Dying is an art, and like any other one can do it with grace or go down kicking, screaming, all the while leaving a big mess behind that future generations have to clean up. This album is supple and sexy as death itself. There is no fear in these pieces. They convey the final breaths of a human as being elegnant and peaceful. This music displaces the anxiety many people feel about death. Doing so is a service to the world.

Although specifically composed to soundtrack a documentary about Colony Collapse Disorder called "The Vanishing of the Bees," The Effective Disconnect is not a dramatic departure from the sort of thing Brian McBride has always done extremely well: subtle and serene music with an undercurrent of sadness. As such, it basically feels more like a scaled-back follow-up to 2005's excellent When Detail Lost Its Freedom than an unrelated side-project. It's probably much too subtle to accomplish much in the way of garnering of new fans, but it is certainly a pleasant diversion for those of us converts waiting around for something more substantial to surface from the Stars of the Lid camp (like that damn feature film that seems to have disappeared).

There are very real reasons why Cyclobe albums are so infrequent, as Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower seem to deliberately eschew or expertly conceal most of the tools that similar artists rely upon (improvisation, chance/randomness, repetition, etc.) in favor of a constantly shifting and deliberate abstract narrative. There is a purposefulness and articulation to Cyclobe’s brand of psychotropic mindfuckery that is very much their own. Their best work (such as this album) feels like a twisted, meticulously composed infernal symphony or an ambitiously nightmarish film soundtrack for a film that no one could possibly make. Wounded Galaxies evokes something far too extreme and abstract to capture with words and images: a deep, timeless, all-consuming cosmic terror.

This trio's approach is similar at times to the musical cubism of the Magic Band but at others they go into overdrive to create a maelstrom of sound without ever completely abandoning melody and rhythm. The group's name evokes the devil, Freemasonry, and Doctor John R. Brinkley's testicular transplants.

Over the course of ten days twelve railway stations were visited and at each a thirty second sound recording and photograph were taken. During the train journeys, compositions were sketched onto scores and later recorded at one rehearsal evening with The City of Exeter Railway Brass Band. The twelve short tracks reflect those brief encounters, hint at the unrealized possibilities and fleeting nature of human life, and seek majesty in insignificant events. Less than eight minutes long and organized into two sections, a reissue of Twelve Stations is overdue.

Folklore Tapes

Listening to this recording is like walking along a dark street in winter and hearing a band playing in a hall half a mile away, or removing one brick from a wall in a rain-swept cemetery and straining to hear faint echoes of sound trapped for half a century. But my enjoyment of the brass band sounds, the chuff chuff, platform announcements, tracks clattering, unknown sounds fading, and the clever short duration of this piece, is one thing; context is quite another. I hesitate to compare Twelve Stations with Chris Watson’s El Tren Fantasma, but it can belong in a context also containing Flanders and Swann’s "The Slow Train" — that of a lament. David Chatton Baker's effort is a more abstract encapsulation of time passing, whereas Flanders and Swann are specifically lamenting the closure of many small railway stations in the UK as a result of a government report (March 1963):

"No one departs and no one arrives
From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives
They've all passed out of our lives."

Those closures arose from what I refuse to call the Beeching Report since Ernest Marples better personifies the Conservative government, with clear conflicts of interest to road construction projects. who had it drawn up. "The Slow Train" was written in July 1963 and it depicts perfectly the sense of loss which was widely felt. On August 8th, 1963, an equally infamous Great Train Robbery occurred of an overnight from Glasgow to London with 72 people on board sorting the mail by hand. The robbers, who grabbed the equivalent of $75 million, had downed phone lines in the area and escaped in getaway cars. One brave rail-man got off the mail train and onto a passing goods train before raising the alarm at a nearby town. The gang, tuning in on VHF police radio heard "A robbery has been committed and you'll never believe it — they've stolen the train!"

If you hang around enough basement shows, if you listen to enough record collector shop talk, if you read lists of your favorite obscure musicians listing their favorite obscure musicians, then you just may have heard of the Dead C. Two decades into the game, the band has not swerved from their distinctive brand of tangled, noisy improvisational rock. To that end, Patience delivers no surprises, no attention-grabbing gestures towards a wider audience, just a steady devotion to raw, monolithic sound.

After over two years of recordings, swapping files and reworking each others' material, this collaboration between Steven Stapleton and Larsen has been long awaited. Regrettably, the end result is not uniformly great as the album has a number of pieces which do not reflect the best capabilities of either party. Yet, all is not lost as there is gold here amongst the debris. Some brilliant sounds are sandwiched between other less exhilarating pieces.

Originally a series of 7" split singles released on the Trensmat label, this compilation collects all the original releases on one CD and also includes a few covers not previously released as part of the series. Featuring a fantastic selection of bands (this is not a collection of also-ran bands doing a crappy tribute album) which for me are mainly an improvement on the originals. Hawkwind are one of those bands whose influence I appreciate more than their original recordings and to hear some bands I truly love interpreting their music has given me a new found enthusiasm for Hawkwind themselves.

With his custom guitar and unconventional playing techniques, Fongaard is one of the unrecognized innovators of prepared guitar, even in his native Norway. Here, three discs of his work, and a DVD, are lavishly presented to hopefully increase the recognition of this artist. There is a lot of material to digest but it is well worth the effort and presents a distinct missing link in the world of experimental guitar.

After the dissolution of his criminally underrated Band of Susans project, Robert Poss continued his obsession with the various noises of the electric guitar, no longer restrained by the constraints of "rock" music (though he pushed those boundaries pretty hard with BoS). Settings is a collection of music recorded for various purposes, but follows the concepts established on his 2002 album Distortion is Truth, reveling in the dissonant and not so dissonant tones of both guitar and analog synthesizer technologies.

Over the course of their incredible 27-year career, Sun City Girls seemed to make a point of doing everything as triumphantly and aggressively wrong as possible, precluding any possibility of widespread acceptance. While they certainly recorded their share of awesome psychedelic jams and inspired ethnic music appropriations over the years, their anarchic sense of humor and love of absurdist theatrics resulted in an accompanying avalanche of baffling and wildly self-indulgent work as well. Of course, that eccentric unpredictability and willingness to try literally anything was central to their charm. Consequently, Funeral Mariachi makes the most fitting of swan-songs, as they’ve finally done the most unexpected thing of all: made an album of very listenable, melodic songs.

ESP Disk's most recent re-issue of the now well-known and loved Heliocentric Worlds series is haphazard and sloppy, offering only the most minimal improvements over their last re-issue from 2005. Fledgling Ra listeners will be happy to find all three volumes together in one package (this time on three distinct discs), but everyone else will likely be disappointed by the lackluster bonus material, mediocre packaging, and poorly edited liner notes. Anyone who owns all three albums already can safely ignore this release, the rest of us can bemoan its poor presentation.

This three disc set sees the reissue of Charlemagne Palestine’s masterpiece for the piano along with two previously unreleased versions of the piece for harpsichord and string ensemble. "Strumming for Bösendorfer Piano" is a landmark of modern composition, a return to first principles typical of that generation of minimalist composers. Eschewing complex forms and technique, Palestine instead chases the pure sound lurking within the piano and uses the instrument in a way that was revolutionary then and remains just as stunning now.

Jack Dangers has been bitten by the dubstep bug and there are no two ways about it. Answers Come in Dreams finds the long time innovator giving in to (or perhaps trying out) the style du jour for a strange distillation of his own sound.

Although only active for around six years, this Shanghai based noise project already has a sprawling discography that rivals many of the long-standing artists that inspired them, with a multitude of limited cassette and CD-R releases. However, I think this may constitute the band’s first solo, mass produced outing. And with this opportunity, the band does exactly as they should: a 73 minute single track of grating, painful dynamic noise.

While often pigeonholed as a "shoegaze" band, the duo of Lovesliescrushing is something entirely different. Ostensibly doing similar things: Scott Cortez's heavily treated and layered guitar noise and abstracted, mostly unintelligible female vocals from Melissa Arpin-Duimstra, LLC took these and pushed them to the furthest reaches, making little to no concessions for traditional musical style or structure. Here, a selection of pieces between 1990 and 2000 are presented, some for the first time, reworked and shaped into even more abstract forms of glorious noise.

It has only been three years since Sublime Frequencies released the inaugural entry in their Guitars From Agadez series, but so much has happened since then that it is a near miracle that Group Inerane even managed another album. The biggest event: second guitarist Adi Mohamed was killed in the uprisings that followed the coup d’état that ousted Niger’s president. Thankfully, frontman Bibi Ahmed narrowly avoided the same fate and recruited Taureg guitar legend Koudede to fill the void. Unsurprisingly, the new Group Inerane are a darker and noticeably different band.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with Edward Ka-Spel's work–he has written some of my all-time favorite songs (Tear Garden's "Romulus & Venus," for example), but he's also recorded an avalanche of stuff that I was not so enthusiastic about. Consequently, I became an increasingly casual LPD fan over the years and haven't heard their last few albums at all. That being the case, I was totally unprepared for how excellent this album is–I can't think of another band in history that has managed to write some of their best songs 30 years into their career. The Dots' best days are definitely not behind them.

Brian (Lustmord) Williams' long-out-of-print 1994 ode to the vastness of space has been remastered and reissued.  The record may sound better now than it did 15 years ago, but I’m not sure that all of it has stood the test of time.

The Caretaker is here to take listeners on a trip deep into the foggy subconscious mind where perception, memory, and dream all collapse into a syrupy void.  If this six disc set isn't enough murky drone for a lifetime, I don't know what is.