Editions Mego has finally reissued the woefully out-of-print complete recorded oeuvre of this massively influential and infrequently convening laptop supergroup.  Unsurprisingly, it still sounds great.

Orgonautic continues to captivate me with their stunning production values, overtly occult lyrics, psychedelic rhythm guitar, blistering electronic synths, and heady beats. Each new release from them shows a step up in quality in terms of both the sound and the artifact. From the first few simply packaged CD-Rs to the now lavish gatefold and silver embossed digipacks they release, Orgonautic have been building a solid and steadfast body of work. Full Circle brings ten new songs to an already well-laid table along with four songs from last year’s free digital download EP, The Moebius Strategy.

Analog Africa has unveiled another lovingly assembled and lavishly packaged overview of funky lost recordings from the birthplace of voodoo. Tireless German vinyl-monger Samy Ben Redjeb has already tackled Benin once (with last year’s excellent Orchestre Poly-Rythmo compilation), but Legends of Benin aims for a somewhat broader survey.  This compilation is devoted to four legendary composers from that country's strikingly fertile period of 1969-1981: Gnossos Pedro, Antoine Dougbé, El Rego et Ses Commandos, and Honoré Avolonto.

A lost gem of private '60s psychedelia, Dave Bixby's debut solo effort is a lonely affair to be sure. With only acoustic guitar in hand, the songwriter penned this album in about a month in reaction to a year of drug abuse. Having filled his head with plenty of acid, the songs here serve as an intimate portrait of an unhinged victim of counterculture.

Every word, rhythm, and melody that seeps from David Longstreth's brain reeks of insincerity and pompousness. The most recent fruit of his ego, Bitte Orca, has come to be pornography for writers and aimless hipsters hungry for something "eccentric" and "unusual" over which they may pant. In truth, it's a dull and transparent mish-mash of pop styles seasoned with empty gestures and overwrought arrangements.

Too often overshadowed by the shrine that is Nuggets, this compilation, along with its companion Testament volume, has nevertheless earned significant cult status among garage aficianados, and rightly so. Comprising a plethora of rare singles from the era, the album is a near necessity for those even tangentially interested in this material.

A reissue of one of the earlier releases on the Intransitive label, this masterwork has loss none of its dark luster in the past decade.  It is a dark trip up river into a heart of darkness, with Marchetti as the local shaman and guide, alongside a broken radio that picks up random frequencies across the world and sacred magnetic tapes, presenting music across the world as a form of cultural transcendence.

Culled from a slew of self-released lathe cut LPs and CD-Rs, the first pressing of this disc far outnumbers the sum total of the original material here, the largest of which was an acetate LP of 27 copies.  To call this compilation bizarre does a disservice to the word, but the personal world documented on cassette from this husband and wife duo fit in perfectly with the absurdist likes of Sudden Infant or the Schimpfluch-Commune community and deserves a wider outlet than just the personal, handmade releases.

The latest release from Berlin-based sound designer and producer Ben Lukas Boysen is an ambitious two disc opus.  On the first disc, he once again works with precision more than melody and space more than structure but on the second disc, his remixers take Hecq's original in a dozen different directions.

As fitting a split as could be, this album joins two of rock's most experimental experimentalists in a meeting of minds that, as any split should do, provides new insights into the output of both artists, creating a fitting relationship between these two diverging takes on weird.

A recent discovery to listeners in this country perhaps, Omar Souleyman has nevertheless been a staple of, in the words of the press release, "Syrian street-level folk-pop" for years now. This collection unearths some of his strongest moments put to tape, compiled and lovingly assembled by the always on point Sublime Frequencies imprint. The result is a non-stop collection of the singer's signature grooves, which stand tall beside this shore's often paltry pop offerings.

This mail order only edition of Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles’ The Surveillance Lounge is superb. In addition, there are two extra CDs of drastically different versions of the album. Creaking and groaning their way across an audio backdrop that brings to mind the boggling landscapes of Yves Tanguy, the three discs cover the same unnerving mental states as classic Nurse With Wound albums like Homotopy to Marie and Insect and Individual Silenced. It is the first Nurse release since Salt Marie Celeste that has spooked me in any significant way and it is a welcome return to weirder moods after the lighter side of Nurse With Wound that has been explored with their recent live and studio output.

For those who have found the more recent work of Sutcliffe Jugend and Kevin Tomkins to be too soft or restrained, the other member of SJ has put together a solo disc that’ll satisfy the need for angry and harsh power electronics.  While there is a lot in common with the mid/late 1990s Sutcliffe Jugend, there is a bit more room for innovation, and even some tracks that work in rhythms and sounds more inspired by early electronic music rather than serial murder.

As former members of the ambient/industrial project Maeror Tri, the duo now known as Troum developed and refined their combination of booming atmospheres and subtle soundscapes.  As Troum, they continue their trek into spaciousness, creating drones of sweeping drama and roar.

A new compilation from Soundway is always cause for excitement and this follow-up to 2006's excellent Panama! is no exception.  I have no doubt that this album will finally cement Panama’s deserved reputation as the funkiest, sexiest isthmus around (tough luck, Suez!).

This is fifth release in Honest Jon's uniformly rewarding plunge into the EMI Hayes Archive of vintage recordings.  While the previous albums have all been exotic, haunting, or unique, The World Is Shaking is the first that can be considered sensuous and fun.  Here the normally disparate worlds of musicology and awesome parties unexpectedly intersect.

Brood is the second album born from a fruitful collaboration between Phil Western and Mark Spybey, who, until this project was hatched, hadn't worked together since their shared time in Download. Fans of that electronic supergroup will find much to enjoy with the music presented here, though it certainly isn't a rehash. Tightly sequenced psychedelia and ritualistic rhythms meet with brooding, subsurface vocals and a sound palette that ranges from far Eastern inflections to the claustrophobically industrial. 

After several years of relying on a computer as his primary compositional tool, Gregg Kowalsky took a page from the mischievous intellectuals of the Oulipo and embraced voluntary artistic constraint as a means of liberating himself from the oft-crippling burden of unlimited possibility.  Tape Chants is the result.

This is an aptly titled and blessed-out slab of shimmering pastoral ambiance by this Tokyo-based composer. Saunter is inspired by the unfamiliarity and heightened awareness of moving to a new home (and the philosophical underpinnings of traditional monochromatic Chinese landscape paintings, of course).

Pelican's newest release and their first for Southern Lord is a quick, three song 12" that swings gracefully through the tropes of heavy instrumental rock.  Ephemeral is dusty and straightforward.  It is free of noodling and epic run-on sentences and it hides a handful of riffs that give away the band's metal roots.