Students of Decay label head Alex Cobb is back with two new albums: his latest ambient drone opus under his own name and a compilation of some of Taiga Remains’ limited-edition cassette releases from 2008. They feel oddly like companion pieces—though at least six years separate the two albums—as it seems like Cobb was always reaching for the same minimal, warm, and blurred aesthetic.  He just used different means to get there at different points in his career.  In any case, both albums are quite likable: while Marigold and Cable handily eclipses Works in both execution and composition, the Taiga album nicely offsets some of Cobb’s serene tendencies with a healthy dose of tape noise, which offers a charm all its own.
This is Thielemans' first full-length for Miasmah as a solo artist, but he has previously turned up on the label as a guest on Kreng's debut album, which provides a fairly accurate window into the milieu from which he is coming: the darker, weirder fringes of Belgium's theater/improv/art scene. Unlike his fellow shadowy avant-garde eccentrics, however, Eric is primarily a drummer and Sprang is composed almost entirely of unusual percussion experiments. Needless to say, that is some rather niche territory to occupy in an already very niche scene, but this is quite a remarkably fascinating album for a one-man tour de force of skittering, plinking percussion.
My general lack of excitement about current glut of synthesizer albums is well-documented, but there are a handful of artists that I still look forward to and Koen Holtkamp is one of them. On this, his first solo album for Thrill Jockey, he delivers yet another fine set of vibrantly burbling analog sounds. While I do not necessarily love every single song on Motion, it certainly contains some of his best work and reaffirms my belief that Koen is in a class of his own when it comes to constructing dynamic, multi-layered synth opuses.
Robot Records’ three-CD retrospective of Jacques Lejeune’s music from the early 1970s and 1980s contains over three hours of heady electronic noise, surreal acoustic transformations, deconstructed field recordings, and disorienting aural splutter. It is a collection that spans 14 years and six electroacoustic compositions: one composed for ballet and inspired by Snow White, another inspired by the myth of Icarus, and others by landscapes, symphonic form, and cyclical movement, among other things. They flash with theatrical flair, jump unpredictably through minute variations, and churn chaotically, tossing fabricated scree and instrumental slag into the air. A 28 page bilingual booklet filled with photographs, drawings, and program notes accompanies the set, along with a 32 page booklet of interpretive poetry. In them, Lejeune, Alain Morin, and Yak Rivais offer up remarkably precise interpretations for each of the pieces, but the writing works much better as a rough guide to the visually evocative clamor of Lejeune’s electric transmissions.
Andrew Lagowski's S.E.T.I. project has been constructing dark ambient dramas with an extra-terrestrial sensibility for over 20 years, blending unidentifiable electronic passages with moments of identifiable synthesizers or samples, and Final Trajectory is the culmination of that. Culled from 30 years of recordings, this album drifts from fascinating to terrifying, much like massive expanse of the universe that influenced it.
I have noted in the past that few artists are quite as chameleonic as Barn Owl, an observation that Jon Porras seems to have taken as a challenge, as he has now gone and made a dub techno album.  While I do not think that he should necessarily quit his day job, the better moments of Light Divide make it seem like Porras has been doing this forever.  In particular, the opening, "Apeiron," is 7-minutes of warmly hissing greatness.  The rest of the album is not quite on the same level, but it is certainly a pleasant and well-executed stylistic departure nonetheless.
Without a doubt, the fact that Klara Lewis is the daughter of Graham Lewis (Wire, Dome, He Said) is going to garner a significant amount of attention for Ett. While hopefully it helps to spread awareness of its release, by no means does she need to rely on her father’s reputation to garner acclaim for this album. Her penchant for deconstructing dance music into something completely different may be genetically inherited, but this is entirely Klara's show, and a brilliant show it is.
Nao Sugimoto's Spekk label had been doing an excellent job of establishing itself as an excellent source of abstract hybrids of organic and synthetic sounds that were sometimes challenging, sometimes beautiful, but always captivating. Because of that, the label’s disappearance after 2011's Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns album by Janek Schaefer was disheartening. When these two new releases appeared, I was hoping that they would be a return to form, and that they are.
Suzuki Junzo has spent much of his career shifting between gentle, almost jazz influenced guitar playing and full on unhinged distortion, both as a solo artist and with projects such as Astral Traveling Unity. That hopping between extremities remains solidly in place on Portrait of Madeleine Elster, which is almost evenly split between gentle, jazz influenced playing and maximum, room clearing distortion. Its best moments, however, are when the two worlds overlap with one another and create an entirely different beast.
Eamon Sprod records music in the field, but don't mistake the product of his labor for a field recording. In some hands microphones and tapes are used to capture the buzz of insects or the sound of rain pelting the land—whatever the subject might be—with the intent of faithfully reproducing those sounds later in a living room or in a pair of headphones. Replication is the documentarian's craft. Sprod's is magnification. He singles out particular noises, brushes them off and, like a geologist or an archaeologist, excavates them from the sediment of ordinary commotion. His efforts yield an enlarged world of microscopic rhythms and porous surfaces, small remnants that point to the unbroken environments from which they were culled. But Sprod re-purposes those extractions as musical vehicles too, for both re-hearing and re-imagining the world.
About a year since the Norwegian trio released their first album with legendary saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, Ich Bin N!ntendo present Look. Without any guest artists (but once again recorded and mixed by Lasse Marhaug), the material does not differ significantly from its predecessor, and it still makes for a sprawling discordant mess in the most enjoyable way. Like a free jazz metal band playing punk covers out in a garage, there is a visceral, but fun sensibility to be had within all of this chaos.
One of the many things that still keeps me excited about Current 93 more than 30 years into their career is that each new incarnation has the potential to be a stunning or reinvigorating reinvention of David Tibet's vision.  This latest line-up offers up an especially divergent and unexpected aesthetic, primarily due to the contributions of Dutch classical pianist Reinier Van Houdt and saxophone titan John Zorn. Although large parts of Field definitely fall a bit short for me, they are happily balanced by some truly wonderful and boldly original moments as well.
As a genre or style, neofolk has always been more miss than hit for me. I am a huge fan of the early through mid period Death in June, Sol Invictus, and a few others, but too often it comes across like low rent Leonard Cohen with a questionable sense of nationalism. The debut from Barren Harvest, featuring members of Worm Ouroboros and Atriarch, does not fall into this trap by any means. With balanced implementation male and female vocals and a tasteful use of keyboards with the acoustic instruments, the album is somewhere between Nada! era DIJ and the stronger moments of mid-period Swans, while still retaining its own identity.
Konstellaatio is yet another release in Mika Vainio's current prolific spate of recordings, and amazingly even here, alone in his solo √ò guise, there seems to be no reduction in quality. Half of this album channels the minimalist techno of Pan Sonic, while the other half hints at moody, sparse ambience that has characterized his other recent works. Like much of his discography, Konstellaatio manages to have an organic warmth amongst its machine generated noises that slowly reveals more of its character.
Kontakt der Jünglinge, the cross-generational collaborative project between Thomas Köner and Asmus Tietchens had a burst of activity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but has since remained rather quiet. This album marks not only their return, but also their first true studio recording. The previous four albums were all live performances, and even the non-live disc Frühruin was actually two solo pieces composed in a similar style. In that regard, Makrophonie 1 accomplishes exactly what it should, capturing the duo’s stark, yet somehow inviting minimal electronics with a greater polish and tightened compositional sensibility that the studio setting brings.
This fourth full-length by the revered (yet somewhat chameleonic) David Lettelier takes his techno in a simpler and more spacious direction than its 2011 predecessor (OR) with varying degrees of success.  While I have seen this effort compared to early Autechre or referred to as "IDM" or "retro" several times, it does not feel much like a deliberate nostalgia trip at all to me.  Such reference points are not exactly off-base, but Solens Arc often seems much more like Lettelier has merely discovered that a throbbing, non-intrusive rhythmic backdrop is the perfect framework for presenting his more experimental leanings.
