This double disc set is an expanded reissue of the first two 17 Pygmies albums and their debut EP Hatikva. It is a fine document of the group formed by Savage Republic member Philip Drucker (aka Jackson Del Rey) in an attempt to make music that was more melodic than SR.

This was my first exposure to the work of video artist/composer JR Robinson and it more or less left me absolutely flattened.  You've Always Meant So Much To Me is ostensibly just a single drone piece Robinson wrote to soundtrack one of his films, but a far better description is probably "a veritable Murderers' Row of Chicago's finest black metal and noise musicians converged at Steve Albini's studio to perform a truly crushing, slow-burning, and blackened epic."  More remarkable still: the album is even better than that sounds.

I have historically had a very complicated relationship with William Basinski's work, as he has released some absolutely brilliant albums over the years, but he has also proven himself just as capable of producing fairly forgettable ambient music and/or flogging a single simple motif to death for a seeming eternity.  This latest effort lies somewhere in the middle of those two poles, as the blurred, uneasy title piece favorably calls to mind a more hallucinatory Morton Feldman, while the closing "The Trail of Tears" gradually devolves into an especially cold, dull, and dreary strain of dark ambiance that is best avoided.

Originally issued on the Flingco Sound System label in 2010, this Virginian trio's full-length album is on CD for the first time, complete with two previously unreleased bonus songs. Homegoing is a powerful, yet light suite of electronic pieces that proves that intensity does not have to be oppressive or forceful.

Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin have been responsible for some of my favorite music for years, but Big Blood is a significantly weirder, more unpredictable, and prickly entity than the duo's previous outlet, Fire on Fire.  While they are almost always compelling and distinctive, Big Blood's voluminous output, occasional shrillness, general inscrutability, and stylistic variability can make them a hard band to fully embrace.  Fortunately, this gorgeous double LP captures captures Colleen and Caleb at their absolute best, occupying the bizarre, lonely nexus where Appalachian folk, ritual, sound art, vintage Egyptian pop, and deep psychedelia intersect.

Lovesliescrushing's 1992 debut bloweyelashwish inarguably stands as one of the greatest shoegaze albums of all-time, but its dreamy, warped guitars had the unfortunate effect of dooming the hapless Scott Cortez to a lifetime of Kevin Shields comparisons, a situation that is probably not helped at all by the Shields-ian infrequency of LLC's major releases.  Case in point: Ghost Colored Halo is the first album that Cortez and bandmate Melissa Arpin-Duimstra have actively recorded together in over a decade.  That reunion seems to have been a fruitful one creatively, but not without some caveats.  I would not necessarily call this effort a return to form (its a bit more understated and drone-minded than Cortez's best work), but its better moments are are just as sublimely beautiful as ever.

Jan St. Werner's work under his own name—assertively distinct from his music as Lithops and in Mouse On Mars—is an airy return to ideas he toyed around with over a decade ago, now given a conceptual touch up. His deference to specific aliases for these different releases has a purpose; most of the material here is for film scores or concept pieces and stands out from all his past work. It's scarce, warm, and comforting ambient music with little to dislike and plenty to think about.

Miles Whittaker can’t be stopped. As one-half of Demdike Stare, as Suum Cuique, and now as Miles, he has released a string of records that have vanished almost as soon as they have appeared. Unsecured follows his first full-length under the Miles moniker, rounding out its low-key tones and subdued colors with four coarse and heavy techno productions. Like his other records, it’s also likely to disappear soon—and for good reason.

This duo of Nathaniel Ritter and Troy Schafer have had their work branded as neofolk since their emergence in the middle part of the last decade, but closer scrutiny makes this an oversimplified label. While Kinit Her may work with instrumentation and esoteric imagery of a time long past, the way it is structured and presented is a different matter entirely, and manages to make them one of the few artists working within a nebulous genre that sound like something far more complex and nuanced than a tired, renaissance faire tribute band.

Combining solo artist Neil Jendon on synths, Mike Weis of Zelienople on drums, and Locrian guitarist André Foisy, Kwaidan might almost meet the definition of a supergroup for the post-drone/metal crowd, and it would not be an inappropriate designation. There is a certain grandiose drama throughout this LP, even if the sound is anything but pretentious or bombastic. It feels like a taut, fully developed collaboration from three masters of their respective instruments.

Even before Prurient's foray into actual electronic music on Bermuda Drain, there was a nascent trend in the noise scene embracing synth pop and early electro sounds in a raw, underground sort of approach. One of the leaders of this charge was Greh Holger (Hive Mind), whose Chondritic Sound label has made a slow transition from harsh noise to minimal wave in the past few years. Here, paired with Brotman and Short's Jesse Short, he presents two rough-hewn throwbacks to the early '80s new wave scene, in the best possible way.

In addition to the cassettes reviewed by Creaig Dunton last week, Anthony Mangicapra has also been busy releasing some terrific little CD-Rs on the world. Short and sweet, these two releases further demonstrate why Mangicapra and his associate Ryan Martin (of the group York Factory Complaint and label Robert & Leopold) are making some of the most engaging music this year.

It seems this trio has made a tradition of releasing a new recording every year and it has become a welcome addition to my calendar. This album sees the group in flying form, expanding their remit to include a much wider spectrum of sounds ranging from delicate atmospheres to psychedelic explosions of freak out rock’n’roll. It is an exciting and, dare I say it, fun trip which may be their best offering yet.

In 1997, as the last of the tenth generation Thunderbirds rolled off the Ford assembly line in Lorain, Ohio, Jason Molina released his debut album and first EP for Secretly Canadian. The Lorain native had two 7" singles to his name when his self-titled debut arrived in April. Hecla & Griper snuck in before Christmas that year, loaded with terse songs, a bigger bottom end, and a tougher sound for the winter. Secretly Canadian’s 15th Anniversary Edition tacks on four new-ish songs, two of them exciting, previously unreleased Hecla versions of "Heart Newly Arrived" and "One of Those Uncertain Hands," which both first showed up on 1998’s Impala.

Important Records has issued many great albums over the years, but it just occurred to me today that they have quietly become one of the best-curated reissue labels around.  Case in point: this visionary 1974 suite of hermetic, hallucinatory solo guitar compositions.  Originally self-released, Samtvogel was later reissued twice by the legendary Krautrock label Brain, which is something of a deceptive pairing. Although he worked as Klaus Schulze's roadie and assistant and had an active presence in Germany's free-jazz and space music scenes in his own right, this surprisingly dark and obsessive early effort bears little resemblance to anything else in the Krautrock canon, aside from perhaps Manuel Göttsching's landmark Inventions for Electric Guitar (which was not released until the following year).

Survival is the latest project from Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, along with long time collaborators Greg Smith and Jeff Bobula. It's an aggressive, boastful debut record that blends hard rock and metal tropes and elements of folk. Shedding the blast beat acrobatics that made Liturgy's black metal such a prominent force has done nothing to deter Hendrix's songwriting capabilities, or make the music he plays any less exhilarating. In fact, Survival argues to name Hendrix and crew as some of the most talented metal polyglots around today.

Menche was the first American noise artist that I was able to embrace, as his approach to art was not only unique (the first work I heard was him processing the sound of salt rubbed between contact mics), but it also was cliché and pretense free. It was simply the work of a man who loved experimenting with different sounds and ways of generating them. While he has stepped back from his more prolific past, the works that he has been releasing are more fully fleshed out and rich, and these two albums are no exception. With Vilké building upon drums, guitar, and wolf howls, and Marriage of Metals focusing exclusively gamelan, the two are vastly different in approach, but the same in quality and structure.

This, Zoviet France's first major release in over a decade, originally surfaced last fall as a characteristically cryptic and incredibly limited box set containing rubbings of neolithic Northumbrian stone and a vial of hawthorn berries.  Unfortunately, it completely sold-out world-wide on the day it was released, so most of us never got to hear it.  Until now, anyway, as alt.vinyl has now issued a second (and more affordable) version.  Hawthorn berry enthusiasts will no doubt be a bit dismayed by the hyper-minimal new format (three black vinyl records in three entirely black sleeves), but it certainly fits the music, as 7.10.12 offers up roughly an hour of minimal/quasi-ambient loopscapes.  While they certainly offer many subtle nods to ZF's weirder, more abrasive past, these records feel more like the beginning of a curious new phase than a triumphant return to form.

While it often feels like the sun has probably set on the golden age of noise, no one seems to have told Lee Howard, as this effort sounds like the culminating masterpiece of a man who has been single-mindedly hellbent on perfecting power electronics for years.  It was time well-spent, as the album's better pieces remind me exactly why I became excited about noise in the first place, as there are few things quite as bracing as a masterfully crafted blast of gnarled brutality.  Thankfully, however, Howard does not rely solely upon force alone, wisely balancing his remarkably articulate ferocity with subtle musicality, clarity, and a highly developed understanding of space, traits which elevate this album far above just about every other recent noise release that I have encountered.

I definitely have a soft spot for industrial music that is so goddamn industrial that it is literally just the sound of machines, so I am the target demographic for this suite of compositions built upon recordings from two French printing facilities.  It is very hard to say how much conventional "composition" was involved though, as Offset often feels like pure audio vérité that has just been cleaned up and EQed for maximum impact.  That is fine by me: regardless of how much or how little studio tweaking, manipulation, and multi-tracking actually took place, Meursault's inspired selection and sequencing yields a very coherent, weirdly hypnotic, and intermittently dazzling whole.