First released in 1984, this album represents Dieter Moebius’ first foray into solo composition after over a decade playing with some of the giants of the German avant garde in the 1970s. There’s always a danger with serial collaborators that they cannot reach the same heights as when they are supported by other artists but Moebius proved that he could hold his own with this gorgeous little album. Although it sounds exactly as expected based on his previous collaborations, it is far from retreading old ground as you can get. Each of the pieces are packed with crystalline melodies set to precise beats and rhythms, all finely crafted and comforting in their familiarity.

Hailing from Vienna, this relatively new trio has refined their approach to a post-rock and ambient influenced sound that, unlike many of their contemporaries, focuses more on the live collaboration to develop their sound, and not as much on DSP processing and effects laden sound.

As Imminent Starvation, Olivier Moreau famously trashed his mixing board after the completion of 1999’s Nord and gave the pieces out in a special collector’s edition.  Now, after spending time with Synapscape and putting out a few 7” singles, he has returned with a new album that shows he hasn’t missed a step in his near decade hiatus.

Triumphantly unfazed by the fact that it is no longer 1950, Francisco López has birthed a sprawling and ambitious double album of undiluted, unabashed musique concrète.  Machines is industrial music in the purist sense, as López limited himself strictly to recordings taken from various pieces of mechanical equipment, then masterfully sculpted them into meticulously composed symphonies of clanking and whirring machinery.

The list of singer-songwriters as raw as Emma Louise "Scout" Niblett is very short. Names like P.J. Harvey and Patti Smith come to mind when thinking of her and, in some ways, both of them are more suitable reference points than the grunge bands Scout has named-checked as her influences. On The Calcination of Scout Niblett she sounds as severe as she ever has and starker, too. But, if Scout began her career under the wings of Nirvana and Sonic Youth, she's long since graduated to something more original, less obvious, and much, much more ominous.

The latest installment in this duo’s quest to pervert well known forms of music may be its most difficult album yet. On the surface it seems the most conventional: a live performance of Anders Bryngelsson on drums and Mattin on guitar with the assistance of some backing tapes, but the way in which these two interpret the blues is anything but.  It is one of those records that is rather unpleasant to listen to, and that is exactly the point of it.

This six disc box set is a nice time capsule for the extremely prolific Drumm's work from 2013 through 2016. Which means, of course, by now this stuff is old hat and there is likely to be another 15 or so albums worth of material available to download at this point. However, Drumm's work is something to be digested slowly and methodically, and with Giuseppe Ielasi ensuring a top quality remastering, it makes for an essential collection of work that is fitting for both new listeners and those who have been there for a while.

As loathe as I am of the term, perhaps this is conceptually the best approach to the "mashup" in recent memory.  Rather than just slapping together two disparate songs with the same BPM for the sake of being "hip", Petit (a member of Strings of Consciousness and head of the BiP_HOp label) has instead created a soundtrack synthesizing the classic Lynch film with Shinya Tsukamoto’s esoteric cyberpunk nightmare, resulting in a cacophonous, disorienting mess of sound.

This is Psychic Circle's oddest compilation yet. Cult actors and UK game show hosts mingle with ethnic novelties, opera singers, prostitutes and unknowns. The liner notes acknowledge some utter crap and complete nonsense within: welcome relief from talk of forgotten gems and legends which has set me up for disappointment with several of PC’s previous efforts.

In 2006, the rather enigmatic and aberrant Mudboy recorded a live session for the Dutch radio station VPRO, but it took three years for it to finally see release.  Upon hearing this odd and uneven set, that delay seems quite justified- there are certainly some moments of sublime beauty and weirdness captured here, but they are few and far between.  This probably should have stayed in the vault.

This is a fun album. It takes a high art concept and makes it playful. Albums that are made up purely of percussion are few and far between as it is, and the fact that the instrument in question here is the Mid-Hudson Bridge makes this a rare bird indeed.

While I suspect Thomas Meluch will always be best known for his more traditional albums, he has quietly become one of North America’s most consistently compelling ambient/drone artists over the last few years.  On this, his first full-length for Portland’s Beacon Sound, Meluch returns to roughly the same territory that he explored on 2015’s gorgeous Sonnet and his self-released Stanza series: lush, slow-moving, and gently undulating drones drifting through a haze of tape hiss.  There are some intriguing small-scale transformations to be found, however, as Meluch's focus has subtly shifted away from structure and melody into an increasing deep fascination with the textural possibilities of weathered and distressed tapes.

Few artists continually push their art into strange and unfamiliar new places quite like Jan St. Werner has been doing with his Fiepblatter series.  Some installments have certainly been better than others, yet St. Werner always brings a unique blend of bold conceptual vision, rigorous craftsmanship, and playful experimentation.  With Spectric Acid, he continues that noble trend in supremely vibrant fashion, taking inspiration from ceremonial West African rhythms to weave a dense tapestry of dynamic shifting pulses, dense synth buzz, and squalls of electronic chaos.  At its best, it sounds like a particularly visceral blend of exquisite sound art and an out-of-control train.

Coldkill is the duo of Rexx Arkana (FGFC820) and Eric Eldredge (Interface), and was created as an attempt to get back to the roots of EBM and 1980s industrial music, an era from which both musicians have drawn influence throughout their careers]. With the use of vintage gear and a more minimalistic aesthetic when it comes to construction and dynamics in these songs, they do an exemplary job of being forward thinking, yet still clearly acknowledging their past.

Alex Keller and Sean O'Neill may have been collaborators since 2015, but Kruos is actually their debut release. That relative youth does not translate to lack of experience on the album, however, as the duo’s work is a complex, nuanced work of sound art, conjured up from some rather rudimentary sources, largely just field recordings and a telephone test synthesizer. It is a bit of a difficult, unsettling experience at times, but a strong one nonetheless.

Ben Frost continues to mine the rich vein of recordings he made with Steve Albini with this full-length follow-up to this year's excellent Threshold of Faith EP. Naturally, The Centre Cannot Hold is a similarly face-melting eruption of ambient drone beefed up to snarling, brutal immensity, yet it feels a bit anticlimactic and redundant after the EP, as three songs are repeated (although usually in different versions) and one piece clocks in at a mere 13 seconds. A few of the totally new songs are quite good, however, and Frost allows himself to indulge and experiment a bit more with structure and melody than he did with the more punchy and concise predecessor. I personally prefer the punchy and concise approach in Frost's case, but the less essential and somewhat over-extended Centre could have been a similarly strong EP if it had been distilled to just its high points. There is some prime Frost to be found here, even if the presentation is less than ideal.

The second full-length album from this bass-driven Australian "freak unit" is an intriguing evolution from the bleary, haunted atmospheres of 2015's Hide Before Dinner. For one, the mood is considerably less unnerving, but the trio has also incorporated a significant dub influence (a move that always makes my ears perk up). Naturally, F Ingers is still as unrepentantly bizarre, prickly, and indulgent as ever, but they seem to found a way to make their fractured nightmares feel a lot more playful, spontaneous, and kinetic. At its worst, Awkwardly Blissing Out sounds like a batch of willfully wrong-headed, dub-damaged, and sketchlike experiments that blossomed from the corpses of murdered songs. At its best, however, it transcendently resembles a newly discovered cache of extended and deeply hallucinatory dub remixes of imaginary early UK post-punk classics.

This latest Folklore Tapes collection is a perfect illustration of why they are possibly the most unique and fascinating label around, assembling 31 different artists to create free-form sound art based upon their research into a specific plant. I certainly like the concept and appreciate the depth and breadth of their commitment to it (there is accompanying literature, a film, and a pack of seeds), yet none of that would matter all that much if the music was underwhelming. As it happens, the music is absolutely wonderful, as the many brief and varied vignettes form a wonderfully surreal and kaleidoscopic whole. A few of the participants were familiar to me beforehand (Dean McPhee, Bridgett Hayden), but most were not and nearly every single one brings something delightfully bizarre, hallucinatory, or enigmatically esoteric to the table.

Burn is superior in every way to Coleclough's other collaboration from 2008. Andrew Liles' sometimes campy, often spooky penchant for drafting other-worldly drones pairs perfectly with Jonathan's texture-rich audio and their flirtation with musique concrète is both entrancing and fun. With some of the samples apparently being drawn from Coleclough and Liles' 2008 Brainwaves set, Burn has the added bonus of featuring sounds from one of the most entertaining experimental shows I have ever seen.

This is a terrific reissue of pieces Spiegel created at Bell Laboratories between 1974-77 when computers were as big as fridge-freezers. Included with her landmark 1980 LP are 15 superb additions, including the entire Appalachian Grove series and "Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds," her contribution to the golden record launched aboard the Voyager spacecraft.