Drawing on literary influences like Franz Kafka and Thomas Ligotti, Mat Sweet returns with an EP about the purgatories and hells that are jobs in the bureaucratic machine. Undoubtedly inspired by the continuing financial crises that have erupted like boils across the world, Sweet has created a concise and precise indictment of the men in suits who have done as much damage to the world as men in military uniforms and priestly robes in past decades and centuries.

Few albums are as successful pulling off an album's worth of music wrapped into a single song as Sleep were in the '90s. Their sprawling weedian travelogue, Dopesmoker, set an impossibly high precedent for bands looking to follow the album-length song format. For Italy's Ufomammut, that precedent sounds more like a challenge to raise the bar, in which case, instead of just one... why not release two back-to-back albums in one year, together encompassing a single mammoth song 90 minutes in length?

Out of all the Sleep albums, the one I would think was least in need of a remaster was Dopesmoker but here we are with a third version of the album (and another artwork change). However, once I got to hear this latest edition of the album, I can understand a little why the band wanted to clean it up. It certainly sounds better than any previous incarnation (though it definitely looks the worst out of all of them) and it is another good reason to talk about this masterpiece.

Even with his recent return to the guitar and reactivation of Main, Robert Hampson has still made time to record new material under his own name, with another album to follow this Fall. Repercussions is not quite an album but more a compilation of recent works, using different source materials and compositional strategies, but all bear that unmistakable stamp of quality Hampson is known for.

This has got to be one of the most improbable, altruistic, and quixotic box sets ever produced, as it compiles 12 albums worth of almost entirely unreleased material from Oliveros' fertile early years.  That, of course, means: 1.) none of her early masterpieces like "Bye Bye Butterfly" are here, and 2.) nothing at all is included from the wildly different (and superior) work that she has done over the last four decades.  Those caveats, coupled with the inarguable fact that no artist on earth has a dozen killer albums worth of vault material lying around, makes this a pretty undesirable prospect for the merely curious or for anyone looking for a definitive retrospective.  For serious fans of early electronic music, however, this is an absolute goldmine.

Pauline Oliveros' best-known and influential work is 1989's Deep Listening, recorded in a massive, reverberant cistern.  In the years since that landmark effort, Pauline has founded The Deep Listening Institute, the Deep Listening Band, and performed many mesmerizing concerts in her unending crusade to explore the untapped potential of space, place, and (of course) reverberation.  These two previously unreleased albums capture some of the final recordings her band made with (the late) long-term collaborator/pianist/electronics wizard David Gamper. Although both performances occurred over the course of a January 2011 Seattle residency, they almost sound like two completely different bands: Octagonal Polyphony luxuriates in sublime, slow-motion drones while Great Howl becomes pretty nerve-jangling.

Named after the groundbreaking 1926 film by Kenji Mizoguchi, this collaboration opens with a very familiar sound found in the first two Vikki Jackman albums: Vikki on piano. Once again it is a slow, delicate, and serene melody, but it is brief and a quite deceptive introduction to the album, conceptually. There is very little of the bright piano as the record unfolds.

An enigmatic project out of the wilds of Madison, Wisconsin, this duo, with connections to the likes of Kinit Her, Burial Hex, and many more projects, weave together an unlikely combination of medieval folk, post-rock, and electronic sounds into two side-long pieces that channel a variety of moods, though most of them are cast with some level of darkness.

The subharcord is an early electronic instrument designed in East Germany during the 1960s. Essentially a subharmonic sound generator, its main function was to be a sound effects generator for TV and film. Only three of the original eight machines are thought to exist, and Bretschneider used one of them in June of 2007 (later remixed and edited in 2011) to create the material that makes up this single piece, a multifaceted composition that stays compelling throughout its entire 37-minute duration.

Originally released to raise money for recording the next Swans studio album, this live album has been repackaged and trimmed down for mass consumption. Capturing the group at one of its many peaks, it provides a thrilling document for those who paid witness or for those poor unfortunates who found themselves unable to attend any of the shows. A wide range of older classics, recent songs and new semi-improvised works make up the set list. If anyone still doubted the sincerity or legitimacy of the reformed Swans, this will silence all arguments.

Previously, Gregory Scharpen’s work as Thomas Carnacki has been strange in an unsettling way, finding haunted parts of the psyche and probing them relentlessly. For this latest album, the music retains its strangeness but now there is a fantastic, warm feeling running through the pieces. There remains a darkness lurking beneath the surface but Scharpen’s humor is more evident now than before.

This debut release from Matt Harries as Brennendes Gehirn is a veritable storm of turbulent noises, ranging from freeform sketches to the kind of almost-danceable rhythms that I would expect from classic albums from Scorn. Bleakly psychedelic sounds reverberate and bump off each other like living creatures as Harries builds a magnificent range of pieces from the sort of junk sounds that can easily be boring or clichéd in less skilled hands.

Despite being one of the most visionary and iconoclastic artists to emerge from the early days of electronic music (as well as a rather fascinating and enigmatic person), Daphne Oram has only recently (and posthumously) begun to get the recognition she deserves.  Unlike the similarly wonderful and massive Oramics compilation from 2010, The Oram Tapes is comprised of largely unheard work from Daphne's mountainous tape archive that is currently being sifted through at Goldsmiths College.  That naturally means a tendency towards sketches and excepts, but it also means that it is sometimes alternately weirder, harsher, better, and more intimate than its predecessor.

The exquisitely curated 12k label has always had a diverse roster, but Gareth Dickson may be the most "out there" artist to be working with the label. In this case, it is because his acoustic guitar and vocal work is so much more along the lines of conventional singer-songwriter when placed aside the label's otherwise more electronic and abstract catalogue. However, Dickson's work has an understated complexity and depth that makes it a perfect fit for the label. And furthermore, this is another excellent work from this Scottish artist.

Recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2010, Slugfield is a trio of Lasse Marhaug, Maja S.K. Ratkje, and Paal Nilssen-Love, three artists who would rarely have the "j" genre applied to them.  The five tracks that make up this improvisation aren't jazzy in the traditional sense, but instead channel that combination of chaotic sonic freedom and moments where the artists lock together as a singular, three headed noise making beast.

Aaron Turner and Faith Coloccia's more esoteric, less traditionally "metal" side label Sige has been responsible for some unexpected, but brilliant pieces of dark sonic exploration in recent years, but with this LP, the most unexpected is simply how normal it sounds. Although lyrically it is as dark and sinister as any metal album, the airy feminine vocals of bassist Sera Timms and drummer Kelly Johnston enshroud it with a certain gauzy bliss that belies its dark content.

Although my initial enthusiasm for this project has been dampened somewhat by Rachel Evans' deluge of similar-sounding releases, her ambitious and divergent debut for Editions Mego's Spectrum Spools imprint demonstrates that she still has some tricks up her sleeve.  While her characteristic layers of gauze-y, ethereal vocals have not vanished entirely, they are unexpectedly infrequent and rarely take center stage.  Instead, this sprawling double-album plunges headlong into burbling, drifting, and subtly hallucinatory synth-based psychedelia and stays there for a pleasantly long time.

Kevin Doherty has long been one of the most quietly compelling artists working in the dark ambient field due to his unusual (and oft-alienating) themes and his inventive artistic purity in realizing them.  This release, which was commissioned by Cold Spring, is constructed entirely from recordings made during the maintenance of a B-2 Stealth Bomber.  While not as objectively impressive as wringing two full albums out of a three-minute recording of a broken heater (Dead Weather Machine) or as musical as his homage to the doomed spaceship in Alien (Nostromo), Stealth is fascinating in its own right and makes a worthy addition to a unique body of work.

Simple, haunting, and frequently plaintive piano music is Robert Haigh's bread and butter. He's a master at making the most out of very little. His career is marked by memorable collaborations with Nurse with Wound, tape shenanigans as Truth Club, pseudo-new age adventures with Silent Storm, and numerous other projects, but his best music is undoubtedly for solo piano. Notes and Crossings is ostensibly a collection of preludes, dances, and improvisations, but the album's collective weight fosters a more cohesive sense. As with much of his work, Haigh's writing here is heavy and introspective, with hints of madness lurking beneath the surface, but it's also immediate and strangely catchy thanks to all the sharp, short, and effective melodies he produces.

As anyone who picked up Siamese Soul or Electric Cambodia last year will probably attest, there was some absolutely amazing music being made in Southeast Asia in the '60s and '70s, so I was pretty thrilled when I heard Soundway was throwing their hat in the Thai pop ring.  As expected, The Sound of Siam is a pretty spectacular album, expertly balancing soulful, funky greatness with exuberant, kitschy fun and unearthing some incredibly obscure artists in the process.