The three Norwegian (and one French) artists who make up Platform may play mostly jazz-oriented instruments but the sounds they create are anything but. Clarinet, cello, piano and drums meld together into a wonderfully jerky, unpredictable free improvised noise. As mostly a live act, this album may not fully do the sound of them collaborating justice, but it makes for an exceptionally good attempt.

Triac formed in 2011 although did not release their first recorded material, In a Room until just last year. The Italian trio featuring former Tu M' member Rossano Polidoro (laptop) Marco Seracini (piano and synthesizers) and Augusto Tatone (bass) create glacial, yet gripping minimalist music in the spirit of Polidoro’s previous project. Both that and their follow-up record Days have a similar, consistent sound, although growth and development can already be heard from one album into the next.

No one could have predicted another Valet record, not even Honey Owens. A rash of techno EPs with The Miracles Club over the last couple of years and a long silence on the hallucinatory front seemed to signal that she was finished with her freaked-out days as a guitar wrangler and soundscape shaper. Drum machines and synth pianos were her new instruments and the dancefloor was her new home, the most natural venue for her conversion to four-on-the-floor rhythms and house melodies. Then, with almost an electric shock, news of a new Valet album on Kranky. Not all is as it was before, however. After seven years and the birth of a child a lot has changed in Valet’s world, and the music has changed with it in a way that is almost as surprising as the album happening at all.

Digitally generated sound has been a staple of Scott Morgan's career as Loscil since his first release. With the project named for one of the basic operators in the popular Max/MSP software package, it is unsurprising that much of Sea Island is the result of DSP programming. However, the sound Morgan creates has a far richer, more organic quality than many who work with similar strategies and methods, and this album is one that is gripping in its natural sounding warmth.

Boston’s Sewer Goddess inhabit the blurry, aggressively dark space between doom metal plod and power electronics/industrial, blending those two extreme genres in a way that works flawlessly. Those two genres are not known for anything subtle, and Painlust is anything but, resulting in an album that embraces the best elements of both of those genres while managing to avoid the cliché pitfalls that are a significant problem within both.

Matmos has long been one of the most uniquely outré and inventive projects around, so it follows that Schmidt's debut solo album would be similarly bizarre and Batu Malablab is certainly that (and more).  In fact, it actually turned out to be far stranger and more challenging than I ever could have imagined: I was expecting a Can- or Harappian Night Recordings-style "ethnographic forgery," but what I got sounds much closer to an electronics-damaged imaginary soundtrack for a '60s Southeast Asian avant-garde theater piece.  Or what the Cannibal Holocaust soundtrack might have sounded like if jointly composed by Cage, Stockhausen, and Harry Partch.

I had been doing an excellent job of ignoring the constant trickle of unnecessary Muslimgauze vault scrapings for the last few years, but the surprising amount of excitement surrounding this one enticed me into grudgingly giving it a chance.  I am glad I did, as Feel The Hiss's mingling of heavy dub and sound collage is probably my favorite of Bryn Jones' myriad stylistic threads.  The album still falls prey to the usual "Muslimgauze vault" curse of sounding like endless slight variations of the same goddamn song, but in this case the song being endlessly replicated is actually good enough to warrant it.  This is the best Muslimgauze album to surface in a long time.

Continuing a strong and consistent period of activity that began in earnest with the third installment of the Read & Burn series, the legendary band's 14th album is yet another high water mark in their expansive (and extremely impressive) discography. Primary songwriting duo Colin Newman and Graham Lewis provide 11 all new songs that blend their artistic obtuseness with catchy songwriting and melodies, the type of sound that made Chairs Missing and The Ideal Copy so brilliant. With Robert Grey's steady drumming and an expanded role for guitarist Matt Simms, Wire is full of moments that are weird, sometimes challenging, but always fascinating and memorable.

Jon Borges, who also records as half of Pedestrian Depot, has chosen a project name that is only partially fitting for the sound he creates. While the Loneliness part is most fitting, given its isolated and depressing sound, the Everyday part maybe not so much. False Validations is a standout within a field of frigid waves and minimalist drone, the sound of beautiful depression.

All art, whether by design or by accident, contends with time. But music’s relationship to it, like cinema’s, is pronounced, as is evident in the case of Anjou. On their Kranky debut, ex-Labradford members Mark Nelson and Robert Donne join Haptic’s (and Innode’s and Pan•American’s) Steven Hess for eight melancholy preludes focused on form, color, light, and time. Their songs are short, no longer than nine minutes, and expressionistic, dotted with half-heard rhythms and implied melodies orbiting a tonal center. They issue into the room in suspended animation and hang there mysteriously, heavy like a storm cloud. In them, the passage of time ceases to mark minutes and seconds and instead denotes the availability of different perspectives. Sounds are typically thought of as moving through spaces, but in this case spaces move through sounds, guided in their course by a trio of directors with an impossible view from above.

Back in 2013, Cécile Schott unexpectedly ended a very long hiatus in appropriately unexpected style by reinventing herself as an eccentric, viola da gamba-wielding singer/songwriter.  Captain of None is both a continuation and refinement of that vein, but with an additional twist: Schott has found a way to subtly integrate her love of Jamaican dub techniques into the Colleen sound.  That turned out to be a great idea, as I have already seen Captain compared to Arthur Russell's World of Echo more than once.  While it does not all that sound much like Russell stylistically, Schott's hushed and poetic pop experiments are similarly idiosyncratic and starkly intimate.  Also of note: Captain of None is yet another absolutely stellar Colleen album.

I have historically not followed Felicia Atkinson’s prolific career too closely, aside from enjoying the excellent Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier album on Aguirre, but this latest experiment in surrealism/dada/collage/detournement piqued my interest.  For one, it is billed as a "concrète/post-digital oratorio in five parts" and was made in willfully constrained/minimalist fashion using only a laptop with limited software (Atkinson has previously sounded like a one-woman psych-rock band).  Also, it was partially inspired by being frightened as a child by Pierre Henry's "Apocalypse de Jean" and is built upon texts ranging from George Bataille's erotic prose to Felicia's own writings to snippets from random Italian art magazines.  To me, that either sounds like a recipe for a pretentious towering fiasco or a goddamn masterpiece, but the end result is mostly neither, though one piece ("L'Oeil") does manage to veer quite close to the latter.

This posthumous release is a thoroughly bittersweet affair, as Shimmering Ghost is both Rodman Melchior's final album and her finest hour (probably, anyways).  A series of fractured and flickering collages, these pieces are "experimental" in the best sense of the word, using an unpredictable and simple mixture of instrumentation, found sounds, and field recordings to weave together a very complex, intimate, and evocative narrative.  At its best, Ghost makes me feel like I am drifting through an immersive, mysterious, and disorienting stream of someone else's dreams and memories.  No one else makes albums like this.

Cetology is one of those albums that sits somewhat close to an established style (in this case techno) on the genre spectrum, but just far enough out to sound like something else entirely. The elements are all here: synth leads, catchy basslines, programmed drums, but it all ends up put together in a way that might seem wrong, but because of that becomes a different and captivatingly unique beast entirely.

Few bands consisting of only a drummer/vocalist and bassist would be able to carry that arrangement for almost 16 years, but few bands are Lightning Bolt. Sticking true to their roots since 1999, Fantasy Empire is their first record in five years, and also their first recorded in a professional studio. This has not at all dulled their sound: it is still as blown out and distorted as ever, and as before memorable riffs and melodies lie beneath the primordial low-end sludge.

The photographs that comprise the artwork for Characters at the Water Margin, of the Hoh River and of Washington State’s Pacific coast, teem with secluded life, the same life that Loren Chasse presents in his music. It’s an unusual sort of life, easy to miss despite its ubiquity. Gnarled tree trunks, stones worn into smooth ovals, driftwood piled into broken lattices; by definition these are dormant and inanimate things, but Chasse listens and composes with a heuristic ear. Along and above the Olympic Peninsula’s jagged shoreline, small commotions lie in wait, accompanied by the constant pulse of the ocean. Tucked away at the foot of a national forest, in the wreckage of a glacial waterway, they are all but invisible. The circumstances of their appearance depend on close listening, on the slowing down of time, and on a willingness to hear the depth of music that subsists in the tiniest places.

On paper, this compilation seems like exactly what the world needs: a new compilation celebrating the legacy of a criminally underappreciated and mostly forgotten band whose entire catalog is largely out-of-print.  In reality, however, Bourbonese Qualk 1983-1987 is kind of a perplexing mixed success, as Mannequin decided to focus exclusively on Qualk's rather primitive early years, bypassing almost all of their more distinctive and original work.  There is still a lot to like here, as the band originally sounded kind of like an anarcho-punk band that could not afford guitars or a full drum kit, but this era definitely would not have been my first choice if I were commencing my own reissue campaign.

A collaboration between these two avant-garde elder statesmen could have gone any number of ways, given Chatham’s late-career embrace of the trumpet and Palestine’s unrelenting eccentricity.  For the most part, however, the sprawling, nearly three-hour Youuu + Mee is a huge success, taking minimalist drone into some very twisted, unexpected, and dark places (though Palestine's occasional eruptions of yowling vocals remain very much an acquired taste/potential deal-breaker).

Ralph Steinbrüchel’s formal training is that of a graphic designer, and his approach to Parallel Landscapes is one of a visual artist more than a sonic one. Packaged with a thick booklet of photography and design, this album is as much of an audio as it is a visual composition. With less of a focus on rhythms or melody, and more on vast expanses of terrain and landscape, simultaneously beautiful and foreboding, the album has a consistent, yet complex sensibility to it.

23 Skidoo has had a significant portion of their previous work reissued over the past few years, but Beyond Time is their first album of new material in 15 years. A soundtrack to the documentary of the same name, exploring the life and art of 23 Skidoo core members Johnny and Alex Turnbull's father, William Turnbull, it stands strongly on its own as an atmospheric work that stays faithful to the band’s roots in funk, hip-hop, and unique post-industrial noise.