Maximalism is in vogue for electronic musicians right now. With the rise of commercialized dubstep (aka "brostep"), this trend is unlikely to be reversed in 2012. Luckily, John Talabot is making fantastically balanced, listenable dance music a bit left of center; his debut album, ƒIN, downplays the genre's current above-ground trends in favor of his own nuanced production.
It has been a few years since Terry Riley has released an album with any meat to it. This double CD represents the first major recorded work Riley has done in a long time and it is a sprawling and intense journey. However, it is far from a return to form and a number of flaws get in the way of this being listed alongside his classic works.
This is the first of two collaborative albums between Jim O’Rourke and Christoph Heemann and represents some stunning spaced-out collage work by both artists. While it lacks the variance of Vol. 2, this particular work is a master class in using a very limited palette of sounds to create a massive emotional impact. The duo are almost painterly in their craft, shading and blending the different tones into each other rather than allowing any discrete patterns to emerge.
For his second solo effort, Deerhunter's Lockett Pundt abandons his experimental tendencies and throws himself wholeheartedly into making chiming, sun-dappled guitar pop.  On one hand, this album is much more focused, hook-filled, and filler-free than The Floodlight Collective.  On the other hand, he absolutely should not have done that, as he was much more compelling before.
Time of the metronomic kind gives shape to music. It defines the tempo of a song, fixes when sounds should and shouldn’t be played, and determines mood as surely as major and minor keys do. On 2 Seconds/B minor/Wave, Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto reverse that relationship and employ sound to illuminate the physical shapes and vaulted spaces of time. The product of independent performances, this album comes together in an astonishingly cohesive way, meaning that besides being a perspective-bending and aleatoric success, it is also a beautiful 60 minutes of music. Listen closely or let it pass over you, either way it furnishes many rewards.
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This live recording from 2009 sees Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter team up with Fabrizio Palumbo, Paul Beauchamp and Julia Kent to perform one of, if not, the classic Nurse With Wound album Soliloquy for Lilith. I cannot pretend that they have succeeded in recreating that amazing work but they have made something equally engaging if aesthetically different to the original. Stapleton is still acting as an aerial or a receiver for the basic sound but the other players build on it to form an entirely novel and separate entity.
Despite a career spanning decades as both a performer and music theorist, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan rarely played in front of a microphone. This album is just an instance in his artistic life, recorded in Bombay only a handful of years before his death but it shows a singer in his prime. His command of his voice and reverence for his art comes through the fog of the 78 recordings with a vigor undiminished by time or culture.
For the third installment of what has become a yearly tradition, three of contemporary music's foremost free improv players joined forces for a three-hour live show in Melbourne, Australia. The four tracks on Imikuzushi are excerpts culled from that blistering performance.
As much as I enjoy all of the musicians involved, the recently reincarnated Fenn O'Berg has thus far failed to recapture the deranged magic of their early years for me.  They can still be quite good though (and occasionally surprising).  These recordings from their 2010 Japanese tour share some of the muted, brooding tone of 2010's In Stereo, but also demonstrate that this laptop trio has not entirely abandoned their more wild, spontaneous, and absurdist tendencies.  I'm not sure if that necessarily makes In Hell stronger than its predecessor, but it at least seems a bit more striking and memorable.
Between this and the recently released Imikuzushi live collaboration with Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke, Ambarchi's work is drifting more and more into the realm of "music" rather than his more abstract tendencies. While the collaboration is a full on psychedelic rock blast, Audience of One is a more restrained, structured affair that features, among other things, an Ace Frehely cover.
As one of many of Dominick Fernow's many aliases, the debut of Vatican Shadow in 2010 could have ended up another one-off project to never be heard from again. However, going in a rhythmic direction rather than just harsh noise made for a project that stood out among its peers. Here, the second release and first full length is re-released on vinyl with a significant leap in sound quality.
Start to finish, Mirrorring's debut is submerged in a hazy, blurred production aesthetic. This is not only unsurprising, it's exactly what I would have predicted from this collaboration between Liz Harris (of Grouper) and Jesy Fortino (of Tiny Vipers) before hearing a single reverbed note. Fortunately, Liz Harris' age-old trick is a good one, and Fortino's contributions are key, making Foreign Body more than the sum of its contributors' parts.
I am not at all surprised that Jim Jarmusch has finally made an album, but given his past links to folks like RZA,  Mulatu Astatke, and Tom Waits, I did not exactly expect his musical debut to be a duet with a Dutch lutenist.  As it turns out, however, Jozef van Wissem turns out to be a very comfortable and effective foil for Jarmusch's rather abstract guitar work.  While this isn't a deep or substantial album by any means (despite the grandiose implications of the Swedenborgian title), it is nevertheless quite a warm and likable one and it never sounds at all tossed-off or overwrought.
This album is hailed as boasting the most energetic and concise songs of White Hills' career, which seems like a very ill-advised direction for the band to take, given that they are not a band known for great songcraft.  I look to them solely for drugged-out, guitar-worship excess—trying to be direct and hard-hitting does not suit them at all.  Fortunately, they still balance their punchier songs with several prolonged, space-y freakouts.  When those avoid sinking into self-parodying extremes, they can be absolutely brilliant.  I just wish that there were fewer uneven, underwhelming, and frustrating moments between them.
Tomkins is of course more well known for his power electronics work as Sutcliffe Jugend, he (as well as SJ partner Paul Taylor) have been using their own label, Between Silences, to release a multitude of experiments and improvisations. Here, Tomkins goes into a more experimental electronic direction, including seven full discs of material inspired by Japanese pachinko halls.
A posthumous release from this composer, with help from Will Guthrie (percussion) and Elisabeth Gmeiner (violin), there is a significant use of space and ambience from this otherwise noise-centric artist. With its unconventional instrumentation and coda/remix by Schäfer’s collaborator and friend Zbigniew Karkowski, it is a fitting tribute.
Collecting a number of cassette only releases from the '80s, this CD box set charts Colin Potter’s development over the course of about ten years. While the styles he employed are drastically different to his current mode of working, this collection covers everything from Kosmische soundscapes to quirky BBC Radiophonic Workshop style tunes. However, it is possible to hear the embryonic forms of what he is now doing; this may be ancient history but it is a narrative with some meaning today.
Robert Henke has long been an influential elder statesman in the worlds of electronic music and sound design (he's partially responsible for the ubiquity of MacBooks), but Ghosts seems to indicate that it is a role that he is not entirely comfortable with.  Much of the album is every bit as sparsely futuristic, cerebral, and ominous as I have grown to expect from Monolake, but there are also some uncharacteristically blunt nods to some of dance music's more aggressive strains.  The success of that aesthetic experiment is certainly questionable, but Henke has otherwise completed yet another minor masterpiece of razor-sharp focus and clarity.