Incapacitants / Chants Of The Dilapidated - untitled
Cassette, Marbre Negre, 2025. Edition of 77 copies.
This harsh noise split tapes lasts for about 20 minutes per side. It's well dubbed and otherwise pro-made too, although I found the artwork's building photos unexciting.
Japan's Incapacitants come first with vivid layers of harsh distortion, submerged rumbles and clearer, more distinctively electronic and even lazery sounds. There's a lot going on in endless motion and the sound choices aren't the dullest ones, but for whatever reason this doesn't really grab my attention. It might be due to the main distortion being a bit weak, like static, so instead of boosting the more distinctive sounds it slightly tones them down. That said, were this a recording by some new project instead of a legend like Incapacitants, I might be less critical of it. Who knows.
In all honesty I am not really familiar with Incapacitants as it hasn't seemed like the type of noise I'd be that much into. While their material here is good, it's not something I'd get actually excited over, or at least that hasn't happened to me yet. Same goes for their split CD with Savage Gospel which I found pretty disappointing on both bands' parts. I've still kept it in my collection though, to re-evaluate it later on.
On the flipside there's a much younger project Chants Of The Dilapitated from Spain. Their part is an untitled rehearsal live of raw and gritty harsh noise. It was captured without any additional mixing, mastering or editing, which is apparently their trusted method. Despite the boneheaded approach, with additional listens it started to reveal more shapes and depth than just a flood of raw distortion. That said, for the main part it certainly is just that. They are a duo just like Incapacitants, so they have enough hands to keep things moving and changing despite the surface being all about rough grit.
While I was initially a bit indifferent about the recording and its style, and their sound palette is intentionally quite limited, it has started to sound better with each spin. I hope the duo keeps honing their style and will create even more effective releases in the future.
Mathieu Sylvestre - Happy Among The Nuts
Cassette, Alrealon Musique, 2024. Edition of 100 copies.
This visually stylish, perhaps even "high art -vibed" cassette doesn't offer much in the sense of infos, and the same goes for the publisher's bandcamp page for the tape. Maybe the sound is intended to speak for itself. The German artist performed in Finland in 2025, and while I wasn't at the gigs, I guess it's through those events that this tape eventually trickled down to me.
The tape offers two untitled 15-minute tracks (or more likely a continuous track that's just been split in the middle), and the gear used to make them are listed as electronics, loopers, modular synth, and tape and field recordings. The tracks are abstract wanderings that rely on their own internal logic, and for the most part that works fine for them. The tape is at its best when it operates on two levels of sound at once. For example, at times it offers some hoarse ambience, a spatial field recording, or a heartbeat-like slow pulsing as a counterpoint or backdrop to more fragile and thin crackles and electronically modified physical source sounds. At those moments it manages to grasp you both on levels of atmosphere and individual sounds.
While I wouldn't call this music fragile on a whole, it often feels thinner and lighter than I'd like it to. While it's regularly more or less enveloping in the sense of ambient or punchy in the sense of more direct electronics, too often it's neither and just flows right by you. The thin feel of the sounds makes some parts of the tape too easy to dismiss. The dubbing quality is luckily great so the cassette sounds good even at those moments. I also like that instead of slowly dissolving or weakening, the tape offers some of its most interesting combinations of field recordings, abstract sounds and electronics near its end. Still, I'd like to hear more focused tracks that'd explore the tape's singular ideas further, or a recording that would be more strictly curated by just rudely cutting out the less interesting parts.
Ieskadulla - Pakkala
Cassette, Satatuhatta, 2024. Edition of 120 copies.
This Finnish unit's debut tape was first self-published in 2024 as an edition of just 20 copies, but luckily the good people of Satatuhatta took action and made a larger reissue edition during the same year. The tape has a very simple layout with somewhat odd track titles and liner notes, or at least my brains weren't capable of fishing out any clear context out of them.
I saw a lot of praise about this tape already before it got reissued, and the reasons for that came evident fast after pushing the play button. Similarly as the textual side, the tape's sound jumps at you from nowhere, and does it LOUD. I don't know if it was how the original recording was or if it has gotten more condensed in the dubbing process, but the tape's two 10-minute slabs of harsh noise are quite thickly compressed. While I'm sure some tones have sunken beneath the sound pressure, the restlessly fluctuating songs still aren't one-dimensional nor flat, and they're certainly appropriately loud and noisy! It's not just a wall of sound though, and especially after a couple of spins you start paying more attention to the elements creating the mass: distorted radio programs or some other spoken samples, synth warbles and screeches, rattling of metal, and other harder to define elements. For the most part, it's the spasming totality of the flooding noise mass that creates the effect, though, rather than any single sound source.
The tracks don't become cut-up noise aside of some short sections, but the tape remains restlessly active and vivid throughout its length. The different sound sources have been layered with good taste, so your ears will constantly have enough to hear and process through. Despite being a quite total barrage for most of its length, the tracks also know when to tone things down a bit. So, while it's not wall noise, it's certainly not an excercise in subtlety either. But most importantly, it's a damn strong debut tape!
Commando 15 - Vauhkola
Cassette, Satatuhatta, 2023. Edition of 100 copies.
The Finnish noise solo project Commando 15 appeared seemingly out of nowhere in 2023, and quickly caught the interest of the local scene. This interest was already warranted by his short but skillfully crafted debut tape Radio Free Bothnia (Freak Animal, 2023), and his later releases have further displayed his skill and dedication to making raw yet nuanced noise.
As much as I appreciate the project's 2024 releases Inner Insurgency Manual CD (Freak Animal) and Bothnia Metaphysica tape (Satatuhatta) with their minimalistic and rough noise, for me the project's highlight release is this perhaps even more minimalistic tape from 2023. While I found the two aforementioned releases to be defined by their fierce and ripping metal sounds that cut like a rusted sawblade, this one is much more subtle and subdued. It is largely built of very analog rattling and rumbling distortion and sharp feedback, but these seemingly basic tools are used with such control, patience and understanding of nuance that the end result is quite impressive to behold.
Despite being very raw, the sounds never jump at you: they weave and slither, they roar and rumble, but do so in a manner where their full power is never unleashed. I'm not sure what kind of tools have been used, as sometimes the sound breaks and crackles like it was captured with a half-broken microphone - yet considering the amount of control displayed, using such unpredictable tools doesn't seem that likely. Either way, the broken crackle further obscures the source sounds, and make the release seem like a newly found recording from decades ago.
If you want raw noise for active and patient listening, I recommend this tape and Radio Free Bothnia, and for when you want to be more thoroughly sliced by physical noise I recommend the two releases from 2024. All are good and carry their scars with pride.
