Full of top-shelf songs, this disc gets at the heart of what a culture-based compilation should be. It is eclectic enough to adequately represent a nation's worth of musicians and singers, but unified enough to present a cohesive listening experience.

This album more than lives up to its visceral title. It contains some of Bishop's most intense and downright ugly work to date as a solo artist, but also some his most sublime. Bishop willfully defies the traditionalist and academic conventions of solo-guitar work, offering both examples of controlled musicianship and malevolent noodling.

Larsen have always been at odds with most of their contemporaries, almost mythical stories about getting signed to Young God Records, a tribute album to Autechre that features no computers and no obvious references to the band or their music and all sorts of strange rumours abounding about the members of the group. However, the live album/DVD ABECEDA sees them cement their reputation as serious artists (minus any negativity that concept might carry with it). ABECEDA is a well-thought out concept delivered with care and finesse by Larsen and their friends. Musically it is as strong as any of their previous efforts and visually it stands out on its own.

Tom Carter has been one of my favorite guitar players for several years now. Outside of the particular skeletal trance-blues style that he has perfected in work with Charalambides, Carter's many many solo and duo recordings carve out a truly unique improvised guitar method, blending extended technique, purist drone logic, trance minimalism, and a beautifully impure psy-punk energy befitting collaboration with many of today's lo-fi drone or psychedelic noise currents.

Another reissue from the Les Disques du Crepuscule back catalog, The Fruit of the Original Sin is a two-disc compilation appropriately subtitled "A Collection of After Hours Preoccupations." While there isn't anything overt that these tracks have in common, many of them share a tinge of melancholy and beauty in equal measure, qualities that are especially noticeable late at night.

The idea of an orchestral approach to the electronic and tape compositions of Iannis Xenakis may seem like an absurd endeavor, but it works, extremely well.

Take equal parts scummy sludge rock, power electronics, and free jazz and mix them together, and you'll get a loud obnoxious mess.  Which is exactly what this album is, and there couldn't be a better compliment for it.

New Jersey's renaissance man of all things heavy has released his second solo album in as many years that explicitly shows his diverse array of skills at their finest, both in the shaping of complete chaos and the obsessive study of minutiae.

This slab of vinyl is perfectly on point in referencing metal twice in its title. Heather Leigh Murray's pedal steel, the cornerstone of Taurpis Tula's sound and energy drenches both of this album's sides in metallic offal. From rust to the molten spread of wet metal to the hiss of megalithic spear-tip in water, this is amongst their heaviest (and best recorded) work yet.

Eight years after his debut, one of this label's first releases, this producer returns with a sophomore set of moderately appetizing tunes that thankfully haven't been left out to spoil in the summer sun.

Recorded over different nights of the Final Academy exhibition, this album features Gysin reading early cut-ups from the time of his early collaborations with William S. Burroughs. Musicians several decades younger than he add a spontaneous excitement to his animated recital, lending this document a vitality that far exceeds its historic value.

Waldteufel returns to conjure primeval forces deep within forests shrouded in darkness. Using hypnotic tribal percussion, cosmic drones, and unearthly chants, they have created an album of dense Germanic pagan hymns that is both transcendent and mystifying.

The third album from Michael Moya's wonderful group picks up where the last one left off. The nine hymnal songs here are sung from the soul, each one heavy with emotional weight. Moya and company manage to merge melancholy with hope and joy. The end result is an evocative and captivating journey.

A couple of years ago, when Justin Broadrick decided to sing instead of shout and focus more on atmospheres instead of riffing, Godflesh became Jesu and an entirely new genre ("shoegaze metal" perhaps) was born.  The Angelic Process have been quick to put their mark on the genre, and this disc is a good effort that is unfortunately hindered by spotty production.

Fresh after a couple of collaborations with noise god Merzbow, this disc shows Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk (no relation) balancing the words of electronic drone and harsh noise across two long tracks.

Four albums into their career, Liars take yet another artistic sharp turn; a set of relatively conventional rock songs.  For listeners used to the contrary experimentalism of their last two records, Liars will be as polarizing as anything the group has done.

In the Sasu Ripatti oeuvre, this savagely deep album stands as a hallmark of the producer's virtuosity. Enraptured by his latest album under this moniker, Whistleblower, I take special delight in returning to his long out-of-print Chain Reaction classic and reconnecting with the artist during his rise to infamy. 

 

The fifth album from this Chicago trio manages to create its own unique take on so-called psychedelic rock by clearly showing some influences that will give newcomers a familiar point to grab hold of while still taking them somewhere entirely new.

Over the last few years, Berlin's beloved have been intensely busy. Much of their time has been spent working concurrently on various projects, releasing around a dozen studio albums over the last five years. During this latest phase of the ongoing supporter project they set themselves a goal of producing an album over the course of a year, one song a month as a gift to those who were helping to fund their forthcoming album, Alles Wieder Offen. With three "bonus" tracks thanks to the phase lasting a few months longer than intended, the 15 Jewels are quite unlike Neubauten's entire back catalogue. Even the frequently challenging releases of the Musterhaus project do not prepare me for the sheer freedom expressed by the band.

It's important to note Menche is an experimenter of sound, not an academic. Here, he takes this opportunity to deconstruct the sounds made by conventional instruments and use them to create something far removed from the original source.