Tunes are great, yes, we all like tunes. Once in a while, though, it’s good to clean out your ears with something harsher. Here’s a quick guide to some of the Brillo pads, putty knives, and rusty razor blades of the recent audio crop.

Hanayo, Gift (Geist). This off-key, baby-voiced Japanese singer’s liner notes refer to Germany, and the album presents her collaborations with 14 European and Asian electronic and noise musicians. The most fun is a screeching digital hardcore remake of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Les Sucettes,” with lurching spike-attack beats by Candie Hank, but she also works with everyone from Icelandic collage-minimalists Stilluppsteypa to white-noise demigod Merzbow. The house-ish beats a few producers toss at her are almost as abrasive in this context.

Anti:Clockwise, Rewatching (Parallelism). Three long, indistinct guitar improvisations by Robert Dennis, who also plays in Tono-Bungay. At first, what you hear appears to be tuning noises bleeding onto a tape from several rooms away, or the kind of sampled loops that come from a pedal inadvertently activated and left alone. But the blur is part of the fun, and Dennis keeps the edges of the recording as fuzzy as he can. There are even a few snatches of hip-hop that sound as if his amp had accidentally picked up a radio station.

Toshimaru Nakamura/Sachiko M, Do (Erstwhile). Sachiko (also of the excellent experimental group I.S.O.) plays a sampler that generates only pure sine tones, so if you move while you’re listening to them, the sound appears to circulate around and through your head; Nakamura plays a mixing board with nothing going into it, so all you hear is the sound of its circuitry amplified. Do documents three live performances that mostly come off like an exceptionally intent digital mosquito. If you’ve ever wished the tests of the Emergency Broadcast System would be much longer, your prayers have been answered.

Lesser, Gearhound (Matador Europe). Computers are good for making beats regular and neat. They’re also good for making them freaky and jagged, which is what J Lesser does with them. Gearhound uses all the materials of electronica that have seeped into the R&B mainstream — skipping ticks, skidding beats, snatches of familiar timbres — and reclaims them for disruptive noise. His rhythms rarely last more than a couple of seconds before they’re brutally fragmented or whacked aside. Lesser also pays homage to the pioneers of mangling comfortable sounds into noise: the title of “Cheeseburger Lady” is an allusion to Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady.”

Jandek, Put My Dream on This Planet (Corwood). The Texan recluse Jandek is one of the kings of difficult listening. His 29th album, though, is a real departure: two extraordinarily lengthy, tuneless, free-associative a cappella blues and one very short one, drawled into what appears to be a voice-activated microcassette recorder. It has the air of finality about it, as if he were cementing the final installment of his life’s work. “I need your life,” he moans in the voice of a man who has lost everything but his words. And then, “I’m ready for the house.” His first album, 23 years ago, was called Ready for the House.

Air Traffic Controllers, Whisper Number (Parallelism). Constructed around guitarist Gerard Cosloy’s incrementally evolving digital-delay loops, these four pieces gradually work themselves up into tempestuous rackets and shake like a demon trapped in a glass phone booth. Former drummer Clare Pannell generally contradicted and unraveled the groove; on this fifth album, successor Jon Steele latches onto Cosloy’s ricocheting patterns and underscores them.

So Takahashi, 30/30 (Carpark). The school of electronic hyperminimalism (usually presenting only a single pure tone or two at a time) has a whole lot of adherents — Ryoji Ikeda’s stark, pulsating discs are probably the best, and the Raster/Noton label’s roster has invented lots of flavors of it — but few of its artists are as aggressive as Takahashi. This half-hour-long piece spotlights dog-goading treble and stomach-rumbling bass slowed down to an agonizing pace and just uneven enough to avoid comforting repetition. The whooshing fake strings 10 minutes in suggest an imminent catharsis that finally arrives, in the form of French babble and beats, 10 minutes later.

386DX, The Best Of (Staalplaat). There are few things more irritating than a favorite song sapped of its meaning, and this disc drains 15 classic-rock standards like a thirsty little chupacabra. The music is the chintziest MIDI files of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “California Dreaming,” and the like available on the Web; the voice singing them is a computer text-to-speech synthesizer. As you can guess, it’s seriously amusing for a few minutes, and then . . . not. 386DX (the brainchild of one Alexei Shulgin) is a cunning host’s secret weapon — it passes for party music but rapidly becomes a room clearer.