Start to finish, Mirrorring's debut is submerged in a hazy, blurred production aesthetic. This is not only unsurprising, it's exactly what I would have predicted from this collaboration between Liz Harris (of Grouper) and Jesy Fortino (of Tiny Vipers) before hearing a single reverbed note. Fortunately, Liz Harris' age-old trick is a good one, and Fortino's contributions are key, making Foreign Body more than the sum of its contributors' parts.

I am not at all surprised that Jim Jarmusch has finally made an album, but given his past links to folks like RZA,  Mulatu Astatke, and Tom Waits, I did not exactly expect his musical debut to be a duet with a Dutch lutenist.  As it turns out, however, Jozef van Wissem turns out to be a very comfortable and effective foil for Jarmusch's rather abstract guitar work.  While this isn't a deep or substantial album by any means (despite the grandiose implications of the Swedenborgian title), it is nevertheless quite a warm and likable one and it never sounds at all tossed-off or overwrought.

This album is hailed as boasting the most energetic and concise songs of White Hills' career, which seems like a very ill-advised direction for the band to take, given that they are not a band known for great songcraft.  I look to them solely for drugged-out, guitar-worship excess—trying to be direct and hard-hitting does not suit them at all.  Fortunately, they still balance their punchier songs with several prolonged, space-y freakouts.  When those avoid sinking into self-parodying extremes, they can be absolutely brilliant.  I just wish that there were fewer uneven, underwhelming, and frustrating moments between them.

Tomkins is of course more well known for his power electronics work as Sutcliffe Jugend, he (as well as SJ partner Paul Taylor) have been using their own label, Between Silences, to release a multitude of experiments and improvisations. Here, Tomkins goes into a more experimental electronic direction, including seven full discs of material inspired by Japanese pachinko halls.

A posthumous release from this composer, with help from Will Guthrie (percussion) and Elisabeth Gmeiner (violin), there is a significant use of space and ambience from this otherwise noise-centric artist. With its unconventional instrumentation and coda/remix by Schäfer’s collaborator and friend Zbigniew Karkowski, it is a fitting tribute.

Collecting a number of cassette only releases from the '80s, this CD box set charts Colin Potter’s development over the course of about ten years. While the styles he employed are drastically different to his current mode of working, this collection covers everything from Kosmische soundscapes to quirky BBC Radiophonic Workshop style tunes. However, it is possible to hear the embryonic forms of what he is now doing; this may be ancient history but it is a narrative with some meaning today.

I can't remember the last time that I was this wrong-footed and bewildered by an album.  Ostensibly, this is a soundtrack for a silent Ho Tzu Nyen film, but it is difficult to imagine music this jarring accompanying anything.  It's also quite difficult to process that this is even a Black to Comm album, as it sounds mostly like being terrorized in a nightmare by Scott Walker or an undead Jamie Stewart.  I am not sure that is necessarily a good thing (a bit nerve-jangling, actually), but Marc Richter has definitely convinced me that he is capable of making some very bold, unique, and uncompromising music.

Robert Henke has long been an influential elder statesman in the worlds of electronic music and sound design (he's partially responsible for the ubiquity of MacBooks), but Ghosts seems to indicate that it is a role that he is not entirely comfortable with.  Much of the album is every bit as sparsely futuristic, cerebral, and ominous as I have grown to expect from Monolake, but there are also some uncharacteristically blunt nods to some of dance music's more aggressive strains.  The success of that aesthetic experiment is certainly questionable, but Henke has otherwise completed yet another minor masterpiece of razor-sharp focus and clarity.

Robert Haigh’s latest piano-based album is his first for US-based label Unseen Worlds. It has a finely crafted pace with such richness and delicate variety that even the most languid and pristine tracks avoid the doldrums of melancholy.

As a devout fan of drone's weirder fringes, I was casually aware of Razen before this album, but I had never taken the time to dive particularly deeply into their bizarre sonic sorcery: Brecht Ameel & Kim Delcour have historically erred a bit too much on the side of shrillness for my taste. I certainly admired their frayed, idiosyncratic, and somewhat unhinged approach to the genre, but it still made for a somewhat rough listen. This latest release, their first for Three:Four, falls quite squarely in my comfort zone though. For one, there are no bagpipes or modular synths to be found, just an organ and a curious array of traditional acoustic instruments spanning several cultures. More importantly, the band believes that "a presence" surfaced in the church where they recorded these improvisations and that the resulting tapes were supernaturally altered in some way. I am not a big believer in the spirit world, but whatever transpired certainly led to a uniquely compelling album, as the best pieces on The Xvoto Reels take ritualistic acoustic drone to a wonderfully hallucinatory and haunting place.

Date Palms’ Gregg Kowalsky has been atypically quiet over the last several years, as his last solo full-length was 2009's inspired and fitfully mesmerizing Tape Chants. I am a huge fan of tape loops, so it would have absolutely delighted me if Kowalsky had spent most of the last decade secretly deepening and perfecting that side of his art. It is certainly possible that he has been, but L'Orange, L'Orange is not Tape Chants II. Instead, Kowalsky consciously set out to make an album that "felt like a human made it." He certainly succeeded at that, as L'Orange, L'Orange is a warm, drone-based twist on Date Palms' sun-dappled psychedelia. Aesthetically, it also shares some common ground with a lot of the Cluster-loving analog synth fare so much in vogue these days, yet the best moments achieve a lushly enveloping, meditative bliss that is uniquely Kowalsky-ian.

Few people have played as crucial a role in shaping the experimental music landscape as Terry Riley, yet his impact and historical significance have not necessarily translated into a discography of timeless classics ("Poppy Nogood" excepted). This particular reissue, originally released on Shandar back in 1972, still sounds remarkably fresh and contemporary though. Part of that is pure luck, as we are currently in the midst of an aesthetically similar analog synthesizer renaissance, yet these two improvised performances would probably seem immortal and transcendently consciousness-altering in almost any cultural context. Though the two pieces take somewhat different paths and evoke different moods, the overall experience is like being present at an organ mass that slowly transforms into a mass hallucination where all the notes bleed and swirl together in a lysergic haze of otherworldly harmony.

Chartier's work is never something that could be considered "easy" to listen to, but the result is always a rich, rewarding experience. Recurrence, which is a project that was splintered off of one of his earliest works Series, follows this trend. It might be difficult at times, but he has consistently excelled in creating work that captures the intersection of music, visual art, architecture, and science, and again, Recurrence is no different.

Reto Mäder is quite a prolific artist, from his solo work as RM74, with Steven Hess in Ural Umbo to his role in Pendulum Nisum. His more metal-influenced work as Sum of R (Mäder with guitarist Julia Wolf) has a relatively small discography, with this being his second full-length work other than a few self-released CDRs. Ride Out the Waves makes for a dense, psych tinged experiment that recalls some of the best moments of early Godflesh, juxtaposed with abstract free-form experimentation.

Kang continues to show his range and vision as a composer and ensemble leader. Visible Breath is a startling album which takes many of the strands of 20th century composition and weaves them into new musical fabrics, far from imitation and full of innovation. His music hangs like a specter in the room, the notes either merging into each other like a ghost passing through a wall.

As the title suggests, this live album was recorded in London’s current hot spot for weirdo music and finds the trio taking their work further into the inner recesses of free improvisation. As expected, given their track record as a group and as solo performers in their own rights, Café Oto/London swerves between danger and calm; safety and turmoil. Every adjective ever thrown at free jazz is applicable but, more often than not, inadequate.

Across 13 tracks of sample abuse and digital detritus, the debut album from this duo is a hyper-kinetic, violent outburst of occasionally musical noise that mixes up some odd concoctions that sometimes work, and sometimes don't.

Considering Roden's recent album Proximities, an abstract, lo-fi piece of sound art, this is an odd step. Created through studio improvisations that were explicitly aimed at avoiding electronic instruments, it becomes a very different beast, which is made even more apparent once actual vocals appear, for better or worse.

Now on their third full-length, School of Seven Bells have evolved into playing a sleek, manicured style of dream-pop constructed with the live experience in mind. While I have mixed feelings on the album start to finish, Ghostory does contain some powerful moments within its palette of sounds.