This album documents the convergence of all kinds of wonderful things at once: Students of Decay, Andrew Chalk's artwork, Rashad Becker's mastering talents, and two of my favorite West Coast experimentalists.  Appropriately, the resultant music is both excellent and distinctive, resembling an eclectically assembled chamber music ensemble trying their hand at understated, improvised drone music and realizing that they should have been doing that all along.

Federico Durand has been quietly making a name for himself in the world of sparse, minimalist sounds that lay somewhere in a nebulous space between synthetic and organic. His use of field recordings and acoustic guitars place his work in a very naturalistic setting, while processed and occasionally distorted layers of sound are anything but. He works heavily within this dynamic on both this new solo record and his collaborative project with like-minded composer Tomoyoshi Date in two different, yet complementary releases.

The two artists who are paired together on this split release differ in their sense of style and instrumentation, but what also unites them is a distinctly unique take on jazz improvisation. Millevoi may stick with a single instrument, the guitar, while (Onibaba)’s more diverse production and instrumentation has a different feel comparably. However, it is this improvisational nature of the recordings that makes it excel for both artists, with the right balance of order and noise.

This latest Daniel Higgs-era full-length is in some ways a logical progression from 2011's memorable Peer Amid, offering up another healthy dose of muscular avant rock and bizarre shamanic stream-of consciousness vocals.  However, significant notable changes have taken place, most notably that group now seem more musically indebted to taut Gang of Four-style post-punk than they do to their messier, noisier influences.  That emphasis on precision, punchiness, and economy proves to be a fascinating backdrop for the band's metaphysical mantras and fables, as that bedrock of normalcy and control makes Dances' weirder elements seem even weirder than usual.

This album is a bit of an experiment in simplicity for Bissonnette, as he decided to limit himself solely to sounds generated from a synthesizer that he built himself.  While I was initially dismayed to see that such a reliably excellent composer had tossed in his lot with the recent glut of synth-worshippers, I am pleased to report that Christopher has not completely lost his mind and that he is still making music that is distinctively his own.  As a complete album, Essays does not quite stand with Bissonette’s lusher and more varied previous work, but some of the individual pieces are certainly quite good and I always like it when an artist takes an unexpected gamble.

Qa'a is a long-running psych-rock project centered around Spain's Victor Hurtado (Huan) and it is quite a bizarre one, both conceptually (magical/quasi-ritualistic in intent) and musically (it sounds like a lost dispatch from Krautrock's weirdest fringes).  Consequently, it is no surprise that Hurtado has collaborated with Nurse With Wound in the past or that Qa'a's work has been championed by the über-eccentric Julian Cope.  I am not certain that I myself necessarily champion this overwhelming triple-LP, but Sang is undeniably significant and ambitious, resembling nothing less than the spiritual successor to folks like Can and Faust, albeit one that is also indebted to noise, outsider art, and Miles Davis' wilder fusion-era excesses.

A pseudo-political noise project in the vein of the Grey Wolves, the debut from U-731 (also known as United Front) channels a lot of that legendary duo's punk infused angst but a little less of its tongue in cheek sarcasm. With guest spots from members of Steel Hook Prosthesis and the Vomit Arsonist, it results in a forceful record that makes no attempt to hide its disdain for the current state of US politics.

Melt is an unexpected pairing given my previous experience with both artists. Higuchi I have heard mostly in an almost conventional jazz context, marked by conventional piano playing and her powerful, idiosyncratic vocal style, while Cris X (Cristano Luciani) I associate with harsher, more noise oriented abstractions. Neither deviate too far from what I expected from them on here, but the odd pairing works surprisingly well and comes together as more than the sum of its parts.

For reasons that are not immediately apparent to me, Bécs is being billed as the conceptual follow-up to 2001's landmark Endless Summer.  To me, it just sounds like another characteristically likable Fennesz album with a couple of better-than-usual pieces, though it is certainly much brighter in tone than either Venice or Black Sea.  In any case, this is a fine (and welcome) return by one of experimental music's most distinctive voices, but it is not any kind of seismic event.  It is very hard to be revolutionary more than once, I guess.

Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O'Halloran's latest offering is a rather lean one, but it is surprisingly beautiful and satisfying nonetheless.  Atomos VII offers up essentially just one new song (a short piece from the forthcoming Atomos full-length) backed by an old outtake and a lengthy Ben Frost reinterpretation of the title piece.  All are enjoyable, but it is the Ben Frost collaboration that elevates this brief EP into something more than just a teaser of what is to come.

Released earlier this year as a single 120 minute cassette, the two variations on Pisaro's composition for guitar, performed by Barry Chabala, appears as a gorgeous new two CD reissue on the Winds Measure label. While it may lose a bit in its transition from analog to digital, the clarity of the CD format actually enhances the contrast between the two separate versions.

Straddling the line between carefully programmed electronic rhythms and aggressive dissonance, this EP strikes an odd, yet fascinating balance between the two. Parts of the album are familiar, reminiscent of late 1990s electronica, but Damaskin takes the final product in a different direction, however, and puts a unique spin on a familiar sound.

A little more than 20 years ago, in the fall of 1993, Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren started the Blue Flea label together in order to release their first record. Pressed to black wax, or purple if you were very lucky, the Watersong/Dragonfly 7" was presented in a simple green sleeve with a picture of a tree on one side and, on the other, the image of three broad maple leaves. Last year, for Record Store Day 2013, Windy and Carl inaugurated their 20th anniversary celebrations with the release of a cassette documenting their 2009 performance at the Solar Culture Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, a single night on what they claim was their last ever tour. Then, in December, they reunited with Dominic Martin, who put out the Emerald 7" on Enraptured in 1995, and released the Calliope/Carnivale single. The cassette caught Windy and Carl somewhere between We Will Always Be and Songs for the Broken Hearted mode, but the 45 was a glance over their shoulders, with a surprise percussion-injected twist tucked away on the B-side. Pressed to red vinyl (the orange vinyl edition sold out in a flash) and adorned in bright, hand painted sleeves that resemble fossilized leaves, I Walked Alone/At Night concludes the celebratory trilogy with a pair of reflective beauties, cool and crystalline from a distance, but red hot at their core. It is a fiery return to that green-sleeved single from 1993, reinforced and refreshed by Windy’s new-found inspiration, Carl’s seemingly effortless playing, and 20 years of hard work.

The pairing of Jenks Miller (Horseback) and James Toth (Wooden Wand) makes perfect sense, given both of them work with their own idiosyncratic approaches to southern Americana, resulting in music that is at times familiar and simultaneously unique. On this split release, each artist submitted three songs that are not only some of their most accessible material, but also complement each other wonderfully.

As a former member of Skullflower and Ascension, Jaworzyn was one of the elite guitar manglers of the '90s noise rock UK scene before seemingly disappearing form the earth. Last year, along with a series of Skullflower reissues, Jaworzyn reappeared with a few singles embracing electronic instrumentation, while still pursuing that world of noise and entropy he did via six strings. Principles of Inertia is another manifestation of this electronic infatuation, with a joyful disregard for genre traditions or conventions.

My general lack of excitement about current glut of synthesizer albums is well-documented, but there are a handful of artists that I still look forward to and Koen Holtkamp is one of them. On this, his first solo album for Thrill Jockey, he delivers yet another fine set of vibrantly burbling analog sounds. While I do not necessarily love every single song on Motion, it certainly contains some of his best work and reaffirms my belief that Koen is in a class of his own when it comes to constructing dynamic, multi-layered synth opuses.

This is Thielemans' first full-length for Miasmah as a solo artist, but he has previously turned up on the label as a guest on Kreng's debut album, which provides a fairly accurate window into the milieu from which he is coming: the darker, weirder fringes of Belgium's theater/improv/art scene. Unlike his fellow shadowy avant-garde eccentrics, however, Eric is primarily a drummer and Sprang is composed almost entirely of unusual percussion experiments. Needless to say, that is some rather niche territory to occupy in an already very niche scene, but this is quite a remarkably fascinating album for a one-man tour de force of skittering, plinking percussion.

Students of Decay label head Alex Cobb is back with two new albums: his latest ambient drone opus under his own name and a compilation of some of Taiga Remains’ limited-edition cassette releases from 2008. They feel oddly like companion pieces—though at least six years separate the two albums—as it seems like Cobb was always reaching for the same minimal, warm, and blurred aesthetic.  He just used different means to get there at different points in his career.  In any case, both albums are quite likable: while Marigold and Cable handily eclipses Works in both execution and composition, the Taiga album nicely offsets some of Cobb’s serene tendencies with a healthy dose of tape noise, which offers a charm all its own.

Robot Records’ three-CD retrospective of Jacques Lejeune’s music from the early 1970s and 1980s contains over three hours of heady electronic noise, surreal acoustic transformations, deconstructed field recordings, and disorienting aural splutter. It is a collection that spans 14 years and six electroacoustic compositions: one composed for ballet and inspired by Snow White, another inspired by the myth of Icarus, and others by landscapes, symphonic form, and cyclical movement, among other things. They flash with theatrical flair, jump unpredictably through minute variations, and churn chaotically, tossing fabricated scree and instrumental slag into the air. A 28 page bilingual booklet filled with photographs, drawings, and program notes accompanies the set, along with a 32 page booklet of interpretive poetry. In them, Lejeune, Alain Morin, and Yak Rivais offer up remarkably precise interpretations for each of the pieces, but the writing works much better as a rough guide to the visually evocative clamor of Lejeune’s electric transmissions.

Christopher King, the artist behind Symbol, has been prolific for a number of years, as the founding member and guitarist for This Will Destroy You, creating film scores, and spending time in other local Austin bands. Online Architecture, however, is his first truly solo release. Across six compositions juxtaposing lush electronics with decaying analog media, the album has a familiar warmth while never shaking the feeling of something sinister just beneath the surface.