After a few weeks of unchallenging music, it's really nice to get a disc like Cement Buddhas. It's essentially a meeting -- if not a knock-down drag-out fight -- between various guitars (Aplanalp) and horns (Kaiser), all heavily manipulated, with treated voices and electronic twiddling filling in the cracks in the mortar. And it's abrasive. Archipelagos of recognizable guitar and horn melody are connected by strings of razor-sharp, ear-flensing noise -- perhaps overmodulated voices, perhaps overdriven electronics, but all of it instinctively hostile to the human ear.

The pleasure here is to find order in the chaos. Kaiser and Aplanalp are both solid musicians, and the paths their music/noise hybrids take are neither gratuitous nor entirely random. The challenge is to halt the noise in its tracks as it seeks to burrow into your head, and to unravel it backwards, revealing its component parts and lurching logic, dissolving into computational textures and insidious fingerings.

Or you can simply embrace the aggressive abnormality of the music and let go, following it as its noisy tentacles work their way into all the cracks and interstitial spaces that riddle the world. That's right. Just let go.