In spite of its title, the first solo album by Steve Goodman aka Kode9, the man behind the curtains of the excellent Hyperdub, is not really a devotional act to nihilism. Many musicians and sound artists prefer to refer to their recording studio as proper laboratories, as the connection between science and sound is closer than someone could guess and the work on sound parameters could look like the one of a scientist which test different conditions for an experiment; Kode 9 seems to build a sonic bridge between his sonic science and quantum mechanics, but you don't need to know quantum field theory or other matters to appreciate Kode9's output, even if I could say as an occasional reader of that branch of literature where more or less notorious theoretical physicist try to make the matter easier for common people, "Nothing" could enhance any peak over some interesting scientific ridges: the opening "Zero Point Energy", which got ignited by colliding metallic electrons before a sort of black hole (simply a distorted bass) swallows the track, as well as many other sticky sonic grids like the perfectly cut "Holo" - a really impressive output that he made by modified female vocals, synth sound, sub-bass pulsations and astonishing percussive elements -, the gorgeous "Zero Work" - a sort of strange artifact from some unknown planet in between future dubstep and footwork -, the trap-like computational chains of "Notel" and "Vacuum Packed", the rhythmical beat-driven rolling of "Respirator" where a human breathe sounds like overlapping the radar picture of cosmic breathe, the funny ping-pong of samples on "Casimir Effect" or the masterfully remake of "9 Samurai" (together with Spaceape), one of the best moment of his first steps that he renamed as "9 Drones" immediately launch listeners into this sort of augmented hyperreality, where the joy of discovery and the concern of human mind in front of the Infinite coexist. Likewise catchy, the memory of his friend and partner-in-art Spaceape, who died after a prolonged battle against cancer in 2014, is another strong feeder of this great album: he seems to live again on the track "Third Ear Transmission" in the shape of an immortal digital entity which managed to find a broadcasting channel from the afterlife dimension that he already knows, as well as in the enchanting "Void", a tune which was originally made for the vocalist, and the final "Nothing Lasts Forever", whose whimsical electric overture got pulverized by the 9 minutes of silence that follow...

One of the first beating of wings by Melbourne-based label Plasma Audio was "Yoga", a track by which DJ Gove Kidao aka Sabre combined sinister catchy sonorities and bouncing wonky beats; the label recently decided to reprise it and include that tune in a release, which includes a couple of remixes of a young wizard of drum 'n' bass scene, the Noth-London-based Belgian DJ and producer Alix Depauw aka Alix Perez, who already collaborated with Sabre on some beat-driven sonic patterns. Both his Club mix and his Warped mix features a higher ratio of inertia as the elements of the original version sound more burdened with distortion, an aspect which got slightly mitigated by wider echo and reverberation as well as by some funny collisions of "bumps" against "swishes" on the first one, which I mostly prefer for shrewdly inoculated embellishments.

The fact I'm writing one day before the 103rd "birthday" (even if passed away in 1984) of the Swiss-born sound artist, composer and brilliant inventor of new instrument Walter Smetak is a pure coincidence. As the well-informed should know, he mainly lived and worked in Brasil and his inventiveness as well as his "pioneering spirit", spurred by the alchemical belief that music and sound were nothing but mediums to reach different levels of knowledge and awareness, had a strong influence on the birth of the so-called Tropicalia or Tropicalismo - named after "Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis", a collaborative album by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil - in the late 60ies, which fused popular and traditional aspects of Brazilian culture with avant-garde and "exotic" elements. Walter Smetak could be considered the main source of inspiration of Marco Scarassatti, who inherited both the spiritual framework, which has been the subject of his essay "Walter Smetak, the alchemist of sounds" (Perspective/SESC, 2008), and his knack of making new musical instruments, but after listening to this "Novelo Eletrico", where he used some of his inventions, I could say there are even some stylistic similarities - if you check Smetak's self-named album that came out on Philips in 1974, you can easily notice them -. I can't really say how a flugelsax cretino, a magnum chaos, an ikebana-flor, an ovni or an harpa paleolitica - some of the instruments used by Marco - work, but I can check how they sound in the five tracks of this album: I particularly enjoyed "dream work", a tribute to the well-known short film by Peter Tscherkassky, as it sounds as hypnotical and hallucinatory as that kind of video art, and the oblique sonorities of the final "magnum chaos's portrait", but the other moments of this release are likewise interesting.

Anytime I listen to something by Spanish sound artist Ferran Fages, who gained some acknowledgements in the improv scene for a set of interesting experiments mainly on electronic devices but also on turntables and guitars, I have the impression he manages to enhance silent brakes in between more or less drone-like sounds. On the occasion of this release, he co-signed with Ernesto Rodrigues, who inserted some snippet of more or less modified tones of his viola, you could imagine that those silent brakes is the field recording they took in the middle of some street, which features the 37-minutes lasting track and is the really pervasive elements of this recording, where their inserts (I'm not sure they recorded and inserted in different moments or simultaneously, even if I could guess Ferran and Ernesto put their resounding stuff in different moments as the linear notes say that "CRU" was recorded in Barcelona in 2013 and in Lisbon in 2014) could be like thoughts or feelings in between the overwhelming and somehow disturbing "silence" of road traffic noise, which managed to interrupt the stream of consciousness of the sentient passer-by or bystander. It's neither an exhibition of samples nor of compositional skills, but it could be considered a likewise fascinating listening experience.

The mixing board of Alexey Sysoev has no input, but its hissing white noise sounds like a fog which gradually submerge the hits on piano's strings and board by Yury Favorin and the strangled sound that got emitted by Konstantin Sukhan's trumpet, two instruments which are closer to somehow phantasmagorical entities in the rising magnetic saturation of seemingly empty noises or I could rather match them to dangerously radioactive objects, whose radioactivity got measured by the noises coming from the mixer in the first part of this release. The second part got ignited by the ringing noise of a sort of broken intercom, where this skilled sound artists implanted a set of almost disturbing interferences, a sort of metallic chewing and locking that got supposedly derived from piano elements, a wheezing tone of trumpet and occasional hits on piano keys by rendering an electrically charged cloud, which gets more and more evanescent, but the peak of compression got reached on the third and last part of this output, where the three sonic entities seem to mirror the noises of invisible bugs in a nocturnal urban scape. Anyway don't try to look for a meaning of what these guys made while Maxim Khaikin recorded their sessions in Moscow (it dates back the 1st of July 2014), as It Do(es)n't Mean a Thing and this kind of intellectual honesty can only be appreciated.