In a recent interview, Kyle Bobby Dunn told Fracture Compound that he heard "the truth" in his favorite music, a truth that he associates with the "brutal honest beauty" of certain classical compositions. Kyle doesn't spell out what he thinks the truth is, but I suspect that Ways of Meaning provides a clue.

This new collaborative project pairs one of the UK’s most gifted and unconventional drone artists, Chris Herbert, with Spanish sound artist Elías Merino. The duo were initially brought together by their shared interest in creating lushly textured soundscapes, but each has a very different process for arriving there: Herbert is quite fond of natural and non-musical "found" sounds, while Merino's work is primarily computer-generated. Their commonalities handily eclipse any potential aesthetic clashes though, as Folds sounds like an absolutely gorgeous drone album enlivened by a churning undercurrent of grainy textures and sneakily obscured small-scale kinetic transformations. I suppose that description could probably apply to much of Herbert's solo work as well, but Folds definitely feels like an extra layer of depth, textural complexity, and visceral power has been added to the picture. Merino's presence has taken something already wonderful and elevated it to a whole new level.

Cécile Schott has long been my absolute favorite kind of artist: the kind who thoughtfully and quietly pieces together wonderfully distinctive albums and tends to only surface when she has something new and intriguing to say. As a result, being a Colleen fan has been a deliciously unpredictable slow-motion rollercoaster that has taken some expectation-subverting turns over the years: most artists who come right out of the gate with a sublime and timeless masterpiece like Everyone Alive Wants Answers would just keep revisiting that success with diminishing returns, but Schott has tirelessly kept moving forward with each new album. That evolution reached a crescendo of sorts with 2015 vocal-centric Captain of None, shedding a lot of artifice to reveal a more intimate and direct incarnation of Colleen. In some ways, this latest album continues that trajectory, but it also finds Schott setting her viola da gamba aside for a synthesizer. Admittedly, I tend to shake my head sadly whenever someone makes a synth album these days, but Schott has managed to bend those electronics to her will rather than falling under their spell like so many others.

Among the most diverse entries in their catalog, Nada! is the sound of two very different individuals creating one distinct album. With the departure of Tony Wakeford, the band pretty much dropped the electric post-punk sound that characterized the earliest singles. What remains is about half acoustic ballads, and half gothic synth pop, but somehow feels like a coherent whole, and for me remains one of their best albums ever.

Whenever a new vinyl release by Andrew Chalk surfaces, several things are fairly certain: it will be a beautiful object, it will be expensive, and it will be worth it.  Packaging-wise, Violin by Night hits impressive new heights in both lavishness and mystery.  The corresponding songs, on the other hand, are atypically brief and melodic, often more closely resembling a damaged Romantic classical recording than anything drone-like.

This is the latest EP by Jakob Battick’s group combines folk and psychedelic experimentation with slow motion arrangements; the group wear their influences on their sleeves but manage to distinguish themselves from their musical ancestors and their peers through their mixing of styles. Bloodworm Songs is by no means perfect (the recording quality is distinctly low fidelity and the more experimental segments are rather tame) but there is certainly diamonds hidden amidst the rough.

The album opens with the title track, a long piece brooding with psychological horror. Panning back and forth with ominous repetition it digs into me, beneath the surface, and I want to shed my skin. Oppressive and claustrophobic I clamor for air. This song feels like the moment of anxiety just before a peak experience. Once the summit of the mountain is reached however, the exultation and triumph incumbent upon a job well done kicks in and the rest of the album is crisp, vast, stretching without pause from horizon to horizon, clear as the hoarfrost on the arctic tundra.

I haven't had this much of a hard-on over an album since Colder's Heat. Marry Me Tonight (actually from 2009) is an almost purely emotional experience, with nine songs that in various levels combine ominous and chugging bass lines, creepy guitar (imagine that sound Wire toyed with on "Single KO"), a cold 808-supplied rhythm, a particularly endearing crudeness, and perverse lyrics with a disaffected delivery. This is a wet dream of a teenager overpowered by his or her hormones with enough pent up angst to send most adults into therapy.

Akron's one-man debut nods to influences such as Delia Derbyshire and Joe Meek but cannot begin to approach the originality or spirit of experiment of those legends. Yet the best of these pieces are odd exotic bleeping echoes which did transport me to other worlds, just perhaps not the ones intended.

This is the final chapter of this colorfully named and eternally shifting Seattle collective's Totem trilogy and it is confounding and inspired in equal doses.  Characteristically, the band still sounds like some kind of weird psychedelic cult, but the fictitious cult in question seems to shift in both disposition and temporal/geographic location a bit more dramatically than they have in the past, which makes for a rather strange and disorienting listening experience.  At least it is confusing for the right reasons though, as Totem 3's problems stem primarily from sheer over-ambition: there is literally no one on earth that could successfully and seamlessly combine influences as disparate as metaphysical philosophy, John Carpenter, Indian cinema, and Taureg blues.

This CD reissue of an instantly sold-out LP on Poon Village from earlier this year is certainly eclectic, but is also unexpectedly intimate and straightforward as well.  More importantly, it offers one of the most inspired Beach Boys covers that I have ever heard, as well as some truly ambitious and creative album art.

As a sporadic consumer of López's work, this album had a decidedly different feel than what I was expecting. I usually associate his name with cold, sterile digital sounds that occasionally veer into difficult territory, but always are worth the effort. Here, the work is much more organic and natural feeling, unsurprising given that it's based on field recordings of rivers in Argentina and Paraguay.

Even though its wrapped in a brightly colored, almost prog rock album cover of nymphs and mermaids, the music is the polar opposite: ritualistic improvised rhythms, clanging metal and tons of effects, all of which conveys an odd mix of sleaze and evil.

Emeralds guitarist Mark McGuire has been releasing his solo recordings on small-run CD-R and cassette pressings since 2007. This double-disc retrospective collects 20 of his best recordings over the years as selected by McGuire and Peter Rehberg—consider it McGuire's greatest hits.

Liturgy's music is a full-on sensory assault, at once controlled and chaotic, meditative and brutal, that demands you immerse yourself fully and pay attention. This is not background listening of any sort, nor easy listening—just an hour of damn good metal.

This album somehow earned a reputation for being one of Christina Carter's best despite being limited to a cassette-only edition of just 200 copies. Released during a fertile 2008 that also saw the release of Original Darkness on Kranky, and initially mistitled Texas Working Blues, this Blackest Rainbow re-release shines the spotlight on one of Christina's most direct, layered, and memorable albums.

27 is a small band. There are two numbers in the name and three people in the group. Brittle Divinity, their latest full length, is appropriately enough a small record. Their last outing, 2007's Holding on for Brighter Days was bigger and broader, more produced and more varied than what they are doing here. But I like this better.

After so much hype, the long awaited collaboration between Sunn O))) and Boris was bound to disappoint. It starts off amazingly but overall there is something missing from the album. With 17 different musicians contributing a few of the pieces get too muddled and everyone finishes the album a bit lost. In the end it is a great idea that doesn’t quite work.

This is a degenerate two guitar record that sounds like it was dredged from the Mississippi along with rotted bodies and tin can telephones still attached. Sludgy doesn’t even begin to describe the muck that these two guys are playing through. This is avant-garde blues as seen through carburettor syrup and burnt amps.

Available as two vinyl LPs or as this one CD these four solo guitar pieces range in length from around 16 to 20 minutes. On his favored Breedlove 12 string, Cam Deas plays guitar like ringing a (Tibetan) bell and with an intimate intensity that is by turns wild, meditative, melodic and transporting. Within an extended structure he rubs and thrashes the strings into an extraordinary, calm, deliberate, fluttering frenzy.