On what I assume will be his final release of the year (although with his prolific output its hard to be sure), Kevin Drumm's Wrong Intersection is a single piece with a sound that fits its somewhat sinister title and ambiguous artwork perfectly. It might not be as aggressive as some of his other works, but Drumm excels in setting an exceedingly bleak mood via a constantly shifting dynamic, and a healthy bit of extreme frequencies as well.

One way to approach Jürg Frey and Radu Malfatti’s II is to concentrate on how they shape their music. The numerous small silences that dot the first disc are conspicuous. So is the album’s low volume and the sharp, maybe surprising, beauty with which Frey plays his clarinet and Malfatti his trombone, but form takes precedence over these. Form and the way sounds are formed. Much of what happens on these two discs is the product of the tension between silence and sound, the difference between expression and phenomenon, and the manner in which sounds beget forms all on their own. By subduing material and structure, Frey and Malfatti knock down the walls that sometimes bind music to a fixed path. What lies outside is a sparse and weightless field where music seemingly organizes—and destroys—itself.

Nazoranai's second album is a curious tabula rasa that makes any kind of quasi-objective opinion nearly impossible, as the baggage and expectations of the individual listeners are far more important than the actual sounds that this trio conjures up.  Though both Stephen O'Malley and Oren Ambarchi are physically present, their distinctive aesthetics are most definitely not: this is Keiji Haino's show and it is an entirely improvised one.  Charitably viewed, that means spontaneous, volcanic, and wildly unpredictable free-rock heaven from one of the genre's most singular icons.  Viewed by me, The Most Painful Time is an indulgent, flawed, quixotic, and intermittently compelling attempt to recapture the wide-eyed freedom and possibility of psych rock's formative years.

In the past few years, Mike Griffin has been perfecting his own personal blend of musique concrete and harsh noise in his suburban basement studio. His output has appeared mostly in the form of limited tapes and CDRs, but Pilot's Salt is his first fully-fledged LP release. Pared with the recently released Tovarich tape, both releases make for excellent introduction to his ever-growing discography.

Aidan Baker is so prolific that his quality control might be open to question, except any criticism is disarmed by the near-impossibility of keeping pace with his myriad collaborations and solo projects. FortunatelyTriptychs would stand out in any discography. Inspired by Satie’s Gymnopédies and "furniture music" it is full of precise instrumentation which allows the music space to breathe and creates a serene, and meditative, air.

This may be the first album from partners in music (and life) Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner since 2011, but the two have been anything but stagnant in those past few years. Collaborations with other artists as Mamiffer and side projects abound between these two restless artists, and the duo are even hesitant to consider this the proper third album. Regardless of how it officially stands in their overall canon, Statu Nascendi is a powerful work that strips the Mamiffer sound down to its organic core.

Culled from two 2012 performances in Japan, the two pieces that make up this album are built from the most simple of arrangements. The way this improvisational trio put these basic instruments together, however, is what makes this album excel. Not a simple or easy listen, it succeeds in that difficult abstraction.

This month, Germany marks two anniversaries of note. The 100th anniversary of the start of the first World War represents one of the darker moments of their history whereas the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall represents a beacon of hope. Einstürzende Neubauten were there for the latter and channel the energy that ran through the divided city of Berlin even still. Through this new project, they connect the dots between the conflicts of today and those of the past while marking the passing of all those who have fallen under the relentless combat and struggle that has plagued mankind since its beginning.

Every once in a while, a record comes along in which the title perfectly encapsulates the music contained within. As a bass/guitar/drum trio, this Norweigian group approaches their instruments with the intensity that noise artists do with their massive batteries of guitar pedals. While I can actually hear the instruments these guys are using, it is assembled so roughly that it might as well be a noise record, and a glorious one at that.

As the final full length release to be released by Clay Ruby under his Burial Hex moniker, The Hierophant is an appropriately dramatic tombstone for the enigmatic project. Esoteric shades of noise and blackened metal color the middle portions of the record, bookended by two gloriously perverse, almost pop songs that standout as both baffling and utterly compelling.

Locust's latest album is a definite anomaly, as Mark van Hoen and Louis Sherman depart from van Hoen's usual distinctive and production-heavy strain of hallucinatory electro-pop to ostensibly pay homage to '70s electronic music (sort of).  The result is an array of atypically loose and sketch-like soundscapes that retain Mark's love of processed female vocals, but veer away from the (imaginary) dancefloor and into more abstract and cinematic territory. It is certainly a pleasant listen, recalling at times Piano Magic, an alternate soundtrack to Donnie Darko, and some of Vangelis & Jean Michel Jarre's better work, but it is ultimately a bit less substantial and satisfying than some of Mark's other recent efforts.

I was completely floored by last year's blackened drone/doom metal epic You've Always Meant So Much To Me, so I was very eager to hear how J.R. Robinson could possibly follow such an out-of-nowhere tour de force. As it turns out, he chose to follow it by essentially doing much the same thing…again. I was initially a bit disappointed by that, as Then It All Came Down is not as immediately striking as its predecessor, nor did it ambush me with any real unexpected twists. Once I listened to it enough for everything to fully sink in, however, it gradually dawned on me that this latest effort is just as spectacular in its own right: Robinson may have revisited his previous formula, but he also found several new and crushingly heavy ways to improve upon it.

Chilean by way of Brooklyn artist Joao Da Silva has been quietly building an impressive discography of droning guitar electronics that can vacillate significantly between dark terrors and bright, shimmering expanses of sound. These two new limited tapes (one a split release with La Mancha Del Pecado) provide an exceptional overview of his widely varying, yet consistently excellent music.

I am not sure which is more amazing: that the Dots are now up to 18 (sort of) of these weird, free-wheeling, catch-all releases or that they are still occasionally both excellent and surprising.  In any case, this double release is quite a fine and rather substantial effort.  Like most (if not) all Chemical Playschool entries, this is not the place to come for hooks and tight editing, but Ka-Spel and company's abstract psychedelia nevertheless blossoms into some very beautiful, strange, and haunting interludes.  Anyone looking to completely detach from mundane reality for 90 minutes without the aid of pharmaceuticals would be hard-pressed to find a better option than this one.

I am not an especially devout Scott Walker fan, as I tend to admire his vision and fearlessness far more than I actually enjoy listening to his albums, but I was definitely very curious to hear how this completely unexpected collaboration would turn out: such a union seemed certain to be both unpredictable and unique at the very least.  Upon finally hearing Soused, however, I am a bit surprised by the early wave of stellar reviews it has received thus far, as it seems like Sunn O)))'s presence is often unnecessary or squandered (or both).  Walker, for his part, certainly provides more of the quavering, deranged catharsis that I have grown to expect from him, but the underlying music is sometimes less than compelling. Although not a failure by any means (it gets much better near the end), much of this effort feels like less than the sum of its parts (though it is still an absolute monster by non-"Scott Walker" standards).

Minnesota's Grant Richardson may be a relatively new player in the American harsh electronics scene, but his expanding discography of tapes and low-run releases have honed his ability and skill at making ugly noise. With Gnawed taking cues equally from the European Cold Meat Industries sound and the contemporary US noise scene, Feign and Cloak is a heavy, yet diverse record that certainly brings power and force, but a lot more as well.

Working with the themes of memory and forgetting, as well as the role of attention in listening, Cluett's latest work is highly conceptual.  Forms of Forgetting is a lengthy droning work where Cluett toys with these themes from a sonic perspective, sometimes hypnotic and sometimes drifting off into silence.  Passages are quiet and hushed enough to be ignored, just to come back with an undeniable force and intensity that cannot be forgotten.

Lovingly curated and compiled by Zbigniew Karkowski’s frequent collaborator and friend Francisco Lopez, No Bullshit is an appropriately titled and presented tribute.  A data DVD containing over five hours of uncompressed audio from 67 well known (and not so well known) artists working with Karkowski’s source material, huge names from both the worlds of harsh noise and the avant garde (genres his work straddled well) appear to pay their tributes.

Between 1989 and 1995, Rudolf Eb.er (Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock) and Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant) had a monthly radio show for Switzerland’s 104.5 FM station. Titled Psychic Rally Transmission, each show was an improvised live performance, mixing found tapes, random household instruments and other items, that helped to define the then-nascent Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Aggressive industrial, punky outbursts, and a healthy dose of absurdity pepper the ten complete shows presented in this box.

This is the debut effort from the duo of Ensemble Economique's tirelessly prolific Brian Pyle and Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier's Félicia Atkinson and it is a great one.  Consisting of two very different long-form pieces, Naked Island offers up a beguiling and hallucinatory mélange of breathy spoken word, dreamy synth drones, clattering percussion workouts, blown-out shoegaze bliss, and spacey abstraction.