TranscendNoise

40. Gas – Rausch  Like many albums of this year´s list, Rausch represents a way to channel the recent Zeitgeist in sound. Gas build Rausch to grapple with the ideas of home, nationalism and right-wing sentiments, hijacking them for their absurd politics for a visceral thump that overrides any sense of comfort and meaningful discourse. The best description there is, is placing yourself, sonically, on the fringes of a Volksfest and experiencing the same sounds and affects as Rausch in its 60-minute runtime. The instinctive stomp, the musicality of feet marching lurking in the back all the time, surfacing for acute minutes of semblance, horror, even warmth to die out again and get lost in the miasma of sound that Wolfgang Voigt creates. Rausch evokes two distinct feelings and collapses them for a political and social statement: The feeling of ecstasy and the feeling of stark discomfort that can only exist in traditionalism and the untraceable affect of your environment going sour...

60. James Ginzburg – Above Water, Inside (Six Correlations) As on half of emptyset, the modus operandi of Ginzburg on Six Correlations might sound familiar if you listened to their last album Borders in 2017. Here Ginzburg tones down the distortion and emphasis on colliding organic and synthetic for a different relation of these two parts. There is no dichotomy between them, yet Six Correlations was born as part of a performance that deals with the disappearance of an analog and natural world in favor of the digital and networked. Maybe it is the intrinsic failure of this theme that sets "Above Water, Inside" and Six Correlations in motion in the first place. Build from a simple drum pattern, clear drone, and white noise weave and breathe around to convey an effect of overtaking the organic sounds. Still, as in Borders and Ginzburg and Paurgas concept of overriding electronic sound made through acoustic means of triggering sounds, there is no part overtaking the other,...