The fourth, and final, in this spaced-out series is the perfect bookend to Cope’s explorations in the dichotomous world cosmological and Earth Mother minded rock. Consisting of the rediscovered first effort and the last ever track recorded for his Rite sequence, Cope shows little sign of doing anything less than 23 minutes when it comes to playing for purely meditational purposes.

Paranoia runs rampant all over this disc, a sense of voyeurism and danger with it, slowly escalating with every cautious movement. The technology we've built up all around us is slowly evaporating, wearing away with rain and wind. Nobody is sure what's beneath everything, what's grown since we buried ourselves beneath steel towers and miles of wire, but Echran is observing and recording the entire event.

Texan Rick Reed is a true multi-instrumentalist ofexperimental traditions.  His primarycompositions, for sine wave, short-wave and Moog, represent mastery of thetexturally-intense, sculptural minimalism nowadays crunched down from the Powerbooktable.

This exceptional single track of bliss on lone droner Hardwick’s debut 3" CD-R runs into nearly eighteen minutes of steadily yearning cloud nine emissions. Wrapped in a garish Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label style wallpaper sample, the music is thankfully made with much better taste.

I've been worried about music without discernable melodies or intriguing concepts lately because I'm finding more and more that they fail me. A host of "difficult" bands have released album after album of strange sounds and subconscious cut and paste tactics, but more often than not there's something musical, fun, or catchy playing side by side with all the insanity. Greg Davis and Steven Hess both reach for that extra something on this disc, but come away with an important piece of the musical puzzle missing.

I'd champion this as the emo-heavy electronic album of 2006 if it weren't deserving of just slightly more praise than that. Shaw-Han Lien composes ultra-busy synthetic pop songs using the same old four-on-the-floor rhythm tracks and toppling sound banks made popular by disco and techno performers, but he adds his own extra-processed spice to the music, making it almost enjoyable. It is simultaneously bright, sunny, and altogether sickening.

This is a spring/summer guitar record that’s been designed to fall somewhere between the earthy simplicity of folk players and the flash of '70s heavy rock. There are understated flamboyant twists to the playing and sound of Ezra Feinberg (ex Piano Magic) and Tim Green (The Fucking Champs and The Nation of Ulysses). The band’s name (and the LP title) maybe be pronounced like Stevie Wonder did on "Living for the City," but this album is anything but straight urban rock.

I had never listened to Maximum Joy, I knew they were connected withThe Pop Group, who I had a passing interest in, but I can now understand whyMaximum Joy have descended into such obscurity.  The songs on thiscompilation have not withstood the test of time: the music here soundsextremely dated and (worse again) it isn’t very good; this might be oneonly for the nostalgia crowd and/or Pop Group collectors.

Not Alonepacks more than five hours of exclusive material by some of today'sfinest recording artists into one massive benefit album, the brainchildof Mark Logan of Jnana Records and David Tibet of Current 93.  Asmight be predicted, many of the artists contained herein arerecognizable as the "usual suspects" of the extended C93 family—artistslike Antony, Simon Finn, Shirley Collins, John Contreras and Nurse WithWound.  However, the set also unexpectedly contains contributions by astaggering number of indie and underground luminaries who exist welloutside of the perceived "apocalyptic folk" milieu.

On Brendan Whitney's latest release as Alias, he's brought in kid brother Ehren tocollaborate, and together they have produced an album that is lush andethereal with a dream-like groove. Wide spaces of silence separate thetracks, giving a feeling of moving from one dream to another.

Nice Nice are Jason Buehler and Mark Shirazi: a multi-talented duo fromPortland, Oregon who have demonstrated through their brilliant fulllength album, Chrome, that they can fill sound to the wallswith only a guitar and drums and some skilled real-time effects processing.With this series—a limited quartet of numbered CD EPs which had to bemail ordered directly through Temporary Residence—I hate to admit, onthe whole, I'm underwhelmed.

Though they originally hail from Washington, DC, Measles, Mumps, Rubella’s sound is not the stereotypical slashing punk sound popularized by bands like Fugazi and Jawbox  immediately associated with the city. MMR are, however,  clearly the kind of band that’s listened to Public Image Ltd very carefully.

David Jackman's release schedule obscures far too many of his best recordings, apparently to the extent that some his best work goes unreleased for years at a time. Die Stadt's 3" release of two never-before-heard 10" records exemplify why Organum has always been one of the most consistently excellent and intriguing projects of the last twenty-plus years.

As a duo Moha! seem to be reaching for a place of their own and failing. Settled between the large comforting bosoms of other discordant and unpredictable bands, Anders Hana and Morten J. Olsen are either jerking their instruments around as though handling a dead chicken by the neck or playing loud, formed jams and sounding indistinguishable from their brethren.

Those waiting on the next Stars of the Lid record can resteasy now as here is another diamond of the Texashinterlands, shining low and weary through the endless fenced-in wild yards andupturned bedroom windows of another druggy afternoon community.

Anyone with a cheap drum machine and a loose understanding of the bassguitar can probably crank out a record better than this in acouple of hours; but they'll need a dirty 4-track cassette recorder tocapture it any worse.

Simon Kealoha's Calika project brings a fresh perspective to bedroom vibe electronica. Fractured and reconstructed though it may be, Small Talk Kills Me is a record composed of songs more than experiments and that's a welcome change of pace.

For most in the international community, the last few years have been anything but good, chock full of bad news and an ever-worsening outlook for the future (United Defense stockholders aside). But for Brooklyn's Dr. Israel, all the war, death and destruction around the globe had a silver lining: how else would he have been able to muster all the outrage and righteous indignation that is Patterns of War?

Six songs of orchestral electronic suspension populate Ryan Teague's first album on Type Records and the majority of them are fairly bland examples of music I've heard before. I could toss the terms evocative or pretty or hypnotizing around all I wanted, but it wouldn't change the fact that I've heard better examples of this style elsewhere.

This is the first full length collaboration between noise’s oldworkhorse, Merzbow, and one of the more exciting artists in the field,John Wiese. The album is slow to take off but when it does, all enginesare blazing and both eardrums are burst. It is one of the betterreleases from Merzbow in recent months and another string to Wiese’sbow.