Based on my first encounters with Ambarchi’s work, I have always associated him with the abstract, post-rock tinged world of experimental guitar noise and drone. However, following up his recent Audience of One album, this album continues his transition into more "song" oriented work, and brilliantly so. Simple, but hypnotic in its execution, it a taut, dramatic 30-plus minute single track that grabbed my attention immediately and has stood up strongly ever since.

Much ado has been made about its two hour duration, and Michael Gira's assertion that The Seer represents the culmination of the entire Swans discography, which is not to be disregarded. From the monolithic, visceral guitar stabs, to the dark, folk hued melodies, and dissonant, deconstructed samples and loops, it all appears here, sometimes within the same song. Thankfully, it does not come across as a conclusion, but the culmination and self-actualization of a long, unparalleled career.

Currently only available as limited edition CD-R (though there are plans for a regular CD/vinyl release soon), these three soundtracks for short films of Derek Jarman have provided Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown plenty of inspiration following their superb album Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window of last year. Some of the same textures and moods are revisited but it is already possible to hear that Cyclobe are developing creatively at an unprecedented rate. Between Wounded Galaxies… and this, they have completely met, exceeded, and destroyed any expectations I may have had of them.

There was always the fear that the reformed Swans might have been a one-shot moment of greatness but The Seer counters any argument that My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was an aberration. Across the two hours, the group cover more ground here than most bands cover in a career. This is visionary, powerful statement that manages to be both visceral and transcendental, something more akin to a birth than rock music.

This is easily one of the most intriguing and enigmatic debuts to surface this year, as two musicians that I am completely unfamiliar with (Daniel Lea and Matthew Waters) have managed to assemble a killer noir jazz ensemble and enlist collaborators as impressive as Ben Frost and David Sylvian. Although they draw their inspiration from a wide array of disciplines (Gerhard Richter and Paul Auster are influences), the resultant music is extremely narrow in scope (or, more charitably, "focused" and "thematically coherent"). Night Within is essentially all brooding nocturnal atmosphere and texture with little in the way of songcraft, but Land are almost so good at what they do that it does not matter.

I have seen this album described elsewhere as "virtually a new Monos record" due to the participants, but Tate's latest effort is a bit more modest than that.  Originally recorded as a guitar and synth solo album, Darren handed his work over to the very capable Colin Potter for a thorough "re-imagining."  I can only guess at what No Longer Here sounded like before Potter's involvement (the droniest drone ever?), but the end result is 45 minutes of beautifully immersive and darkly hallucinatory bliss.

Equal doses of Hell’s Angels, bad drugs, and Russ Meyer; Clayton Burgess' downer biker metal hits the spot like a tire iron across the jaw. More The Born Losers than Sons of Anarchy, Satan's Satyrs deserve the term badass as much as any b-movie anti-hero. This is music that has come to town, decided it wants your girl and she has decided she prefers them to you.

Having recently put out a double disc package with Anthony Pasquarosa, and another collaboration with Noise Nomads, the Albany, New York area noise master Mike Griffin has managed to compile yet another set of spacey, at times aggressive, but always fascinating abstract electronics. The first is a full vinyl LP of solo work, courtesy of the always amazing Sedimental label, and the second a collaborative release with meme slinger John Olson. Griffin’s style is consistent between the two work, but the differing contexts give each a unique and distinct feel, differing from one another.

Scrine is one of the earlier works from Hands To, the name solo artist Jeph Jerman was working with at the time. With the project's first release just a year before in 1987, he was already a seasoned practitioner in the mid to late 1980s noise cassette scene. Even at this stage his work was highly conceptual, using his environment as a primary source for his compositions. Compared to his later works under his own name, however, there is a major emphasis on the sounds of urban and suburban environments, and a raw, rough edge that summarizes that era of noise perfectly.

Dead Can Dance released a string of unique and wonderful albums during their prime, but I absolutely loathed 1996's Spiritchaser, so their break-up in its wake seemed like a fine artistic decision to me.  I never expected them to ever record new material again, as Lisa Gerrard seemed to be doing quite well on her own as a soundtrack composer and lives on a completely different continent than the comparatively dormant Brendan Perry, and yet...here we are.  As I expected, the reunited duo do not quite recapture the magic of classics like The Serpent's Egg, but there are still some glimpses of it amidst this oft-perplexing effort.

It has been an atypically quiet year for Barn Owl, but Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti have filled the void somewhat with major solo albums every bit as good as their main gig.  While Porras' Black Mesa heavily favored the band's lonely desert rock side, Caminiti's deceptively titled Dreamless Sleep takes a dreamier, dronier approach.  While its shimmering bliss sometimes lacks distinctiveness, Evan does a wonderful job balancing his ambient tendencies with healthy doses of tape hiss, unpredictability, and artfully controlled guitar squall.

Like a lot of people, I am guilty of failing to properly appreciate Marcus Fjellström’s deeply unconventional and haunted vision during his lifetime, but Miasmah's Erik Skodvin has long been a tireless champion of the late Swedish composer's work, as the label was home to much of Fjellström work from the last decade. After hearing these reissues of Fjellström’s earliest two albums, I now fully understand why Skodvin was so passionate about his work: these two albums lie somewhere between a viscerally disturbing nightmare and a macabre fairy tale. I suppose that is not exactly surprising stylistic terrain within the Miasmah milieu, but the execution is what matters and Fjellström was on an entirely different plane than just about anybody else in that regard. At their best, these two albums make me feel like I am plunged into an intense and hallucinatory dreamscape filled with terrifying ballets, haunted clocks, and blood-soaked puppet shows.

This third installment of Fovea Hex’s excellent "The Salt Garden" trilogy brings the series to a close on an unexpectedly uplifting note, as Clodagh Simonds' ensemble transform their signature haunting and meditative hymnals into joyous, light-filled ones. Much like its predecessor, however, The Salt Garden III has also been released in an expanded edition with some bonus remixes. In this case, however, the remixes are a track-for-track reimagining of the entire EP by Headphone Dust's Steven Wilson. In essence, that offers two significantly different versions of the same EP, as the Wilson remixes take these four songs in a more shadow-shrouded and meditative direction akin to the previous EPs. Naturally, both are a delight, as Fovea Hex is a project like no other, occupying an enchanted and timeless realm of sublime, organic beauty.

This debut full-length from the Berlin-based Ekomane shares a lot of conceptual common ground with Caterina Barbieri (one of Important's previous break-out sensations), though the two artists have radically different approaches to composition. For example, both artists are quite enamored with using slow shifts in repeating patterns to wonderfully hypnotic and near-psychotropic effect. Ekomane, however, largely eschews hooks or anything resembling conventional songcraft in favor of a visceral, slow-motion onslaught of phase-shifting fragments in immersive quadraphonic sound. Given that focus on intensity and psychoacoustic sorcery, I am not sure that this live document from 2018's Ars Electronica festival quite captures Ekomane at the peak of her powers, but the opening "Solid of Revolution" is certainly a beguiling introduction to Ekomane's distinctive aesthetic.

The Opalio brothers close an exceptionally productive year with this third and final release of 2019. I suppose just about every My Cat is an Alien release could be described as a live album, given the duo's devotion to "spontaneous composition," but this one is live in the traditional sense: it was performed in front of an actual audience. More specifically, it is a document of a 20th anniversary concert that the brothers gave in their hometown of Torino back in 2018. As befits such an auspicious occasion, the Opalios were joined by a pair of their favorite collaborators: Lee Ranaldo and French composer/guitarist Jean-Marc Montera. Needless to say, it is always fascinating to see what transpires when unpredictable outside elements are invited into Maurizio and Roberto's shared consciousness and this release is no exception, as the quartet gradually wind their way into some truly uncharted frontiers in mind-melting, cosmic psychedelia.

I certainly grouse a lot about the seemingly endless tide of modular synth albums being released in experimental music circles these days, but there are a handful of artists who induce me to marvel at the truly incredible potential of such gear instead. One such artist is erstwhile guitarist Cam Deas, who absolutely floored me with last year's brilliantly twisted and phantasmagoric Time Exercises. Happily, this latest release returns to roughly that same squirming, tormented and mind-dissolving terrain, but the world of the more spacious and nuanced Mechanosphere evokes a somewhat different feel than its more explosive and abrasive predecessor.

It is hard to overstate Lee "Scratch" Perry's influence on Jamaican music, hip-hop, and evolution of electronic music, as everyone who has ever used sampling or any dub-inspired production techniques is part of a continuum that he played a massive role in conjuring into being. For the most part, his most visionary work was recorded during the white-hot creative period in the '70s when Lee was obsessively recording at his Black Ark studio in Kingston, but his career after (allegedly) burning down his studio (to purge it of evil spirits) has objectively been a strange and erratic one with Perry embracing a sort of cosmic jester persona. He has always remained a boldly original thinker, however, and has continued to fitfully release some fine albums whenever he finds a sympathetic foil. One of the earliest artists to fill that role in Perry's post-Black Ark era was Adrian Sherwood for 1987's Time Boom X De Devil Dead (a union that was reprised two decades later with The Mighty Upsetter). With Rainford and its dub companion Heavy Rain, those two dub heavyweights are reunited once again (and at a time when both artists are experiencing a bit of a well-deserved renaissance). Both albums boast their share of killer material, but Heavy Rain is the more focused and uniformly strong of the pair.

For their fourth studio album, this Texan combo retains their guitar-centric post-rock approach but expands more into abstraction and dissonance amongst these nine instrumental compositions. Shades of shoegaze and electronic ambient pepper the pieces, but the TWDY do an exceptional job at making sure the record is one that is impossible to easily categorize.

A spate of vinyl reissues has brought welcome attention to Family Fodder more than 30 years after they formed, and their eclectic music sounds as engagingly fresh, naive, and wise, as ever.

Imagine music resides everywhere that sound can travel. It flows from the faucet into the sink each morning, creaks out of the loose boards on the way up and down the stairs, and, incredibly, buzzes in your sweetheart's mouth as he or she snores noisily at 3 AM on Monday morning. The difference between music and not-music then pivots on the attention and consideration different sounds receive. Record them to tape, amplify and manipulate them, or set them into new patterns and a surprising, sometimes beautiful music can emerge. That's the music of The Breadwinner, the first album in Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet's recently completed trilogy on Erstwhile.