Ben Chatwin is not one to shy away from ambitious concepts, having previously devoted albums to both the subconscious and the creation of the world.  Now, in collaboration with Fluid Radio's Dan Crossley, he tackles the more intimate subject of their shared alienation and misery in London.  Curiously, however, the music and packaging of Eaten Alive are much more elaborate than anything Chatwin has ever done before.  I had some difficulty reconciling myself with that, as something is definitely lost in Chatwin's transition from experimental guitarist to full-blown composer/urban historian/multimedia artist, but he certainly made a valiant and impassioned effort to do something truly unique and special this time around.

Robert Millis is not exactly a household name, but anyone with a healthy curiosity for the musical fringes has probably unknowingly encountered at least one thing that he has been involved in over his lengthy career.  Recently, he has been most prolific as a filmmaker for Sublime Frequencies, but he has also curated or worked on some of the most interesting compilations to emerge over the last several years (Dust-to Digital's Victrola Favorites, for example).  He is also one of the founding members of Climax Golden Twins as well as an occasional solo artist, as he is here.  Appropriately, Relief seamlessly blends together many of Millis' esoteric pursuits, but it does so in a more understated, raga-drone way than I expected.

In all the time that I have spent writing record reviews, I do not think I have ever been able to say that a band has burst onto the scene without the use of ironic quotation marks, but I think this French trio finally warrants it: three weeks ago I had never heard of Oiseux-Tempête and today I am saying that they have made the single most exciting and bad-ass post-rock album since...uh...well...I cannot even remember the last time there was a great post-rock album. In any case, this epic favorably calls to mind all the ambition, urgency, and cinematic scope that characterized Godspeed! You Black Emperor's debut.

Two forces define Jason Molina's entire career: work—he was almost obsessively dedicated to his craft—and his band. In 2003 he brought these forces to Steve Albini's Electrical Audio in Chicago and, with nine other musicians, caught lightning in a bottle. Up to that point Molina had made a case for his being a great songwriter, but on Magnolia Electric Co. he became a great bandleader. Those nine other musicians share the spotlight with him on these eight songs, and rightfully so. They're an integral reason Magnolia ended up one of the best rock 'n' roll records ever recorded.

Neither Christian Winther nor Christian Meaas Svendsen are newcomers within the Norwegian improvised music scene, but this double disc set marks the first specifically solo releases from the two (albeit with a few collaborative moments as well). With Winther's guitar and Svensden's double bass making for the only instrumentation used, both produce amazing sounds and compositions out of such basic, traditional sources.

Recorded near the end of a European tour, Gau is the collaboration of Will Long (Celer), Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabrik), and brothers Jan and Romke Kleefstra. Although on their own these artists tend to work in quiet, sparse sounds, on this single improvised piece all open up quite a bit, bringing with them some forceful, aggressive moments as well as their traditionally restrained ones.

This is the debut full-length from Brian Leeds' Huerco S. nom de guerre, one of the most exciting projects to emerge from burgeoning scene surrounding Opal Tapes.  While Leeds does not necessarily offer up anything truly novel, his skill at seamlessly blending together industrial clang, dub techno, hissing Tim Hecker-style ambiance, Boards of Canada-esque warped wooziness, and minimalist underground dance is quite peerless.  This is easily one of my favorite albums of the year.

Stephen Bishop is best known as the man behind Opal Tapes, but he also releases some very deviant and noteworthy music of his own as the deceptively named Basic House.  While both of these albums were released in 2013, they take Bishop's otherworldly wrongness in two very different directions.  Caim in Bird Form is the much weirder (and arguably more unique) of the two, but the more recent Oats compensates for its comparative lack of derangement by incorporating a heavy noise/industrial influence that yields some impressively brutal results.

Ambiguity hangs from every word that comes out of 25 year old Tahliah Barnett’s mouth. She sings about sex, love, craving, deception—and sounds direct enough doing it—but what she leaves out of her songs is just as important as what she keeps in them. Her accomplice, producer and Yeezus collaborator Arca, couldn't be more sympathetic. He matches her terse, enigmatic professions and weightless melodies with a magic show of slow-motion rhythms and phantom effects, making the best possible use of repetitious forms to emphasize and heighten the drama in her lyrics. EP2 is a pop record, but FKA Twigs and Arca pull it off so spectacularly that it sounds and feels like more.

How Dominick Fernow made the transition from home taping noise artist to celebrated techno musician still baffles me. I do not think it was a trajectory anyone could have imagined or expected, but that is exactly what happened. To that fact, Remember Your Black Day makes for his first LP proper amidst confusing limited tape formats and vinyl collections of out of print material. To that end, it does sound like a fully realized album, but is still distinctly Vatican Shadow, for better or worse.

I suspect Not Not Fun deliberately release one album every year that I would absolutely love, hoping that I will miss it in order to punish me for not paying more attention to them.  I have no idea what 2012's masterpiece was (there almost definitely was one), but Gagged in Boonesville has now joined Peaking Lights' 936 (2011) in instantly flooring me upon first listen.  Stylistically, it most closely resembles what I would expect if Jandek and Dirty Beaches teamed up to make an indie pop album, yet it is somehow far weirder and more disturbed than even that highly improbably event could be.

A collection of various compilation pieces recorded between 1999 and 2002, Syzygie shows just how diverse and eclectic this duo (two thirds formerly of Maeror Tri) were, and still are. With an approach in league with their previous project, warm analog electronics and dark, menacing sounds mix with stylistic trappings diverging wildly from piece to piece, but all coming together into a consistent and cohesive whole.

I have become quite a devoted Vatican Shadow fan (with some reservations) over the last year or so, as Dominick Fernow's voluminous and oft-excellent string of limited cassettes has gradually become widely available through digital release and a couple of major compilations.  Somehow, though, he never got around to releasing an actual "official" full-length album until now (though I find this debatable).  Given that extremely long and slow build up, I fully expected Remember Your Black Day to be some sort of grand artistic statement or major creative evolution, which it mostly is not.  In some very minor ways, I suppose it might be, but it is essentially just another batch of new songs: some very good, some kind of forgettable.

There are precious few bands out there that can create the same manic sense of terror and legitimate fear that The Body does. The duo of Chip King and Lee Buford push the sounds of doom past just slow, de-tuned guitars and apocalyptic lyrics into something much more tangible and real. With a diverse gathering of collaborators, Christs, Redeemers just furthers this into their most intense and varied work to date.

Affiliated with the Schimpfluch-Gruppe collective, Marc Zeier has managed to be one of the lower profile members of the loosely-knit group, and also one who’s work is perhaps the most understated. Without the visceral, nauseating organic sounds of Rudolf Eb.er or the occasionally jolly, punk-tinged absurdism of Joke Lanz, Zeier’s work has been one that emphasizes the sound more than the presentation. Not an overly prolific composer, Sub makes for a major release in its two-disc duration and use of recognizable, but still heavily treated everyday sounds to create a work that captivates as well as terrifies.

For their second collaboration, Steven Stapleton and Graham Bowers take the elements that worked so well on Rupture and push them outwards into something more bewildering, but equally as compelling. Pomp, ceremony, showbiz and a cryptic approach to musical arrangements, this is a powerfully odd and oddly powerful work by the duo. As much as I enjoyed Rupture, its heavy subject matter prevents it from being a regular addition to my listening schedule but Parade fills that gap perfectly.

Following a visit to the Tate Gallery and seeing JMW Turner’s paintings, Burkhard Stangl began working on a way to represent these painted landscapes as musical soundscapes. Focusing on Turner’s unfinished works, Stengl never truly gets into the same sphere as Turner. The resulting album is a collection of superficially nice music that has little below the surface, in opposition to the elegance and depth of Turner’s masterful compositions.

For some reason, my favorite albums always seem to be those that come from unexpected places, a trend that delightfully continues with this third effort by Belgium's Bram Bosteels.  I was vaguely familiar with Bosteels already, but only because I had previously heard 2011's Barra Barra and casually dismissed it as "a bunch of murky soundscapes for obscure theater productions."  After hearing this latest effort, however, I found myself desperately rummaging around my house in vain hope of finding and revisiting my long-forgotten copy of its predecessor.  Hokus Fokus is absolutely deranged in the best possible way, resembling nothing less than an extremely disturbing carnival-themed nightmare.  This is easily one of the strangest albums in recent memory.

Ba Da Bing have officially blown my mind yet again, following their 4LP reissues of the epic Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and The Snowbringer Cult trilogy with an even more ambitious project: reissuing 2009's incredibly rare and overwhelming Daughter of Darkness cassette series as a massive 8LP box set with hand-painted album art (which took months to complete).  While it is not the best Natural Snow Buildings album by any means (no band can make a uniformly great 8-hour album), it is still quite a good one and it is unquestionably their longest, which offers a unique appeal all its own.  There are probably are not too many people who find the prospect of plunging into a seemingly endless rabbit hole of roiling, hallucinatory, quasi-ritualistic drone very appealing, but those who do have probably just found their Holy Grail.

For the longest time, I could not understand why people were so excited about this act, but last year's Carter Tutti Void album re-ignited my curiosity enough for me to give it another chance.  While it still remains a mystery to me how Factory Floor became so quickly revered, their first real full-length is intermittently wonderful and dramatically better than much of their earlier work.  Obvious Chris & Cosey comparisons aside, this trio is definitely onto something uniquely their own, stripping their thumping, retro-dance formula down to little more than a beat, a simple modular synth pattern, and Nikki Colk Void's appealingly languorous sexy-android-on-heroin vocals.  As it turns out, that is all they need.