For their second collaboration, Steven Stapleton and Graham Bowers take the elements that worked so well on Rupture and push them outwards into something more bewildering, but equally as compelling. Pomp, ceremony, showbiz and a cryptic approach to musical arrangements, this is a powerfully odd and oddly powerful work by the duo. As much as I enjoyed Rupture, its heavy subject matter prevents it from being a regular addition to my listening schedule but Parade fills that gap perfectly.

Following a visit to the Tate Gallery and seeing JMW Turner’s paintings, Burkhard Stangl began working on a way to represent these painted landscapes as musical soundscapes. Focusing on Turner’s unfinished works, Stengl never truly gets into the same sphere as Turner. The resulting album is a collection of superficially nice music that has little below the surface, in opposition to the elegance and depth of Turner’s masterful compositions.

For some reason, my favorite albums always seem to be those that come from unexpected places, a trend that delightfully continues with this third effort by Belgium's Bram Bosteels.  I was vaguely familiar with Bosteels already, but only because I had previously heard 2011's Barra Barra and casually dismissed it as "a bunch of murky soundscapes for obscure theater productions."  After hearing this latest effort, however, I found myself desperately rummaging around my house in vain hope of finding and revisiting my long-forgotten copy of its predecessor.  Hokus Fokus is absolutely deranged in the best possible way, resembling nothing less than an extremely disturbing carnival-themed nightmare.  This is easily one of the strangest albums in recent memory.

Ba Da Bing have officially blown my mind yet again, following their 4LP reissues of the epic Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and The Snowbringer Cult trilogy with an even more ambitious project: reissuing 2009's incredibly rare and overwhelming Daughter of Darkness cassette series as a massive 8LP box set with hand-painted album art (which took months to complete).  While it is not the best Natural Snow Buildings album by any means (no band can make a uniformly great 8-hour album), it is still quite a good one and it is unquestionably their longest, which offers a unique appeal all its own.  There are probably are not too many people who find the prospect of plunging into a seemingly endless rabbit hole of roiling, hallucinatory, quasi-ritualistic drone very appealing, but those who do have probably just found their Holy Grail.

For the longest time, I could not understand why people were so excited about this act, but last year's Carter Tutti Void album re-ignited my curiosity enough for me to give it another chance.  While it still remains a mystery to me how Factory Floor became so quickly revered, their first real full-length is intermittently wonderful and dramatically better than much of their earlier work.  Obvious Chris & Cosey comparisons aside, this trio is definitely onto something uniquely their own, stripping their thumping, retro-dance formula down to little more than a beat, a simple modular synth pattern, and Nikki Colk Void's appealingly languorous sexy-android-on-heroin vocals.  As it turns out, that is all they need.

Lee Stokoe has been active for two decades but has maintained a relatively low profile with limited and self released recordings, with his biggest claim to fame having spent time with the legendary Skullflower. Like that band’s head Matthew Bower, Stokoe works heavily with guitars and a legion of guitar pedals, but the result is less raw and aggressive, and more hypnotic and minimalist. Across these two side-long pieces are repeated, meditative drones that seem to lurk just out of view, in a distant fog or mist.

In a spate of recent releases, Room40 label head Lawrence English has produced three very different works on the always beautiful Winds Measure label, with some recorded as far back as a decade. While he utilizes field recordings from Japan and Australia on all three, each one sounds nothing like the other but all are indicative of the Australian artist’s ability at capturing and manipulating familiar sounds into something else entirely.

Gilbert has not been a prolific solo artist even after departing from Wire, but whenever he has released new material, it has been of the utmost quality, and this record is no different. A concept album on global warming and floods in collaboration with Beaconsfield Art Works (David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin) is no different. Mixing treated field recordings and electronic instrumentation, Diluvial is another high water mark in his impressive discography.

Much of Daniel Lopatin's work has been characterized by uncertainty. Even in his best moments, there was a hesitance, an aversion to commitment which staggered the fluidity of his material. In his initial presentations of synth arpeggios, there was the voice of a burgeoning artist struggling to move past process, to bridge the gap between idea and execution, to make a full measure. On R Plus Seven, Lopatin has fully realized this goal. Filled with a stupefying sureness, this record once again finds Daniel reinventing his style from the ground up, combining the dated provinces of new age music, soundtracks, and corporate ambience into something tremendous.

This Chicago band’s career trajectory has been a singularly impressive and curious one, as they have somehow managed to continually reinvent their sound while still getting exponentially better with each new album.  Era makes that trend seem even more remarkable, as Disappears have made yet another huge leap forward despite tampering with what was arguably their best feature (Brian Case's dissolute-sounding, deadpan vocals) and losing drummer Steve Shelley to Lee Ranaldo's new band. As it turns out, neither are missed, as the band more than compensate by paring their aesthetic down to pummeling, machine-like precision mingled with great hooks and well-placed eruptions of chaos.

With Gates of Atlantis, Phelios (the solo project of Martin Stürtzer) has created a soundtrack in search of a film. It has a distinctly cinematic tone and structure to it, and even follows a loose narrative structure. However, there is far more than incidental sounds and music cues here, and it simply is too complex and varied to function with any other media.

Robert Piotrowicz's LP from earlier this year, When Snakeboy is Dying, found the Polish composer stepping out of his comfort zone and working with a variety of traditional instruments with exceptional results. Lincoln Sea, however, sees him going back to his modular synthesizer array that has appeared on so many of his records. But rather than the chaos and noise that previous work was based, the sense of structure and composition here is significantly deeper and manages to touch upon rock and orchestral approaches.

A side project of members of Blessure Grave, Soft Kill does bear a resemblance, but one that focuses less on the folk tinged sound of that band and instead emphasizes the more post-punk elements. In some ways, Circle of Trees is a step backwards from their debut An Open Door: The live drums are replaced by a rigid machine and the overall production seems a bit more sparse, but it also gives the record a distinct sound, and along with it a few more uptempo moments than others in their catalog.

Staalplaat's latest pair of excavations from Muslimgauze's supernaturally bottomless vault is a bit of a surprise, as these two albums contain some of the best material to surface from the departed Bryn Jones in a very long time.  While a good portion of Tandoor Dog has admittedly appeared before, it was only as part of an extremely limited 4LP set that virtually no one has, while Izlamic Songs is an entirely unreleased, fully formed, and coherent album.  To my ears, Izlamic Songs is probably the better of the two (it has higher peaks, at least), but both intermittently capture Jones at the peak of his aberrant and bludgeoningly percussive dub genius.

A raw live recording from earlier this year, Chalaque's main man Nick Mitchell performs here with Eric Hardiman (Century Plants, Rambutan et. al.) on bass and Pascal Nichols on drums.  Essentially a live on stage improvisation, the trio bounce off each other perfectly and manages to grasp that tenuous balance between experimentalism and pure unadulterated rock and roll.

Two different artists who both work within the realms of psychedelic tinged minimalism share this split single that in a genre sense are very different from one another, but thematically and conceptually make an excellent pairing and compliment each other quite well.

A Zelienople side project featuring Matt Christensen and Mike Weis, the latter also of Kwaidan, and Scott Tuma recorded the material that comprises this album originally for a CD-R in 2006 and have been rather quiet since. Reissued with a wider scope and presentation, the seven untitled pieces that make up this album are in league with their other projects, yet have a hazy, singular edge all their own.

Jenny Hval takes a morbid pleasure in using her voice to provoke discomfort on her second full-length release. From the opening lyrics of the title track to the arcing croon of "The Seer," Innocence Is Kinky lives its title through a bravery bordering on refuge in audacity. It seems to be a defense based in false naïveté, where Hval's surrealistic persona adds a unique flourish to a collection of unabashedly smart and well constructed songs on gender and sexuality. As the record unfolds, this keen irreverence pays off. Innocence Is Kinky reveals itself as one of the better singer/songwriter albums of 2013, hiding a deeply powerful message under the false guise of shock.

For its seventh and final volume, Sub Rosa’s mighty experimental music compilation has been expanded to a triple CD. At this point, I would have thought that all the good stuff would have been covered but label boss and Anthology curator Guy Marc Hinant has managed to uncover more startling curiosities from the last 150 years to make this series go out with a bang (and a drone and a blast of white hot feedback).

This sequel to 2010's fine Afro-Beat Airways delivers still more Fela-free gems from Ghana's golden age, which is (of course) is exactly what I wanted and expected.  While many of the featured artists (Vis-A-Vis, K. Frimpong, etc.) will already be quite familiar to anyone with even a casual interest in African music reissues, the material is uniformly solid and offers enough obscurities to keep things interesting.  Even the most jaded aficionados will enjoy Samy Redjeb's characteristically colorful and exhaustive liner notes though, as he has unearthed a slew of rare photos and tracked down some interesting interviews with a lot of people who probably never expected to be interviewed by an excited German in 2013.