aggression. A luminous drone can be interrupted by corroded impact without either element canceling the other. Melancholy does not arrive as relief from the noise; it is embedded inside the same weathered surfaces.

The third disc joins Monumentti with material from the split release, pushing the music toward structures that feel commemorative and ruinous. A monument is intended to resist time, but these pieces sound as though the act of weathering began during construction. Repetition gives them mass while distortion continually erodes their edges. The long paired “Monumentti” pieces act as central pillars, surrounded by shorter works whose titles introduce blood, mountains, power and flashes in the northern sky. The landscape is no longer merely observed. It has become a site where memory, violence and mythology accumulate.

The final disc, Veri, Tuli, Kuolema—blood, fire, death—is the collection’s most openly mechanized section. Titles refer to armored colossi, steel chaos, caterpillar tracks, flesh, swords and night witches. The military language is not presented with the clarity of martial industrial music built around marching samples and polished bombast. It arrives through distorted weight, clanking rhythm and crude forward movement. Machinery appears enormous but damaged, dragging itself through mud rather than advancing in a clean parade.

The ending, “Mankind Emerging From the Branches,” brings the collection’s recurring conflict into one image. Humanity does not emerge from a laboratory or city but from branches, already connected to an older living structure. Yet the preceding discs have demonstrated what follows that emergence: tools, ritual, monuments, vehicles, warfare, electrical signals and the transformation of land into material. The project does not resolve whether civilization is a continuation of nature or a rupture from it. It makes the two conditions audible at once.

Pentti Dassum’s gentle mastering respects the cassette origins. The recordings have been made coherent enough to inhabit a box together, but their roughness has not been scrubbed away. Tape saturation, uneven density and blurred edges remain part of the sound. This restraint matters because the original limitations are not defects awaiting correction. They are the conditions through which the project developed its character. Cassette murk helps collapse differences between synthesizer, field recording, metal contact and environmental noise.

As an archival object, Rural Industrial 2016–2020 does more than rescue rare tapes from obscurity. It reveals continuity across work that originally appeared in scattered, handmade editions. Heard together, the recordings describe a complete territory: frozen ground beneath celestial light, machinery among trees, rituals performed beside scrap metal, and human memory embedded in materials that will eventually outlast it. The box gives that territory boundaries without domesticating it. Four discs and a booklet impose order, but inside them the weather, machines, soil and ghosts continue interfering with one another. The Day of the Antler’s rural industrial sound is not a fantasy of returning to nature. It is the sound of discovering that nature, technology and history have already grown together.

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.