Pragmatica Quartet

Kazakhstan-based hyper-prolific Russian-born electronic musician Octa "Moebius" Sheffner (aka Octavia Sheffner aka OMS) recorded dozens of noise collages under dozens of monikers (more than 100 albums between 2017 and 2022). For example, Chapel of Discord++ (2021) contains the distorted apocalyptic mayhem of Sunflower Chapel's Finest Wines & Sunflower Chapel's Utmost Blissful Regrets (29 minutes) that peaks after seven minutes and implodes after three minutes becoming a landscape of flashing radioactive rays. Unfortunately the other piece is a waste of 20 minutes. Finding Exit++ Doors (2021) contains the aggressive and devouring tidal waves of Soft Mirror On the Verge of Death, but the rest is disposable. Both the lengthy collages of A Loose Passageway (2021) are trivial, and so are the four collages on It's Only Total Information (2022) and the four on Status Limps (2022), with the exception of the 19-minute Tempus Fugitive (on the latter). Just one of his monikers, Asleep Country, released more than 100 albums between 2020 and 2023, all of them sound collages.

Sheffner formed the Pragmatica Quartet (or Pragmatic Quartet) with Canadian electronic musician Audry "Noiz" Thurber and U.S. lesbian electronic musician Janis Lago (another hyper-prolific composer who released some 60 albums between 2021 and 2023).

Radical (2022), aka the sign used for the square root, contains 110 minutes of music. Played Football for the Location Eagles, halfway between a videogame soundtrack and a Russian folk dance, is the highlight, but equally representative are the abrasive and disorienting Ribbit Garrison Grenade Hand Throw and the ethno-jazz plunderphonics of Orchestra Covered in Gelatin and Meat. Last but not least, Portrait of Tallgrass Afterlife sounds like a glitchy remix of a religious ceremony, and the 18-minute Looking But Not Touching - Supernova Version (another highlight) is dense and rhythmic molasses of blended sources. Like a cross of Negativland and Vampire Rodents.

Two Arrows Up (2022) contains 143 minutes of music. Much of it is indulgent and redundant, but the epic minimalist crescendo of Six Pieces of Real Polychroma (12:55) and the distorted industrial dance of Everybody in LA Forgot How a Fresco is Made (9:11) are grotesquely intriguing dadaistic pieces.

Their masterpiece, Logical And with Double Overbar (2022), contains 15 massive sound collages. Some are simple narratives with sparse accompaniment like 13-minute Pokilotherm and the 20-minute Logical And with Double Overbar Others are demented ballads like the two parts of Deep Karaoke (17 minutes and 15 minutes) that take all sorts of detours. The eleven-minute The Maker's Perfect in the Image of the Earth is a moving psychedelic dirge that gets progressively ground and destroyed. But the highlights are the pieces of computer-assembled musique concrete. Rarified Earth is an 18-minute instrumental of viciously hyperkinetic drum'n'bass, and the rhythmic trance of Twelve-Points Color Gamut keeps morphing until it achieves the same kind of syncopated hysteria (after which it samples a dance-pop ballad). Blue Charcoal Atta Windshield is a rapidly shifting wall of noise. The 19-minute In Frankfurt opens in a whirlwind of electronic noise propelled by a stammering techno pulsation but then disintegrates into a black hole of ordinary sounds. The 36-minute Awaited the Disconnection or We Villains All is a breathless orgy of dadaistic sounds.

Audry Thurber and Sheffner collaborated without Lago for the hour-long Real Fake Oil Torture on 01 (2023), a less exciting flow of random ideas, and for 10 (2023).

The hyper-prolific Audry Thurber released more than 20 albums in 2022 alone and by the end of 2023 had already released 40. More Stretched by the Curtain (2022) is emblematic of her collages. Fireworks of Singapore and Hong Kong (13:40) is a symphony of chopped-up and ear-splitting noises which evoke the audio of a vintage shooter videogame. The 24-minute Ideation No Longer Pt 2 is instead a languid ambient suite for repetitive melodic fragment (although it ends with a punk-industrial explosion). Language No Longer Curved (13:36) is a mediocre post-rock suite that starts from some vague industrial noise and morphs into a hypnotic jam. Ambivalence Going Retro As Cooling Completes (9:15) is country-rock of the robot age. Backstage (8:59) remixes somebody's concert into a monotonous flow of brittle glitchy loops.

Janis Lago (also a software-based composer, based in Georgia) began a sort of musical diary of her mental depression with the one-hour sound collage of Aftercare (january 2021). It peaks with the symphony of harsh drones that begins around minute 13 and lasts for about 7 minutes before plunging into a whirling darkness. The second half is as close as she will ever get to ambient music. Her inner journey continued on This is what we do while the others are asleep (april 2021) with harrowing pieces like When i wake up tomorrow morning everything is going to be normal everything is going to be fine and there is no chance in hell that im gonna nearly end up in the emergency room again but just like that i know i cant assure it and especially Noone picks up anymore so i guess ill just lose it tonight. Here and there she flirts with existing genres, like in God wants me flat on the asphault at twelvethirty in the morning right next to the streetlights this is my offering to them, her stab at hip-hop. Note: all the titles are spelled without the blanks (i added the blanks because my software doesn't like long titles). The artistic peak of that period of mental depression was the album Daughter of Sappho/ Recovery (february 2021), with song titles like "Why I shouldn't think about death before sleeping" and "How to beat depression", luckily ending with "I am still alive and I am asleep beside the most beautiful person I have ever known". The pieces can therefore be "read" as devastating self-analysis and self-therapy: Eyeballs - Swallower is a ballad of the subconscious, and Nightmare - Get me the Hell out of my own Bed (11:59) is gothic music of bipolar depression. Regardless of the circumstances, The Longest Walk (11:33) is an imposing wall of noise that perhaps materializes her fears. Alas, Shared Dream (27:31) is a good example of the weakness of Lago's music: it contains some powerful moments (possibly inspired by classical music) but also a lot of unnecessary, repetitive and sometimes vexing sections. It's like a bad remix of Constance Demby's Novus Magnificat. The pieces on Waters Unnoticed (may 2021) suffer from the same lack of editing. However, Morningless (9:12) and Hours in the same Place (10:02) are respectively somber and woozy additions to the soundtrack of her mental depression. As she writes: "Life is there and i am here". The 61-minute piece of Lago's Bondage (june 2021) comes with the note: "I'm stuck in my room all the time - theres no void left for me to fill". By her standards, it's a quiet work, almost new-age music for relaxation. Lago told more of her life's story on Reunion (october 2021): "it took sixteen whole lives for it to end like this, dying and being reborn while i sing the last song every time. it all ended in a supermassive manic love story. i called it reunion". It is not surprising that the 27-minute No Severance feels like a psychodrama, or even a violent version of Robert Ashley's operas, and that the cybernetic ballad This Love Is All That's Real (13:40) emanates romantic abandonment despite being buried in sludgy detritus. Her Thirdyear (2022) contains Nice Beautiful Story (14:58), one of her most kaleidoscopic and kinetic collages, and Adolescent Limbs (2022) contains What Shrinkage? (11:35), halfway between sci-fi soundtrack and psychedelic trip before it becomes a tribal dance jam. The Void Beyond Our Love (2022) contains generally shorter pieces like Substitution Song, which could be her stab at synth-pop, a couple of disintegrating ballads like Hyperalone, and the wall of noise with wailing vocals When the World Started Ending (13:51). Her YrVVarmth (2022) is a very minor work. Lago's Infinity KDR (2023) contains the new wall of noise Children Disintegration IV.