Combining two previous tape releases, with a special edition including a third remix CD, the enigmatic German project defy any sort of classification or clear genre identification. The trio of Christian Dräger, Eric Bauer and Nils Lehnhäuser pull bits of ambient, jazz and drone together without ever fully locking into one style.  The pieces here drastically range from conventional structures to unadulterated, foundation shaking pure bass tones.

Polish artist Sebastian Banaszczyk once again demonstrates another leap in compositional development with his Bionulor project. This work, a 3" CD constructed from sounds extracted from Erik Satie's piece of the same name, features some noticeable elements from the original piece. As a whole, however, it has a sound that is unquestionably the work of Banaszczyk.

With a true collaboration happening between these two bands, I was not expecting any sort of subtlety or restraint, and my initial thoughts were proven to be true. I was, however, planning to hear a lurching mass of distortion and excruciating vocals, and that is exactly what is here. Neither artist clearly fits into the standard metal templates, and with them working together here, that is all the more apparent.

Second in a trio of inaugural cassette releases from Yucatán, México's Lengua de Lava, Harness joins two live performances recorded on the same night at Oberlin College's Fairchild Chapel. The first documents the gutsy force of Joe Panzner and Greg Stuart's machine noise, the second catches Jason Brogan and Sam Sfirri in slow-death mode, twisting canine howls and malfunctioning equipment into avian distress signals and seismic events. Each duo treats their material differently, but the attention paid to physical properties and processes links them. It's a detail picked up and echoed in the superb artwork from Matthew Revert, who channels the corrosive elements of both pieces into a frayed and intricate scrawl.

The first volume of Gengras's Collected Works was unexpectedly one of my absolute favorite albums of 2013, so I was looking forward to this follow-up with a great deal of anticipation.  As it turns out, my expectations were way off the mark, as New Process Music is nowhere near as great as its illustrious predecessor.  However, it is equally worth noting that it is not trying to be: this album is a different beast altogether.  While The Moog Years captured Gengras at his haunting, long-form compositional peak, New Process Music instead documents a series of brief experiments in harnessing the squiggling, burbling chaos of a small Eurorack modular synth.  The results are certainly interesting, but anyone seeking something beautiful or sublime should definitely look elsewhere.

2013's Era was a criminally underappreciated monster of an album that marked an significant, unexpected surge forward in forging a distinctive and wonderful aesthetic all Disappears' own.  I am not sure quite what I expected from this follow-up, but it certainly was not still another dramatic evolution.  That is exactly what I got though.  While I still give Era the edge from both a songwriting and simmering menace perspective, Irreal takes its predecessor's hypnotic, machine-like precision and echo-heavy minimalism and runs with it.  Admittedly, the band's brilliance is primarily stylistic this time around, but Disappears have nonetheless provided yet another thoroughly bad-ass avant-rock tour de force.

Sometimes I wonder why the rest of the world does not seem to appreciate the singular genius of Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin like I do.  Other times, an album like this comes along and reminds me how truly unhinged, prickly, and unsuited for mass consumption the duo can be and everything makes sense once more.  Given the diversity and volume of Big Blood's output to date, it is hard to say just how dramatic a divergence Unlikely Mothers actually is, but I normally associate the band with a uniquely raw, primal, and art-damaged strain of folk that defies easy categorization.  Unlikely Mothers also defies easy categorization, but calls to mind some sort of primitive, sludgy, and bass-driven strain of '70s hard rock.  Some of the grooves achieve an unexpectedly hypnotic momentum or bracing, wild-eyed power, but the shrillness and single-mindedness of some these pieces can definitely make for a rough ride.

A reissue of a self-release from the enigmatic Grant Smith, the sound on this disc fits squarely in the world of guitar noise, but with a significant amount of development and variation within each of its six untitled segments. Sometimes harsh, sometimes pensive, and sometimes melodic, it results in a wonderful, mysterious album that is enjoyably unpredictable.

Will Thomas Long has been less prolific as of late with material as Celer, his minimal ambient project. That longer space between releases has made each one all the more memorable, and that is no different with Sky Limits. Even though it is conceptually about the ephemeral nature of life and experiences, stopping to listen to these quiet pieces makes for a great metaphor of life on a grander scale.

It has been quite a long wait since the last proper Black To Comm album (2009's wonderful Alphabet 1968), so it was an absolute delight to have Marc Richter unexpectedly re-surface in December with an inspired return to form (and one of the year’s finest and most singular albums).  While this latest release understandably bears almost no resemblance to Marc’s decidedly outré soundtrack for EARTH (2012), it also does not seem to follow any obvious, linear progression from his previous work either. Black To Comm is its own self-contained, anomalous world of vibrant, hallucinatory sound art brilliance, resembling nothing less than the beautiful nexus where drone, space rock, psychedelia, and the flickering unreality of late-night semi-consciousness meet.

Bastard Noise was not as prolific in 2014 as previous years, with only a handful of releases appearing. From that handful, these two are very different in their respective approaches, with Live at Babycastles consisting of a single long-form piece recorded by the duo of Anthony Saunders and Eric Wood, and Uncertainty Principle being two short pieces in collaboration with two well known Japanese artists. The sound, however, stays consistent: a subtle, at times ambient series of sounds that manage to get very noisy, but never lose their direction.

Richard Skelton has a long history of shifting monikers, unusual concepts, and stylistic evolutions, but this latest project still came as a bit of a surprise to me, as it does not particularly sound like a Richard Skelton album at all.  Not at first, anyway.  Rather, it sounds a bit like a warmer variation on classic Lustmord or one of Steve Roach's space-themed albums–a far cry from Skelton's vibrant and organic signature blend of bow-scrapes and rich, shimmering harmonics.  After a few listens, however, it becomes evident that Skelton's aesthetic is still perfectly intact, but has been slowed down and stretched to something approximating geologic time (appropriate, given his well-documented non-musical interests).  While Nimrod is definitely not representative of what Richard historically does best, it is nevertheless a deep and absorbing listen, boasting at least one piece that is probably as great as anything in the space music canon.

Considered "lost" for the better part of the past decade, these two live pieces, commissioned for a performance in Berlin, has some unexpected moments for those familiar with these two composers. Steve Roden and Frank Bretschneider blend their strengths of subtle electronics and improvisation, but also bring in some surprisingly conventional beats and rhythms, resulting in an unpredictable, yet diverse and gripping record.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed, nominated, and voted.

Regler, the Swedish combo lead by noise artist Mattin and Anders Bryngelsson (Brainbombs) is anything but subtle in their approach to music. On this double CD set, they lay out exactly what to expect from the disc titles: Noise Core is the group (featuring Henrik Andersson on bass) doing an hour of noisy, almost grindcore chaos, while Free Jazz is the trio plus Yoann Durant on sax, making an hour of vaguely jazz tinged racket. It’s not for everyone, but it is an impressive work no matter what.

The word "dance" does not come to mind when I see Ralf Wehowsky's name, so I was intrigued by this collaboration from its title alone. Johannes Frisch is not known for working with electronic beats either, so the fact that they appear here in anything but a conventional sense is not that surprising. Between Wehowsky's electronics and Frisch's double bass, shards of dance music appear but extremely deconstructed, and blended up with free jazz and electronic experimentalism.

For the third installment of his all field recording based Epoch series, López presents material collected at somewhat more conventional sounding locations, at least for an American such as myself. Captured at various parks and nature preserves throughout Cuba and both the Southeast and Southwest of the United States, the sounds are no less fascinating than his rainforest-centric previous entries in this series.

The noise/orchestral ensemble, lead and directed by Reinhold Friedl, have performed the work of power electronics titans Whitehouse before, with their 2010 Whitehouse Electronics release drawing heavily from the band’s final three albums. Following recent performances of Metal Machine Music and collaborations with Keiji Haino, Whitehouse succeeds even more than its predecessor by taking a wider swath through the nearly 30 year catalog, and even featuring an all-too-brief vocal contribution by William Bennett himself.

Benjamin Finger's fractured and skittering first release for Digitalis is not entirely without precedent, as he previously dabbled with techno beats a bit on 2010's For You, Sleepsleeper, but it is still quite a departure from the dreamy, hallucinatory soundscapes that I normally associate with him.  As far as departures go, I would say Mood Chaser is quite a good one, as Finger successfully translates his skewed psychedelic sensibility into a disorienting and kaleidoscopic dance party.  Though it is perhaps a bit too over-caffeinated to quite stand with his best work, this is certainly an exuberant, weird, and fun effort in its own right.

This reissue of Amir Abbey's 2011 cassette is not quite as strong as last year’s Movements of Night LP, but it certainly boasts enough inspiration to justify Students of Decay's decision to rescue it from out-of-print cassette purgatory. Although Amir covers a perplexing amount of stylistic ground and occasionally errs on the side of being too derivative, he has admittedly chosen some very cool artists to emulate (Popul Vuh, for example) and tends to excel at most of the genres that he delves into (shoegaze, drone, etc.).  That unevenness and shifting vision prevents The Silent March from quite succeeding as a complete album, but a few of the individual pieces are quite compelling.