Irish steel-string guitarist Cian Nugent's fantastic full-length for VHF is his first widely available recording. It recalls a timeless vinyl record with its two side-length pieces—cohesive and complementary, deftly played, rooted in tradition with a modern experimental bent.

Steve Roach's 1984 opus Structures from Silence has been a staple of my record collection for ages, but it has been about eight years since I last checked out anything new from him.  Although he can sometimes be a bit too earthy for my taste, Destination Beyond shows that Steve has not yet abandoned the spacier side that produced The Magnificent Void, nor have his powers begun to ebb at all.  I wish I had been paying more attention, as he seems to be in the midst of a rather fruitful creative period. 

Black to Comm's Marc Richter is an artist that perpetually seems to be on the verge of releasing an absolute masterwork, always creeping closer and closer but never quite nailing it.  Alphabet 1968 does not quite buck that trend completely, but it is an oft-brilliant and unforgettable album nonetheless.  Richter's impressive artistic evolution is showing no sign of slowing.

On his fourth release for the venerable label, Niblock has produced three large scale compositions, based entirely around the use of stringed instruments.  In the process, he brings out the most subtle of harmonics and creates an unraveling tapestry of microscopic change in layers of sound.  And a slight Band of Susans reunion.

I found this CD in a small shop full of musty vinyl, fanzines, crates of tapes, and neatly arranged homemade and self released CDRs on a recent trip to Portland, Maine. I had no idea what kind of music I would find on the disc, but liking the cover, I took a stab at it. I did remain skeptical knowing next to nothing about what I had just purchased. What I found was a very humble and unassuming album of non-pretentious lo-fi folk meanderings. On listening my attitude of skepticism quickly relaxed under the pastoral melodies Jeremy Pisani coaxed from his acoustic guitar.

Spilling over with trembling strings and thunderous crescendos, "Coward" foreshadows the electric energy that is to be found throughout Vic Chesnutt's newest record. With members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Silver Mt. Zion, and Fugazi once again contributing, At the Cut is populated by giant melodies, quiet meditations, and intense studies on mortality and memory. But, for all its bombast, At the Cut is probably most notable for Chesnutt's unwavering honesty and cathartic power. Because of these qualities it has quickly become one of my favorite and most played records this year.

Pelican's latest proves that you don't need a crooner to rock, and that you don't have to ramble on for a quarter of an hour just because your band doesn't have a singer, either.  This is an album full of gritty, muscular songs that makes the case for hard rock bands releasing instrumental versions of their albums.

Juana Molina's music is a child-like and eruptive force of nature. On her fifth album she has refined her musical vocabulary and crafted a work that rejoices in playfulness and unrestrained dynamism.

Ka-Spel's follow up to last year's excellent Part One is similarly organized, but features vastly different results. More disjointed and even jarring at times, this album mines new emotional territory. Uncertainty and dread give rise to paranoiac self-effacement on this melancholic gaze into the underworld.

It's hard to imagine a better guide to vintage European prog/psych than The Bevis Frond's Nick Saloman. Here he curates another compilation of quality obscurities from the late '60s and early '70s, this time originating primarily in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Ireland, and Britain. While not every selection is a lost classic, this collection is thoroughly entertaining.

Lauded often as the zenith of their career, this album manages to be richer and more unified by actually being more disjointed: rather than the nine distinct pieces that made up Information Overload Unit, Leichenschrei is 14 shorter tracks that bleed over into one another, often invisibly. Taken as a whole there is a certain thematic linkage that pulls the album together into one of darkest, bleakest ones in existence, one that loses none of its power nearly 30 years since its release.

Ankersmit's first solo foray, last year's Live in Utrecht was praised by many, including myself, as a powerful and unique piece of abstraction mixing inorganic processed sounds with saxophone in an impressively diverse live setting. Here, with fellow composer Valerio Tricoli (3/4HadBeen Eliminated), the work is in a more traditional context, composed between 2008 and 2010, with the results being no less impressive than his solo live endeavor.

J. G. Thirlwell's Manorexia project is perhaps the most idiosyncratic in a career of idiosyncrasies. As both a specifically solo project and one in which traditional structures are an afterthought, it excels in both the realms of modern composition and pure chaos. Those strengths are magnified on this album, specifically with the inclusion of a 5.1 surround sound mix on DVD, which one of the most creative and effective uses of the format I have yet heard.

Collecting ideas from fiction and philosophy, this release clarifies Florian Hecker’s reputation for playfulness and investigation. Like a rogue mathematician who is considering questions which most people will never consider, Hecker attempts to turn metaphysical query into sound. His response to the (strange and hilarious) notion of hyperchaos will be unpalatable for some; but others of us wouldn’t have it any other way.

In 2009, filmmaker Olivia Wyatt flew to Ethiopia to document an indigenous music festival (the Festival of a Thousand Stars), only to learn upon her arrival that the government had canceled it.  Rather than admitting defeat, Wyatt opted instead to embark upon an epic road trip, visiting more than a dozen of the tribes associated with the festival on their own (very remote) home turf.  The mesmerizing footage of amphetamine-fueled spirit possession ceremonies, unsettling wedding rituals, and bizarre music videos that resulted boasts some of the strangest things that I have ever seen or heard.

These two very different releases are the first formal full-length albums from Michael Jantz's solo guitar project, but he already has a lengthy discography behind him that spans many of cassette culture's most revered labels (Stunned, Housecraft, Digitalis, etc.).  While he covers a wide stylistic range, Jantz never seems like a tourist: he brings an assurance and a laconic charm to everything from banjo playing to neo-krautock.  In fact, he might be one of the only artists that I can think of that can seamlessly bridge the gulf between the rootsy steel string folks and the newer wave of loop-y, laptop-enhanced experimentalists.  He is not infallible though.

Stunning and devasting from beginning to end, this Triosk member's solo debut emotes relentlessly, unrestrained by any prescribed genre boundaries.  To futilely classify this pensive meisterstück, as some critics are wont to do, defies sense, as the piano-driven music in effect speaks for itself, in despondent whispers and virtual screams.

My first experience of the music of Coil came in the mid-'90s, hearing their remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. I tended to prefer the remixes to the NIN originals, and the versions by Coil were some of the best of those: creative and bizarre sound construction and deconstruction. Still, as remixes they were not the unfiltered visionary music of Coil proper which still allures and intrigues me to this day, a vision I fell for completely on listening to Love’s Secret Domain.

"Out of Light, Cometh Darkness" proclaims the scroll on the cover of Love’s Secret Domain, a fitting epitaph for Coil. The rest of the cover shows a skeleton, an eye, flames, occult symbols and a spectral penis painted on an outhouse door, all combining to form the face of a lion. Feral, phallic and fantastic, Steven Stapleton’s artwork perfectly prepares you for what is to come after pressing play. Chimeric and disjointed, decadent and symmetrical, this is one of Coil’s finest moments.

In the summer of 1993, my friend Eric showed up at my house with a grocery bag full of CDs that he swore I needed to hear. Among them were Lustmord's Paradise Disowned and Heresy and just about everything available at the time from Coil. I had already been exposed to Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, but this was my first taste of Coil and I started with Horse Rotorvator because I figured that I needed to hear any record that kicked off with a song called "The Anal Staircase" immediately.