Pitre's latest composition is certainly an impressive and mesmerizing one, but it is quite a daunting challenge to find words to describe quite why it works so well.  Built around computer-randomized patterns of harmonics and fleshed out by a sextet of strings and dulcimer, Feel Free's beauty lies in its rippling, organic near-stasis: this is classical music blurred, stretched, and rendered in such a pointillist fashion as to seem like a languid, blissful, and formless haze.

After last year's acclaimed Please Stop Loving Me and the Ante Algo Azul subscription series, Szczepanik has almost simultaneously put out his first and second vinyl releases. While the two albums could hardly be more different from each other, both carry the composer's careful attention to detail and creation of beautiful, sparse music.

Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde introduced Alcest to the world five years ago with Stéphane "Neige" Paut's ideas fully formed from the start. Écailles de Lune took a conceptually dark detour, with Neige playing around with bold song structures (the album opens with a two-song suite lasting 20 minutes, both parts also titled "Écailles de Lune") and branching into new sounds (see all-acoustic closer "Sur l'Ocean Couleur de Fer"). Third album Les Voyages de l'Âme—translating to The Journeys of the Soul—boasts cleaner production, more immediate hooks, shorter songs, and spiritually evocative titles ("Beings of Light," "Summer's Glory"). In short, this is Alcest's most approachable, immediately striking album.

Aside from his role as the lead singer of The Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley briefly operated his own label, Groovy Records, devoted to strange electronic music. Drag City have reissued the full Groovy catalog including this mesmerizing solo album by Shelley. Consisting solely of shifting oscillator patterns, this is a far cry from the short, choppy punk he is best known for yet is just as engaging as his more famous efforts.

In August of 1982, Mute released the 7" single for "Life on the Line," one month ahead of the forthcoming album. It was a stark contrast to the previous single, "Saturday Night Special," released only in February that year. This too was a catchy melody, but it was unashamedly supplied by a beefy synth and almost purely electric rhythm. Frank had decided to strip the producing and engineering team leaving only John Fryer and himself at the controls. The result is arguably the favorite amongst the fans.

Erik Skodvin is having quite an atypically prolific year, following up a stellar B/B/S/ album and the much-anticipated reissue of Deaf Center's debut with the return of his Svarte Greiner guise.  As with all Skodvin projects, Moss Garden is quite a dark and quietly heavy affair, but it is a bit more abstract, mysterious, and longform than much of his other output.  While Skodvin's eerie Ebow work is sometimes recognizable amidst the brooding murk and seismic shudders, Moss Garden works best when it is just a billowing black cloud of seething menace.

Folklore Tapes has quietly been one of the most singular and fascinating labels around for the last several years, a secret that they have managed to keep fairly well-concealed with their hyper-limited, hand-made and elaborate editions that tend to disappear quite quickly.  A handful of them eventually surface on Bandcamp, but most do not: Folklore Tapes releases are nothing if not elusive and ephemeral.  Thankfully, some of the more classic releases gradually get reissued, such as this one (which had an initial run of just 30).  This considerably larger (and newly vinyl-ized) reissue has an interesting twist, however, as the lengthy Children of Alice piece from the original has been replaced by three atypical new pieces from guitarist Dean McPhee.  Given that Children of Alice is comprised of the surviving members of Broadcast, that news will likely break a few hearts, but the two playfully hallucinatory soundscapes from the mysterious Mary Arches scratch quite a similar itch.

I am not sure if I am very late to the party on Croatian Amor or unintentionally getting in at exactly the right time, but Loke Rahbek's latest album has sneakily become one of my favorite releases of the year.  I suspect I would have missed Love Means Taking Action entirely had it not been co-released on Luke Younger's largely unerring Alter imprint, as Rahbek seems to have built a career out of being a shape-shifting enigma, leaving a large and varied discography of noise, power electronics, black metal, and dark wave behind him, most of which has surfaced on his own excellent Copenhagen-based Posh Isolation label (though he has also turned up in few Sacred Bones acts as well).  Also significant: Croatian Amor releases generally tend to have some kind of half-pornographic/half-conceptual motif suggestive of more harsh quasi-industrial fare.  As a result, I was quite surprised to discover that Love Means Taking Action most closely resembles the genre-fluid and dreamy Romanticism of prime This Mortal Coil.  It is anything but a nostalgic pastiche though, as Rahbek manages to capture the elusive feel of those albums while still doing something quite unusual and unique.

Two new side-projects from Locrian guitarist Andre Foisy, the former with David Reed (Envenomist) on keyboards, and the latter a live improvisation trio with Mike Weis (Zelienople) on percussion and Neil Jendon on synths. While the two are distinct projects and releases, there is a certain shared tense bleakness that exists between the two cassettes.

As Julia Holter's second full-length in less than 8 months, Ekstasis has a good deal of anticipation on its shoulders. Last year's Tragedy was her big splash into the experimental music pond, packed with high-brow conceptualism that made perfect sense given her academic background in electronic composition. On Ekstasis, Holter steps into the spotlight with an entirely different take on her sound.

Julia Holter's debut is finally in prime position to reach a wider audience; given the broad appeal of her 2012 album, Ekstasis, to the NPR listening set, Tragedy has been graciously granted a CD pressing. If anything, the pop leanings of Ekstasis reinforce the otherworldliness of Tragedy, which remains a world all its own, conceptually daunting, rich in texture but a difficult entry point into Holter's music.

Curiously, Jon Porras' second solo album does not sound anything at all like 2011's brilliant and blackened Undercurrent.  Instead, it sounds exactly like Barn Owl.  More specifically, it sounds like the chameleonic duo's lonely, vaguely occult-sounding desert rock side.  On one hand, that is pretty disappointing, as his debut was more immediate and powerful. Also, sounding like his primary band seems to defeat the whole purpose of releasing solo work.  On the other hand, Black Mesa is an excellent album in its own right (and is much better than several actual Barn Owl releases).

In theory, this doesn't seem like it should not be an especially noteworthy album, as Brad Rose is constantly collaborating with other musicians and has already amassed a vast, Merzbow-esque discography under many, many guises and I am fairly unfamiliar with his foil this time around (guitarist Pete Fosco).  Also, this is already the fourth Concessionaires release.  In reality, however, this duo conjures up one hell of a crushing, synth-heavy futuristic dystopia.

There's a saying something to the effect of "You'll never be as good as your first album," and for Frank Tovey, his second Fad Gadget record doesn't make a good argument against that statement. In 1981, Tovey seems to have been trying to distance himself from the electro domination that prevailed throughout his first singles and much of Fireside Favourites. Depeche Mode were graduating from opening for Fad Gadget to headlining their own shows, and Mute was being recognized as a home to many synth-dominated acts. Tovey made choices that may have suited him right at the time but years later I don't think they hold up so well.

I've grown to expect unusual albums from Daniel Padden and this one did not disappoint me.  Much like Sublime Frequencies and Harappian Night Recordings, Ship Chop is the product of an omnivorous love of indigenous and exotic music from around the world: Padden took his favorite records and turned them into collage pieces that inventively combine previously unrelated cultures and sounds. Most remarkable about the album, however, is how exacting he was with his editing.  This easily could have been a murky and surreal miasma of overlapping recordings, but it isn't.  Instead, this album is surprisingly coherent, sharp, and hook-filled.  While there quite a few shorter pieces that are too brief to be satisfying, the handful of more extended songs are pretty unerringly excellent and it all forms a memorably warped whole.

Michal Jacaszek is one of the few contemporary composers around who is able to blend classical themes and instrumentation with digitized noise without sounding forced or unnatural.  It's a very distinctive aesthetic that he has been honing for a decade now and it seems to grow more refined with each new album.  Glimmer doesn't stylistically diverge at all from my expectations, but Jacaszek has made some definite improvements in building textural layers and balancing his characteristic gloom with some warmth and movement.  Those minor tweaks collectively make a big difference, as this might be his finest album yet.

When I first found Throbbing Gristle's live album, I expected it to be the ultimate TG time capsule--preserving TG's live sound for future generations—but the band had other plans.  Rather than a live recording made at a pubic gig, Heathen Earth was a contrived and controlled affair that captured the sound of Throbbing Gristle performing for an invited audience in their studio. Rather than a blistering assault, it played more like a subdued (albeit menacing) jam session. They never made it easy.

Ten years ago this week a heart attack ended Frank Tovey's life. To this day, Fad Gadget has still not achieved "household name" status but Tovey's music continues to have an influence both directly and indirectly on music across numerous genres and ages. This month Brainwashed is going to honor his work by tackling each Fad Gadget album.

In a move that can only be described as "classic Heemann," Plastic Palace People 2 exhumes and recombines recordings from a 20-year-old collaboration.  These aren't just unheard remnants from the vault though: a lengthy and very recognizable segment of Mimyriad is reprised.  In fact, this can easily be viewed as a third version of that album–while most members of Mimir are not represented, their absence is not especially noticeable (given the nature of the music) and the two albums follow a similarly drifting, abstract, and long-form structure.  I think this incarnation definitely improves on the previous ones in most ways, but the whole endeavor is still as puzzling as it is revelatory.

Taking a step away from his singer-songwriter dabblings and harsher noise outputs of Burning Star Core, Yeh's 1975 is a piece of sound art that occasionally flirts with musical elements, but prefers to stay in the realm of abstraction, with a healthy sense of humor to boot. While it might not feel like an album in the traditional sense, the pieces that make up this disc still come together strongly, making for a whole greater than the sum of its parts.