Contagious Orgasm have been around for a long time now, but if their name is unfamiliar, it's because much of their discography has been released in very small quantities or on labels already filled to the brim with peculiar artists, all of which probably already have a large fan base.

Alexander Hacke's new solo album Sanctuary bears some of the hallmarks of Einstürzende Neubauten's last album Perpetuum Mobile, an album that documented the concept of travel in a very tight and streamlined way. Unlike Perpetuum Mobile,Hacke uses a myriad of styles and tempos which make it difficult tolisten to at first.

Fortunately, the title of Piano Magic's new album is not indicative of the music. There is a certain coldness and calculation to Glen Johnson's ensemble but it does not quite approach disaffection. Part of the album's chill is due to the explicit motif of ghosts and spectral images which cuts across both the music and the liner notes.

With any collaboration, searching for that elusive balance betweenrespective styles doesn't necessarily yield fantastic results, with thepitfalls of compromise and dominance playing significant roles in thesongwriting process. Many times, the sound of one musician will drownout the voice of another.

Everyone pretty much knows by now that it's pretty useless to review anew Merzbow album. Merzbow is Merzbow, and he'll always be Merzbow, andhe "does" Merzbow better than all of the Merzbow copyists out there,and it will probably always be that way. Aside from a few minorquibbles over whether digital-era Merzbow is better or worse than theoriginal analog Merzbow, there really isn't a whole lot of criticaldivision over Merzbow's output.

Major Stars are Boston's best-kept secret, as anyone who has witnessedtheir live performances over the years can certainly attest. By day,under the auspices of their basement record shop Twisted Village—trulya Boston institution—Wayne and Kate are purveyors of psychedelic rockand hard-to-find underground sounds from around the world.

Nothing can stop this band from forcing me to participate in the most sinister of feelings. They're soaked in evil, sex, and those lonely and terrifying sensations that only open, dead spaces can convey. Bohren und der Club of Gore associate themselves with doom metal via their own website, were formally a self-described "hardcore" metal act, have all the mystery and intrigue of the best David Lynch films, and yet none of these descriptions get to the core of this quartet's sound.

I wrote about Akiyama's last record, describing him as a kind ofaccidental hero of the instrumental glitch musicians. His newerrecordings, alone or with Desormais, channel the same tugging, emotivebaggage and fragile tension as other real-time deconstructionists(clearest touchstone: Christian Fennesz), but Akiyama's are mostcomplex, less dependenton a single instrument or one's traditional referents.

I was skeptical about the potential clusterfuck of a record featuringDJ Spooky, Dave Lombardo (from Slayer), and Jack Dangers, but thepresence of two of my favorite MCs of all time, Chuck D and Dälek,pushed me over the edge into "I've got to at least hear this"territory.

While I wasn't paying attention, Finland seems to have become the newIceland. All the new underground acts worth knowing about these daysseem to hail from the sub-arctic climes of Helsinki, Tampere orJyvakyla.

Though they are also from Finland, Pharaoh Overlord have scrupulouslyavoided getting lumped into the "Finnish Underground" category typifiedby Es, Kemialliset Ystavat, Avarus, etc. This is largely because theirbrand of churning, plugged-in post-Krautrock shares little in commonwith the often amateurish, willfully obscure acoustic noodling of theirgeographical contemporaries.

Damien Jurado dabbles thoughtfully in Americana, making the whole ofour country's midlands his playground. His songwriting has always beensharp (lauded and even appropriated by artists like Neil Halstead) andit loses none of it acuteness on these most recent twelve songs.

For Surrounded By Silence, the fourth full-length release as Prefuse 73, Scott Herren picks up the thread from where 2003's One Word Extinguisherleft off in terms of pushing the envelope of musical beats forming intosublime compositions divided with interesting interludes. Havingpreviously collaborated on some tracks with MCs, this time out Herrenhas invited a bevy of singers and MCs such as Beans, Aesop Rock, MastaKilla and the GZA, who turn up to further enrich a good deal of thedisc's 21 tracks.

Having spent the better part of the past ten years successfully fusinglarge ensemble jazz with electronic-based music(s) for a fresh andinteresting take, Norwegian collective, Jaga Jazzist, have refinedtheir chops and compositions for their fourth official release, What We Must.

Perhaps electronic music's most "obscure known" collective, TheExposures began their music careers in the late 1970s as anonymoustelevision composers, creating uncredited background music forcommercials and short films on a major German television station.

I'm having difficulty imagining a sound more alluring than the one produced by this German sextet. Two years ago, Cicadidaeput me under its spell and maintained a constant spot on my late-nightlistening play list. The band has tightened up for their latest releaseand managed to outdo themselves.

13+God is the final product of an intensive 17-day studiocollaboration between vaunted German electro-pop outfit The Notwist andUS-based ambitious free-range "rappers" Themselves. Unlikelybedfellows, a common admiration for each others' work led to thetrans-Atlantic tete-e -tete, which originally began with home-madeNotwist remixes of tracks from Themselves' avant-garde LP The No Music.All the disparate elements of both groups—Notwist-staple dreamy, catchyhooks and scattered computerized percussion; themselves' esoteric andhalf-growled, half-whined verses—are noticeably present and,surprisingly, mesh quite well together.

Though it did make me chuckle back when I read Jon Whitney's scathingreview in which he unfavorably compared the duo to a pair of untrainedmonkeys playing with a drum machine, I actually always liked Adult's Resuscitation.

This is the long-delayed sequel to the mad Welshman's 2003 Double Vulgar album, which was intended to follow closely upon the release of the first, but because of various problems surrounding the pornographic artwork and the dissolution of World Serpent Distribution, it has been delayed until now.