The beautiful photographs of little houses in the countryside capture the vibe of You Are My Home succinctly. The album very much encapsulates the feeling of being very small in a wide open space, unable to do anything but sit and take in the splendor of the surroundings. Nathan Amundson's songs are deceptively simple. They are gentle but with a hidden strength that only occasionally erupts (and when it does come through it is impressive to say the least).

If the original Hafler Trio performances and releases of How to Slice a Loaf of Bread can be seen as full meals, Colin Potter’s reworking is a compact collection of ideas shoved into one of those toasters that squish the sandwich into a condensed snack. A Pressed On Sandwich doesn’t cover the depth and breadth of the original releases but Potter does augment the material into a worthy piece in its own right.

Sheffield label Singing Knives have gathered together some of the city's more appealing noise/folk underground (and their peers) here showing that it's certainly not a city still in thrall of Warp's legacy and output. The similarity between these acts is pretty loose, but most appear to work within or around the use of traditional forms / instruments, improvisation and drone or a combination of the two styles.

With their latest album of pastoral folk pop, Glenn Donaldson and Donovan Quinn seem determined to let everyone know where they're from, in case there were any doubts.

The selection of butcher knives that adorns this lathe-cut's cover isn't really an apt representation of its contents. Anyone expecting great slab splitting chunks of noise will be sorely disappointed, this is a far more in-depth and busy release. Creating a no-mans land between noise and psychedelic crystallised drone, this is a restless listen where a thousand Catherine wheel cogs of sound sync and separate.

One of the most underexposed and exciting reggae vocalists today, Paul St. Hilaire delivers the kind of album his associates Rhythm & Sound should have produced this year.

Dressed in black, as ever, this Prurient lathe sits more easily alongside his recent Load release Pleasure Ground than his circuit board slaughter. This track leans a little less on the ripping-out-throats-with-teeth style and more on a knife edge tension tip. This is more like slow insidious mental torture than someone merzbowing your face into a pulp.

The world is shockingly louder after hearing Andrew Chalk's work. This is true of many of his pieces, but seems most applicable to the reissue of East of the Sun. Originally released in 1994 on cassette by OR (Ora's label), the album is as quiet and reserved as they come, teeming with invisible life that always seems just beyond the reach of the human ear. There's plenty going on in these washes of sound, but everything seems consciously subliminal from the second the album begins.

This fascinating record shadows an apparently murderous concept with more than enough themic ambiguity, musical invention and sly humor, to make repeat listens essential, if not exactly desirable.

By my account, both at the time and retrospectively, List of Lights and Buoys was the best album of 2004.  This follow-up reprises that exquisite debut's delicate melancholia as minimal, often radical, re-interpretations of classic and, at times, even sacred material.  How well it accomplishes that is another story altogether.

This lathe captures Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club and ex-Vibracathedral Orchestra) and Sticky Foster, both, A-Band alumni, somewhere in the world making sound together. Allegedly containing material that could be about ten years old, this release squeezes (what I think is possibly) four tracks onto a clear seven inch vinyl.

It is nice to know that there are still people out there with very strange ideas, sufficiently demonstrated by this album, the second collaborative effort from Tony Wakeford and Andrew Liles.  However, in a world in which Nurse With Wound is working on a HipHop album, and David Tibet is both a professed Christian and a cabinet member of the OTO, perhaps the word "strange" needs to be redefined.

With this very brief album the Japanese duo drum up 16 songs in just less than 16 minutes. It may be extremely short but this CD contains bucketfuls of energy.Their noisy, angular interpretation of punk is a little different to the norm and most importantly fun.

This compilation is meant to be an audio and visual experience. As well as 16 audio tracks there are four videos for the computer. They could have saved themselves the bother of including the videos as they are awful examples of video art. That being said, none of the music inspires much confidence either.

Ultralord try their hardest to be heavier than thou, sometimes it works but other times it comes across as juvenile metal posturing. It’s hard to draw the line between serious metal and the tongue in cheek and with Ultralord the line is blurred.

Sprawled over two discs, this album from New Zealand’s Mrtyu! is a lumbering behemoth of rumbling bass, feedback, and layers of distortion. It’s a gloriously unholy mess, suggesting subterranean rites held far from the light of day.

Brothers John and Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond take an exquisite and enjoyable side trip into harmonious interstellar regions with this low-key study of vibrations. With stripped down instrumentation, they drift into shimmering passages of temporal displacement.

After several months of hefty improv submersion it’s possible to cultivate the taste buds enough to be able to sift out the quality from the claptrap. This is most definitely the former, a 21 minute improvised freak out wrapped in a brain-splurge primary colored aggro cover

Not a mysterious Frenchman in fact, Benoit Pioulard is Thomas Meluch, another Midwestern boy mutating folk tradition through personal mythology, only this time it’s not founded on states in the Union or suburban Americana but on the fuzzy sublime of forests and oceans, cryptic continental romance and Bergman films.

Perhaps Planet Mu's clearest attribute is founder Mike Paradinas' willingness to put out diverse releases from artists he believes in regardless of where they lie on the electronic music spectrum.  Yet as this budget-priced compilation demonstrates, it's also the label's most obvious weakness.