I can think of few bands that are as cheerfully single-minded in their aesthetic vision as Esplendor Geométrico.  In fact, I suspect I could have written a remarkably accurate (if vague) review of Fluida Mekaniko without ever having heard it: lots of visceral and hypnotic percussion loops, no melodic hooks at all, plenty of low-level radio wave and static chaos, and some occasional tuneless and rambling vocals from Saverio Evangelista.  Done.  Predictably, Fluida Mekaniko DOES provide all of that, but I keep buying Esplendor Geométrico albums because they also tend to feature at least one or two absolutely mesmerizing pieces where everything comes together perfectly and Arturo Lanz seems like a goddamn genius. Fluida Mekaniko continues that tradition beautifully and even finds room to let in a bit more light and nuance than usual.  As a result, it is probably one of EG's strongest and most listenable albums yet.

It occurred to me the other day that there was an incredible wave of great, experimentally minded solo guitarists several years back (Area C, Black Eagle Child, Talvihorros) that has either gone completely silent or moved into very different territory and that no one has quite risen up to replace them.  Thankfully, however, the wildly prolific Justin Wright has not gone anywhere and continues to be a tireless torchbearer, both through his Sonic Meditations label and his own Expo Seventy project.  Given the sheer volume of Expo Seventy releases, I tend to only check in on the major ones and this one fits the bill: recorded as part of a three-week art event in Kansas City (America: Here and Now), Wright was able to assemble a like-minded quartet featuring two drummers to back his slow-burning psych-rock pyrotechnics.  At its best, the results are surprisingly accessible and anthemic, like a time-stretched and deconstructed Black Sabbath jam experienced through a heady fog of drugs.

I never know what to expect when putting on a new Ralf Wehowsky album. He has never let me down, but what form of strange electronics and unconventional compositional techniques he employs is always a mystery. Flurry of Delusion is then, fittingly, another extremely abstract and unpredictable work from the legendary member of P16.D4 that is as much random improvisation as it is rigidly structured composition. Maybe. Or maybe not. The confusion is intentional, by the way.

After a lengthy dormancy, Andrea Chiaravalli reinstated his long standing harsh electronics project Iugula-Thor in 2012 and has been active ever since, releasing some of the strongest work of his career. This is the first full fledged release since then, with the prior ones being largely splits and singles, and also features Chiaravalli partnering with Paolo Bandera (Sshe Retina Stimulants, Sigillum S) to create a bleak, but multifaceted record of diverse electronics.

Rashad Becker’s 2013 debut album was a singular and radical work of art, resembling nothing less than field recordings from a sinister extra-dimensional jungle.  For this follow-up, however, he apparently opted not to try to blow my mind a second time and instead just deepened and expanded upon what he had already done previously.  Naturally, the second volume is every bit as deranged and wrong-sounding as the first, so my favorite hallucinatory and Lovecraftian aural nightmare essentially just became twice as long.  I am quite fine with that state of affairs.

Few current artists are as consistent and reliably absorbing as William Basinski, as he has carved a wonderful career out of conjuring work of hypnotic beauty from simple, well-chosen snippets from his backlog of decaying tapes.  It is not nearly as simple a formula as it sounds, but Basinski always manages to make it look effortless anyway.  Recently, however, he seems to have become a bit restless with that aesthetic, as he transformed the more traditionally Basinski-esque The Cascade into The Deluge with the aid of some feedback loops of varying lengths.  A Shadow in Time is an even more radical leap forward, as the title piece feels like a pile-up of blurred tape loops woven into a vibrantly shifting composition.  The other piece, Basinski's gorgeous tribute to David Bowie, is admittedly a bit less adventurous in structure, but is not devoid of unexpected twists either.

This is a long-awaited CD reissue of a largely unheard 45 RPM art edition LP from 2014. Although the idea of getting a small Steven Stapleton painting with an album was certainly appealing at the time, I was understandably a bit apprehensive about buying an expensive album that could easily turn out to just be a bunch of regurgitated studio scraps or live recordings.  I passed.  As it turns out, however, The Great Ecstasy was (and is) actually a surprisingly excellent and cohesive album.  More importantly, this reissue appends another great rarity to the original release in the form of Silver Bromide's "Circles of Confusion," which is one of my favorite NWW pieces in years.  Given that copies of Silver Bromide are currently going for $1500, this humble CD holds an awful lot of appeal.

Staalplaat's tireless trawl through Bryn Jones's endless archive yielded yet another fine pair of releases to close out 2016.  Jerusalaam, the stronger and more traditionally Muslimgauze-esque of the two,  is not so much a new find as it is a straight-up reissue of the fourth album from 1998's Tandoori Dog boxed set.  However, that absorbing and varied release is expanded with a couple of lengthy unused pieces recorded for the Return of Black September album.  The much stranger Mohammad Ali Jinnah album has an even more perplexing and convoluted provenance, as it is basically an alternate version of 2002's Sarin Israel Nes Ziona, with significant variations in sequence and song lengths.  Staalplaat rightly describes it as "a release unlike anything else in Jones' discography," as classic Muslimgauze fare rubs elbows with some rather spirited forays into frayed breakbeats, experiments in obsessive repetition, and four-on-the-floor house thump.

I think at some point in the near future Richard Chartier will be releasing new material under his own name again, but as of late his focus has been on his Pinkcourtesyphone project. There are similarities between the two monikers, but PCP tends to eschew the conceptual academics of his other work for the sake of tongue-in-cheek kitchiness, but still is an unabashed showcase for his subtle touch when it comes to performance and composition. Additionally, this new record shows him honing his craft even more, making for his most fully realized album to date.

For Eric Hardiman’s Rambutan project, 2016 was an uncharacteristically quiet year. This new tape from the Upstate New York multi-instrumental experimentalist did not appear until November, and as best as I can tell it was the only release of the year. Perhaps that singular focus on this album was a good thing, because Universal Impulses is another fascinating release, up there with Remember Me Now and Inverted Summer as a complex, beautiful and mysterious work.

Richard Skelton was atypically quiet in 2016, as he and Autumn Richardson seemed to be focusing primarily upon their publishing ventures, poetry, visual art, and Skelton's esoteric and multifarious research projects.  Fortunately, however, the duo managed to release this EP in December to accompany a series of collages they completed during a month-long residency in the Orkneys.  While it only clocks in at a lean 20 minutes, Earth by Means of the Currents is one of the more focused and powerful releases in the duo’s collaborative oeuvre, featuring both a solid foray into their warmly beautiful drone comfort zone and a buzzing, gnarled plunge into its negative image.

As a complement to 2014's Francisco Lopez curated audio-MAD, this is another work, compiling artists from his current home in the Netherlands (both permanent residents and those who were just spending time in the city) with the intent of giving lesser-known electronic artists a wider amount of exposure. However, for such a minimalist composer, Lopez has had a maximalist streak as far as presenting material as of late. The aforementioned audio-MAD (which compiled material from artists residing in Madrid) was a two data DVD compilation of 100 artists, and 12 hours of uncompressed audio. audio-DH (for Den Haag/The Hague) goes even further: issued on a custom USB card and is compilation of 190 artists and over 16 hours of audio. So a quick listen it is not, but it is a rich and unique compilation of many artists I had not been familiar with in the past, but now am most definitely interested in examining more closely.

For the second part of the quadrilogy, the cage that composer David First decided to lock himself into is perhaps the most sonically diverse and flexible of the chosen cages: the venerable Korg MS-20 synthesizer. Compared to the previous work using an acoustic guitar, and the future two involving blues harp and sitar, the massive array of knobs and options almost seem not limiting enough, conceptually speaking. As a whole, First adheres to his staunchly ascetic approach to composition and delivers an appropriately focused meditation on the instrument.

Both Kinit Her and Wreathes are projects of the Wisconsin duo of Nathanial Ritter and Troy Schafer, and while there is clearly overlap in the two, there are also some distinctly different elements. The former is more deeply rooted in folk traditions, which an emphasis on medieval moods and esoteric concepts (but none of questionable politics), while the latter is almost a post-punk, electronic take on those stylistic flourishes. Both of these new releases are excellent, and present the duo taking both projects in increasingly varied and complex directions.

It has been an interesting couple of years for the former holy trinity of the UK’s blackened and gloom-shrouded post-industrial dance deconstructionists: Raime picked up guitars and turned into a post-hardcore band, Haxan Cloak started collaborating with Björk and composing film scores with NIN's Atticus Ross, and Demdike Stare doubled-down hard on their techno roots with a series of extremely beat-oriented 12" singles.  Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker’s latest full-length roughly picks up right where the extremely varied Testpressing series left off, leaving behind most of the duo's more indulgently bleak and bombastic tendencies for something considerably more visceral, pared-down, and propulsive.  While I almost always favor the more abstract/drone side of the spectrum to the dancefloor, Demdike Stare prove to be the rare exception to that rule, as they are a hell of lot more listenable when their darkness is more understated and spectral.  Some more melody admittedly would be nice, but Wonderland is quite a strong, striking, and beautifully focused work.

It is rare for me to get very enthusiastic about tour-only releases, as I feel that artists generally want their best material to be heard by as many people as possible rather than just a handful of collectors.  This compilation of The Legendary Pink Dots’ ephemeral holiday EPs was an exception though, as it has always driven me slightly crazy that I had missed the boat on so many special one-off releases.  Also, Edward Ka-Spel always seemed like the rare artist who might be unpredictable and prolific enough to cheerfully release his best material in an incredibly limited edition.  Upon hearing the sprawling Festive, I can safely say that that was not the case, as a lot of LPD's holiday epics tend to be drifting, understated soundscapes or amusing experiments in twisting and tweaking samples, but a few pieces are legitimately striking and the cumulative effect of all this material at once is pleasantly overwhelming.  As such, this prolonged plunge into the benignly deranged holiday rabbit hole is strictly for fans of the Dots' more abstract and unrepentantly indulgent side.

There is a distinctly lo-fi theme that runs through Colin Blanton's (ant'lrd) newest release. The three lengthy pieces are all nicely covered in a light haze of noise and distortion, but it never fully obscures the beautiful melodies and motorized rhythms that lurk beneath that scratchy, decaying surface. Instead, that element of dirt and grime enhances what it covers, resulting in an album that wonderfully blends the raw with the delicate.

One important lesson that I have learned over the years is that promising-sounding collaborations between experimental music artists are almost always disappointing, as the resultant releases tend to be half-baked edits and reworkings of improvised jams that occurred when all the musicians involved happened to be in the same town for a day.  Consequently, it was a delight to discover that this trio of Aidan Baker,  Andrea Belfi, and Erik Skodvin feel like the exact opposite of that. While this second full-length for Miasmah was admittedly improvised over the course of a couple days in Berlin, Palace is the work of a band with both strong vision and razor-sharp focus. Of the three artists involved, Palace is most similar to Skodvin's solo aesthetic, but these deliciously tension-filled and slow-burning reveries easily transcend the sum of their parts.

Late last year, Rutger Zuyderveldt teamed up with violinist Anne Bakker for the brilliantly tense, nerve-jangling, and unique Deining EP.  Naturally, when I learned that Bakker had returned to the Machinefabriek fold for an even longer work, I had to hear it.  As it turns out, however, Crumble is absolutely nothing like its predecessor at all.  Part of that is certainly due to the additional presence of vocalist Edita Karkoschka, but (as with Deining) it is ultimately Zuyderveldt that pieces everything together in service of his vision.  That vision, in this case, is quite a bizarre one, quixotically cramming gorgeous neo-classicism, sultry vocals, spiritual-sounding reveries, and a whole lot of harsh noise into a single longform piece.  As a whole, it seems a bit maniacally over-ambitious and fragmented to me, but it definitely contains a handful of wonderful moments.

Following up her excellent album Gather & Release from earlier this year on Category of Manifestation, percussionist Sarah Hennies showcases her continually developing skills as both a composer and performer. Intentionally stretching the definition of what truly constitutes percussion at times, Everything Else is another distinctly different, yet no less amazing entry in her discography.