Anthony Mangicapra's Hoor-paar-Kraat project has always been rather prolific, but a recent spate of limited new releases has made this even more noticeable, but without any reduction in quality or distinction On these two tapes, he (and associates) balances both tense, carefully constructed pieces with shambolic, improvised sonic rituals.

While I certainly would not complain if the endless tide of synthesizer albums were to suddenly stop completely, that does not mean that an occasional good one does not turn up every now and then.  This one, the solo debut from Jimy SeiTang (Rhyton/Psychic Ills) comes very close to being one of those albums, offering up a handful of thick, buzzing, and obsessively repeating soundscapes that sound like a mixture of John Carpenter and Krautrock.  Unfortunately, most of them either end too quickly or evolve too little to completely suck me in, but the closing piece reminded me very favorably of Popul Vuh's brilliant Aguirre soundtrack (minus all the hippy noodling), which is a high compliment indeed.

To this day, I am utterly baffled as to how The Haxan Cloak managed to become relatively popular at all–it all seems suspiciously Faustian.  Granted, Brian Krlic's profile has certainly benefited from his getting lumped in with the Raime/Demdike Stare pantheon of glacial, black-hearted "dance" artists, but his debut album was still essentially a collection of bleakly dissonant string dirges inspired by death, something that does not generally offer much in the way of mass appeal (or individual appeal for me, for that matter).  Excavation, however, is intermittently amazing, as Krlic's incredible evolution and inspired addition of deep sub-bass have transformed his previously oppressively sad vision into quite a heavy and frightening one.

I have not been paying much attention to Wolf Eyes for the last several years, but I was inclined to give this album a chance after repeatedly hearing all about how it is both a bold change of direction and a major statement on the state of noise in 2013.  After listening to it a few times, I guess it is arguably both, but it is definitely not some kind of epoch-defining revelation, nor is it a particularly great album (though it certainly has some great moments).  Rather it is merely an uneven, intermittently inspired effort that displays a new penchant for ruined-sounding ultra-minimalism, but offers only a few fully realized, successful examples of it amidst too much filler.

Barn Owl's penchant for subdued guitar music has always been a reliable standard for me. Lost In The Glare and Ancestral Star were easy to dissect, but welcoming and pleasantly sparse with a primal aesthetic that worked as an easy entry point into drone. In contrast, V is a totally different creation. Drawing inspiration from dub and dark ambient music, V is a fresh achievement for Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti, shifting tone artfully and refining their style. It superbly bridges a gap between two common but oddly disconnected subgroups of music.

A massive ensemble of New Mexico-based artists, DCS features no less than ten bassists amongst other multi-instrumentalists. At first blush I expected an unidentifiable cacophony of noise, which would not necessarily be a bad thing, but this self titled album is much more varied and open than I believed it would be. Across three long and distinct pieces, there is much dissonance, but also subtlety to be heard.

After a 12 year hiatus, Mark van Hoen has unexpectedly returned with a new Locust album.  In fact, I do not think that Mark himself even expected it: he enlisted his friend Louis Sherman to join him for a live performance on WFMU and discovered during their rehearsals that they sounded both 1.) great and 2.) an awful lot like Locust.  As Van Hoen remains the driving force and has a very distinctive aesthetic, the resultant material still shares a lot of common ground with last year's excellent solo album (The Revenant Diary), but You'll Be Safe Forever is floating and melancholic rather than then tense and haunted.

Back in 2010, Tarentel's Cantu-Ledesma blindsided me with an absolutely wonderful dream-pop/drone solo opus (Love is a Stream) that I have grown to love more with each passing year.  Since then, however, he has been keeping a curiously low profile, quietly releasing only a handful of tapes, splits, singles, and a Dutch LP.  I wish I had been paying more attention though, as this latest self-released digital EP shows that he has been both creatively fertile and steadily evolving the whole time.  I guess I have some catching up to do.

Haynes is a multimedia artist who works in many different mediums and formats, but a consistent sense of rust and decay carries through them all. Recent audio works Sever and The Decline Effect exemplify this perfectly each, built upon layers of found sounds and field recordings, processed and disintegrated into textures and sounds that are enticing, yet alien. For his debut on Editions Mego, he follows the same successful format, using the sounds of desert winds, laser cooling systems, and thin wires as the source, resulting in a work that sounds entirely alien.

The always prolific Uwe Schmidt (Senor Coconut, Atom Heart) has produced a third album that continues his push away from the traditional, sterile art of the Raster-Noton label by embracing a skewed, but still engaging take on nostalgic electro pop, bringing in recognizable sign posts throughout while never feeling like an unnecessary throwback.

Emuul brings patient drone to life with careful repetitions, and succeeds in an attempt to build something acutely iconic on his latest release. Free Structures doesn't drift or wander like a lot of drone music; its very purposeful motifs layer onto one another without reduction in volume and without compromising what is a very singular idea. I found this approach oddly immediate, and welcoming, despite the 17-minute running times of each piece.

This minor but charming solo effort was recorded earlier this year while Ka-Spel enjoyed a vacation on Fire Island.  Given the logistical difficulties inherent in transporting an entire studio across the ocean, these songs are necessarily more loose, informal, and stripped-down than is typical for Edward (if anything about his oeuvre can be described as such).  Such an approach does not necessarily cater to his strengths (Ka-Spel is at his best when he is at his most complexly hallucinatory), but this batch of lilting, drum-machine-driven psych-pop miniatures offers some pleasantly twisted diversions nonetheless.

In 2005, when Camper Van Beethoven’s gear was stolen on tour, Jason Molina ran into David Lowery and offered to lend him some of Magnolia Electric Co.'s equipment. They became friends and, later that year, met in Richmond, Virginia to record some new songs Jason had in the works. Before he could finish, Molina’s mother suffered a stroke. He completed what he could and returned in 2006 to finish Black Ram, one of the four recordings that finally surfaced as part of 2007’s Sojourner boxed set. Backed by musicians not in the touring Magnolia lineup, it's one of the darkest and most distinct albums Molina ever released—closer to his Songs: Ohia days in spirit and tone, and overflowing with some of his best writing.

This limited-edition CDR is an experiment in spontaneity, as it is the product of a five-day recording frenzy that occurred last winter.  That endeavor proves to be a mixed success, as Taos Hum offers lots of great ideas, but not much in the way of great songs.  That is about what I would expect, as the Dots' Achilles' heel has always been that their voluminous output precludes aggressive editing, a trait that can only be exacerbated by rigid time constraints.  This is still an intermittently impressive effort (the band has definitely been on a hot streak lately), but the best moments are probably too diluted or overlong to offer much appeal to more casual fans.  Which, of course, explains why this is only a CDR.

One fascinating aspect of the Legendary Pink Dots is that I never know where and when their simmering brilliance will fully manifest itself.  Case in point: this limited-edition solo effort by keyboardist Phil Knight was casually released on CDR on the same day as two other LPD-related albums with only the most cryptic and inscrutable of descriptions ("...aliens here to study mankind had taken control of the airwaves; spread confusion with fake weather reports..."), yet it contains a fluke quasi-noise/industrial collage that ranks among my favorite pieces in the Dots' entire discography.

While it definitely boasted some of the year's best cover art (I am a sucker for shadowy figures wielding curved blades), Implode's 2011 Kranky debut (Black Earth) occupied a fairly unappealing niche for me, offering up a lot of bleak, slow-motion shoegaze with too much processing and too few hooks.  Two years later, Recurring Dream offers more great cover art and more brooding effects pedal abuse, but the band have definitely grown quite a bit better at what they do.  It is still a bit of a slog to make it through the entire album, but the handful of highlights are great enough to make it worth the effort.

In a very real sense, The Watchers is an endearing improbable album that captures a magical and ephemeral union between two like-minded virtuosos playing together for the first time.  The catch, unfortunately, is that the magic was something of a closed-loop: while the two musicians flowed together as seamlessly and intuitively as old friends, the end product basically sounds like a rough sketch for an unfinished James Blackshaw album (albeit one where Blackshaw himself is often perversely relegated to the background).

This single is a particularly divergent release in a career where divergence is rapidly becoming the norm, combining (arguably) the least Om-like song in their entire discography with Al Cisneros' recent fascination with dub reggae.  I expected the result to sound a lot like Al's solo dub debut from last year ("Dismas"), but this is something completely new altogether.  The reason for that is that Cisneros handed over the controls to seasoned British roots duo Alpha & Omega.  The piece is likable in its own way (once I got past reeling from my subverted expectations), but I suspect many Om fans will find that this detour is not for them.

German artist Marsen Jules has been working in sparse, subtle worlds of ambient sound for over a decade, and this single song album follows that template. Living up to its title, throughout the 47 minutes there is a constant change of light and dark, hues and saturations that never stay still.

As half of the black metal influenced duo Menace Ruine, Geneviève Beaulieu gives the project its unique sound via her distinct, idiosyncratic voice that alternates between dramatic and understated. On the debut of her side project Preterite (with multi instrumentalist James Hamilton), the metal is scaled back and the more folk elements are pushed forward, but in a way that defies expectations based on that simple description.