The most striking characteristic of this album compared to Will Long's others is how hushed the material is. "A Small Rush Into Exile" never creeps above a whisper, making it necessary to listen in complete silence to perceive the floating melodies and delicate shimmers that exist.

Lee Bartow's Navicon Torture Technologies project came to a lavish end with the double album The Gospels of the Gash in 2009, after which he adopted the Theologian moniker and continued on. A special limited edition was released alongside, with an additional two discs of exclusive remixes and collaborations with a slew of artists both well known and just getting established. Your Suffering Will Be Legendary reproduces those additional discs, which function nicely on their own, thankfully not relegated to be forgotten bonus material.

While I could not possibly be more weary of synthesizer albums at this point, one still comes along every now and then that miraculously breaches my wall of indifference.  This aptly titled effort is one such album, as Holtkamp has unleashed a burbling, radiant, and psychedelic tour de force.  The sheer candy-colored brightness of Koen's vision still remains a bit of an obstacle for me (as it was earlier this year with Mountain's Centralia), but Liquid Light Forms' dazzling and dense vibrancy is sometimes enough to transcend my normal aesthetic preferences.

Made up of the members of psych rock group Overhang Party (whose discography has been recently been compiled by Important Records), the trio lead by guitarist/vocalist Rinji Fukuoka captures much of that band’s sound and intensity in these two new albums and deluxe reissue. It also clearly shows the changes and development of their sound, using the past as a reference point but not being mired in it.

Good luck pinning down New York's Nate Wooley. He's an Oregon-born trumpeter with solo, duo, and quintet projects that deal in free improvisation, extended techniques, feedback, noise, and jazz. He has played with Yoshi Wada, John Zorn, and Anthony Braxton, held residencies at ISSUE Project Room and Cafe OTO; he curates the Database of Recorded American Music online and is editor-in-chief for its quarterly Sound American journal. For The Almond Wooley flies solo, using carefully looped and layered tones to sculpt a beautiful and imposing 72-minute composition for trumpet and voice.

Anthony DiFranco has been a stalwart of the UK noise scene under many guises since back in the Broken Flag days.  In recent years, he has mainly constrained his activities to Ramleh, but he spent the late '80s and early '90s quite actively, recording as Ethnic Acid, JFK, and as an early member of Skullflower.  He also made several gnarled and ugly guitar noise albums as AX, which have long been woefully unavailable.  Metal Forest happily remedies that inequity, cramming all of AX's highlights into one snarling and truly brutal CD.

Like past releases, the latest from Dan Friel is an overblown, exuberant burst of colorful noise, swelled with circuit bent synthesizers, distorted drums, and major key melodies, celebrating life in a messy display of strength. The sheer caustic timbre of these songs is still the biggest barrier to entry for a lot of people, but now that Parts And Labor has broken up it is more likely than ever than Friel's solo venture will get some serious attention.

This is Cobb's first full-length under his own name, but he has long been an active and influential figure in the American drone scene as both Taiga Remains and the man behind the Students of Decay label.  Appropriately, the shedding of his artistic alias coincides with a more human, warm, and intimate direction that is not wildly dissimilar to early Taiga recordings like 2006's Ribbons of Dust.  That (somewhat circular) change seems to have suited him quite well, as he and his guitar have delivered a wonderfully languorous suite of gently swaying dronescapes.

From its sound to its presentation, this is as much scientific experimentation as it is something to vaguely consider music. The track titles and stark, back cover–that looks more like a lab report than an album cover–are indicative of a work that is heavily focused on conceptualism. For the most part, the experiments work taken out of context as compositions, with a few hang-ups along the way.

I'm always impressed by groups that can make a collection of distinct songs without changing much in the formula that composes each one. By sparing themselves a lot of the melancholy and slowed choruses inherent to dreamy guitar pop, Beach Fossils has made a sophomore record that feels emotionally charged without ever having to resort to gimmicks or overcompensation on mood or texture. At the core of each song is genuine pop, driven by a real desire to communicate ideas clearly.

Drawing on parapsychology, pseudoscience and good old fashioned dance music, the latest album from Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt is almost unimaginably good. Based around the Ganzfeld experiments in telepathy, in the spirit of The Marriage of True Minds, this review will consist of two parts. One, the regular review by me and the other an experiment by my wife who has not heard the album but has attempted to experience it by concentrating on my thoughts as I listened to the album on headphones.

While singing has frequently been part of Yoshi Wada’s other compositions, this is the first work of his to be released that dispenses with all other forms of instrumentation. Three male voices are all that is needed to create this intense and beautiful work captured during two performances in 1978. Combining the ultra modernism of the minimalist movement and ancient vocal traditions, Singing in Unison rivals any other modern vocal work I have heard thanks to its powerful mix of simple structures, complex harmonies and, above all, its emotional warmth.

Edward Ka-Spel's recent hot streak arguably takes a bit of a break with this release, but that is at least partially by design, given the Chemical Playschool series' role as a repository for indulgence, improvisation, experimentation, orphaned songs, and general weirdness.  The bulk of these lengthy pieces center around Ka-Spel's surreal, paranoid monologues and throbbing, synth-based space rock vamps, which can be quite compelling (and also disturbed-sounding).  The catch is that these lengthy not-quite-songs are not particularly well distilled, leaving the album's many high points embedded in quite a bit of meandering psychedelia.

Daniel Padden has always been a prickly, inscrutable, and unpredictable artist, equally capable of visionary brilliance and perplexing, inaccessible indulgence.  This latest effort is an especially perverse and puzzling one, as Padden takes his long-standing fascination with English and Eastern European folk music into more accessible, song-like, and vocal-centric territory.  It is an intermittently successful experiment, but The One Ensemble's greatest talents definitely lie elsewhere.

Compiling their vinyl debut and follow-up EP, this compilation captures the Chicago rock supergroup (made up of some of the city’s best known noise artists) honing and perfecting their surprisingly restrained and tuneful, but appropriately grandiose work.

For their second collaborative release (following Untitled 1-3), these two composers who work in very different, but musically complementary realms have created a single, 45 minute work that makes for the perfect blend of light and shadow, clear and haze, with the album artwork making for a perfect metaphor for the sound within.

This is an album of such glorious and near-comic excess that it could only have been released by Hospital Productions, as it clocks in at a staggering 2 1/2 hours of brooding dark ambiance.  In fact, it feels like a perverse negative image of the perfectly distilled brutality of last year's Relief, drowsily stretching out endlessly in drone-mode without a hint of violence to be found.  A few of these seven pieces are (of course) quite good for what they are, but this is not an album that showcases Drumm's power, vision, and distinctiveness particularly well at all.

To celebrate their reissue of 2008's acclaimed, widely beloved, and charmingly titled Dragging A Dead Deer Up a Hill, Kranky has concurrently issued this surprisingly solid companion album of unreleased recordings from the same period.  Nearly all of these pieces adhere to Deer's aesthetic of strummed acoustic guitars amidst a warm, dreamlike haze, but the hooks are not nearly as strong or frequent this time around.  With most artists, that would generally mean "these songs were not good enough," but Grouper has always been far more about atmosphere and mood than "songs."

For their fourth album, Theme’s Richard Johnson and Stuart Carter have picked up Faust’s Jean-Hervé Peron and Budapest musician Zsolt Sörés to pad out their already exciting sounds. The three barely restrained improvisations that make up this LP show a group that knows how to cook in the studio. At times tense, at others serene, Theme manage to cover a huge amount of ground with a fairly limited palette of sounds.

American Power Electronics is a divisive sub-sub genre for me. My tastes tend to lean towards the more industrial/punk tinged, politically ambiguous European type (Genocide Organ, Grey Wolves, etc), because the US projects are too often hung up on violent misogyny or politically unambiguous shock tactics. Projects like Nyodene D, however, manage to transcend the clichés and put together albums that stand entirely on their own, such as Edenfall.