Unapologetically Strange

Different Noises 144

This selection moves through the frayed edges of the underground, shifting from abrasive textures and brooding narratives into moments of experimental clarity. Whether navigating the frantic energy of the opening tracks or the deliberate, intricate arrangements of the latter half, the atmosphere remains consistently unyielding. This music is dense, evocative, and unapologetically strange.

AUDIO

PLAYLIST

• Black Market Heart - What Happens In The Dark - What Happens In The Dark ¹

• The Red Propellers - Given The Circumstances (Remix) - Not Holding The Centre ²

• Occult Character - Skull Cult - Prayer For Death ³

• Xenonaut - Shedding Sun - Shedding Sun ⁴

• Aziola Cry - Withdrawn and Alone - Dysphoria Ritual ⁵

• Nequient - Mad King/Fool - Avarice ⁶

• Lydia Lunch & Marc Hurtado - Rocket USA - Metempsychosis: Reincarnate the Music of Alan Vega + Suicide ⁷

• Lowsunday - This Is Not Heaven - This Is Not Heaven ⁸

• 5pm to Nowhere - Stasis 1946 - Stasis 1946 ⁹

• David McClymont - Nothing To Say - Nothing To Say ¹⁰

• Prymek & Sage - Shelter From - Shelter ¹¹

• Cédric Dind-Lavoie - Chrysalide - Collages (2019–2022) ¹²

• D.J. Sparr - The Zen Of Muhammed Ali - The Tao of Muhammad Ali ¹³

• Ittai Shapira - Hila Plitmann - Reunion Celebration - Chunghyang ¹⁴

• Geoffrey Gordon - Creavit Deus Hominem I. Still - Fumée ¹⁵

• Totoabas - bladders, bloody bladders! - Winter Spawning ¹⁶

• Amanda Irarrázabal - Esterismo - Imprimiendo ¹⁷

• Roberto Fabbriciani - Pantomima - Fleuno ¹⁸

• Hooper - Graduation - Super Duper ¹⁹

• Jody Glenham - Love Deficiency Syndrome - Still Here ²⁰

• Cam Butler - Clear Infinity - World Forever ²¹

• The Middle People - Can You Feel The Moment - Can You Feel The Moment: Best Of The Middle People ²²

• The Greenberry Woods - Lame Love Letter - It’s All Good, Sugar ²³

• Julia Greenberg - Leaves - Leaves ²⁴

• Lydia Lunch & Marc Hurtado - Touch Me - Metempsychosis: Reincarnate the Music of Alan Vega + Suicide ²⁵

• The Go-Betweens - Sleeping Giant - G Stands For Go-Betweens: The Go-Betweens Anthology - Volume 3 ²⁶

• Dave Graney and Clare Moore - MY ESV (Estimated Street Value) - Laburnum of the Mind ²⁷

• Moff Skellington - Where The Water Makes Things Appear Closer - Dawn Ablutions ²⁸

• The Dream Syndicate - Forest for the Trees (Live at Roskilde Festival, Denmark,1986) - Live Through the Past, Darkly ²⁹

NOTES

1. Los Angeles post-punk trio Black Market Heart returned on April 14, 2026 with their new full-length, What Happens in the Dark, arriving alongside a new video for the title track. The record finds guitarist and vocalist Spencer Robinson and drummer Shawn Medina, both formerly of The Lords of Altamont, joined by bassist and vocalist Tina Brugnoletti, pushing deeper into a sound that feels wired, nocturnal, and slightly unhinged.

2. A remix of a track from their recent album by Will Stokes of Voka Gentle featuring saxophonist Chris Cundy.  James says “We were thinking of how the Stooges used saxophone on the Fun House record”.

3. Mr Nauseous is back with a new Occult Character mini-album, exclusive to subvert.fm and free to Subvert.fm members. 7 songs, 17 min. Weirdo, gothy spoken word over lo-fi electronics.

4. The third single from the Cambridge based three piece. More instrument swapping from the band with Graeme Clarke now on guitar, Emily Rendell now on bass and Neil Bruce on drums

5. An instrumental progressive rock trio featuring Warr guitarist Jason Blake, guitarist Mike Milaniak, and drummer Tommy Murray. Known for blending technical precision with dynamic, composition-driven writing, the band has carved out a distinctive voice within the modern progressive music landscape. This is their second album.

6. Avarice is the quartet’s third full-length album, the culmination of more than a decade spent evolving their unique synthesis of extreme metal and hardcore in the depths of the aggressive music underground. Honing the adventurous song-writing and lyrical venom exhibited on previous releases.

7. Lydia Lunch and Marc Hurtado collaborate to create a tribute to Alan Vega and Suicide. Through the film Metempsychosis, they deconstruct the primal rhythms and industrial minimalism of the New York underground, reimagining iconic tracks with Lunch’s confrontational delivery and Hurtado’s hypnotic electronics.

8. Back after a quarter-century, the Pittsburgh “retro-futurist” pioneers return with their latest single ‘This Is Not Heaven’, previewing their ‘Low Sunday Ghost Machine - Black EP’ via Projekt Records. The darker counterpart to its critically acclaimed ‘White EP’ which secured the #2 spot on Post-Punk.com’s Best EPs of 2025—this release completes a powerful “duality” cycle for original members Shane Sahene and Bobby Spell.

9. 5pm to Nowhere are turning the page following the release of their debut album, City of Light. “Stasis 1946” serves as the suspenseful introduction to the next leg of the band’s journey, wrapping the listener in murky uncertainty as they leave the safety and stability of their home behind. Soft and anxious verses give way to hooky and hopeful choruses, balancing the nostalgia and unease of liminal spaces while telling a tale of being trapped in limbo and unsure of the future.

10. One off single of which there is little information, so here is the Bandcamp link

11. A sprawling pastoral meditation built for high elevations from the duo of Chaz Prymek & Matthew Sage. Slowly layered with sparse overdubs – yearning slide guitar, accordion, clarinet, recorder, delicate synthesizers – and sateen production treatments, the core of the album is a series of first take live improvisations with Prymek on electric guitar and Sage on piano.

12. Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Cédric Dind-Lavoie returns with “Chrysalide,” a textural, comforting, and quietly melancholic instrumental piece that moves between shelter and transformation. Rooted in folktronica and electroacoustic exploration, the track unfolds like a memory. Intimate, enveloping, and gently evolving, it’s taken from Cédric’s upcoming album, Collages (2019–2022), a new series of studio explorations and reinterpretations of music originally created for contemporary dance and documentary film.

13. The Tao of Muhammad Ali began as music for a podcast, but in the hands of composer D. J. Sparr, it has been reborn as an intimate commentary on an extraordinary life. Stripped of narration and reimagined for the album format, these pieces form a single arc: an invocation, a walk through the shadow of mortality, and a peaceful return. The score was originally written in collaboration with author and narrator Davis Miller, whose memoir traces his life-transforming friendship with boxing legend and larger-than-life persona, Muhammad Ali (1942-2016).

14. Soprano, violin, and orchestra join forces in this intimate epic from long ago and far away (but relevant to here and now). Acclaimed violinist and composer Ittai Shapira’s Chunhyang features two-time Grammy Award-winning soprano Hila Plitmann and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Florin Parvulescu in a dramatic concerto inspired by a 400-year-old tale of female empowerment, love, resilience, and hope. A sweeping narrative work, Chunhyang (2019) reimagines Korea’s most famous folktale—the story of a woman’s unwavering virtue in the face of authoritarian corruption—through a unique global musical lens.

15. Smoke, sometimes, gets in your ears. Neuma Records announces the release of Fumée, featuring world premiere recordings of three major orchestral works by British-American composer Geoffrey Gordon. Each composition transforms visual art into music: Willem de Kooning’s explosive Abstract Expressionism, a haunting Belle Époque chanson, and the early-20th-century Synchromist movement’s “colour orchestration” all find new life through Gordon’s vividly imagined scores.

16. After many years of working together on the purely recording based project Binaural Camping — during which they explored and interpreted various acoustically interesting industrial or sacred spaces through mutual performative interaction — Petr Vrba and Zdeněk Závodný decided to build on binaural camping with a concert project. One of the impulses for this step was, among other things, the meeting of two instruments of Scottish provenance in both musicians’ inventories: Instruo electronic modules and Scottish bagpipes. The project places emphasis on structured and partially composed playing, with layers of drones and repetitive rhythmic patterns that both musicians shape in order to create a pulsating musical matter.

17. Amanda Irarrázabal’s new album weaves together the mechanical rhythms and textures of paper printers - recorded on site at two working printing houses in Santiago, Chile, in March 2025 - with later studio improvisations that respond to, reshape, and collide with these sounds, developed at the Disonaureo studio in Santiago in July 2025.

18. Italian flautist Roberto Fabbriciani’s Rattle debut is a beautifully performed and recorded celebration of his own compositions. Despite being composed many years apart and in a variety of situations, his music conveys a compelling stylistic homogeneity, expressing a precise and spherical sense of form and coherence that might otherwise—by its very nature—tend towards the nebulous and elusive.

19. Super Duper, the debut LP from Hooper, feels like a record that has been lived in long before it ever reached tape. It is his most intentional and fully realized work yet, drawing from the melodic, story-rich tradition of ’60s singer-songwriters and filtering it through a scrappy, imperfect ’90s lens. The result is warm, worn-in, and deeply human, with songs that feel both carefully crafted and effortlessly loose.

20. Still Here, Jody Glenham’s self-produced EP, released April 24, 2026, marks a new chapter in her nearly two-decade career, centreing on emotional endurance and creative maturity. Moving beyond the immediacy and mood of her past work, the collection emphasizes patience and presence, weaving hazy guitars, door-chime synths, and dreamy vocals into a cohesive, timeless set of songs.

21. ‘World Forever’ is a Heavy Machinery Records commissioned work and was released May 1st. Butlers work exudes personality at every moment. His immediately identifiable guitar sound, his artful command of distortion, timbre, and texture is used to consistently powerful effect, the result an intoxicating display of guitar wizardry. Clear Infinity introduces us to the imposing sounds of the Melbourne Town Hall’s Grand Organ within the tracks first moments. Shifting to then showcase a 28 piece string section paired with Butler’s singular guitar tone which is a signature feature across all his solo projects, conjuring complex and beautifully captivating orchestral-like guitar webs of sound.

22. With three albums under their collective belt since Mikey Georgeson (David Devant & His Spirit Wife) & António Olaio (Repórter Estrábico) first met in 2024, it is high time for a Best Of The Middle People compilation. Gathering tracks from Revenge Of The Killjoys, Dogmatists In Disguise, and even one from last year’s Christmas With The Middle People holiday album, Can You Feel The Moment: Best Of The Middle People also adds a trio of new songs to bring more ‘Art-Pop Joy’.

23. Their first new album since their two widely-revered mid-’90s Sire Records releases. A rich bounty of sterling songwriting, hooks, and harmonies that’s every bit the equal of their vintage classics, and a complement to last year’s acclaimed album Mobtown by the equally-beloved GBW splinter band Splitsville

24. NYC-based singer-songwriter Julia Greenberg presents her new single ‘Leaves’, an uplifting track that feels remarkably hopeful despite being written amidst the quiet wreckage of personal loss. Mastering the art of letting go, she offers a poignant reminder that some seasons simply cannot be held captive. This is a hauntingly graceful prelude to her ‘Born Sentimental’ EP, slated for June release via New Jersey’s Magic Door Record Label.

25. as 7.

26. Featured Box Set

27. Opening track from the new album

28. Featured album

29. Featured album