Aaron Dilloway returns to Dais Records with 'No Skill Comedy Mind Reading', his first true full-length album since 2017, a collection of characteristically jarring, absurdist material. Marked by his signature distortions and contortions — feedback-shrouded found sounds, field recordings, and vocal improvisations — 'No Skill...' collects nearly a decade of select solo work and yet, feels distinctly in the present: a scattered product of volatility, both harsh and humorous.

Few contemporary experimental artists over the past quarter-century are as prolific and revered as Dilloway, a pioneer of the American Midwest noise scene, a former member of Wolf Eyes, and the founder of the Oberlin-based label and record shop Hanson Records. But for wielding such an immense catalog, he has released only two proper solo LPs, amid a steadier output of tape releases and collaborative projects, with 'No Skill...' completing what has become an ambiguous album trilogy starting with his 2012 landmark 'Modern Jester'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Raw Hyde
2. My Brain Has Finished Growing
3. Forced Auctioneer
4. Find A New Way To Laugh
5. Bring Me The Head Of The Unknown Comic
6. Possession Audition Tape
7. The Levitation Hacker
8. Supporting Actor (for Pieter & Phil)

American experimental composer Stephen O’Malley releases 'Avaeken', two sides of immense, immersive, self-annihilating music via Dais Records.

The record preserves site-specific work: O’Malley installed 'Avaeken' as part of Wish You Were Here, the exhibition by renowned American artist Banks Violette, underscoring the tension between presence and absence, life and loss.

O’Malley and Violette have developed a distinct language of sound, space, and sculpture over the past two decades, reverberating through the walls of world-class institutions from The Guggenheim and Centre Pompidou to prominent galleries such as Maureen Paley in London, Gladstone Gallery in NYC, and Antwerp’s TICK TACK, the brutalist space where Wish You Were Here unfolded in early 2026.

Emerging now as an LP, 'Avaeken' presents power and phenomena: low-frequency vibrations, deep oscillations, and phase cancellations that translate as innately effective in any environment. Violette’s visual expression — the impossibility of locating yourself within the loss of a friend and the broader decay of culture — now fills the LP sleeve and feels inextricable from O’Malley’s sound, both still without resolution.

The origins of 'Avaeken' date back to 2020, when O’Malley was commissioned by the ZWERM electric guitar quartet of Belgium. He rendered the piece, naming it after the millennium-plus-old oak tree on Sweden’s island of Fårö, for four guitarists on standard electric guitars, sustaining microtonal harmony produced with ebows and slides.

“Natural harmonic tone coloured by the valves of the amplification is the one desired characteristic,” reads the initial notes.

“At first I asked, why would I write for another guitar player?” he says. “I realized how amazing it is to be a listener on the other side of the music; together we were able to try all these precisions with intonation, harmonics, specific microtonal ideas.”

The quartet performed 'Avaeken' several times before O’Malley joined them for a recording session at Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, a 13th-century former hospital with modern acoustics in Ghent.

O’Malley’s connection to Violette began in 2005, when they met in a cab and quickly became immersed in each other’s craft, leading to their first collaboration later that year.

“I asked him if he'd have any interest, and that was really the spark of it all,” says Violette, whose pioneering work delves into the darker aspects of human existence, drawing from subcultural aesthetics like death metal, punk, and goth.

“It was just like, hey, this is what I'm interested in. And it turns out, you're also interested in it. And now after 20-plus years, we still seem to find something to talk about, which is enormously gratifying.”

When Violette told O’Malley about the vision for Wish You Were Here, the unreleased 'Avaeken' recordings immediately came to mind.

“They felt conceptually linked, using beating and physical waves,” O’Malley explains. “I asked what do you think of these pieces? And Banks responded very positively. He didn't question what the instrumentation was… it was about sound and the phenomena of what the sound was doing.”

TRACK LISTING

1. 21:13 (Take 4)
2. 21:30 (Take 1 Comp) 

'Carnival' finds the Fort Worth trauma ray capturing some of their strongest, most intense, and exploratory work within the boundaries of a whirlwind year. The breakout success of 'Chameleon', their 2024 debut on Dais Records, further established the band amidst the current wave of shoegaze revivalists, yet increasingly agile, able to weave between scenes, touring throughout 2025 with the likes of Deafheaven, Loathe, and Touché Amoré. A confluence of blitzing riffs and stark beauty, their sound continues to evolve, nodding to loud-quiet-loud greats across metal, grunge, and shoegaze from Slowdive to Smashing Pumpkins. 'Carnival' delves into moodier, more cerebral material, like holding their past excursions against a funhouse mirror. There's a distinct sense of unease in these songs, built as a band in a fleeting window of time, proving they work best under pressure and when pulling from the darkest corners of their subconscious. The wordless 'Carousel' ushers in the EP's unsettling atmosphere with blasts of static and downcast strums giving way to 'Hannibal', ananthemic track packed with power riffs and raw emotion. The band has hit this kind of sheer power before, from 2018's 'Solstice' to 'Chameleon's title track, while 'Hannibal' contorts with a tinge of unprecedented evil, slithery, Stone Temple-y, Alice in Chains-y, Avilaquips. Lyrically, he taps into teenage angst, the feeling of being dissected and rejected.

'Méliès', named after the French illusionist and filmmaker cuts between heavy, sludgy chords and a skyward chorus, "from something scary to like a dream state," says Avila, who channels the namesake's surreal abstraction. His lines detail, "being stuck in your head and just making up realities that probably aren't the real thing going on, when you don't want to face the truth." 'Funhouse' dips into doom metal, with sparse guitar work and possibly the band's slowest ever BPM, as self-proclaimed Sleep-heads. Lyrics play with shifting perspectives, culminating in the call-and-response outro ("take my hand / this is not your wonderland") that conjures two forces, or frames of mind, at odds with one another. In contrast, the final track 'Clown' jolts, flashes, and pummels, like the listener has come out the other end of a house of horrors, now fully immersed in the jarring, disorienting lights of the carnival. Personified by a knotty, synthy lead guitar squal—"the lead tone is something I'm super proud of, we've never had something like that in a trauma ray song," per Perez—'Clown' reminds them of Robin Williams, an archetype of tragic happiness, how the people trying the hardest to make others laugh may privately be the saddest. Sonically, the band is quick to credit the influence of 'Undone' and 'Stuck on You' by '90s cult favorite Failure, alongside the omnipresent Loveless, which gets to the greatness oftrauma ray: five musicians absorbing, synthesising, and expanding on what they love. 'Carnival' offers a brief and highly loopable detour into darkness from a band growing more formidable by the mile.

TRACK LISTING

1. Carousel
2. Hannibal
3. Méliès
4. Funhouse
5. Clown

The latest by Arizona desert brotherhood Alex and Andrew Jarson aka Body Of Light further hones their smoldering strain of tempestuous synth-pop into a transformative suite of anthems, reveries, and reckonings: Bitter Reflection. Written in the wake of 2019’s neo-EBM classic, Time To Kill, they sifted inspiration from hidden moments within their own arcana – childhood tapes, home movies, abandoned demos – asking themselves the question: “How can we make this grow?” Sampled snippets of voice, noise, synth, and field recordings flicker in the periphery of these 11 tracks, murmuring like nostalgias half-forgotten, or displaced memories. It’s music pulled between twin flames of truth and desire, romanticization and reality, catharsis and control, born of a bond sealed by years, dreams, and blood.

Working with Telefon Tel Aviv co-founder Josh Eustis in Los Angeles, the brothers incorporated an expanded array of live instrumentation – piano, bass, saxophone, acoustic guitar – in addition to vintage Akai samplers, Moogs, and archaic hardware, giving the album an eclectic, unpredictable palette. Opener “Get It Right” showcases their impressive refinement: sleekly cold drum machinery builds to a swooning chorus of synths and piano, then suddenly slips into a dream sequence bridge of strummed guitar and echo-shrouded vocals, before surging back to the main melody. Throughout, the songs shift gears and moods in evocative ways, as if bending to fleeting thoughts or lengthening shadows. Simmering synth lament “Strike The Match” captures the Jarsons’ unique technique of co-crafted lyrics, accruing meaning as the world turns; though written long before, the track ended up being recorded the day Russia invaded Ukraine (“I fall asleep to the candlelight / things will be different but not tonight / it wouldn’t be like you to strike the match / over and over, I can’t understand”).

A trio of intriguing instrumentals deepen the album’s scope, echoing the duo’s early experimental era as part of the influential Ascetic House collective. “Fortia,” “Hyena,” and “Deepcolorlights” drift in a prismatic gauze of whispered synths and oblique minutia, in the spirit of Boards of Canada at their most hushed and haunted. Elsewhere the record spins through a gallery of the band’s ongoing fascinations: Depeche Modeesque declarations of dread and excess (“This Conversation”), brooding dance floor epiphanies (“Out Of Season”), smooth Thomas Dolby city skyline melancholias (“Never Ever”), lovesick looking glass ballads laced with Art Of Noise orchestral stabs (“On This Day”). A new age demands new waves, and Body Of Light belongs at the forefront of a resurgent generation fusing modern methods with the sounds of futures past. Singer Alex Jarson sees their muse clearly, at the axis of anguished transition, temporal collapse, and, just possibly, the brink of hope: “Time is dysphoric. The dream breaks down. Everyone’s beginning to panic, but in the end something will come from it.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Get It Right
2. Strike The Match
3. This Conversation
4. Fortia
5. Bitter Reflection
7. Out Of Season
8. Never Ever
9. On This Day
10. Hyena
11. Last Repose
12. Deepcolorlights