The fifth LP from the Swedish producer is a significant expansion on its early vinyl only incarnation, with a massive bonus track added.  It's a dark, yet comfortably fascinating journey through the wilds of Sweden.

A note for note cover of any Atari Teenage Riot song is a silly idea but that is what D-Trash Records have offered up with The Virus has been Spread. Nearly every track here is a straight-up cover lacking in any imagination, vision, or sense of danger. As such, The Virus has been Spread is a limp and impotent attempt at a tribute. It is most likely a way for this label to get its acts some spotlight; it has bitten them in the tail because after listening to this CD I do not want to hear any of these artists again.

This project takes a unique approach to music: rather than instrumentation, it is based around the sound of writing and drawing. It makes for some original textures but it lacks a coherent feeling and compositional structure that would have made it more compelling.

The latest entry in Southern Records' Latitudes series is from Finland's mighty Circle. Even though the combination of the band's name and the title of the album seems like a nod to one of Celtic Frost's classic songs, this release focuses on the band's more spacey sounds than on their classic metal-worshipping moments. Like most of their previous albums, there are some amazing moments on Tyrant but also a few stumbles along the way.

This extremely long-in-the-making (five years!) collaboration between these two titans of the avant garde finally arrives with high expectations that are summarily met.  Rather than something academic and difficult, it is instead a captivating and visceral work.

Throbbing Gristle activates a certain part of my brain that immediately responds with the idea of noise. Then, after more careful reflection, harsh noise, death, industry, sex, pain, exploitation, and a host of other generally negative and exciting responses come to the fore and resolve the picture I have of the band, however incomplete and misinformed it is. Part Two - The Endless Not surprises me because it doesn't evoke that picture of Throbbing Gristle and in fact calls the presence of that name on this recording into question.

Anla Courtis and Ralf Wehowsky combine their talents to create an album of distorted, erratic textures that scrape the eardrums to inspired, ecstatic effect. The spirits they conjure don’t seem very happy to be awakened, unleashing their exquisite vengeance with a wrath like the Furies.

Rjyan Kidwell is going on ten years of musical output and his music is growing accordingly. Of his most recent endeavors, Sketchi is his most immediately mature work, abandoning what might be called his more adolescent tendencies in all places except the artwork that accompanies the record. Don't be fooled by the "Twin Towers" cover, Cex's newest is one of his most sober releases to date.

"Dungtitled (in A major)" seems an irreverent title, but announces sonically Brian McBride's and Adam Wiltzie's most doggedly serious recording to date. Compared to The Tired Sounds of... the music on And Their Refinement of the Decline is more direct, relying less on minutiae and emphasizing the power of their music as cleansing and consumptive.

For anyone who has spent any serious amount of time listening to the leftfield of electronica over the past three or four years, it's hard to imagine someone reinventing the proverbial wheel. I know the more I listen to new and "underground" electronica, the more I keep hearing the same things over and over. Phat beats make for a great 12" or live set but an album needs more. Nebulo gives a lot more. On Kolia, through atmospherics and melody, Nebulo has made the best electronica album I've heard since Ellen Allien's Berlinette.

After Unai's substandard A Love Moderne made for an inauspicious resurrection for Force Tracks, this full-length from a netlabel favorite picks up the gauntlet previously held by Dub Taylor and M.R.I. Still, it isn't quite enough to bolster the once unassailable tech-house imprint.

Despite (or perhaps because of) a 25 year long career playing with Einstürzende Neubauten, Mania D and Malaria! as well as running a successful record label, she has never put out her own album. I Put a Record On is a far cry from her previous work with the other groups: it captures the modern Berlin's new slick, chic culture as opposed to the decay and geographical isolation that gave birth to the Neue Deutsche Welle.

A stylistic mish-mash of styles, cultures, and sounds, Radio Zumbido create the perfect documentary soundtrack for a film that does not exist. My first thought on a quick sampling of this disc was old Bomb Squad era Public Enemy. 

Die Stadt's reissue program of early Asmus Tietchens' early releases continues into its ninth iteration, this time focusing on two records from the late 1980s.  Both differ greatly in their approach and are not equally compelling to these ears.

The mad man from the Pacific Northwest creates an album based solely on the sound of Native American percussion, with the processed results as wild as the roaring bear that adorns the album's sleeve.

The second installment in a proposed David Jackman trilogy (preceded by Sanctus, and to be completed with Omega) lives up to its name with a spiritual recording of Hammond organ, tower bell, gong, and processed voices. 

Inspired by a German audiobook of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the tracks on this album suitably evoke contact with distant landscapes that may or may not be inhabited. An eerie otherness pervades these songs, as if anxiously awaiting the arrival of alien emissaries.

Robert Horton weaves together drones, field recordings, improvisations on homemade instruments, and digital manipulations in the creation of this excellent, otherworldly recording. His explorations go in such a variety of directions and altered states that it is hard not to be a little awestruck in their wake.

The latest installment to spill from Andrew Liles' ambitious and generous Vortex Vault series casts Liles as the ringleader of a black magic vaudeville act. Theatrical and playfully whimsical, this multilingual, dialogue-laden album is a striking release that shifts modes effortlessly, revealing new finds from Liles' unlimited bag of tricks at every turn.

If Toronto's Do Make Say Think haven't changed much in the decade or so they've been on the scene, it's because they haven't needed to.  Their mastery of their basic aesthetic elements—from their natural, textured guitar sound, to their melancholy passages, huge crescendos, album-long symmetry and even their earthy packaging—works so well that they need little evolution.  It's as if they found the perfect moment and haven't left it in ten years.