V/H/S/Halloween is the 8th in the V/H/S/ found footage anthology series.  As its title suggests, all six of the stories have an All Hallows' Eve setting and/or theme. Moving between a spectral-sourced frizzy drink, a deranged children's home, weird goings on/ murder in a medium’s house, a macabre alternative candy reality, a child killer stalking during Halloween, and a family-made haunt that suddenly becomes very real.  Here from Acorn Media is a Blu-ray release of the film, taking in a commentary track and a few other extra

Atrophy is nearing an 80-minute ride into thick, dense, and truly hope-killing walled noise from this Hungarian project. This is an example of the world around you blocking noise, when you just want to get away for an hour or so, into constantly churning sonic nihilism.

Here’s a thirty-minute slice of bass-affected and lightly textural skittering walled noise, with a decidedly murky aquatic feel. Vacant Algin is a Wisconsin-based project, and going from their Bandcamp, they been active since October last year, with three other releases to their name.

A project that has been releasing works for twenty-three years, Craig Varian’s 400 Lonely Things (co-member Jonathan McCall passed away in 2020) should be a haunted household name when it comes to the “pagantronic” and “ghost ambient” genres of electronic music. 400 Lonely Things is self described “Rustic Ambient Psychedelia” and “Analogue Folk Dronescape,” an amalgam of decayed samples, ethereal electronics, and detourned field recordings that conjure up a visionary, eldritch place that exists at the crossroads of hauntology and folk horror. Varian creates a sonic cosmos that fuses past, present, and future sonorities, a cinematic effect that plunges the listener into an uncanny atmosphere. While 400 Lonely Things’ recordings are indeed “hypnotic,” the music is actually quite complex and evocative, a diffuse layering of sounds, ambiances, moods, and effects. 

She Thinks She The State Department is a wonderful, unbalancing, and disconcerting collaboration between Chicago’s PBK, and Massachusetts prime cassette tape-scaper Howard Stelzer. It’s a five-track CD album, which blends disorienting textural fumblings, stuck avant-jazz bayings, off-kilter droning’s, and a general feeling of disqueting-to-unhinged sound-scaping.

Wilt is an Illinois-based project that blurs the boundaries between dark ambience, uneasy field records, and low-key/ brooding noise texturing. The projects been active since the late 90’s, with over one hundred and twenty releases to date. Mold The Earth is a CD album release from 2024, taking ten tracks.