Irisarri’s latest album is not rooted in a particularly happy place, as it was recorded after most of his gear and possessions were stolen during a cross-country move.  The experience ultimately proved to be artistically liberating though: without his usual studio set-up or his backlog of material to work with, Rafael decided to use the occasion as an opportunity for an aesthetic rebirth.  That was the plan, anyway–to my ears, A Fragile Geography is not a particularly radical or revelatory transformation.  It certainly feels a bit more structured, composed, and grainy than before, but is still basically more of the likable and warmly hissing synth-based ambient music that I have grown to expect from Irisarri (albeit now with slightly broader appeal).  Fans of label head Lawrence English or early (read: less dissonant) Tim Hecker will likely find this album appealing, while longtime Irisarri enthusiasts will presumably require no adjustment period at all to appreciate his change of course.

Surprisingly Sentimental Something is the first vinyl album release from Richard Chartier’s less aesthetically academic, but brilliantly ambiguous Pinkcourtesyphone project. The music, with all its 1950s and '60s kitsch trappings and imagery, is no less complex and just as rich and beautiful as his self-titled work. Regardless of the format, these three compositions continue PCP’s penchant for generating hazy landscapes of frigid tones and obtuse worlds of sound.

Michael Hann’s work as Marreck has always kept one foot on the dance floor, and the other in uglier, noisier realms. Computerized beats and programmed synthesizer leads abound, but always under a distinctly dissonant, corroded cloud of production that makes his work stand out distinctly. For his new vinyl EP, Yuda, he shifts that balance more towards the aforementioned ugly side of his work, but never fully abandons his techno inclinations on these five increasingly chaotic compositions.

After an unusually lengthy period of relative silence, Natural Snow Buildings have returned with a significant departure from much of their previous work.  Well, a departure in some ways, at least–both the songs and the entire album are unexpectedly brief and concise.  Also, the most memorable pieces eschew the duo's usual drone and "haunted folk" tendencies in favor of something resembling a lysergic, nightmarish Ennio Morricone score or an imaginary soundtrack to a Jodorowsky film.  Otherwise, everything great about the duo thankfully remains, as comparative accessibility has done nothing to lessen Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte’s characteristic spell of haunting and timeless otherworldliness.  This is definitely one of the more essential Natural Snow Buildings albums.

Crimewave's Andy Gibbs is best known as one of the guitarists for dour, doom metal artisans Thou, but his solo work could not possibly be more different. This collection compiles two tapes of solo synth material that is much more subtle than his guitar work, but lacks none of the creativity and diversity of his other output. Shades of classic film score and ambient music can be heard, but the final product stands strongly as a unique set of songs.

St. John at Hackney, the parish on Lower Clapton Road in the London Borough of Hackney, was consecrated in 1798. Nineteen years earlier, surveyor Richard Jupp proposed expanding the capacity of the original structure, which was situated to the southwest, where the tower of St. Augustine still stands. The need for more seats, spurred by the church’s convenient location, was supposed to have guaranteed a larger space, but architect James Spiller convinced its trustees that fewer seats and a smaller space would better serve the church’s acoustics. The organ now inside St. John’s, a gorgeous three manual Mander, was installed much later, after May 18th, 1955, when a fire started in the church’s roof, ate through its galleries and pews, and finally consumed the original organ built by George Pike England. Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion EMS, where John Chantler assembled and recorded a portion of Still Light, Outside, was constructed nine years later, in 1964. The other portion of his album was recorded at St. John’s, on the three manual Mander. Chantler’s music is loud, physically powerful, and spacious, as evocative of material, location, and history as it is of composition. It is, in an obvious way, a combination of the new and old, but also a model for the passing of time and the endurance of sound.

Bayou Electric is the final part of an unplanned trilogy that began with the wonderful Feel Free and continued with the almost-as-good Bridges.  Much like the two previous installments, this latest release has its origins in an unusual and compelling idea: in this case, composing a long-form piece that organically complements and interacts with an unaltered field recording taken from Pitre's native Louisiana.  Unlike previous installments, however, Bayou Electric's laudable ambition regrettably exceeded Pitre's ability to do it justice.  The problem is not that this is a bad album–it is not (at least not for those who enjoy pastoral ambient drone).  Rather, Bayou is disappointing solely because it fails to be particularly distinctive or moving, which is an especially tragic fate for an album with such sincere and personal aspirations.

Dean McPhee has been eerily quiet for the last few years, releasing nothing since his 2011 debut LP (Son of the Black Peace) on Blast First Petite.  With Fatima's Hand, he resurfaces in the familiar environs of Hood Faire, the label he co-runs with Sam McLaughlin and Folklore Tapes' David Orphan.  Musically, however, little has changed: McPhee basically picks up right where he left off, quietly and languorously crafting sublime solo electric guitar reveries that sound like absolutely no one else.  Fatima's Hand is not exactly more of the same though.  While McPhee's evolution is unquestionably a slow and nuanced one, his latest work burrows deeper into untraveled terrain as his assimilation of disparate influences such as dub and Moroccan Trance becomes increasingly fluid and seamless.

Four long years after their seismic performance at London’s Short Circuit Festival, Carter Tutti Void have finally returned with their first proper studio album.  Equally noteworthy is that fact that f(x) is the first new music to be released by Industrial Records since 2012's Throbbing Gristle/X-TG swan song Desertshore/The Final Report.  Given those circumstances, it would be hard for any record to live up to the resultant expectations, so it is not especially surprising that f(x) falls a bit short of the mark.  The problem is not that the trio were lacking ideas or inspiration, however: they have just backed themselves into a very constrained stylistic niche that cannot realistically yield multiple albums of compelling material.  That said, f(x) is still quite an enjoyable album, even if it is essentially Transverse Redux (albeit with some of the sharper edges sanded down a bit).

Blood Room has only a handful of releases under that moniker, but the sound of Chroma and Coda is that of a confident, self-assured electronic artist. Hints of the early 1990s and the dawn of techno appear throughout, but with an appropriately dissonant, experimental bent to keep it sounding fresh and contemporary.

This debut release from the duo of Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf and Retconned is shrouded in mystery and ambiguity. The four pieces that make up this cassette EP are of unknown sources, but obviously processed and reformed to bear no resemblance to their initial forms. The final product, however, is a brilliant suite of sparse, yet complex compositions that benefit greatly from their haziness.

"Liberty" is one of those great terms that contains a trace of its inverse. It is usually taken to mean "freedom from" something, or immunity, as in the diplomatic kind everyone recognizes thanks to televised political dramas and George W. Bush. Consequent to that understanding, the less controlled or restrained a thing is, the more liberty it possesses. So the curtailment of action doesn’t usually figure into conventional senses of freedom, but think of all the liberties secured by the abridgment of desire, prejudice, and fear. License in one space often demands restriction, or constriction, or even conversion, in another. Something like that is at work on Severe Liberties, the benighted electroacoustic product of Kevin Parks and Vanessa Rossetto’s first collaboration. "Severe Liberties" are the kind of thing people take when they need to bend the truth, or when they simply don’t understand something. Here they are the kind of thing that transforms silverware and surface noise into music.

I definitely didn't think I would enjoy an all vocal improvisation album this much, or on such a grand level. I simply love the acoustics of the room where Jason Kahn recorded in, where he is belting out such interesting and nondescript sounds where, "In the rooms of a former Swiss-com telephone relay station in Zürich. I decided to use the main room, which was entirely empty. Its linoleum floors, bare walls and many windows made for a very resonant space. Double glass windows sealed off the world outside but many sounds still emanated from somewhere deep in the bowels of the building." I wasn't terribly sure what a telephone relay station is, so I googled imaged it, and saw that it was what I thought it was after all. Lines of machines, with women (sometimes men too?) would sit in front of huge electronic boxes with wires and patches, crisscrossing each other, while the operator there would take people’s requests for phone calls and to be connected with others. To me, then, there is a sense of irony, or even a haunting simile that almost reminds me of an echo of conversations that might have taken place in the building in the distant past.

Basinski and Chartier have collaborated a number of times in the past, and their disparate, yet complementary approaches to music have always complimented each other perfectly. An uncharacteristic vinyl release for Chartier (a digital loyalist), these two sidelong pieces embrace both loops and melody, coming together beautifully as a sparse, yet forceful piece of music.

On his previous album for 12k, Twenty Ten, Kenneth Kirschner compiled three full discs of material. On Compressions & Rarefactions, he ups that even more by including a download with the CD of three additional pieces, totaling over five and a half hours. It is a lot to take in, especially given Kirschner's understated approach to composition, but the result is more than satisfying.

Fun is too often ignored when talking about experimental music. The language surrounding works by composers like Iannis Xenakis or Luc Ferrari is usually technical or mathematical, and sometimes political, but it’s rarely euphoric or exuberant. Which is a shame, because the flash of their audaciousness and the buzz of excitement their music generates is just as dignified and as worthy as the theory running beside it. Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman’s Three Exercises, which takes some inspiration from both Xenakis and Ferrari, is a lot of things. There should be no shame or reticence in recognizing that chief among them is fun. Recorded at St. Thomas the Apostle Elementary School in West Hartford, Connecticut, it spins amusement and pleasure from sources both unusual and mundane, with humdrum objects like ping pong balls and duct tape, and with homemade instruments like the one Hoffman tests in this video, which utilizes dynamic stochastic processes. Tucked away behind these sounds are ideas about the relationships between artists and audiences, structures and performances, and between spaces and sounds. Theory and technicality still figure into the mix, only they are inseparably attached to the noises that DiSanto and Hoffman deploy, and are as much a part of the fun as the chaos of the music.

In the mid 1980s, there was no internet, eBay, discogs, and if you didn't live in a metropolitan area, music was expensive. These two releases were the first affordable releases to surface on the North American continent from Cocteau Twins, and while neither were issued by the band themselves in this form, the arrangement of the collection and the pairing of the two EPs are flawless and remain a fantastic listen three decades later.

The origin of this collection is a bit peculiar: originally sold through television commercials by the Polygram TV division in 1995, reclaimed by Beggars two years later, and now presented on LP for the first time, 20 years later. Essentially this is just about every Numan song a curious listener could want, featuring singles and popular album cuts. Aesthetically, however, the quality control in the art department could have taken a closer look.

For some reason, this seems to be one of the most weirdly overhyped albums of 2015 (at least in the underground/indie/experimental music spheres that I travel in), suggesting that: 1.) people absolutely cannot get enough Grouper, 2.) people are desperate to find a new album to be excited about, and 3.) widespread cultural amnesia has set in.  That is not a knock on the band though: Liz Harris’s garage/indie-pop trio is certainly enjoyable, but it is disorienting to see such a jangly, pretty, and breezily lightweight affair be so celebrated at a time when no one seems to clamoring to name-drop Tallulah Gosh, Opal, The Shop Assistants, or any similar late '80s/early '90s indie pop bands as major influences (though they totally should be).  In any case, The Original Faces certainly has its appeal–despite being inherently a modest event with very low-key aspirations, it is not every day that I get to hear Harris let down her guard and bash out fun indie-pop confections with her friends (imaginary and otherwise).

It has been roughly 10 years since Thighpaulsandra’s last solo album, which is notable because it definitely feels like an entire decade-long backlog of ideas has been poured into this sprawling and overstuffed release.  Fits of great inspiration, masterful songcraft, baroque orchestration, meandering filler, and plenty of very ill-conceived motifs all tirelessly vie for their moment in the sun over the course of an exhausting 2-hour tour de force of intermittently wonderful and oft-grueling excess.  The Golden Communion is simultaneously a celebration of the joys of unfettered imagination and the perils of complete creative freedom.  There is probably an absolutely perfect LP buried in here somewhere, but Thighpaulsandra certainly does not make it easy to find.