On his third album as Bionulor, Sebastian Banaszczyk has made an even greater leap into personalizing his sound. While he still focuses on the use of processed and recycled sounds, here there is a sense not only of consistency from piece to piece, resulting in a cohesive album of material, but also a more personal touch, a human element all too often missing from this sort of music

Performed, composed, and recorded over a period of 14 months, Crosshatches is a massive and exquisitely constructed 85 minute piece stretched across two compact discs. On it, Pisaro and Tsunoda sketch and blend non-musical sounds into musical ones, erasing the seemingly natural distinction between them as they go. The vehicle for that transformation is crosshatching, which the duo elegantly transforms into a musical mode.

The trajectory of Natural Snow Buildings continues to amaze me with each new album, as Mehdi and Solange seem to grow more and more inventive and skilled at composition every single time they surface.  Mehdi's last solo effort, the drone-heavy Then Fell the Ashes... was one of favorite albums of 2011, but Bogyrealm Vessels is a completely different (but no less wonderful) animal: an enigmatic and weirdly beautiful song-based concept album involving a space invasion, schoolgirls, and giant plants.

Ben Chatwin's latest effort is an experiment gone awry in the best possible sense, as his initial plan to make an album in a single week ultimately turned into his spending more than a year trying to abstractly replicate the creation of the world using The Seven Days of Creation as a guideline.  Unsurprisingly, the resultant album is considerably brighter than its brilliant predecessor (Day One being the creation of light, after all) as well as more structurally complex and dynamically varied, but Ben's compositional talents thankfully seem to have had no trouble matching his daunting ambition.

The use of Daphni as a distinction between the bulk of Dan Snaith's work done as Caribou is more than just an attractive new coat of paint or the result of yet another frivolous lawsuit. As Daphni, Snaith takes the elements of electronic music and dance that inspired much of 2010's Swim and extracts all semblance of outside influence, leaving a pretty faithful, smirkless take on house music. To me, Daphni is a way for Snaith to immerse himself into a subculture he's only been a tourist to. Here he can be a face in a crowd, playing freely with ideas instead of living up to a reputation.

I have fallen in love with Bob Mould again. I had the amazing opportunity of seeing Hüsker Dü as a teenager on their final tour and Mould's first two solo albums have a lot of outstanding songs, but for me it wasn't until Copper Blue that I became more in touch with his music. Twenty years ago, Mould was able to thread a collection of great songs into something much more magnificent. With Silver Age, he has finally, for me at least, been able to do this again.

While some of Collins' works have leaned a lot into more guitar-centric sounds and traditional structures, on Tenebroso he goes for a more understated, cinematic approach. Bleak and dark, but without any trite cliché elements, the resulting disc is a wonderfully unsettling one.

While the recent Gustafsson album Bengt saw the prolific saxophonist working with extreme restraint, here with the Norwegian trio Ich Bin N!ntendo he is doing anything but. A short, but fierce live performance captured and mastered by Lasse Marhaug, it lurks somewhere between free jazz, punk, and noise and makes for a unique, if slightly painful experience.

It certainly does not seem as if it has been seven years since Ciphers + Axioms, but it has, and Even if it Takes a Lifetime is the first music Anatomy of Habit have released since then. The heaviness that pervaded their previous two albums and debut EP is here for sure, but there is also a greater sense of melodicism, spearheaded by band leader Mark Solotroff’s (Bloodyminded, The Fortieth Day) vocal approach. The album still sounds like the same band, but one that has solidified into a pummeling, yet nuanced machine that is as complex as it is heavy, resulting in their best work to date.

Self-Released

The album opens with "A Marginal World" and, at less than seven minutes, is the shortest song the band has created so far. With the limited duration the band wastes no time launching in to a heavy chug by rhythm section Skyler Rowe and Sam Wagster, nicely complemented by Solotroff's bandmate in Bloodyminded Isidro Reyes' metal clattering accents. Solotroff's booming voice comes right in quickly, his stentorious delivery as severe as ever. Rapid fire snare and cymbals soon come in, upping the tempo and giving a slightly less doom laden feel compared to their other work. There are a lot of transitions given its short length, but it leads to a complex, yet immediate sound from the start.

Winter is the most fitting season for Deupree's music, a distinctive blend of cold, sparse spaces mixed with warm, melodic passages. Faint is no different, an album consisting of five long pieces that capture the stillness of nature, the coldness of electronics, and the warmth of organic instrumentation.

Embracing the world of niche analog formats, Albany, New York’s Century Plants—the duo of guitarists Eric Hardiman and Ray Hare—have just put out this lathe cut 7" and one sided LP of new material that differ drastically from one another in style and sound, but have the same undeniable level of depth and quality that I have come to expect both from this project and from the requisite multitude of side-projects they are involved in.

There are very few musicians that can craft a genuinely compelling album from just a few sustained tones or chords and most of them (Catherine Christer Hennix and Eliane Radigue, for example) seem to have records on Important.  With the eerie and evocative Secret Photographs, Rutger Zuydervelt has decisively earned his place in that highly exclusive clique.

Digitalis head Brad Rose has been a wildly prolific and varied artist for years, but his heavy drone project The North Sea has been the longest-running of his many musical endeavors.  Lately, however, he has a adapted the more synth-centric guise of Charlatan as his primary outlet, so Grandeur & Weakness marks the end of an era and does so beautifully.  In some respects, this effort is not radically different from Charlatan's recent Isolatarium (they use very similar tools), but the difference in density and atmosphere is dramatic, as futuristic unease is replaced by buzzing, bristling monoliths of menace and dread.

Lichens' Robert Lowe has always been a rather singular artist, but this latest effort is unusual even by his standards. Although it takes its inspiration from the British sci-fi series The Tomorrow People, its futuristic overtones are contained within a framework that seems far more indebted to raga, drone, and other sacred and ancient sources.  It is certainly an original vision, but the actual content is not quite strong enough to support Lowe's endless, mantric repetition.

I can't let 2011 go by without gushing about the newest music to come from this criminally underexposed Virginia-based group. This brief four-song EP is a walloping punch with an infectious lead title tune that is more of an honor to the wall-of-sound of Joe Meek's production for The Tornadoes claim to fame than it is for any '80s band. This has been accomplished without turning their back on their already established signature sound.

Although Stephen Mallinder has been probably the least prolific of his Cabaret Voltaire cohorts, his work outside of that classic band has never been lacking in quality. This album, originally released in 1999 with Shane Norton, demonstrates how his post-CV trajectory moved towards the dancier end of the spectrum and manages to mostly sound fresh, even within a genre that tries to reinvent itself every few months.

Originally issued on CD in 2009 and now reissued on double vinyl with additional tracks, Without Sinking is the second album from this Icelandic cellist (who has worked with the likes of mum and the Hafler Trio). Hildur’s subtly treated cello and zither compositions are only enriched by the vinyl format, adding an extra layer of warmth and emotion to her already powerful works.

When Wire imploded in 1980, Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis quickly began the Dome project, recording their first three albums within a 12-month span, then a fourth in 1983. Collating the four classic Dome albums from the early 1980s with the Yclept compilation presented on vinyl, these classic albums are presented in a luxurious new set which is undeniably essential listening.

There is something to be said about listening to a good instrumental record on a cold wintry day. The right one should be picked of course, whose notes and timbres are delicate as powdery snow. The music should be austere, but with warm harmonics cutting through the cold like glimmers of sunshine. The eight pieces on this album are just the thing, and have a nice narrative arc that has me thinking of the similarities between novels and albums, how moving both forms can be, and how a good album, even without words, always tells a story. Like curling up with a good book, it’s nice to be inside on a Sunday afternoon comforted by the joys of a turntable and a warm cup of coffee.

Golem is widely regarded to be a lost psychedelic masterpiece among the sorts of people who are interested in such things, numbering David Tibet, Stephen Stapleton, and Julian Cope among its more outspoken champions.  In fact, Current 93 even covered "May Rain" on Thunder Perfect Mind.  Now, 36 years after it initially appeared, Golem has finally been reissued for the first time in its original form (though it previously surfaced as part of Durtro's Ultrasonic Seraphim retrospective in 1996). I don't think I'd quite call it a masterpiece myself, but it is definitely one of the more memorably bizarre albums to emerge from the krautrock milieu and that is certainly no small feat.