Lee Stokoe has been active for two decades but has maintained a relatively low profile with limited and self released recordings, with his biggest claim to fame having spent time with the legendary Skullflower. Like that band’s head Matthew Bower, Stokoe works heavily with guitars and a legion of guitar pedals, but the result is less raw and aggressive, and more hypnotic and minimalist. Across these two side-long pieces are repeated, meditative drones that seem to lurk just out of view, in a distant fog or mist.

In a spate of recent releases, Room40 label head Lawrence English has produced three very different works on the always beautiful Winds Measure label, with some recorded as far back as a decade. While he utilizes field recordings from Japan and Australia on all three, each one sounds nothing like the other but all are indicative of the Australian artist’s ability at capturing and manipulating familiar sounds into something else entirely.

Gilbert has not been a prolific solo artist even after departing from Wire, but whenever he has released new material, it has been of the utmost quality, and this record is no different. A concept album on global warming and floods in collaboration with Beaconsfield Art Works (David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin) is no different. Mixing treated field recordings and electronic instrumentation, Diluvial is another high water mark in his impressive discography.

Much of Daniel Lopatin's work has been characterized by uncertainty. Even in his best moments, there was a hesitance, an aversion to commitment which staggered the fluidity of his material. In his initial presentations of synth arpeggios, there was the voice of a burgeoning artist struggling to move past process, to bridge the gap between idea and execution, to make a full measure. On R Plus Seven, Lopatin has fully realized this goal. Filled with a stupefying sureness, this record once again finds Daniel reinventing his style from the ground up, combining the dated provinces of new age music, soundtracks, and corporate ambience into something tremendous.

This Chicago band’s career trajectory has been a singularly impressive and curious one, as they have somehow managed to continually reinvent their sound while still getting exponentially better with each new album.  Era makes that trend seem even more remarkable, as Disappears have made yet another huge leap forward despite tampering with what was arguably their best feature (Brian Case's dissolute-sounding, deadpan vocals) and losing drummer Steve Shelley to Lee Ranaldo's new band. As it turns out, neither are missed, as the band more than compensate by paring their aesthetic down to pummeling, machine-like precision mingled with great hooks and well-placed eruptions of chaos.

With Gates of Atlantis, Phelios (the solo project of Martin Stürtzer) has created a soundtrack in search of a film. It has a distinctly cinematic tone and structure to it, and even follows a loose narrative structure. However, there is far more than incidental sounds and music cues here, and it simply is too complex and varied to function with any other media.

Robert Piotrowicz's LP from earlier this year, When Snakeboy is Dying, found the Polish composer stepping out of his comfort zone and working with a variety of traditional instruments with exceptional results. Lincoln Sea, however, sees him going back to his modular synthesizer array that has appeared on so many of his records. But rather than the chaos and noise that previous work was based, the sense of structure and composition here is significantly deeper and manages to touch upon rock and orchestral approaches.

A side project of members of Blessure Grave, Soft Kill does bear a resemblance, but one that focuses less on the folk tinged sound of that band and instead emphasizes the more post-punk elements. In some ways, Circle of Trees is a step backwards from their debut An Open Door: The live drums are replaced by a rigid machine and the overall production seems a bit more sparse, but it also gives the record a distinct sound, and along with it a few more uptempo moments than others in their catalog.

Staalplaat's latest pair of excavations from Muslimgauze's supernaturally bottomless vault is a bit of a surprise, as these two albums contain some of the best material to surface from the departed Bryn Jones in a very long time.  While a good portion of Tandoor Dog has admittedly appeared before, it was only as part of an extremely limited 4LP set that virtually no one has, while Izlamic Songs is an entirely unreleased, fully formed, and coherent album.  To my ears, Izlamic Songs is probably the better of the two (it has higher peaks, at least), but both intermittently capture Jones at the peak of his aberrant and bludgeoningly percussive dub genius.

A raw live recording from earlier this year, Chalaque's main man Nick Mitchell performs here with Eric Hardiman (Century Plants, Rambutan et. al.) on bass and Pascal Nichols on drums.  Essentially a live on stage improvisation, the trio bounce off each other perfectly and manages to grasp that tenuous balance between experimentalism and pure unadulterated rock and roll.

Two different artists who both work within the realms of psychedelic tinged minimalism share this split single that in a genre sense are very different from one another, but thematically and conceptually make an excellent pairing and compliment each other quite well.

A Zelienople side project featuring Matt Christensen and Mike Weis, the latter also of Kwaidan, and Scott Tuma recorded the material that comprises this album originally for a CD-R in 2006 and have been rather quiet since. Reissued with a wider scope and presentation, the seven untitled pieces that make up this album are in league with their other projects, yet have a hazy, singular edge all their own.

Jenny Hval takes a morbid pleasure in using her voice to provoke discomfort on her second full-length release. From the opening lyrics of the title track to the arcing croon of "The Seer," Innocence Is Kinky lives its title through a bravery bordering on refuge in audacity. It seems to be a defense based in false naïveté, where Hval's surrealistic persona adds a unique flourish to a collection of unabashedly smart and well constructed songs on gender and sexuality. As the record unfolds, this keen irreverence pays off. Innocence Is Kinky reveals itself as one of the better singer/songwriter albums of 2013, hiding a deeply powerful message under the false guise of shock.

For its seventh and final volume, Sub Rosa’s mighty experimental music compilation has been expanded to a triple CD. At this point, I would have thought that all the good stuff would have been covered but label boss and Anthology curator Guy Marc Hinant has managed to uncover more startling curiosities from the last 150 years to make this series go out with a bang (and a drone and a blast of white hot feedback).

This sequel to 2010's fine Afro-Beat Airways delivers still more Fela-free gems from Ghana's golden age, which is (of course) is exactly what I wanted and expected.  While many of the featured artists (Vis-A-Vis, K. Frimpong, etc.) will already be quite familiar to anyone with even a casual interest in African music reissues, the material is uniformly solid and offers enough obscurities to keep things interesting.  Even the most jaded aficionados will enjoy Samy Redjeb's characteristically colorful and exhaustive liner notes though, as he has unearthed a slew of rare photos and tracked down some interesting interviews with a lot of people who probably never expected to be interviewed by an excited German in 2013.

I have been casually following Benjamin Finger's career ever since being completely blindsided by his hallucinatory 2009 masterpiece Woods of Broccoli and I have found it quite perplexing to observe: Broccoli never got even a fraction of the acclaim it deserved and its beat-driven 2011 follow-up (For You, Sleepsleeper) seems to have completely disappeared without a trace.  In a perfect world, this latest effort would redress that inequity (Nerves is Finger's first release on a US label), but Benjamin's current aesthetic has taken quite a curious and challenging turn.

Daniel Crokaert’s Mystery Sea label challenges artists to produce music inspired by and infused with the mystique of "liquid states," whether that means using the sound of amplified water or catching the unpredictable flow of human perception on disc. French musician and painter Philippe Lamy comes at that challenge from both directions on Drop Diary, using the sound of water to focus on the way various environmental and synthetic sounds interconnect. Each piece is stacked with tiny sounds, but the way he weaves them all together gives the album a beautiful, supernatural quality, as open and as alive as the environments used to make it.

The word "epic" has lost all meaning due to overuse and misapplication in popular culture. Thus when something fits the true definition of that word, such as Images of the Dream and Death, it almost seems pointless to use that as a descriptor. However, spread across three LPs and attempting to capture the never-ending struggle between the two opposing forces of good and evil, with often terrifying results, there is not a more apt term.

Even though 12k head Taylor Deupree has made it a point in recent years to focus on face-to-face collaborations (as opposed to file swapping), the two most recent products of this have their own distinct sense of isolation and loneliness to them. With Cameron Webb's Seaworthy, it is literal: the record perfectly captures the feeling of being alone in the woods with only an acoustic guitar present. With legendary artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, it is more of an implied, intimate and hushed loneliness via muted tones and extended ambience.

Catherine Christer Hennix has certainly had a very curious career, to say the least: she worked at MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab in the '70s, was a research professor in mathematics at SUNY New Paltz, studied with Pandit Pran Nath and LaMonte Young, collaborated with Henry Flynt, and made some singularly challenging and adventurous music that somehow never got formally released until her 1976 performance of The Electric Harpsichord was finally issued by Die Schachtel in 2010.  Now in her mid-60s, Hennix has beautifully capitalized on the belated interest in her music to become the reigning queen of deep, Eastern-influenced drone.  This latest release is not a far cry from last year's fine Chor(s)san Time-Court Mirage album, but it is every bit as good (if not better).