Sightings' 14-year long history might be thought of in Car Talk-qua-Three Stooges terms: a trio of grease monkeys go in on a lemon together for the thrill of fine-tuning its engine, then discovers that tweaking the engine's innards and fluids to produce variations on a sputtering, splintering theme is infinitely more satisfying than cruising the strip in a purring, detailed Datsun could ever be. The Sightings scree-knell is noise as jerky industrial clangor and interior-monologue drive-by, and most of the time, it sounds like nothing else in this fallen world.

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When Punk Authority (Software Recording Co.), Pete Swanson's new EP, is emanating from my iPhone, a funny thing happens: my German Shepherd rushes in from wherever else he was in the house, snuffling and whimpering and breathing heavily. The ears flatten against his head. His entire body heaves. "For the love of God," those large, sad, watery eyes seem to plead, "shut that fucking noise off so I can get back to chewing on my spine." And then, when I comply, his mien all of a sudden reverts to normal and he saunters away like he just won the mother of all staring contests.

Who can blame him? Whether you're listening through high-res headphones or crap speakers, the latest ledger entry in the former Yellow Swans member's solo career (the transplanted Portlander now calls NYC home) Authority carries its immediate predecessors' predilection for drawn-and-quartered electronic paintball to new, extra-cyclonic extremes -- it's a mulched-beat half hour of power that requires a half dozen listens to really worm into your mental jukebox. The cover and promo art more than match the mood: a wide-eyed, graffiti smothered Swanson backed up against a brick wall and slung over the shoulder of an interloper. From the gesticulating frequencies of "C.O.P." to the fracking-drill feedback of "Life Ends At 30" to the title track's spin-cycle upheaval, Authority rages, wild-eyed, against encroaching complacency.

SOTC emailed with Swanson about the making of the EP, how he's balancing noise and grad school, and how he knows that his 20s weren't wasted.

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Cloud Becomes Your Hand might be thought of as Brooklyn's indie-pop answer to Baltimore's late, great Teeth Mountain: Dada-minded insurrectionists hellbent on dismantling various genres then re-assembling them inside out with gleeful aplomb. Classifying some of the pastiches on the quintet's 2010 self-titled album and 2011's Doggy Paddle Tore Tape (both self-released) is almost impossible, due to the volatility of the music's surrealism abacus from moment to moment: radio-serial interlude organs segue to Cave Bears-worthy primitivism to warped, sunny folk to miniature psychedelic masterpieces to manic Tortoise-esque sprints to spasms that suggest a malfunctioning tape deck mangling the innards of an cassette copy of an early Animal Collective record.

Here are two amazing things of note: 1) a submerged, intuitive logic connects all of the diversions and somehow keeps them from sounding random, and 2) these albums sound startlingly new everytime you re-crack their metaphorical seals and collapse anew into Cloud Becomes Your Hand's hair-brained hailstorms. Theirs is a sound that more than deserves to be heard beyond their borough. Singer/guitarist Stephe Cooper, violinist Hunter Jack, synthesizer player Weston Minissali, malletkat player Sam Sowyrda, and drummer Booker Stardrum are nurturing a sound that deserves to be celebrated beyond their zip code.

This email interview with SOTC was the band's first.

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How best to tag the restless, reactive folk-pop of Lady Lamb the Beekeeper? So many ways, dude: rambunctious, precocious, invigorating, probing, sweet, exasperating, quirky, self-indulgent, lunging, crackers, too sane, even. The outfit led by Brooklyn's Aly Spaltro, 23 -- named after something she scribbled on a page while stuck in a dream -- ultimately embodies all of these qualities and more, though it should be noted that she's getting better at focusing her musical attacks. New album Ripely Pine (Ba Da Bing!) is heads and tails above the run of releases the former Air Force brat has committed to digital tape since 2007, even if the experience of submitting to its songs is comparable to getting lost in a virulent Tumblr maelstrom. There's an endearing theatricality at work in her songwriting, with mad breathlessness giving way to oases of calm and the sense that the dusky blues of "Taxidermist Taxidermist" or spritely "You Are The Apple" -- where limber-digit guitar squares off against Spaltro's uncanny, unintentional Morrissey impression -- are less quick-hit bursts of sonic product than intense journeys that listeners are intended to join Lady Lamb on. The swoop and sweep of her sprawling craft somehow finds room for echoes of Half-Handed Cloud's devotion, PJ Harvey's vengeance, and Regina Spektor's evocative brittleness.

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Mountains

Eight years in, Mountains albums arrive with certain expectations attached. There will be gently melancholy expanses of sound. There will be lapping-wave dissolves and cross fades caulked with spectral drone. There will be reed-rustling whispers and dry-heaving synthesizers. There will be the illusion, on the part of the listener, of being incrementally disconnected from his or her nerve endings and immediate surroundings. All of these things will seem to be continuing forever, and it will be awesome.

See also:
-Mountains Conjure Intangibles, Do Not Cover 'Mississippi Queen'
-Moving Mountains: The Brooklyn duo gets aggressive with sound on Air Museum
-Download: Mountains' Bubbly "Thousand Square"

In a lot of senses, then, there's nothing surprising about Centralia (Thrill Jockey); on the new album, machines and instruments manipulated by the Brooklyn duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg gurgle, thrum, and rustle unreservedly, reveling in a dizzying, uncommon contentedness. But a new warmth has crept into their conflict-free melees, from the drizzling pinprick electronics defining "Liana" to the raspy, delirious shivers of "Sand" to the threshing, high-altitude head rush of "Propeller."

In the weeks leading up to the release of Centralia, SOTC emailed with Holtkamp and Anderegg about their new album and the evolution of their sound.

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Now that Christmas is over and the presents are all unwrapped, you have no excuse but to switch off the computer, get up, wrestle on a cardigan and a sweater vest, grab your smart phone, and hit the streets. Vacate. Go. Get out, and look at some Christmas lights. Because, look, your hood didn't risk their necks and court the flu turning every available inch into an electrical fire hazard just so you could waste away December inside on Twitter, headbanging to Grimes and clipping your toenails. Christmas is awesome, hideously wasteful light outlays are awesome, and someday soon we'll all be living in a Mad Max-ian world where we'll miss having had a choice as to whether or not to spend the entirety of an evening goggling and bedazzled. So tour your local holiday lighting extravaganzas hard, dear reader, and often--and allow Sound of the City the pleasure of soundtracking your quest.

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When noise began to co-opt my listening preferences a decade ago, my primary complaints with the genre mirrored my primary complaints with hip-hop: a dearth of promos and advance notice, and a general reticence on the part of label chieftains to keep lines of communication open with the music press.

See Also:
- The Best Albums Pitchfork Hated This Year
- The Ten Best Metal Albums of 2012
- The Ten Best New York City Rap Albums of 2012

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C. Spencer Yeh is one loquacious dude. Pose a question to the guy, and it's likely to return a treatise as discursive and winding as his improv pieces tend to be. In a world of limited print space, Yeh's long-form conversational gregariousness runs a definite endangered-species risk: our email interview about Transitions (De Stijl) earlier this month clocked in somewhere in the range of 4,000 words, while The Village Voice's print edition article itself was confined to roughly 800 words. Now, in advance of the C.S. Yeh Band's CMJ debut at Death By Audio, Sound of the City proudly presents everything about Yeh's full-length left turn into the indie-rock world that we couldn't cram into the dead-tree package.

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Rat Racing

Over a rapidly accumulating pile of releases, the New York trio OPPONENTS has laid claim to a sound that can be endlessly distended and expanded upon: An arresting panorama of synth boil-overs, grit-coated slow-roll electronic growls, arctic slurries, and the sweet, sour burn of Aaron Feinstein's sometimes disaffected/sometimes elemental vocals. The trio—Feinstein, Joshua Slusher, and Josh Greco—all contort various electronics and create noise avalanches that are architecturally savvy, groove, bulldoze, and linger on the palette. Slusher counts "Excepter, Throbbing Gristle, and Aphex Twin" among his artistic inspiratiosn, and their influence is all over cortex flambés like 2011's Ambivalent Cloud Designs (Obsolete Units) and 2008 debut Fascist Starship (The Comic Beyond). Sound of the City emailed with OPPONENTS about the band's name and the shifts in intensity over the years.

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Melissa F. Clarke sets sail for Greenland on August 3.

The discogs.com entry for Melissa F. Clarke is mercilessly brief, and with good reason. This New York-based sound artist doesn't go in for headphone music; she crafts immersive, science-fueled audio/visual experiences that demand observation of the interplay between images and sonics, like the haunted hum of Untitled Antarctica—which riffs on Sonogram-reading image onrush as it calls to mind the majesty of arctic ice while nodding at its depletion—or the nullifying, cornea-peppering turbulence of Bacteria, her collaboration with video artist Shimpei Takeda. (Her single-medium work is arresting, but her multi-sensory adventures are transcendent.)

Today, she sets sail on a three-week group voyage that will follow a course set by American painter William Bradford in the late 1860s and lead to the northernmost tip of Greenland. In the weeks leading up to her trip, SOTC emailed with Clarke about Arctic ice, the art she hopes to make on her journey, and the definition of a "work in progress."

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