I certainly grouse a lot about the seemingly endless tide of modular synth albums being released in experimental music circles these days, but there are a handful of artists who induce me to marvel at the truly incredible potential of such gear instead. One such artist is erstwhile guitarist Cam Deas, who absolutely floored me with last year's brilliantly twisted and phantasmagoric Time Exercises. Happily, this latest release returns to roughly that same squirming, tormented and mind-dissolving terrain, but the world of the more spacious and nuanced Mechanosphere evokes a somewhat different feel than its more explosive and abrasive predecessor.

It is hard to overstate Lee "Scratch" Perry's influence on Jamaican music, hip-hop, and evolution of electronic music, as everyone who has ever used sampling or any dub-inspired production techniques is part of a continuum that he played a massive role in conjuring into being. For the most part, his most visionary work was recorded during the white-hot creative period in the '70s when Lee was obsessively recording at his Black Ark studio in Kingston, but his career after (allegedly) burning down his studio (to purge it of evil spirits) has objectively been a strange and erratic one with Perry embracing a sort of cosmic jester persona. He has always remained a boldly original thinker, however, and has continued to fitfully release some fine albums whenever he finds a sympathetic foil. One of the earliest artists to fill that role in Perry's post-Black Ark era was Adrian Sherwood for 1987's Time Boom X De Devil Dead (a union that was reprised two decades later with The Mighty Upsetter). With Rainford and its dub companion Heavy Rain, those two dub heavyweights are reunited once again (and at a time when both artists are experiencing a bit of a well-deserved renaissance). Both albums boast their share of killer material, but Heavy Rain is the more focused and uniformly strong of the pair.

For their fourth studio album, this Texan combo retains their guitar-centric post-rock approach but expands more into abstraction and dissonance amongst these nine instrumental compositions. Shades of shoegaze and electronic ambient pepper the pieces, but the TWDY do an exceptional job at making sure the record is one that is impossible to easily categorize.

A spate of vinyl reissues has brought welcome attention to Family Fodder more than 30 years after they formed, and their eclectic music sounds as engagingly fresh, naive, and wise, as ever.

Imagine music resides everywhere that sound can travel. It flows from the faucet into the sink each morning, creaks out of the loose boards on the way up and down the stairs, and, incredibly, buzzes in your sweetheart's mouth as he or she snores noisily at 3 AM on Monday morning. The difference between music and not-music then pivots on the attention and consideration different sounds receive. Record them to tape, amplify and manipulate them, or set them into new patterns and a surprising, sometimes beautiful music can emerge. That's the music of The Breadwinner, the first album in Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet's recently completed trilogy on Erstwhile.

In typically perverse fashion, LPD bring their wildly prolific year to a close by burying their absolute best material on the second side of an extremely limited Italian picture disc (though it has thankfully now been made available digitally). The first half is not bad either, but the creepily phantasmagoric closer "Ghost of a Summer to Come" is one of the strongest arguments for Edward Ka-Spel's genius in recent memory.

The Opalio brothers are certainly no strangers to uncompromising, indulgent mindfuckery, but their latest effort is extreme even by their own standards.  Stretched out across six discs, Roberto and Maurizio use their weird arsenal of homemade instruments and detourned toys to create an absolute monolith of abstract psychedelia.  Simultaneously nightmarish, overwhelming, and inspired, My Cat is an Alien have concocted an epic, brain-frying bad trip like no else before.

After a surprisingly quiet year, Keiji Haino not only reignites the engines that power Fushitsusha but also forms this new trio with Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi. While I have yet to hear the new Fushitsusha album, Nazoranai hit the same spot as Haino’s most infamous group. Yawning chasms of feedback, pitch black silences and rock distilled down into its most concentrated acts of musical rebellion, this is up there with any of Haino’s best.

AUN is definitely the work of Christian Fennesz, but it does have a distinctly different sensibility compared to the work he normally puts out under his surname. Rather than a suite of complex, evolving compositions, this feels more like a series of sketches, a rough draft for other works, that function just fine on their own (and obviously work well in a soundtrack context).

The relationships between these four artists makes for a complex family tree on their own, and thus it makes perfect sense that there is a tangible sense of unity between these four sides of vinyl, something split releases often miss. Jeremy Lemos and Matthew Hale Clark play together in White/Light, while Ken Camden and Matt Jencik make up Kranky band Implodes. While each artist contributes very different sound material, they all complement each other quite well.

I could never quite understood why this Portland duo were not more popular, as their dreamy Twin Peaks/early 4AD/shoegazer aesthetic always seemed pretty likable to me (if a bit over-sedate).  Curiously, however, they have dramatically changed their sound for this album, their most high-profile release to date.  I cannot quite say that their shift into quasi-choral ambient doom is entirely an improvement, given that the new lack of actual "songs" is necessarily less engaging, but the better moments are pretty damn close to being audio heroin.

2009's polarizing God is Good alienated quite a few long-time Om fans, a situation that this album is highly unlikely to remedy–it looks like Al Cisneros' fascination with sitars, strings, and tablas is here to stay.  In fact, Om has never sounded less like Om, which I find a bit troubling.  Still, Al's ambition and intensity are almost sufficient enough to make it all work.  Despite its occasionally awkward attempts at grandeur and exoticism, Advaitic Songs is ultimately a very listenable and uncharacteristically varied batch of songs.

Ramleh and Broken Flag have seen a resurgence in the past few years, largely due to the three day Never Say When festival in the UK this past May (for which both of these releases were compiled), but also in a recent reactivation of Gary Mundy's seminal noise (and sometimes rock) project. While Mundy and current partner in crime Anthony DiFranco are moving onward with new material, these sets are an essential documentation of the band, and label’s past, as well as an often overlooked piece of early industrial culture.

Following up an already impressive album (the self-released CDR and cassette reissued II) is never an easy feat, but Chicago's Sun Splitter have done just that. Continuing their doom metal/rock/industrial hybrid sound with an even greater level of polish, as well as going a bit more experimental at times, the sequel may even surpass the predecessor.

Chalk has again walked a very fine line between complete abstraction and conscious identification. It's something that I feel only this genre is capable of and that Chalk, in particular, has managed to portray on Vega.

As if the allure of Jessica Bailiff's voice isn't enough to get any reasonable person excited about Northern Song Dynasty, then knowing that her fantastic song writing mixes exceedingly well with Jesse Edwards' approach should be enough to motivate everyone else.

En's 2010 debut (The Absent Coast) was pretty much universally regarded as a great drone album, finding a nice balance between Stars of the Lid-style shimmering bliss and subtly harsh crackle and hiss.  Happily, their latest album repeats that formula, but takes all of their impulses a bit further: the harsh parts are harsher and the dreamy parts are even dreamier. Although it may not be not quite as uniformly solid as its predecessor, the highlights are a bit more impressive.

This is a landmark album in the Acid Mothers Temple oeuvre for a variety of reasons, but not all of them are good.  On the positive side, Cotton Casino has returned to the fold and Kawabata Makoto and company have ambitiously stepped out of their comfort zone to attempt a "true electric jazz album" in homage to Miles Davis' 1970 masterpiece.  Unfortunately, the end result of their bold experiment is a bit of an exhausting, self-indulgent, and muddled mess.

There is no denying that Kawabata Makoto is an uncompromising and unique artist, but the sheer volume and unbridled excess of his work as Acid Mothers Temple has been yielding diminishing returns for me for quite some time.  Consequently, I always look forward to his more experimental and intimate diversions, such as this uneasy, drone-heavy collaboration with enigmatic Japanese accordionist à qui avec Gabriel. The two musicians make an inspired and complementary pairing, but Golden Tree does not entirely avoid some of Makoto's more irksome tendencies.

Fabrika is a new label based out of Athens, Greece, for exclusively vinyl-only limited editions focusing on obscure and up-and-coming minimal synth groups. Their first release, limited to 500 copies, is a sampler of analog synth acts, primarily from Europe, a few of who have since released full-length LPs through Fabrika Records as well. This collection ranges from the complex, pulsating cold wave ambience of NY-based Led Er Est to the bopping "electrobilly" of Berlin-based Jemek Jemowit. Over half of the tracks are from Germany and the general feel of the record is bleak, robotic and danceable with serrated edges.  It is essentially a dance compilation for the disaffected contemporary nihilist.  I envision futuristic sci-fi dancefloor party scenes with a looming, omnipresent antagonist while some of the characters might be overdosing yet no one seems to care.