Prurient has taken a backseat in the past few years in favor of Dom Fernow's more recent high profile projects. The last major Prurient releases too were somewhat baffling: the EBM noise of Bermuda Drain and minimalist techno of Through the Window screamed out as an identity crisis compared to the harsh historical releases. This 7" is a tentative step back into the world of more abrasive, but is not quite the Prurient of the early days.

Mika Vainio's collaboration earlier this year with Joachim Nordwall was enjoyable, but this new release grabbed my attention immediately and did not relent for a moment. ÄÄNIPÄÄ, with Stephen O'Malley on guitar, Eyvind Kang (viola), Moriah Neils (contrabass) and Maria Scherer Wilson (cello) has more in common with Vainio's work with Pan Sonic than his recent projects, and with Alan Dubin screaming the poetry of Anna Akhmatova on two of the pieces, it surprisingly resembles a Khanate revival.

The New Alchemy creates transformational music from simple elements: voices, guitars, organs, and saxophones. The music moves deliberately, contrasting an intense, blistering, squall one might associate with screams from human sacrifice, with an airy, spacious, psychedelia.

When she is at her best, Brooklyn-based experimental guitarist Sarah Lipstate is capable of creating work of almost breathtaking beauty.  On this, her debut for Important, she is at her best exactly once.  The rest of album is filled with perfectly likable, if unexceptional, forays into muted ambient soundscapes, but it is the Popul Vuh's Aguirre-meets-gnarled-guitar brilliance of the title piece that makes No Dreams an album worth hearing.  I certainly wish the rest of the album were similarly spectacular, but it feels silly to complain that Lipstate only composed one must-hear masterpiece this year.

Following the recent lavish 7.10.12 box, the enigmatic :zoviet*france: have complied another release, albeit in a more conventional package, that continues the style of that set. Lush synthesizers, infrequent and erratic rhythms, and mysterious ambiences that shift from the delicate to the demonic make for another brilliant work in their long career.

Ben Chatwin is not one to shy away from ambitious concepts, having previously devoted albums to both the subconscious and the creation of the world.  Now, in collaboration with Fluid Radio's Dan Crossley, he tackles the more intimate subject of their shared alienation and misery in London.  Curiously, however, the music and packaging of Eaten Alive are much more elaborate than anything Chatwin has ever done before.  I had some difficulty reconciling myself with that, as something is definitely lost in Chatwin's transition from experimental guitarist to full-blown composer/urban historian/multimedia artist, but he certainly made a valiant and impassioned effort to do something truly unique and special this time around.

Robert Millis is not exactly a household name, but anyone with a healthy curiosity for the musical fringes has probably unknowingly encountered at least one thing that he has been involved in over his lengthy career.  Recently, he has been most prolific as a filmmaker for Sublime Frequencies, but he has also curated or worked on some of the most interesting compilations to emerge over the last several years (Dust-to Digital's Victrola Favorites, for example).  He is also one of the founding members of Climax Golden Twins as well as an occasional solo artist, as he is here.  Appropriately, Relief seamlessly blends together many of Millis' esoteric pursuits, but it does so in a more understated, raga-drone way than I expected.

Two forces define Jason Molina's entire career: work—he was almost obsessively dedicated to his craft—and his band. In 2003 he brought these forces to Steve Albini's Electrical Audio in Chicago and, with nine other musicians, caught lightning in a bottle. Up to that point Molina had made a case for his being a great songwriter, but on Magnolia Electric Co. he became a great bandleader. Those nine other musicians share the spotlight with him on these eight songs, and rightfully so. They're an integral reason Magnolia ended up one of the best rock 'n' roll records ever recorded.

In all the time that I have spent writing record reviews, I do not think I have ever been able to say that a band has burst onto the scene without the use of ironic quotation marks, but I think this French trio finally warrants it: three weeks ago I had never heard of Oiseux-Tempête and today I am saying that they have made the single most exciting and bad-ass post-rock album since...uh...well...I cannot even remember the last time there was a great post-rock album. In any case, this epic favorably calls to mind all the ambition, urgency, and cinematic scope that characterized Godspeed! You Black Emperor's debut.

Neither Christian Winther nor Christian Meaas Svendsen are newcomers within the Norwegian improvised music scene, but this double disc set marks the first specifically solo releases from the two (albeit with a few collaborative moments as well). With Winther's guitar and Svensden's double bass making for the only instrumentation used, both produce amazing sounds and compositions out of such basic, traditional sources.

Recorded near the end of a European tour, Gau is the collaboration of Will Long (Celer), Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabrik), and brothers Jan and Romke Kleefstra. Although on their own these artists tend to work in quiet, sparse sounds, on this single improvised piece all open up quite a bit, bringing with them some forceful, aggressive moments as well as their traditionally restrained ones.

Ambiguity hangs from every word that comes out of 25 year old Tahliah Barnett’s mouth. She sings about sex, love, craving, deception—and sounds direct enough doing it—but what she leaves out of her songs is just as important as what she keeps in them. Her accomplice, producer and Yeezus collaborator Arca, couldn't be more sympathetic. He matches her terse, enigmatic professions and weightless melodies with a magic show of slow-motion rhythms and phantom effects, making the best possible use of repetitious forms to emphasize and heighten the drama in her lyrics. EP2 is a pop record, but FKA Twigs and Arca pull it off so spectacularly that it sounds and feels like more.

Stephen Bishop is best known as the man behind Opal Tapes, but he also releases some very deviant and noteworthy music of his own as the deceptively named Basic House.  While both of these albums were released in 2013, they take Bishop's otherworldly wrongness in two very different directions.  Caim in Bird Form is the much weirder (and arguably more unique) of the two, but the more recent Oats compensates for its comparative lack of derangement by incorporating a heavy noise/industrial influence that yields some impressively brutal results.

This is the debut full-length from Brian Leeds' Huerco S. nom de guerre, one of the most exciting projects to emerge from burgeoning scene surrounding Opal Tapes.  While Leeds does not necessarily offer up anything truly novel, his skill at seamlessly blending together industrial clang, dub techno, hissing Tim Hecker-style ambiance, Boards of Canada-esque warped wooziness, and minimalist underground dance is quite peerless.  This is easily one of my favorite albums of the year.

How Dominick Fernow made the transition from home taping noise artist to celebrated techno musician still baffles me. I do not think it was a trajectory anyone could have imagined or expected, but that is exactly what happened. To that fact, Remember Your Black Day makes for his first LP proper amidst confusing limited tape formats and vinyl collections of out of print material. To that end, it does sound like a fully realized album, but is still distinctly Vatican Shadow, for better or worse.

I suspect Not Not Fun deliberately release one album every year that I would absolutely love, hoping that I will miss it in order to punish me for not paying more attention to them.  I have no idea what 2012's masterpiece was (there almost definitely was one), but Gagged in Boonesville has now joined Peaking Lights' 936 (2011) in instantly flooring me upon first listen.  Stylistically, it most closely resembles what I would expect if Jandek and Dirty Beaches teamed up to make an indie pop album, yet it is somehow far weirder and more disturbed than even that highly improbably event could be.

A collection of various compilation pieces recorded between 1999 and 2002, Syzygie shows just how diverse and eclectic this duo (two thirds formerly of Maeror Tri) were, and still are. With an approach in league with their previous project, warm analog electronics and dark, menacing sounds mix with stylistic trappings diverging wildly from piece to piece, but all coming together into a consistent and cohesive whole.

I have become quite a devoted Vatican Shadow fan (with some reservations) over the last year or so, as Dominick Fernow's voluminous and oft-excellent string of limited cassettes has gradually become widely available through digital release and a couple of major compilations.  Somehow, though, he never got around to releasing an actual "official" full-length album until now (though I find this debatable).  Given that extremely long and slow build up, I fully expected Remember Your Black Day to be some sort of grand artistic statement or major creative evolution, which it mostly is not.  In some very minor ways, I suppose it might be, but it is essentially just another batch of new songs: some very good, some kind of forgettable.

There are precious few bands out there that can create the same manic sense of terror and legitimate fear that The Body does. The duo of Chip King and Lee Buford push the sounds of doom past just slow, de-tuned guitars and apocalyptic lyrics into something much more tangible and real. With a diverse gathering of collaborators, Christs, Redeemers just furthers this into their most intense and varied work to date.

Affiliated with the Schimpfluch-Gruppe collective, Marc Zeier has managed to be one of the lower profile members of the loosely-knit group, and also one who’s work is perhaps the most understated. Without the visceral, nauseating organic sounds of Rudolf Eb.er or the occasionally jolly, punk-tinged absurdism of Joke Lanz, Zeier’s work has been one that emphasizes the sound more than the presentation. Not an overly prolific composer, Sub makes for a major release in its two-disc duration and use of recognizable, but still heavily treated everyday sounds to create a work that captivates as well as terrifies.