After a decade-long hiatus, Aki Onda returns to his field recording series with a collage of recordings made during his first trip to Mexico back in 2005.  While the recordings themselves form a evocative and sometimes beautiful narrative, the surreality of Aki's travelogue is further enhanced by the fact that two of his three recorders began malfunctioning during the project.  As a result, South of the Border is occasionally bizarre enough to transcend the field recording genre and drift into relatively uncharted and unpredictable territory.

Back in 2011, Chris and Cosey united with Factory Floor's Nik Void (né Nikki Colk) for an improvised set during London's Short Circuit Festival.  Not very many people got to actually see it (it was a small room), but those lucky few who did were fairly unanimous in declaring it spectacular.  Thankfully, someone competently recorded it and everyone involved agreed that it should be released once they heard it.  I am sure that Transverse is not nearly as great as being there must have been, but it definitely makes for a very unexpected and satisfying consolation prize.

Markus Mehr is often compared to and grouped in with ambient composers like Tim Hecker and Fennesz for his use of timbre, bass, and unusual sound sources. But his collected works—In, On, Lava, Hubble, and now, Off—display an artistry and forethought that are more unique than he gets credit for. He recognizes the power and emotion that can be conjured from a focused process and an immaculately dense sound. But he came to that conclusion independently, not as an imitator.

These seven lengthy grooves are sure to please disco fans and their refreshing quality can be appreciated by those others who, like me, tend to view the genre with a mixture of amusement and terror. Sadly, behind the ecstatic sounds of 24 Hours in a Disco is the tale of a talented artist who was cursed by addiction and doomed by fame.

This recently reissued epic from 1996 was one of Stars of the Lid's first major statements, but it is not without its flaws, as Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride were still at a stage in which their ambient influences were readily apparent.  Despite the occasional lack of distinctiveness, this remains a solid effort and benefits from a darkness and tension that is often absent from their more recent works.  More importantly, The Ballasted Orchestra contains the two-part "Music for Twin Peaks, Episode #30," which is a serious contender for the most perfect 20-minutes of music that Stars of the Lid ever recorded.

Sublime Frequencies' first new compilation after a long dormant spell is quite an ambitious one, as compiler Carl Hamm spent almost 8 years researching this project.  That effort shows, as his liner notes could probably be stretched into a book with minimal effort.  As for the music: anyone expecting the titular "psychedelic rock" or even anything particularly outré is likely to be disappointed by 85% of the material, but the Malaysian interpretation of '60s Western rock and pop is otherwise quite enjoyable and catchy (though not as endearingly wonky as some of the Thai pop that SF has previously unearthed).

This sound art project of John Kolodij has only a few works out to date, but the proficiency heard on Sanguine Futures indicate that of a much more prolific artist. Working with John Twells (Xela, Type Records) and a guest appearance by trumpeter Greg Kelley, this work is as atmospheric and engaging as it is unsettling.

This double album by the prolific Reto Mäder (Ural Umbo, Sum of R) has a surprisingly personal feel to it, given its dark and murky pedigree. Even during the moments where he works heavily with dissonance and abstract, disembodied noise, it is all tied together with a natural beauty that belies its seemingly dark nature.

To be frank, I am somewhat astonished that I like this album so much, as the combination of muted house beats and synth-based ambient music seemed like it could not be anything but lethally boring at this point, as the ship has definitely sailed on that particular niche.  However, it is impossible to overstate the importance of skilled execution.  In the wrong hands, great ideas are doomed, while the right artist can turn something seemingly dubious into something wonderful.  In this case, Tim Gray, recording as Ethernet, is the right artist.  It is hard to isolate exactly where all of his talents lie, but the most obvious one is that Tim is a truly excellent producer.

Koen Holtkamp and Brandon Anderegg return with yet another meticulously constructed suite of warm, partially acoustic soundcapes. Not much that will surprise longtime fans (though a pair of live pieces are atypically harsh), but a few of these pieces are quite beautiful. This, of course, is exactly what I would expect from a new Mountains album.

(Possibly) the final record by Broadcast featuring the late Trish Keenan, this is less of a proper follow-up to ...Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age than it is a sparse collection of novelties and scraps assembled for the movie it was scoring. Berberian Sound Studio does tend to follow faithfully in the same path that Broadcast's previous records set out for them, namely the increasingly ambient moods which pulse throughout, but I can't help but feel longing for what could have been.

This album from Egan Budd's solo noise project is one that comes together splendidly at the intersection of a multitude of sounds, approaches, and structures, although the mood remains consistently dark throughout. While at times the bleak atmospherics at times become a bit too much, overall it is a strong and aggressive album.

On his third album as Bionulor, Sebastian Banaszczyk has made an even greater leap into personalizing his sound. While he still focuses on the use of processed and recycled sounds, here there is a sense not only of consistency from piece to piece, resulting in a cohesive album of material, but also a more personal touch, a human element all too often missing from this sort of music

Performed, composed, and recorded over a period of 14 months, Crosshatches is a massive and exquisitely constructed 85 minute piece stretched across two compact discs. On it, Pisaro and Tsunoda sketch and blend non-musical sounds into musical ones, erasing the seemingly natural distinction between them as they go. The vehicle for that transformation is crosshatching, which the duo elegantly transforms into a musical mode.

The use of Daphni as a distinction between the bulk of Dan Snaith's work done as Caribou is more than just an attractive new coat of paint or the result of yet another frivolous lawsuit. As Daphni, Snaith takes the elements of electronic music and dance that inspired much of 2010's Swim and extracts all semblance of outside influence, leaving a pretty faithful, smirkless take on house music. To me, Daphni is a way for Snaith to immerse himself into a subculture he's only been a tourist to. Here he can be a face in a crowd, playing freely with ideas instead of living up to a reputation.

The trajectory of Natural Snow Buildings continues to amaze me with each new album, as Mehdi and Solange seem to grow more and more inventive and skilled at composition every single time they surface.  Mehdi's last solo effort, the drone-heavy Then Fell the Ashes... was one of favorite albums of 2011, but Bogyrealm Vessels is a completely different (but no less wonderful) animal: an enigmatic and weirdly beautiful song-based concept album involving a space invasion, schoolgirls, and giant plants.

Ben Chatwin's latest effort is an experiment gone awry in the best possible sense, as his initial plan to make an album in a single week ultimately turned into his spending more than a year trying to abstractly replicate the creation of the world using The Seven Days of Creation as a guideline.  Unsurprisingly, the resultant album is considerably brighter than its brilliant predecessor (Day One being the creation of light, after all) as well as more structurally complex and dynamically varied, but Ben's compositional talents thankfully seem to have had no trouble matching his daunting ambition.

I have fallen in love with Bob Mould again. I had the amazing opportunity of seeing Hüsker Dü as a teenager on their final tour and Mould's first two solo albums have a lot of outstanding songs, but for me it wasn't until Copper Blue that I became more in touch with his music. Twenty years ago, Mould was able to thread a collection of great songs into something much more magnificent. With Silver Age, he has finally, for me at least, been able to do this again.

While some of Collins' works have leaned a lot into more guitar-centric sounds and traditional structures, on Tenebroso he goes for a more understated, cinematic approach. Bleak and dark, but without any trite cliché elements, the resulting disc is a wonderfully unsettling one.

While the recent Gustafsson album Bengt saw the prolific saxophonist working with extreme restraint, here with the Norwegian trio Ich Bin N!ntendo he is doing anything but. A short, but fierce live performance captured and mastered by Lasse Marhaug, it lurks somewhere between free jazz, punk, and noise and makes for a unique, if slightly painful experience.