Every great once in awhile an album comes along that completely blows me away. This is one of them. Within the first few chords of the opening song I can feel Overloaded Ark singing in my bones. It is an album that reminds me of the power music has for elevating the mind and spirit. When listening to these songs it is hard to be unmoved and unhappy. Overloaded Ark is rapture made audible, joy stirred by a resonant interplay of voice and strings, a pure sonorous ecstasy.

In a perfect world, Marielle Jakobsons' blackened and visceral monster of a solo debut would cause legions of uninspired drone artists to smash their laptops and sine oscillators in frustration and scurry about trying to find something else to do. I suspect that probably will not happen, but Ore is nevertheless one singularly scary, fully-formed, and brilliant work.

As a member of the Roll Over Rover roster, a Bay Area based group of musicians headed by Sean McCann, Kellen Shipley continues in the label’s pioneering spirit of bridging the varied forms of experimental music with the pop medium so many embraced as children and have reluctantly held onto as tastes have shifted and moods changed. Deep Breaths, for all its avant pretense, finds Shipley comfortably navigating the choppy waters of blending fresh and salt water with a potent combination of carefully crafted drones amid churning pop melodies.

While ostensibly only a mere remix album, this is actually something far more miraculous and novel: a second chance.  The original All is Wild, All is Silent was a frustrating and somewhat clumsy album by a generally good band that seemed to have lost their way.  Fortunately, eleven of Balmorhea’s talented pals have helpfully erased their mistakes and resurrected the material as a far more compelling and impressive work.  Every band should get friends like these.

Issued earlier this year as an LP, the latest Final album is rereleased digitally with almost an entire second album’s worth of alternate mixes that combine the strongest moments of Justin Broadrick’s long-standing side project into a single work.  It meshes the dark, moody ambience of his discography with the more recently resurrected love of dirty noise into 80 minutes of melancholy melody and speaker shredding squall.

While initially I thought that Luminous Night was a weak follow up to 2007’s Shelter from the Ash, it is obvious from repeated listening sessions that this album is a much more complicated and layered work than Ben Chasny’s previous album. The rich musical tapestry that his group has created here sounds timeless; that inimitable mix of rock, traditional and atmospheric music that sets Chasny and his companions apart from other bands.

To commemorate its 12th year in existence, Hymen, the more "conventional" step-child of the Ant-Zen label, releases this massive two disc compilation of its roster, and it is packed with the electronic, IDM, and occasionally pop elements of the label that we’ve all grown to know and love.

While both these artists are known for their work with the purely synthetic world of sound, here both add more traditional and organic instrumentation to their sound, and the result is a warm and melodic set of tracks that occasionally allow in a bit of dissonance.

Culled from home demo recordings, this new artist flexes his muscles in that dark area where metal, drone, and noise mingle, and the result is a set of five very different tracks that capture the essence of the respective genres, but never feels like by the numbers simplicity.

This album lives up to the band’s name, being a mechanized, but monochromatic, noisy death machine, hitting menacing metal tinged levels unheard since the end of Godflesh. It focuses on the aggression absent from Broadrick's newer work, and serves as the dark demonic yang to Jesu's pop-tinged yin.  It is undeniably the work of Justin Broadrick, but feels more like a collaboration as opposed to a solo project, with the other members bringing their own elements to the table.

Rome's bold and prismatic vision is anchored by one of the strongest vocalists I've heard this year. Jerome Reuter's commanding and resonant voice is a significant part of this band's appeal, but it's the exotic and manifold musical styles used throughout the record that generate the most excitement and make Flowers From Exile a joy to hear.

This 10 CD boxed set is an epic trek through Ferrari’s electronic compositions for Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) from his early experiments in musique concrète in the 1950s up until his death (and beyond in one case). Along with detailed notes by Ferrari or those close to him, this is the definitive collection that covers all his most important works. This is essential listening of the highest order.

Deeming this meeting of minds a classic is certainly beyond cliché at this point, though to some degree the album still does not receive the recognition garnered by other ventures that the collaborators were individually involved in. Yet Bureau B, whose recent digs through the archives have revealed and shared some true gems of late, has graced the world with the album again, and its flow and thoroughness of conception is as apparent now as ever. There is a dignified sense of space here that fuels these compositions and promises them a life far beyond the 30+ years already lived by them.

Since the early '90s, C. Spencer Yeh has followed the typical path of the contemporary noise-maker, releasing dozens of solo and collaborative works through numerous labels on every format imaginable.  Whether it is released under the Burning Star Core moniker or under his proper name, the varying quality and availability of Yeh’s work makes understanding it, let alone assessing it, a difficult task. It shouldn’t be that way. Challenger provides all the proof needed to establish him as versatile and provocative musician.

The most appealing thing about Peter Swanson and Gabriel Saloman is that compared to other groups from the great noise trend of the mid 2000s was their devotion to the psychedelic power of sheer sound. They never followed the ultimately boring route of power electronics white-out nor the well-trodden path of post-industrial filth, instead their focus was on the shimmering edges of reality that lay between the layers of noise. Their contribution to Staalplaat’s Mort aux Vaches series is no letdown in this respect as the four untitled pieces on this CD shake my immediate reality to the point where it is almost possible to see through to the other side.

This second compilation of Salmou "Doueh" Baamar's exquisite guitar playing is as enchanting as the previous one. Trawling through his recordings from the '90s has turned up more gems, some as expected and one particularly surprising extended guitar workout. Yet, his guitar playing is just one facet of this wonderful music; it is how his western-influenced style is fully integrated into Sahrawi folk music to create something truly unique.

Consistent with the 12k sublabel's aesthetic, Tu M' are a duo of multimedia artists that work not only in the realms of sound, but in the video arts as well.  Monochrome is four long tracks of laptop improvisations, recorded live by the duo.  The video accompaniment is available via their Web site, but is unnecessary to enjoy the music. The album lives up to its title and is an intentionally minimalistic piece of ambient sound.

With drums and percussion courtesy of Aaron Moore (Volcano the Bear), this collaboration is a purely absurd, Dadaist outburst of jazz influenced noise.  With cluster bomb percussion that rivals Peter Brotzmann's most chaotic compositions, violin abuse, and spastic turntable-ism, this is two sidelong tracks of noise that resembles very little else, which is probably a good thing for the world.

Relatively soon after their "return" album, Part-Primitiv, the classic Factory act has released another long player of new material that channels their classic post punk days into a more modern context, though here with an almost overly nostalgic bent that leaves it sounding a bit dated.

This lovingly assembled tribute to revered, yet remarkably obscure, folkie Kath Bloom combines one album of covers by a haphazard array of semi-famous fans with a retrospective of some of Bloom’s own material.  While certainly an enjoyable curiosity, the covers album does not come close to capturing the fragile intensity and beauty of the original material.