As electroacoustic, classical, and experimental electronic worlds collide on the collaborative album I by Musique Infinie, a rich, intricate, yet fundamentally minimalist style crystalizes.

Frida and the Filibusters Bid Farewell and Fall Asunder embodies the anarchic energy and radical inclusivity that makes DIY music feel like home. As a live record, listeners are given a front row seat to CIME’s molotov cocktail of noise rock, freak folk, jazz, funk, Latin music, and art punk. While their sound is already explosive in-studio, CIME’s live work is even more intense and captivating. Conga percussion and swells of alto saxophone back Monty Cime’s expressive vocals, her voice strained to its limits in a performance that would draw any porch-dwellers back inside the house to catch this unmissable set.

Where church tradition depicts such moments with choirs and organs, both musical elements with a clean, open sound that soars high above our physical bodies, Saint Elisabeth exhibits a willingness to engage with Jesus and Francis’s shared bodily nature.

From just behind the horizon, however, a slow yet certain march encroaches, bringing with it bulletproof bureaucracy, unsolvable resource shortages, and factory farms.

With an anxious and in-your-face approach, ni downright refuses to fit in any one category as they explore techniques in black metal, avante-garde jazz, math rock, psychedelic prog metal, and more across this 10-track run.

As an end result, these typically straightforward words become these abstract masses that convey more of a feeling than an actual concrete meaning.

Of course, the loose cannon vocals are this record’s crowning jewel, stringing together shrill screams, throaty yells, defeated speech, and wailing singing to tell a story of a deeply troubled person in the midst of a mental breakdown.

Overall, the record only takes a cautious step forward when that step brings the sound more in tune with the flow of the world, a design philosophy that makes the integration of field samples so seamless as to be nearly unnoticeable.

Pulling elements from industrial music and dark techno, these sounds are deconstructed down to their base elements and reformed to create highly textured beats and an atmosphere of unrestrained chaos.

Gossamer synths and hazy samples set an ephemeral tone, as hypnotic looping tracks paired with washed-out vocals create a sense of disorientation that only immerses the listener deeper into this world.

With angular synth riffs and steady, resonating percussion, the high energy coldwave instrumentation is paired with emotive shouting vocals to deliver the sound of frustrated EBM.

Shadows from the Walls of Death recounts the process of learning that the Victorian era’s beloved ornate wallpapers actually contained debilitating levels of arsenic. Throughout the record, the experimental duo puts us in the shoes of Icarus as he feels his wingtips get grazed by the sun, crystallizing the feeling that at some point everything extraordinary and beautiful eventually starts doing more harm than good.

No matter how much diversity Princess Thailand serves up in their style, each moment still exists mainly to raise our blood pressure and give a voice to our directionless anger.

Each sound gets treated to its own acoustic space, resulting in a mosaic that blends together into the type of strange image that we experience with our senses at all times.

Throughout the record, the expert sound design inherent in the drone metal tradition helps mold the artistic direction, both when the band meditates on sparse chords and when they’re tightly executing whiplash-inducing mathcore segments.

Deep in the shadows cast by lo-fi crunch, accessible, catchy indie rock songs morph into something much more sinister, something more emblematic of severe depression than of winter melancholia.

With a heart-wrenching atmosphere and expressive lyrics portraying each victim’s final moments, this mournful release is a must-listen for fans of DSBM.

Songwriting from the garage rock revival and production from the lo-fi era join forces to create Busy with People by Zoos of Berlin, a deep, brooding indie record that stacks layers of distortion upon their pop sensibilities.

Seeing this subconscious rhythm externalized inspires us to listen even when the music stops, to find ways of remaining in tune with the world when there’s no drum in our ear to keep us in line.

Immediately, the infusion of indie rock songwriting sensibilities shakes the straightforward dance tropes out of the Darkwave sound, and from there the band introduces dashes of noise tones and jazz chords to encourage a further departure from the worlds of both indie and darkwave.