For Nigel Ayers the systematic derangement of the senses has never been enough. From the beginning of his career he has sought nothing less than the total disarrangement of reality. Using slowed down voices, sludgy bass, noisy analog synthesizers, guitar and weird effects, these unorthodox statements from his first band sound as if they were made in an atmosphere of cerebral discord. Conventions of musicality are thwarted in favor of shoestring arrangements gelled together by intuition rather than adherence to preconceived formulas. Traversing terrains that range from the psychotropic to psychotic, the collected works of The Pump make for an artifact that is not easily pigeon holed, not now, and probably not in the late 1970s when the group first formed with his brother Daniel Ayers and the late Caroline K.

High Place’s second proper full-length album is a gutsy and daring surprise, as Mary Pearson and Rob Barber have cast aside much of the childlike innocence and fragility that characterized their earlier releases in favor of a darker, more muscular new direction.  While I still prefer the quirky, blurred pop from their past, the shift towards a sharper-focused, more visceral sound works far better than I expected.

Although many of these songs were made available previously on an identically named and highly limited edition album from 2004, this is not technically a reissue as the material has been reworked and the album has been quite expanded compared to the original. The quiet white light at the core of the music has been refracted and split into a rainbow of strings and woodwind, all arranged by Maxim Moston (best known for his work with Antony and the Johnsons and Rufus Wainwright). The sweetness of the songs become even more pronounced with its small orchestral backing, although Moston does not over-clutter Dee’s songs and allows her singing and piano to take center stage.

Rather than the work of ironic hipsters or bandwagon jumpers, the duo of Sean Hewson (of Eternal) and Chrisian Savill (of Slowdive) is the real deal.  Given Savill’s genre-defining guitar sound the two bring a classical sense of pop know-how and the ability to craft undeniably catchy songs that could be from another era, but make for irresistable listens in 2010.

This is one of the cases where the artists’ environment clearly comes across in their recorded output.  Hailing from Norway, the duo of Pjusk weave digital soundscapes that are cold and icy, yet have an inviting warmth to them, like a fireplace heated cabin amongst the frozen tundra.  Their second album is a gloriously minimal piece of subtle melody and texture that reveals more the closer it is listened to.

Hz was initially a series of six EPs, released monthly, then compiled into a six disc box set, and later a two disc compilation.  In my opinion, the then-duo of Robert Hampson and Scott Dawson reached the highest peak in their quest to take the sound of the electric guitar as far as it could go.  Evenly split between astronomical ambient abstraction and a nascent take on post rock, this set was the final one where the duo’s history as Loop was still shining through.  The result is two hours of the best experimental rock and ambient drone in my own personal collection.

Miguel De Pedro continues to find ways to make his already motley discography more diverse and unpredictable. After manipulating and distorting the sounds of Mille minimal techno, glitch, techno, rave, and having an almost intimate encounter with ambient something-or-other, Kid606 is now taking a stab at analog noise. Without his signature beats and usual goofiness to aid him, Miguel sounds a little lost. But, even with its numerous lulls and head-scratching moments, Songs About Fucking Steve Albini is one of the better things the Kid has released in the last few years.

Scorn's third album was a groundbreaking and seminal release, as Napalm Death’s former rhythm section finally shook loose the last vestiges of their metal past to attain the sinister strain of dub that they came to be known for. Unfortunately, it was also one of the last times that things went well for the project, as Mick Harris would soon be hit by the mercurial Nick Bullen's departure, creative differences with Earache, and a precipitous decline in the popularity of the isolationism genre.

Bill Fay says David Tibet is probably the only person who would have released this 2CD set. The first disc covers demos and live material from 1970-1971 with Fay’s singing, piano, guitar, bass, and drums combining at times to astonishing effect. The second, lighter disc, recorded at home in 2008, begins with Fay's vocals added to a Michael Cashmore instrumental from The Snow Abides and ends with a song written by his brother, John Fay.

Mark Kozelek has recorded several brilliant albums over the last two decades, but this 1993 collection of odds and ends left over from the Red House Painters' first eponymous album is generally not considered one of them.  Nevertheless, it remains of his most strangely compelling releases to date and features some of the most achingly perfect distillations of everything that made his early work so unique and powerful.

From the joyous opening song to the last note of the final track I am captivated by the fierce instrumentation and solemn warmth of Slow Six. Serious yet playful they remind me that I don't need to jump out of an airplane or ski down the alps to experience the rush of exhilaration; all I have to do is turn on my stereo and put on this beautiful record.

Robert Lowe seems to be the busiest man in music, as well as his own Lichens project he is popping in up in so many different bands: The Cairo Gang, Om and Twilight (the metal band, not the film) to name a few. On this second collaboration with Rose Lazar, Lowe again contributes the music and the duo worked together on the artwork. Musically, it is a far cry from the Robert Lowe I already know; soft synthesiser rhythms and melodies are the order of the day. It is entrancing, comforting and magnificent all in one go.

After a four-year hiatus, this slumbering drone supergroup has returned with a deeply unsettling and surreal new album.  That time was not spent idly, as Above The Sky sounds like it has been sculpted and tweaked to razor-sharp perfection.  Despite being the work of three people with three different aesthetics, there is no absolutely trace of ego, compromise, bloat, or wasted time here.  This is as perfect as drone music gets.

Hungry Shells documents the meeting of two remarkable avant garde spirits. In 2018, Pekka Airaksinen presented Ka Baird with Buddhist parables that had been revealed to him in a mediative state. The result is a glorious recording, as the collaboration dissolves their individual states, their voices, flutes, and synths, into an organic harmonic discord.

RVNG Intl.

In the history of both these artists are signs which led here. From 1967-70 Airaksinen composed as a member of infamous performance group The Sperm, who fell foul of Finnish obscenity laws. After devoting his 1970s to Buddhism, Airaksinen returned in the '80s with a system for translating the names of Buddhas into mathematical forms and then into musical compositions. Ka Baird, under her own name and as an integral part of Spires That In The Sunset Rise, always makes an intriguingly cathartic and genuinely skillful racket. Like a whirling dervish tramp emerging unscathed after an instinctive blindfold dash through a forest of rocks and bogs, she has incredibly never put a foot wrong. Baird's signpost is perhaps STITSR’s concept album Mirror Cave based on a blend of Italo Calvino’s (very) short story ‘Sword of the Sun’ and Shinkichi Takahashi’s After-Images: Zen Poems. The lyrics of "Hungry Shells" also bear a resemblance to elements in that Calvino story.

His story is somewhat legendary in the noise/power electronics scene:  recording as MB, Bianchi put out a slew of albums in the early 1980s that helped to define the genre during its nascent days.  Then, in the middle of the decade, he left music for personal reasons (rumoredly he became a Jehovah’s Witness).  He reappeared in the latter part of the 1990s, with work I had been told (either directly or via a place like alt.noise) resembled a more avant garde Yanni.  Needless to say I avoided it.  Once this album was available, something told me to check it out and, while not in the same league as his early work, it channels enough of it to still be an interesting listen.

This is one of those kind of albums that is impossible to pigeonhole in any sort of specific genre.  There’s some drone elements, but those are mostly overshadowed by tribal drumming.  There’s dubby production, but also layers of noise and mutated psychedelic rock.  All the while there’s a little bit of metal here and there.  Named for a giant squid, this Italian project certainly has its tentacles entangled amongst themselves to create an unclassifiable blur, but it’s a compelling racket.

This latest collaboration between Nurse With Wound’s Colin Potter and guitarist/Twenty Herz label-head Paul Bradley is an experiment in returning to an earlier, less complicated way of making an album: only two guys in a studio with some instruments.  Despite that, it is not a stunning or radical departure from either musician’s past solo work, though it bears a stronger resemblance to ambient’s early days than usual.  It was an inspired move in theory, but the end result suggests that making music the complicated way might be a still better idea.

In 1992, 8-bit samplers were cutting-edge gear. This reissue of Chaleur Humaine by French siblings Danielle and Didier Jean, shows Didier's use of a sampler to reshape and project his sister’s voice into a memorable, magical-sounding dream world with barely discernible hints of doom under the glossy enveloping surface. At times it is reminiscent of the tracks "Alsee," "Criminie," "Bruma," and " Wask," on Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba (1988). Very different albums in some senses, but in a wildly imperfect analogy, the recognizable voice parts on Plux are like Elizabeth Fraser hiccuping through tubes in an Yves Tanguy surrealist painting whereas Chaleur resembles Virginia Astley and Sheila Chandra harmonizing with helium-high hedgehogs in a symbolist landscape by Marc Chagall.

Freedom to Spend

A poem recurs throughout Chaleur Humaine in a variety of languages, including English, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Vietnamese: "It’s this force, almost animal, warm, like a kiss, fresh like the morning dew, that we call human warmth" but not even that can derail this sultry cinematic music. Wordless vocalizing is used as glitchy percussive punctuation and haunting backdrop. Spoken word combines with splashes of metallic synth, angelic and robotic gibbering, as Didier digitally accelerates, delays and reverses sound sources to create an ambient landscape across which the imagination may travel. I felt I was in a futuristic sound sauna one minute and the next was at the wheel of a car, filmed from above, speeding across deserts, gliding over bridges, and easing through streets ablaze with neon nightlife.

This is purportedly the final album in Soundway’s excellent Nigeria Special series (a fact that causes me no small amount of pain), but at least it is concluding in fine form.  While some of the previous albums may have hit higher highs, the breezy, laid-back songs collected here might be the most consistently strong and listenable batch yet (though without entirely forgoing eccentricity).  This will likely be the soundtrack for my summer.

Few current artists are as conspicuously detached from their own era as San Francisco’s Jonas Reinhardt, as there is essentially nothing on Powers of Audition or 2008’s self-titled debut that betrays any inspiration gleaned from the last two decades of recorded music (or culture in general).  Nevertheless, his influences are pretty eclectic within the narrow confines of analog’s golden age, as hints of space rock, early synth experimentalism, krautrock, and forgotten cult film soundtracks all find their way into his defiantly dated aesthetic.