A lot of excellent music has come from the recent spate of noise musicians turning beat-ward, but there are a number of comparatively underappreciated and overlooked techno artists like Perc and Ancient Methods who have been producing similarly scary and crushing industrial dance music all along.  One of the best is Berlin's Kareem (Patrick Stottrop), who has reanimated his dormant Zhark Recordings label with this four-song salvo of bludgeoningly heavy beatscapes.  I am not sure that this is necessarily Kareem's finest release ever (people love Druids), but it is unquestionably a seriously strong contender.

This is the solo debut from Burch, who is probably best known for being the man behind The Spring Press label. Using a palette of consisting primarily of acoustic guitars and modular synths, Jeff offers up two very different long-form pieces.  While the lazily drifting ambience of "The Nine Points" definitely misses the mark for me, the jangling, mesmerizing psychedelia of the closing "La Perouse" is intermittently spectacular.

It has been five years since Benjamin Finger released his masterpiece, 2009's Woods of Broccoli, which makes it as good a time as any for him to release a thematically similar successor.  Though not quite a full reprise of Woods' lushly hallucinatory aesthetic, The Bet's warped piano-and-sound-collage miniatures make for yet another warmly beautiful trip down the rabbit hole.  Nobody does fractured dreaminess better than Benjamin Finger.

On paper, this album seems like a lock for one of the most fun and memorable releases of the year, as Drew Daniel is one of the smartest and most innovative artists currently working in electronic music and he and his talented friends are reinterpreting some of the most spectacularly self-parodying music ever recorded (the album's subtitle is "Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics").  The reality, however, is more baffling than anything.  While Heathen certainly boasts a couple of inspired moments, its bulk lies somewhere in an unsatisfying no-man's land between one-note joke, head-scratching pastiche, and weirdly reverent homage.

There has been an unusual amount of excitement about this debut and for good reason: Eric Holm takes a very cool and inspired idea and executes it beautifully.  Culled entirely from contact mic recordings that Holm made from remote telephone poles used by military listening stations in the Arctic Circle, Andøya is an unexpectedly rhythmic and haunting series of meticulously crafted industrial soundscapes that occasionally blur into weird minimalist techno.

Capturing a single performance between these two titans of improvised music, labeling this three-plus hour set as "intense" would be doing it a disservice. Recorded in 1996, after Keiji Haino and Peter Brötzmann had worked together in the studio setting some time prior, so the two artists had some previous interactions to build from. Here augmented by the full Fushitsusha trio of Yasushi Ozawa and Jun Kosugi, it all comes together with a primal intensity few can match, and well up there with the best moments in both artists’ catalogues.

Sutekh Hexen are one of the few artists who successfully transcended that boundary between esoteric black metal and experimental noise without seeming to be also-ran poseurs in an already crowded field.   They also manage to dabble with occult imagery and moods without it coming across as a simple ploy for attention. This most recent release, Monument of Decay reissues an out of print limited LP and cassette from last year with a wider availability and a previously unreleased ten minute bonus piece appended.

Initially released in 1997, three years after Derek Jarman's passing, The Garden Was Full of Metal was a fitting tribute to the legendary director. It also, however, helped to demonstrate that Robin Rimbaud was a musician with a more significant artistry than solely relying on the novelty of presenting covertly recorded wireless phone conversations. Reissued for the 20th anniversary of Jarman's death, with four additional songs from the same sessions, it remains an extremely personal tribute to one artist from another.

Tom Kovacevic has been in a couple of great bands over the years (Cerberus Shoal & Fire on Fire), but he has never been an especially prominent figure, so I had absolutely no idea what to expect from a debut solo album that celebrates two decades of studying Arabic music.  As it turns out, I should have expected a lot, as Universe Thin as Skin is a bit of a minor masterpiece (and a wonderfully anachronistic one besides).  While there are certainly appealing shades of Fire on Fire to be found, Tom's true kindred spirits seem to go a bit further back to visionary folks like Robbie Basho and The Incredible String Band (though he thankfully eschews any of the latter's absurdist tendencies).

This is my first exposure to this Chicago super-duo consisting of Steven Hess (Pan•American/Locrian) and Michael Vallera (COiN), but they have actually existed long enough to record a loosely related trilogy of albums that culminates in this one.  According to Immune, Drown is the "apex of a five-year exploration of image, space, and sound," so I guess it is as good a place to start as any.  I cannot say I have much to note about their image, but I am legitimately impressed with Cleared’s use of both space and sound, as they strongly resemble an improbable convergence of Sunn O))), Cocteau Twins, and Tortoise.  It does not always work entirely seamlessly, but it sure is great when it does.

Since the reformation of Wire in the early 2000s, solo and side projects from Colin Newman and Graham Lewis have been scant to say the least, with only the occasional odd release or compilation song to be heard. Therefore, the announcement of not just one, but two new Lewis albums immediately grabbed my attention, and immediately made me wonder how they might differ being issued as true solo albums (as opposed to as He Said or Hox). Featuring assistance from collaborators including Thomas Öberg (27#11), Andreas Karperyd (He Said Omala, Hox), and Paul Thomsen Kirk (Akatombo), the results were certainly worth the wait, and make for the perfect culmination of his work to date.

Papir's fourth album shows off the trio's dynamism and subtlety across a broad range of emotional and technically impressive instrumental passages, recalling influences as diverse and possibly accidental as Durutti Column and Hawkwind.

Extremely enigmatic and sporadically active over the past 30 years, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project maintains their secrecy on this new album of decaying material and found recordings. Heavily based on the use of ancient magnetic tape and careful mixing and processing, the result is a strange, sometimes dark but always captivating bit of audio art that emphasizes mystery above all else.

One of the most recent examples of an established noise artist "selling out" (and I mean that sarcastically) and making actual music was a surprising one. Avellan Cross' Elden M is best known for his work as the enigmatic Allegory Chapel Ltd., but has been dipping his toe into the new lo-fi EBM scene. The thing is, he brings enough of his dissonant past with him to make an album that really cannot be easily labeled, but covers enough of both industrial and noise to make it a strong entry in both genres.

These first two installments of the Epoché Collection are a notable departure from the prolific Francisco López’s usual work, being that they are entirely untreated field recordings. Recording natural spaces is of course nothing new to him, as that has been an element of many of his compositions over the years. Even though he was essentially only a facilitator on these works; acting only on the selection of recordings and editing, the result still clearly shows his mark.

I find it rather odd that Swans have suddenly become digital media darlings at this point in their career. Not that Michael Gira and his exemplary band are undeserving by any means, but their post-reformation output is anything but accessible or commercially friendly. Small clips or snippets might seem to belie the force of their early records, but as full compositions these songs are anything but conventional. As great as The Seer was, To Be Kind is an even more focused distillation of the best moments of that record, while still maintaining that grandiose scale that no other band manages to reach.

Most of Carl's first solo album perversely sounds almost exactly like what I would expect it to sound like: a Windy & Carl album without Windy.  On one hand, that is a little disappointing, as it would have been interesting to hear a completely different side of Hultgren's artistry and this material probably could have been the start to yet another great collaboration.  On the other hand, Carl's languorous, shimmering guitar passages have always been my favorite part of Windy & Carl's music and now I get an uninterrupted two-hour deluge of them.  Though the presence of a vocalist would have added some nice contrast and variety, Tomorrow is still strewn with more than enough dreamy beauty and understated masterpieces to work quite nicely on its own.

Not all that dissimilar from the trend one time collaborator Robert Hampson made from Loop to Main to his solo works, Gordon Sharp has also evolved from a more conventional musician (appearing on works by This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins no less) to an idiosyncratic electronic composer in the past 30 years. In line with his work from the earlier part of this century, touchedRAWKISSEDsour is a mass of laptop generated noises that are actually much more nuanced then they would seem on the surface, intentionally obscuring a rich world of composition.

Over the last few years, Thomas Ankersmit has been shifting his primary instrument from a saxophone to modular analog synthesizer. Surprisingly, Figueroa Terrace is technically his first album proper, with previous releases consisting of collaborations and live performances. Unsurprisingly, however, is his use of the less immediate setting of the studio to his advantage, constructing a dizzyingly dynamic album length piece that showcases all of the strengths he has shown in previous releases, with an even higher level of polish.

Newly released on vinyl for the first time (now with actual cover art!), this aptly titled 2003 album shares a surprising amount of common ground with last year's Nocturnes.  The key difference is that Melancholia is broken up into 14 discrete quasi-impressionist piano vignettes.  While history has shown that Basinski is primarily at his best with more longform work, this is still a likable and somewhat fascinating effort that occasionally offers up a few rather unique sci-fi-meets-Claude-Debussy moments.