This split album between Ohio’s Emeralds and Japan’s Pain Jerk was initially made to accompany their co-headline tour of the UK but thankfully it has made its way into the wider world. Both groups have done the decent thing in including top quality tracks when any old tosh would do. On paper, the idea of pairing these artists seems bizarre and with over half an hour of bliss from Emeralds and a truck load of sonic hell from Pain Jerk, the word “split” has never felt so apt.

After three years since their demise, the final album by Khanate has finally seen the dark of night. After a lot of speculation as to whether it would actually emerge or not, my expectations were high and unfortunately they were not quite met. The improvised music was recorded during the sessions for Capture & Release with the vocals added much later. This approach has lead to a hit or miss album that is awesome when on form but a touch disappointing when not.

"Free-folk" is a term that gets thrown around a lot, and to some extent it has come to represent a certain strain of quirky indie cuteness far removed from its more primitive punk precursors. Both elder statesmen of the style, Dredd Foole and Ed Yazijian have been playing together for years to little public acknowledgement. But in an increasingly open musical climate they have at last reconvened for an album of loose extrapolations within the form, proving their collective voice to be as stylistically prophetic and effective as one could hope from these two luminaries.

Not the most obvious instrumental choice for the modern age, the lute is far more often associated with Renaissance fairs and Dungeons & Dragons then contemporary minimalist composition. Yet that is exactly the approach that Jozef Van Wissem takes with this disc, combining seven compositions whose conceptual prowess ultimately proves tangential to Wissem's relaxed and stark approach to his instrument.

Although not part of any of the various art related series on the label, this release from the duo of Antoine Chessex and Ktho Zoid mine similar territory as either the Arc or URSK series do: dark, bleak, meditative drones; and in this case sourced from electronics, guitar, and tenor sax.  It does, however, lean more into the realms of noise than some of the other releases, and it is all the stronger for it.

Originally commissioned for a solo dance performance, the single piece on this disc not only stands on its own without any visual elements, but also showcases De Mey's history in film school as well, because it has the dynamicism, variation, and drama of that medium as well.

Reworking a site-specific piece she performed in 2007 in New York City, this disc finds sound artist Andrea Parkins using a slew of amplified objects along with her own processed accordion to create an hour long work of bloops, blips, and scratches. The combined effect of which transcends genre in favor of a pure and unadulterated sonic exploration for the electronic age, as her myriad patches decompose much of the sound into pieces that situate the listener on the verge of witnessing, in her own words, "things falling apart."

Kentucky's Vestigial Limb is not likely to emerge from the endless, faceless hordes of the harsh electronics tape underground anytime soon, but Ray Shinn is intermittently really damn good at what he does. I did not expect Kentucky to be a particularly fertile bed for avant-garde electronics.

Twenty years removed from his landmark solo debut Workbook, the former Hüsker Dü frontman belatedly produces another album worthy enough to bear his name, after a lengthy string of middling efforts. A mix of vibrant uptempo rockers and hooky ballads, it displays his maturation free of the masturbatory electronica and incredibly uneven songwriting that sullied his legacy these past eleven years.

Two artists that I am largely unfamiliar with (Brittany Gould of Married in Berdichev! and Eva Aguilera of Kevin Shields) have formed a band together and unexpectedly floored me with an EP of fractured, otherworldly beauty.  I wish surprises like this occurred more often in my life.

Bernard Szajner is a significant and influential figure in the composition and performance of electronic music. He created Superficial Music mainly from recordings of his earlier album Visions of Dune; by reversing tapes, slowing to half speed, mixing and adding effects. The intriguing results sound harmonious, anxious, consistently stunning and emotionally involving. The 1981 release is now reissued with relevant bonus tracks and extensive liner notes.

A pioneer in the use of laser technology in entertainment, Szajner's futurism carried into his other pursuits. His second album is a soundtrack to a documentary on capital punishment, but the mood feels more akin to the techno-dystopias popular in science fiction at the time of its release. Fans of Blade Runner or Escape from New York will be familiar with Szajner's aesthetic, but his dynamic songcraft sets him apart from the cinematic snyth musicians of his generation.

The thought of solo electric guitar improv generally fills me with a mixture of extreme apprehension, apathy, and an overwhelming urge to be elsewhere, but Justin Wright seems to have found a very compelling little glacial niche for himself.  White Ohms is a surprisingly hypnotic and unique album.

Paul Taylor and Kevin Tomkins have been working together for well over 25 years, most notably as the notorious power electronics duo Sutcliffe Jugend.  After a few reinventions of that project, they emerged a few years ago as simply SJ and created two albums, Between Silences and Threnody for the Victims of Ignorance that channeled the same dark atmospheres and tension, but expanded to more instrumentation than just raw synths and screamed vocals. This evolution has continued into Inertia, where guitar is the main instrument, but along with piano, clarinet, and other traditional instruments, to create dark and disorienting audio paintings.

In their third release on Thrill Jockey in barely a year, the fraternal trio continue their trek into Appalachia-damaged stoner rock that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve, yet takes their backwoods classic Sabbath through Earth sound into a realm all their own.

I don't know if music has ever been prescribed for people suffering from the vagaries of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Perhaps it is yet to be. I don't know if this album, the debut full length release from the Austrian duo of Roman Gerold and Richard Eigner, would help with the attention aspect of the disorder (its lush textures allow the mind to drift along lazily). I am positive though, that its soothing sounds can certainly calm the frantic, hyper-driven tendencies of the modern mind.

Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada has had a bit of a resurgence in the public eye lately due to a number of recent reissues of works that, in retrospect, fit alongside many of the best and most challenging minimalist works of the last forty years. Here, EM presents the fourth and final Wada release in their series with the world premiere of a 1974 performance in Syracuse, New York consisting of a single drone and four Wada-created "pipehorns" tuned to the frequencies of the room itself.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius' stature in German experimental music is well documented in his work with Cluster, Harmonia and Brian Eno. Yet Roedelius' solo output often drifts sadly under the radar. Here Roedelius' 1979 solo effort, his second, is reissued so that once again his distinctive musical style can be seen unblemished by a surrounding group. With this freedom, Roedelius used his simple compositional approach to achieve one of his most whimsical and curious statements.

Sacros won the 1968 Chilean schools contest for "beat" groups. Five years later they recorded their only record: this Latin American country rock hymn cycle inspired in part by ancient Mayan and Andean Gods. Released September 18, 1973, seven days after a military coup installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, most copies were destroyed in the subsequent crackdown.

Almost disturbingly prolific, this is the latest (though that might change by the time you read this) disc from this noise/drone/metal duo.  While they have been cranking the releases out in their relatively short career, they have at least been consistent with the quality of their releases, and Drenched Lands, for all its metal look and presentation, is one of the more subtle releases I have yet to hear.