99% is the record that significantly expanded Meat Beat Manifesto’s audience by narrowing the band’s sound. It was somehow smaller, cleaner, and less ambitious than the records before it, but it managed to give the band a voice that a wider audience could understand.

Lopez’ music has a way of getting under my skin, in the same way the faint whine from fluorescent lights and computer screens in an office or the background hum of refrigerators and appliances at home do. While listening to Amarok it becomes part of the environment and the mind filters out its steady subliminal assault. At times I almost forgot I had an album playing, but then the pressure either built up with noise reasserting itself, or it halted abruptly at which times I felt an immediate sense of ease and relaxation. These moments don’t last though and the underlying anxiety (both frigid and animalistic) inevitably returns.

Among the current crop of instrumental bands that worship at the shrine of Cluster, Tangerine Dream, and Manuel Göttsching, Roll the Dice are perhaps the most underrated. In the wake of their enjoyable, self-titled debut on Digitalis last year, In Dust is a massive step forward—as striking and cinematic as the best synth-based albums I've heard in recent years.

After a brief introductory song that sets the languid tone, the second throws out a hook with a luxurious bass line, reeling me in. At this point bootgazing becomes the order of the day. On their seventh release the duo easily straddles starry eyed left-field pop and drones as expansive as America's western plains.

Frank Baugh has been beguiling me with his warm and wobbly soundscapes for a couple of years now, but this is his first "proper" album.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect, as I have only heard a fraction of his vast catalog of limited-edition tapes and CD-Rs, making it very difficult to follow his chronological evolution. Also, I was secretly hoping that he was holding back some truly staggering material for his auspicious vinyl debut. After hearing it, I don’t think Fields and String eclipses his past work, takes things to another level, or delivers any major surprises, but it certainly reaffirms what myself and Frank's small-but-devoted following already knew: he makes some uniquely beautiful music.

This rather unusual anthology compiles the nascent works of pioneering electronic/computer composer Pietro Grossi and several of his contemporaries and collaborators. Unsurprisingly, the music assembled is often quite challenging, discordant, minimal, somewhat primitive, and historically important. Unexpectedly, however, several of these 40-year-old pieces sound like they could have been recorded today. I am not sure how much direct influence Grossi may have had on the contemporary electronic avant-garde scene (given the historic rarity of his recordings), but he certainly anticipated and explored many now-commonplace elements of extreme/outré music decades before the rest of the world caught on.

“Is that goo or tears coming from your eyes?” Is that noise or music coming from my speakers? This incredible overview of Smegma’s early work is a bounty of strange sounds, haunting atmospheres and some of the weirdest music put on tape. Across 6 LPs and a DVD, Smegma’s formative years spill out like maggots from a freshly disturbed corpse. Yet each of the maggots grows and becomes one of a plethora of magnificent, bizarre chimeras. This is gloriously wild stuff.

Scott Morgan is something of an anomaly in the field of ambient music for having a simple and clear purpose: releasing a consistent stream of reliably good albums. He has no clear avant-garde pretensions, nor any reliance on high-concept philosophical underpinnings or improvisation. He just turns out dense, composed, and immersive washes of sound, year after year. Anyone that has heard Loscil before probably has a pretty good idea of what Endless Falls sounds like, but there is an unexpected surprise at the end that may signal a bold new direction.

This compiles 14 rare tracks from innocent, energetic and progressive 1960s and early 1970s Cambodia; a time which Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (with plenty of help from Western friends) would attempt to obliterate.

On their debut collaboration, percussionist Steven Hess (Haptic) and Reto Mader (Sum of R) create brilliant film score-ish compositions that, on the surface, are as dark and bleak as any that can be imagined, but the structure and instrumentation used give far more depth and variation to what otherwise could be mundane and trite.  The result is a diverse set of pieces that prove there are a wide gradient of shades of gray.

Towards the end of his career, Soleilmoon put in a request to the late Bryn Jones to put together some material that was conventional enough to allow some crossover into the electronic and dance scenes.  This wasn’t an absurd request, because at this time his work more than flirted with dance and hip-hop beats, but often it was just as likely to slide into harsh, abrasive textures.  The proposed 12" requested by the label was delivered as a 90 minute DAT, all of which is reproduced here.  It is two discs of the most ass shaking, head-nodding material he ever did that conjures images of burka clad women shaking their asses, Miami bass style.

As I grow older and more culturally saturated with each passing year, my capacities for surprise and wonder have become nearly non-existent.  Nevertheless, 2006’s Ys completely floored me and has been very firmly entrenched as one of my favorite albums ever since.  Given the stunning beauty and imagination of that album and the enormous progression that it displayed from The Milk-Eyed Mender, my expectations for its follow-up were impossibly, crazily high.  Unsurprisingly, they were not met.  Have One On Me is an enjoyable and accessible album, but it is a decidedly anticlimactic one.

Charlemagne Palestine's monolithic 71 minute organ riff is a sensual, pleasure inducing drone. The crisply sparkling sonority creates a sense of drift, a foreword carrying motion propelled by colliding tones. Buoyed by slow changes that create illusions of movement, the experience of listening to Schlingen-Blangen is one of floating between parallel worlds of harmony and noise.

One of the first images I remember associating with Coil is the sticker that asked, "When you listen to Coil do you think of music?" After listening to Gold is the Metal many times, my answer remains a strong "no." In a discography filled with bizarre and bewildering recordings, this collection of odds and ends still stands out as one of Coil's most difficult and oblique.

This has always been a hard record for me to understand. It's not a typical long-playing album but it feels like more than just a collection of four singles. The botched track listing on my CD didn't help matters. As a product of remix culture, it's a far-reaching experiment that runs the gamut from funky breaks to outright noise.

Ida is a perfect example of pop music in its finest form. At the heartof the group are three multi-talented singer/songwriters, who, whentogether make some of the most beautiful harmonies and memorable songs.

With their live shows, Mouse On Mars defy any and all accusations andprejudiced expectations of electronic music in performance. However, asa musical token, this live collection is more of a "greatest hitsrevisited" than an essential live archive.

This CD/DVD set of Henry Jacobs'work has a lot to offer for  anyone who decides to crack it openand spend a few hours exploring. The CD does amarvelous job of illustrating the breadth and variety of Jacobs' soundart, contained in 39 digestible little nuggets while the included DVD is also a fantastichistorical artifact, collecting all three episodes of a surrealtelevision show assembled in a free-associative manner.

Although the members of XXL insist that the project be considered a new band, and not a one-offcollaboration, I can't help but suspect that this might be the onlytime XXL will be heard from. This brief album, though strong musically, feelslike the product of a specific place and time, inexorably tied to thefortnight of drinking, reveling and recording during which it wasproduced.

I have long had a theory that cold and miserable climates produce the best art and music, but the Canadian underground (aside from Skinny Puppy) has never played a serious role in my record collection.  Nevertheless, there is a small but flourishing scene of people there making appropriately hostile and abrasive music, and this debut release from the fledgling Prairie Fire Tapes label is an ear-shredding first step towards making the rest of the world notice it.