Psychedelic folk stalwart Ben Chasny's newest album speaks volumes through its packaging. Small observations hint at the nature of the music within: tranquil cover art picturing three hand-painted, mystic animal figures; a dedication to the late Dr. Ragtime in the liner notes; and the album's vivid title, Asleep on the Floodplain, referencing a peaceful state of rest and rejuvenation amidst a greater chaos.

Dawnbringer is Chris Black, a contemporary metal musician who writes and produces all of his own material and performs most of it on record. His fourth full-length album is superb, finding inspiration in traditional heavy metal forms and injecting them with Black's own character and creativity.

The best description of Ashley Paul's music that I can think of is that it sounds like she heard a Jandek album one day and thought "Yes!  This is exactly what I want to do!  But better, obviously."  I mean that in the best possible sense though, even if it is bizarre to hear a presumably well-adjusted, conservatory-trained Brooklyn composer make something that resembles very creepy, sociopathic, and unsettling outsider art.  Heat Source is a wonderfully broken-sounding, discordant, and challenging effort.

Disparition is the solo project of Brooklyn composer Jon Bernstein, who is best known as the man behind the music for Welcome to Night Vale.  Most of his previous non-Night Vale work has been in the ambient/ambient-techno veins, but this latest release is a wildly ambitious departure, enlisting a large cast of disparate collaborators for a stylistically eclectic This Mortal Coil-style tour de force.  Clocking in at almost 2 hours, Granicha can be a bit of an overwhelming and disorienting listen, but it somehow still manages to err on the side of far too many good ideas rather than too few.

Franz Kafka died of starvation on June 3rd, 1924, his throat cinched by laryngeal tuberculosis. The intravenous delivery of food to sick patients wouldn’t be invented for another 35 years and the swelling in Kafka’s throat caused by the infection made swallowing even water difficult. Forbidden from speaking by his doctor at the sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, Kafka would often communicate with his friends and visitors by writing small notes on scraps of paper. Some such scraps were less notes and more fragments or disconnected ideas, phrases impossible to understand without context. It’s something Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, recalls in the opening pages of the booklet that accompanies Joseph Clayton Mills’s The Patient. "Usually these notes were mere hints; his friends guessed the rest," he writes. Mills, accompanied by Olivia Block, Noé Cuéllar (Coppice), Steven Hess (Pan•American, Haptic, Innode), and Jason Stein take a shot at interpreting those fragments on this record, using Mills’s textual score to trace a line around Kafka’s final abraded thoughts.

Drumm’s latest is quite an unusual and expectation-subverting one, given that his previous releases for the label have largely been genre-defining noise masterpieces. Trouble is definitely not that, nor does it bear much in common with any of Kevin's other major efforts.  Billed as "54-minute excursion into the netherworld of the audio spectrum," the piece is an extremely quiet and amorphous experiment in queasily dissonant harmonies that teeters dangerously close to being complete silence.

Liz Harris is becoming an increasingly complex and compelling artist, as her discography has started making unexpected leaps into the past that feel like leaps into the future.  Originally recorded in Portugal in 2011 with only a four-track and a piano, Ruins feels like a bold yet natural progression from last year's excellent The Man Who Died in His Boat (itself recorded from 2008 and 2010).  Consequently, it is completely unclear whether Liz is moving towards a simpler, more naked approach in general or if this is just a one-off experiment before she unleashes another salvo of reverb-soaked dreaminess à la Alien Observer/Dream Loss.  Regardless of its place in Grouper's continued evolution, however, Ruins is yet another fine album, boasting several of Harris's strongest compositions to date.

Following quickly on from last year’s …Sun, Broken…, Mugstar have extended the formula that blew me away on that previous album and have made an impossibly shimmering, psychedelic and, most importantly, rocking album. Lime may not rewrite the history of rock music but it does act like the fruit it is named after, it cuts through the senses in a most pleasant fashion.

Heavy on percussion, the group have honed their rhythmic edge into a surgical knife. Stark, effective bass lines (sometimes just two notes) complete the rhythmic picture, adding a muscle to the rigid bones of the drumming. There is a vaguely ritualistic feeling to the music, for example on "Starts/Ends," where the percussion dances around itself to create a cathartic and engaging sound. Gavin Duffy’s immediate bass playing drags the music from this weirdly transcendent place back to the dance floor.

Few artists can boast debut albums as stunning as this one, making its reissue after nearly three decades of unavailability something of a major event.  Originally recorded in 1983, the Soul Possession sessions assembled a murderer's row of talented collaborators such as Crass and UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood to back young Annie Anxiety's animated and unseemly tales from the dark side.  Rightfully considered an underground classic, this album captures a rare "super group" in which everyone involved was at the top of their game, giving birth to something truly disturbing and visionary.

This digital-only EP released as an appetizer for the latest MBM full-length is a deliciously weird mixture of the sounds and ideas that make Meat Beat records so wonderful and unpredictable.

With mainstay Vincent De Roguin absent and Stephen O'Malley exercising sharp restraint, Æthenor have released their best album and maybe one of the best live recordings I have ever heard. Assembled from three shows recorded in Oslo, Norway during 2010, En Form For Blå captures Æthenor improvising a loose electric sound bound expertly together by the talents of percussionist Steve Noble and one-half of the Ulver crew. Together they create a surprisingly intelligible sound, which betrays its impromptu origin.

Although they appeared on a variety of compilations in the early 1980s, including the legendary Rising from the Red Sands, Pseudocode mostly remained unknown, putting out their own cassettes and the occasional odd 7", but never reaching the same levels of notoriety that contemporaries in the early industrial underground enjoyed. Nearly 30 years later, some of these earliest recordings have been issued, for the first time, in a deluxe double LP package.

Recorded together using similar techniques, but vastly different source materials, these two releases feel like different parts of the same whole, with both of them emphasizing Mathieu's balancing of texture and melody, to excellent effect, through the use of processed, pre-recorded compositions.

I don't understand how Erik Carlson has managed to stay so woefully underappreciated and low-profile for so long, as he has a very distinctive and appealing aesthetic.  Also, he has recently been largely infallible quality-wise. That hot streak continues here: wisely sticking closely to the sound he intermittently perfected with 2009's excellent Charmed Birds Against Sorcery, Carlson has delivered yet another impressive album of spidery, shimmering beauty.  It could benefit from a bit more bite though.

This album is very deceptively packaged and presented, but in the best way possible: the tame cover art and the word "folk" did nothing at all to prepare me for the extremely fun and quirky pseudo-surf gems within.  Of course, many of these pieces were originally folk songs, but they have been so jazzed-up with kitschy organs and twangy, tremelo-happy guitars as to make that term a wildly misleading understatement. Curator Stuart Ellis has assembled an improbable monster of a compilation.