I find it rather odd that Swans have suddenly become digital media darlings at this point in their career. Not that Michael Gira and his exemplary band are undeserving by any means, but their post-reformation output is anything but accessible or commercially friendly. Small clips or snippets might seem to belie the force of their early records, but as full compositions these songs are anything but conventional. As great as The Seer was, To Be Kind is an even more focused distillation of the best moments of that record, while still maintaining that grandiose scale that no other band manages to reach.

Most of Carl's first solo album perversely sounds almost exactly like what I would expect it to sound like: a Windy & Carl album without Windy.  On one hand, that is a little disappointing, as it would have been interesting to hear a completely different side of Hultgren's artistry and this material probably could have been the start to yet another great collaboration.  On the other hand, Carl's languorous, shimmering guitar passages have always been my favorite part of Windy & Carl's music and now I get an uninterrupted two-hour deluge of them.  Though the presence of a vocalist would have added some nice contrast and variety, Tomorrow is still strewn with more than enough dreamy beauty and understated masterpieces to work quite nicely on its own.

Not all that dissimilar from the trend one time collaborator Robert Hampson made from Loop to Main to his solo works, Gordon Sharp has also evolved from a more conventional musician (appearing on works by This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins no less) to an idiosyncratic electronic composer in the past 30 years. In line with his work from the earlier part of this century, touchedRAWKISSEDsour is a mass of laptop generated noises that are actually much more nuanced then they would seem on the surface, intentionally obscuring a rich world of composition.

Over the last few years, Thomas Ankersmit has been shifting his primary instrument from a saxophone to modular analog synthesizer. Surprisingly, Figueroa Terrace is technically his first album proper, with previous releases consisting of collaborations and live performances. Unsurprisingly, however, is his use of the less immediate setting of the studio to his advantage, constructing a dizzyingly dynamic album length piece that showcases all of the strengths he has shown in previous releases, with an even higher level of polish.

Newly released on vinyl for the first time (now with actual cover art!), this aptly titled 2003 album shares a surprising amount of common ground with last year's Nocturnes.  The key difference is that Melancholia is broken up into 14 discrete quasi-impressionist piano vignettes.  While history has shown that Basinski is primarily at his best with more longform work, this is still a likable and somewhat fascinating effort that occasionally offers up a few rather unique sci-fi-meets-Claude-Debussy moments.

This album documents the convergence of all kinds of wonderful things at once: Students of Decay, Andrew Chalk's artwork, Rashad Becker's mastering talents, and two of my favorite West Coast experimentalists.  Appropriately, the resultant music is both excellent and distinctive, resembling an eclectically assembled chamber music ensemble trying their hand at understated, improvised drone music and realizing that they should have been doing that all along.

Federico Durand has been quietly making a name for himself in the world of sparse, minimalist sounds that lay somewhere in a nebulous space between synthetic and organic. His use of field recordings and acoustic guitars place his work in a very naturalistic setting, while processed and occasionally distorted layers of sound are anything but. He works heavily within this dynamic on both this new solo record and his collaborative project with like-minded composer Tomoyoshi Date in two different, yet complementary releases.

The two artists who are paired together on this split release differ in their sense of style and instrumentation, but what also unites them is a distinctly unique take on jazz improvisation. Millevoi may stick with a single instrument, the guitar, while (Onibaba)’s more diverse production and instrumentation has a different feel comparably. However, it is this improvisational nature of the recordings that makes it excel for both artists, with the right balance of order and noise.

This latest Daniel Higgs-era full-length is in some ways a logical progression from 2011's memorable Peer Amid, offering up another healthy dose of muscular avant rock and bizarre shamanic stream-of consciousness vocals.  However, significant notable changes have taken place, most notably that group now seem more musically indebted to taut Gang of Four-style post-punk than they do to their messier, noisier influences.  That emphasis on precision, punchiness, and economy proves to be a fascinating backdrop for the band's metaphysical mantras and fables, as that bedrock of normalcy and control makes Dances' weirder elements seem even weirder than usual.

This album is a bit of an experiment in simplicity for Bissonnette, as he decided to limit himself solely to sounds generated from a synthesizer that he built himself.  While I was initially dismayed to see that such a reliably excellent composer had tossed in his lot with the recent glut of synth-worshippers, I am pleased to report that Christopher has not completely lost his mind and that he is still making music that is distinctively his own.  As a complete album, Essays does not quite stand with Bissonette’s lusher and more varied previous work, but some of the individual pieces are certainly quite good and I always like it when an artist takes an unexpected gamble.

Qa'a is a long-running psych-rock project centered around Spain's Victor Hurtado (Huan) and it is quite a bizarre one, both conceptually (magical/quasi-ritualistic in intent) and musically (it sounds like a lost dispatch from Krautrock's weirdest fringes).  Consequently, it is no surprise that Hurtado has collaborated with Nurse With Wound in the past or that Qa'a's work has been championed by the über-eccentric Julian Cope.  I am not certain that I myself necessarily champion this overwhelming triple-LP, but Sang is undeniably significant and ambitious, resembling nothing less than the spiritual successor to folks like Can and Faust, albeit one that is also indebted to noise, outsider art, and Miles Davis' wilder fusion-era excesses.

A pseudo-political noise project in the vein of the Grey Wolves, the debut from U-731 (also known as United Front) channels a lot of that legendary duo's punk infused angst but a little less of its tongue in cheek sarcasm. With guest spots from members of Steel Hook Prosthesis and the Vomit Arsonist, it results in a forceful record that makes no attempt to hide its disdain for the current state of US politics.

Melt is an unexpected pairing given my previous experience with both artists. Higuchi I have heard mostly in an almost conventional jazz context, marked by conventional piano playing and her powerful, idiosyncratic vocal style, while Cris X (Cristano Luciani) I associate with harsher, more noise oriented abstractions. Neither deviate too far from what I expected from them on here, but the odd pairing works surprisingly well and comes together as more than the sum of its parts.

For reasons that are not immediately apparent to me, Bécs is being billed as the conceptual follow-up to 2001's landmark Endless Summer.  To me, it just sounds like another characteristically likable Fennesz album with a couple of better-than-usual pieces, though it is certainly much brighter in tone than either Venice or Black Sea.  In any case, this is a fine (and welcome) return by one of experimental music's most distinctive voices, but it is not any kind of seismic event.  It is very hard to be revolutionary more than once, I guess.

Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O'Halloran's latest offering is a rather lean one, but it is surprisingly beautiful and satisfying nonetheless.  Atomos VII offers up essentially just one new song (a short piece from the forthcoming Atomos full-length) backed by an old outtake and a lengthy Ben Frost reinterpretation of the title piece.  All are enjoyable, but it is the Ben Frost collaboration that elevates this brief EP into something more than just a teaser of what is to come.

Released earlier this year as a single 120 minute cassette, the two variations on Pisaro's composition for guitar, performed by Barry Chabala, appears as a gorgeous new two CD reissue on the Winds Measure label. While it may lose a bit in its transition from analog to digital, the clarity of the CD format actually enhances the contrast between the two separate versions.

Straddling the line between carefully programmed electronic rhythms and aggressive dissonance, this EP strikes an odd, yet fascinating balance between the two. Parts of the album are familiar, reminiscent of late 1990s electronica, but Damaskin takes the final product in a different direction, however, and puts a unique spin on a familiar sound.

A little more than 20 years ago, in the fall of 1993, Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren started the Blue Flea label together in order to release their first record. Pressed to black wax, or purple if you were very lucky, the Watersong/Dragonfly 7" was presented in a simple green sleeve with a picture of a tree on one side and, on the other, the image of three broad maple leaves. Last year, for Record Store Day 2013, Windy and Carl inaugurated their 20th anniversary celebrations with the release of a cassette documenting their 2009 performance at the Solar Culture Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, a single night on what they claim was their last ever tour. Then, in December, they reunited with Dominic Martin, who put out the Emerald 7" on Enraptured in 1995, and released the Calliope/Carnivale single. The cassette caught Windy and Carl somewhere between We Will Always Be and Songs for the Broken Hearted mode, but the 45 was a glance over their shoulders, with a surprise percussion-injected twist tucked away on the B-side. Pressed to red vinyl (the orange vinyl edition sold out in a flash) and adorned in bright, hand painted sleeves that resemble fossilized leaves, I Walked Alone/At Night concludes the celebratory trilogy with a pair of reflective beauties, cool and crystalline from a distance, but red hot at their core. It is a fiery return to that green-sleeved single from 1993, reinforced and refreshed by Windy’s new-found inspiration, Carl’s seemingly effortless playing, and 20 years of hard work.

The pairing of Jenks Miller (Horseback) and James Toth (Wooden Wand) makes perfect sense, given both of them work with their own idiosyncratic approaches to southern Americana, resulting in music that is at times familiar and simultaneously unique. On this split release, each artist submitted three songs that are not only some of their most accessible material, but also complement each other wonderfully.

As a former member of Skullflower and Ascension, Jaworzyn was one of the elite guitar manglers of the '90s noise rock UK scene before seemingly disappearing form the earth. Last year, along with a series of Skullflower reissues, Jaworzyn reappeared with a few singles embracing electronic instrumentation, while still pursuing that world of noise and entropy he did via six strings. Principles of Inertia is another manifestation of this electronic infatuation, with a joyful disregard for genre traditions or conventions.