Bandcamp’s outer limits continue to be a rewarding place for psychedelia, experimental club music, noise, vaporwave, and other sounds that are wholly uncategorizable. In each edition of Acid Test, Miles Bowe explores its far reaches to dig up hidden gems and obscure oddities. This June, we explore a sonically crushing album inspired by Tibetan Buddhist meditation; a fiery collision of guitar and saxophone; melted psychedelia; and a concert recorded in a shower.
C. Lavender
Rupture In The Eternal Realm
Compact Disc (CD)
The work of sound artist C. Lavender can be colossal and compact all at once. While 2020’s Myth of Equilibrium approached “healing music” through earthshaking drones, her incredible follow-up, Rupture In The Eternal Realm, feels pressurized, as moments of crushing intensity crack open into colorful inner worlds. Using Buchla synthesizer, gongs, and otherworldly sound processing, Lavender builds sprawling pieces like “Melt Into The Light” and “The Blue Expanse” that make subtle sweeping shifts feel tectonic. Those contrast with moments that are as immediate as a lightning storm—like “A Billion Worlds,” where a bed of quietly rippling synths gives way to a blaring electronic fanfare. Inspired by Tibetan Buddhist meditative practices, Rupture In The Eternal Realm feels just as raw, gripping, and authentic as its predecessor, while evolving in entirely new ways.
Wilted Woman
What’s Her Secret
T-Shirt/Shirt
Wilted Woman, aka producer Elizabeth Davis, reaches an alluringly eerie peak with What’s Her Secret. The creeping chamber music of opener “You Don’t Want To Know” and the stark buzzing electronics of “Two Airs Meet” conjure such heady, absorbing atmospheres that they give the veteran techno producer’s shifts towards rhythms an intoxicating pull. “Steppin Out” emerges with prickling drums and a broken piano melody that brings to mind a Fabio Frizzi horror score, while “Pinch Me” ratchets up tension with nothing more than a few twinkling synths. As its cleverly titled closer “What’s My Secret?” makes clear in its playful electroacoustic flutters, What’s Her Secret remains unknowably mysterious, while feeling immaculately constructed.
Porta d’Oro
Cos Dentro Come Fuori
Vinyl LP, 2 x Vinyl LP
Italian songwriter Giacomo Stefanini, who records music as Porta d’Oro, delivers an ideal summer album with the melted psychedelia of Cos Dentro Come Fuori. Stefanini’s arrangements of drum machine, Casio keyboards, and guitar bring to mind Joe Meek and Lee “Scratch” Perry filtered through crumbling tape-decks. Yet for all that sonic haze, these tracks feel intensely focused, from the playful rhythms and harmonics ringing through “O Sentiero Futuro” to the warm, organ-flooded title track. Meanwhile, Stefanini’s compelling monotone stretches across messy punk songs like “Bleah” and the tender keyboard vignette “Là,” before finding a perfect Alan Vega groove on the sprawling “Notte E Giorno.” Closing on the dark atmospheric tension of “Tutto Crolla,” gives Cos Dentro Come Fuori both a suddenly chilly ending and an eerie preview of what could come next.
Actress
Statik
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Less than a year after the sprawling, multilayered LXXXVIII, Darren Cunningham spoils us with another Actress album, and another seamless shift. Statik is steely and featherlight, bridging the oblique mystery of R.I.P. or Ghettoville with the immediacy and euphoria of Splazsh and AZD. While “Ray” and “Dolphin Spray” stand out with their vibrant drums, each delicate vignette locks together like a jigsaw puzzle made of the thinnest glass. The pieces here range from the music-box whispers of “My Ways” to the shimmering tension of “System Verse” or the brief title track that passes like a cloud. Following several sweeping albums that felt like repositories for all of Actress’s unique forms to that point, Statik is thrilling in the way Cunningham tightens his frame and tunnels into a new soundworld. It doesn’t sound quite like anything Actress has made, but feels like it’s always been there.
Byron Westbrook
Translucents
Compact Disc (CD)
On Byron Westbrook’s new album Translucents, the electroacoustic composer fuses passages of modular and digital synthesizer, field recordings, and tape across a single towering track. But the 41-minute “Translucents” never feels beholden to its gargantuan structure, and builds off the stormy vignettes of its excellent 2021 predecessor Distortion Hue. Every thrilling shift towards a foggy drone, flaring synth—or, in one dramatic moment, handclaps emerging from an inky silence—feels like Westbrook is intimately exploring fragments of the one vast space.
cc cv lt ss s
carpet event blue
For over a decade, Cvlts has quietly evolved across hazy bedroom guitar recordings, steely electronics, and chintzy lounge music. Even the project’s name—presented here as cc cv lt ss s—has gradually twisted out of shape. It’s a fitting form for carpet event blue, a record that wrings anxiety from a narrow palette of synths. Small, blinking electronics conjure vast cavernous spaces on tracks like “event” or opener “ca,” where a puttering motor provides an ominous undercurrent. Yet for all the tension carpet event blue builds in its first half, the final two tracks effortlessly release it. “Bl” places a crunchy slowly looping synth over a dreamy soundscape for 10 hypnotic minutes, before the immaculately icy techno of “ue” ties everything together. And it’s only in reaching that ending, so far from where it began, that you really appreciate carpet event blue’s brilliant arc.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Recessed Draughting
Compact Disc (CD)
In recent years, composer and modular synthesist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe has crafted excellent musical scores for everything from the horror movie Candyman (2021) to the documentary series Telemarketers (2023). So it’s a joy to find this transporting collection of modular synth-and-voice pieces he made over that same span. But Recessed Draughting feels as unique from Lowe’s concurrent scores as it does his work as Lichens decades earlier, or his previous years-in-the-making collection Mind Kontrol from 2020. The deeply moving textures of “The Drift (Fractus),” the percussive “Ataraxic Rotation,” and the knotty synth clusters of “Occurences” all make gripping moments in an album that snapshots a particularly beautiful period in Lowe’s constantly growing work.
Ponomarev / Obrazeena Massacre
Sonic Oblivion
Compact Disc (CD)
Anton Ponomarev and Anton Obrazeena join forces as P/O Massacre on this fiery collision of guitar, brass, and electronics. The pair take their time building volcanic tension between each thunderous guitar riff of 39-minute opener “Progressive Collapse.” But Sonic Oblivion’s immensity is not only defined by its searing peaks: “Love Waves” is a storm of feedback and blaring saxophone, with its central guitar riff steadily blinking like a lighthouse; elsewhere, “Nonslaught” turns the volume down for nearly 30 minutes of spindly guitar riffs and breathy pocket trumpet. It all finds an airy, ominous ending in “Kirkenes-Tromsø,” where digital electronics seem to swallow up Ponomarev, Obrazeena, and all their instruments in a plume of smoke.
Aaron With
A Bridged Comprendium of Many Folds
Compact Disc (CD)
Multimedia artist Aaron With has previously worked as one-half of the Mexico City duo Pidgins alongside percussionist Milo Tamez. On A Bridged Comprendium of Many Folds, the composer takes us through a sprawling hour-long journey of liquid environmental music and spoken word. With’s mercurial sounds and eerie electronically manipulated wordplay constantly poke holes in any New Age vibes, filling this hour with marvelous sounds, unexpected humor, and vivid imagery.
Basil Neptune
10 Minute Shower Noodle
Vinyl LP
Over four years ago, you might remember the puzzling and playful album Entropy Noodle credited to The Nag’s Head appearing in this column. That’s producer Stephen Maskell, who returned last year under the new moniker Basil Neptune with even more woozy electronic vignettes. Their latest release revisits one of Entropy Noodle’s outdoor jams—or “noodles”—which ranged from gardens to street corners to, in this case, a bathroom. The previously brief “Shower Noodle” gets wonderfully extended here, crafting a brilliant little concert over the rippling textures of a shower.
