Last year's Collected Works Vol. I – The Moog Years was one of my favorite albums in recent memory, so I was very much looking forward to this suite of entirely new modular synth pieces from Gengras.  Naturally, my anticipation turned out to be justified, but the meditative, pastoral Ishi has a radically different feel than its moodier, more haunting predecessor.  While I happen to vastly prefer moodiness to serenity, Geddes' compositional talents and intuitive understanding of both space and pacing ensure that Ishi is still a characteristically enjoyable effort.

This is the solo debut from Burch, who is probably best known for being the man behind The Spring Press label. Using a palette of consisting primarily of acoustic guitars and modular synths, Jeff offers up two very different long-form pieces.  While the lazily drifting ambience of "The Nine Points" definitely misses the mark for me, the jangling, mesmerizing psychedelia of the closing "La Perouse" is intermittently spectacular.

Over the span of a far-too-short 20 minutes, Ritual Howls manages to plow through a variety of styles that all rank amongst my favorites, with a lo-fi level of production that would make any "true kvlt" black metal band jealous. Even with all this ugliness, however, the material is more memorable than dissonant and at times leans into true song structures that are more memorable than what similar artists usually do.

Drawing influences from '80s pop, '90s techno, and a bit of more experimental sounds, Profilgate's Noah Anthony manages to be one of those rare electronic-heavy records that is extremely difficult to pin-down as far as time period goes. These three songs encompass sounds from four decades of electronic music, with specific moments that fit into a specific style or genre, but the whole is a much different than the individual parts.

As elements of New Orleans Bounce music has been slowly drifting outside of its largely southern borders, Big Freedia, also known as Freddie Ross, has become the unofficial ambassador for the genre, making various high profile TV appearances and rather memorable live performances.  Just Be Free is his first true full-length album, and has the polish that could gain new fans, but never strays far from his roots and manages to stay undeniably fun.

It has been five years since Benjamin Finger released his masterpiece, 2009's Woods of Broccoli, which makes it as good a time as any for him to release a thematically similar successor.  Though not quite a full reprise of Woods' lushly hallucinatory aesthetic, The Bet's warped piano-and-sound-collage miniatures make for yet another warmly beautiful trip down the rabbit hole.  Nobody does fractured dreaminess better than Benjamin Finger.

After what almost seemed like a begrudging festival reunion to play Streetcleaner, it was exciting to see that the pieces were coming together for a true Godflesh reunion, and even more so when the likelihood of new material appearing got higher and higher. Unexpectedly announced as a precursor to the upcoming full-length album, Decline & Fall sounds as if it could have been recorded around 1993 through 1995, because it has such archetypical Godflesh sound, which is reassuring to say the least.

A lot of excellent music has come from the recent spate of noise musicians turning beat-ward, but there are a number of comparatively underappreciated and overlooked techno artists like Perc and Ancient Methods who have been producing similarly scary and crushing industrial dance music all along.  One of the best is Berlin's Kareem (Patrick Stottrop), who has reanimated his dormant Zhark Recordings label with this four-song salvo of bludgeoningly heavy beatscapes.  I am not sure that this is necessarily Kareem's finest release ever (people love Druids), but it is unquestionably a seriously strong contender.

On paper, this album seems like a lock for one of the most fun and memorable releases of the year, as Drew Daniel is one of the smartest and most innovative artists currently working in electronic music and he and his talented friends are reinterpreting some of the most spectacularly self-parodying music ever recorded (the album's subtitle is "Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics").  The reality, however, is more baffling than anything.  While Heathen certainly boasts a couple of inspired moments, its bulk lies somewhere in an unsatisfying no-man's land between one-note joke, head-scratching pastiche, and weirdly reverent homage.

There has been an unusual amount of excitement about this debut and for good reason: Eric Holm takes a very cool and inspired idea and executes it beautifully.  Culled entirely from contact mic recordings that Holm made from remote telephone poles used by military listening stations in the Arctic Circle, Andøya is an unexpectedly rhythmic and haunting series of meticulously crafted industrial soundscapes that occasionally blur into weird minimalist techno.

Capturing a single performance between these two titans of improvised music, labeling this three-plus hour set as "intense" would be doing it a disservice. Recorded in 1996, after Keiji Haino and Peter Brötzmann had worked together in the studio setting some time prior, so the two artists had some previous interactions to build from. Here augmented by the full Fushitsusha trio of Yasushi Ozawa and Jun Kosugi, it all comes together with a primal intensity few can match, and well up there with the best moments in both artists’ catalogues.

This is my first exposure to this Chicago super-duo consisting of Steven Hess (Pan•American/Locrian) and Michael Vallera (COiN), but they have actually existed long enough to record a loosely related trilogy of albums that culminates in this one.  According to Immune, Drown is the "apex of a five-year exploration of image, space, and sound," so I guess it is as good a place to start as any.  I cannot say I have much to note about their image, but I am legitimately impressed with Cleared’s use of both space and sound, as they strongly resemble an improbable convergence of Sunn O))), Cocteau Twins, and Tortoise.  It does not always work entirely seamlessly, but it sure is great when it does.

Tom Kovacevic has been in a couple of great bands over the years (Cerberus Shoal & Fire on Fire), but he has never been an especially prominent figure, so I had absolutely no idea what to expect from a debut solo album that celebrates two decades of studying Arabic music.  As it turns out, I should have expected a lot, as Universe Thin as Skin is a bit of a minor masterpiece (and a wonderfully anachronistic one besides).  While there are certainly appealing shades of Fire on Fire to be found, Tom's true kindred spirits seem to go a bit further back to visionary folks like Robbie Basho and The Incredible String Band (though he thankfully eschews any of the latter's absurdist tendencies).

Initially released in 1997, three years after Derek Jarman's passing, The Garden Was Full of Metal was a fitting tribute to the legendary director. It also, however, helped to demonstrate that Robin Rimbaud was a musician with a more significant artistry than solely relying on the novelty of presenting covertly recorded wireless phone conversations. Reissued for the 20th anniversary of Jarman's death, with four additional songs from the same sessions, it remains an extremely personal tribute to one artist from another.

Sutekh Hexen are one of the few artists who successfully transcended that boundary between esoteric black metal and experimental noise without seeming to be also-ran poseurs in an already crowded field.   They also manage to dabble with occult imagery and moods without it coming across as a simple ploy for attention. This most recent release, Monument of Decay reissues an out of print limited LP and cassette from last year with a wider availability and a previously unreleased ten minute bonus piece appended.

Since the reformation of Wire in the early 2000s, solo and side projects from Colin Newman and Graham Lewis have been scant to say the least, with only the occasional odd release or compilation song to be heard. Therefore, the announcement of not just one, but two new Lewis albums immediately grabbed my attention, and immediately made me wonder how they might differ being issued as true solo albums (as opposed to as He Said or Hox). Featuring assistance from collaborators including Thomas Öberg (27#11), Andreas Karperyd (He Said Omala, Hox), and Paul Thomsen Kirk (Akatombo), the results were certainly worth the wait, and make for the perfect culmination of his work to date.

Papir's fourth album shows off the trio's dynamism and subtlety across a broad range of emotional and technically impressive instrumental passages, recalling influences as diverse and possibly accidental as Durutti Column and Hawkwind.

Extremely enigmatic and sporadically active over the past 30 years, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project maintains their secrecy on this new album of decaying material and found recordings. Heavily based on the use of ancient magnetic tape and careful mixing and processing, the result is a strange, sometimes dark but always captivating bit of audio art that emphasizes mystery above all else.

One of the most recent examples of an established noise artist "selling out" (and I mean that sarcastically) and making actual music was a surprising one. Avellan Cross' Elden M is best known for his work as the enigmatic Allegory Chapel Ltd., but has been dipping his toe into the new lo-fi EBM scene. The thing is, he brings enough of his dissonant past with him to make an album that really cannot be easily labeled, but covers enough of both industrial and noise to make it a strong entry in both genres.

These first two installments of the Epoché Collection are a notable departure from the prolific Francisco López’s usual work, being that they are entirely untreated field recordings. Recording natural spaces is of course nothing new to him, as that has been an element of many of his compositions over the years. Even though he was essentially only a facilitator on these works; acting only on the selection of recordings and editing, the result still clearly shows his mark.