Troller's debut album is the perfect example of the imagery not matching the music. The late 1980s metal woman on the cover and script font screams some sort of early thrash revival, when the album contained is actually a lush, bleak piece of electronics heavy death rock from this Austin, Texas trio. The result is a disc that definitely feels rooted in that era of smeared mascara and smoke machines, but with a clearly modern day sensibility.

Splitting most of his time between his blackened southern rock behemoth Horseback and playing guitar for the alternative country Mount Moriah, Jenks Miller has not had much time to record true solo work. Spirit Signal is technically his third solo release, following Approaching the Invisible Mountain and the intentionally difficult Zen Automata Volume One, and is comparatively a more fleshed out album in the traditional sense, while still retaining a distinct stripped down, truly solo sound.

The name of the game is "metal" for this collaboration between Vainio (Pan Sonic) and Nordwall (Skull Defekts, Sons of God), both in the genre and literal sense. Fragments of Sunn O)))'s deconstructed riffs, plate reverbs and Einsturzende Neubauten's earliest days all show up here, in a wonderfully cohesive, oppressively dark recording that is surprisingly organic, given all its metal trappings.

Billed as the "sonic and visual documentation of the journey of a lone astronaut into deep space, as imagined by a seven year old boy," there certainly is a lot of outer space imagery on Steve Fors' second release under the Aeronaut moniker. Conceptual trappings aside, this album is a strong piece of ambient noise that stands completely on its own as a slab of majestic tones and lush, beautiful textures.

The worlds of free jazz and harsh noise have always shared a lot of commonalities: both eschew the limitations of structure and melody for the sake of pure tone and texture, and both can either come across as structured, compelling chaos, or inane, boring noodling. Burning Tree have managed to straddle that line between jazz and noise as well as few other artists have, and with unrelenting brutality, on this first full length release that stands with the titans of both genres.

If Keith Rowe and Graham Lambkin haven't produced one of the most mind-bending records of 2013, they're at least high in the running. Making A shares its name with one of Cornelius Cardew's Schooltime Compositions. Written in 1967, these pieces were designed to help musicians and non-musicians develop their own methods of interpretation and music-making. They emphasize process over finished products and personal development over pretty results. Rowe and Lambkin's unusual recording emphasizes process too, but turns the spotlight on the listener. The album changes color and shape with the light. Sometimes improvised, sometimes structured; it constantly reflects its audience and hides its perpetrators. Few other records like it come to mind.

There is something endearingly heroic about The Dead C, as they have been gleefully blurring the lines between inspired deconstructionist rock and messy, half-assed indulgence to widespread indifference for almost three decades.  Unsurprisingly, this latest release finds them obstinately splashing about in the same ambiguously muddied waters as ever.  I suspect these two fairly challenging long-form pieces are unlikely to win the trio any new fans, but they are absolutely certain to please the already indoctrinated, as they rank among the group's finest.

Pitre's latest offering is a fine companion piece to last year's stellar Feel Free, achieving a similar outcome through composition rather than computerized randomization.  Built upon Duane's now-characteristic pointillist plucking, shifting drone swells, and Oliver Barrett's swooping and sliding cello moans, Bridges delivers yet another swaying, languorous reverie that I could happily listen to in an endless loop.  It may not quite scale the heights of its predecessor, but that is more of a commentary on Feel Free's brilliance than it is upon Bridges' shortcomings.  In fact, in many ways, Bridges displays an impressive evolution.

Rashad Becker is a fairly revered and influential figure in experimental music circles due to his role as the resident mastering genius at Basic Channel's Dubplates studio.  That association is a bit deceptive here, as anyone expecting anything resembling dance music will be spectacularly wrong-footed by his debut release. Becker has taken abstract experimentalism into some very exotic, disorienting, and gloriously wrong territory.  I do not think I will hear a stronger or more unique noise (or utterly uncategorizable) release this year.

With the constant resurgence of various genres co-opted by younger generations, many an inactive artist has returned to the fold to capitalize on their previous notoriety. The synth pop trend of a few years back has unsurprisingly brought with it the revival industrial and goth scenes (and all of their various permutations), much as it did three decades ago. However, the reappearance of Mike VanPortfleet’s Lycia has little to do with this, and more to do with pure synchronicity: Quiet Moments is made up of material recorded over the past seven years. As such, it manages to fit in nicely with their earlier work while still sounding like new roads being taken, and also appearing at the right time to capture some much deserved attention.

The first side of this cassette leads off in a realm closer to noise than anything of a more musical approach: thin, flaky distortion obscures deep, bellowing tones that are not necessarily dissonant, but not inviting either. Through this a churning, distorted rhythmic passage sneaks to the surface, bringing with it a bit of melody, albeit barely perceptible amidst the abstraction that surrounds it.

Cortini is best known as a member of Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels, but his work with Trent Reznor is quite a bit different from this opening salvo of a planned trilogy of releases using a Buchla Music Easel as his sole instrument.  Given my justified weariness of the recent vintage synthesizer revival, it is hard to say whether I will stick with Alessandro for the entire project, yet I have to admit that his work in this field is much better than most.  In fact, the opening and closing pieces of this double album are great enough to transcend any of the limitations that I erroneously felt this genre had.

As half of avant metal duo Menace Ruine, S. (or whatever permutation of that initial he uses) does not like to be confined to that style, and his S/V\R side project does the same thing with harsh noise and industrial rhythms. At times grating and abrasive, and other times structured and pensive, this tape nicely covers those two extremes while still sounding like a unified whole.

This project takes a different approach to field recordings in that it does not strive to capture a phenomenon that most will never experience, nor does it rely on something overly conceptual. Instead, it essentially acts as an audio postcard of the Cape Cod region, both the natural surroundings as well as the people and places. These recordings then form the foundation for artists such as Loscil and FourColor, amongst others, to create their own compositions from, which makes for a very impressive compilation.

Rephlex is almost definitely behind EDM (Electric Dance Music) A2 and B2, but they’re not owning up to it. Neither disc sports a label, neither comes with liner notes, and except for a few Jodey Kendrick aliases, most of the 13 featured artists are unrecognizable. Alain Kepler, Rob Kidley, and Trevor Dags could be anyone, but with electronic music as hyperactive and acid washed as this, the first anyone that comes to mind is Richard D. James.

A distinctly different release than his last, El Tren Fantasma, this album not only acts as part of an overall larger project (a collaboration with faculty at Durham University), but also focuses on nature, rather than that disc’s use of man made transportation. Not just nature, but an attempt to capture the essence of of Lindisfarne Island as it would have sounded to St. Cuthbert in 700 AD. The result is an album that is a bit less compositionally oriented than El Tren Fantasma, but one that does an impeccable job at capturing a feel and an environment via audio.

Innocuous enough as a sampler of some deeper, more sprawling artistic discography, The Source Family OST serves a second function as the audio equivalent of an ad pamphlet for its titular utopian cult. Nothing about them needs embellishing; Father Yod's colorful DIY psych collective is as convinced of their own message as they hope you'll be. Every aspect of the Family seems to match the beautiful, spontaneous mythos they spread, even Yod's appropriately spectacular demise. Behind all the posturing and spiritual gravitas, though, laid real music, and a group who made some interesting ideas come to life.

A side band of Maurice De Jong (Gnaw Their Tongues) with Eric from Mowlawner, Aderlating embraces some of the same power electronics/harsh noise sensibilities, but casts them within a different sonic murk, alongside demonic black metal snarls and flailing free jazz drumming. Somehow, those disparate parts work together in ways that sometimes baffle in the best possible way.

Agarttha is a solo project of Francesca Marongiu, who is also half of the Italian project Architeuthis Rex, and to some extent that project is reflected in this album. A similar noise/industrial/metal hybrid shines through, but Marongiu’s project stands out with its slightly lighter, vocal centered approach, and the six songs manage to capture occasional moments of blackened, dissonant experimentalism with segments of pure, unadulterated beauty.

Aquarelle's second album for Students of Decay caught me off-guard a bit, as Ryan Potts' aesthetic has evolved noticeably from 2011's Sung in Broken Symmetry, but not in the expected way at all.  Rather than playing up his talents for crackle, hiss, and artful obfuscation, August Undone mostly jettisons those elements in favor of a kind of a jacked-up, guitar-noise-heavy pastoralism.  While I was a little disappointed that none of the new pieces were immediately striking as Symmetry's "With Verticals," this more understated follow-up is a more complex, varied, and lushly absorbing whole.