In Versatile Ambience’s second half, Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes cobble together a sequence of individual words and short phrases from a small ensemble of speakers. As each solitary fragment, captured with varying degrees of fidelity, falls into place, a kind of instructional sense emerges from the cut-up poetic randomness: "Your voice arrested; the smithy’s forge displacing hard footfall with scrutiny of boot-leather. Attempts to redirect equally malleable." A final exchange points the way to Versatile’s heart: "You, the anvil?" someone questions. A faded voice replies, "I’m the hammer." Using insect and animal life, tape noise, and acoustic performances from Jacob Duncan and Ken Vandermark, Jerman and Barnes temper their field recordings like a smith tempers metal, constantly moving from ambiguity to particularity and back again, molding their music with heat and cold. Seemingly inconsequential sounds, like the dry splash of fallen leaves, become intricate explosions. The wooden hum of a violin unfurls and sinks like a wave at sea and the album sways between modes, constantly eluding the firm grip of a total view.

Despite being one of the more inventive and intriguing artists in the contemporary experimental music milieu, Australia's Tim Catlin is not a particularly well-known name here in the US, though he has collaborated with both Jon Mueller and Machinefabriek in the past.  It is hard to say whether or not his first full-length for Important will raise his profile though, as it easily stands as one of the most uncompromisingly hyper-minimal and outré releases from the label in recent memory.  For one, it is devoted primarily to works composed for the Vibrissae, a set of "microtonally tuned metal rod instruments" built by Catlin.  Secondly, it provides exactly what the name "Overtone Ensemble" suggests: plenty of eerily harmonizing sustained tones and little more.  As such, it is probably a hard sell for anyone not deep into the more rarified fringes of sound art, but it is a quite unique and wonderful release for those of us with ears attuned to that wavelength, at times exploring terrain not dissimilar to that of Catlin’s label mate Ellen Fullman.  Other times, it probably sounds like absolutely nothing else on earth.

For a band notorious for doing the absurdly perverse, such as releasing two albums both titled The Ape of God simultaneously, but with entirely different track lists, Mickey Rookey Live at London is a surprisingly straight-forward live album. Across 18 songs, spanning since the super-group’s inception in 2000, it works great as a stand-alone release, but also as a distillation of the band’s decade and a half career, captured one night in 2014.

I first encountered John Chantler's work with 2010's Luminous Ground and summarily dismissed him as just another vintage gear fetishist making gently blooping, blurting, and semi-random-sounding modular synth music. In hindsight, I still do not think that I was entirely wrong about that, but I was quite mistaken in my assumption that that album conveyed the full range of Chantler's artistry. While some parts of Which Way to Leave? similarly invite comparisons to the fading analog synth revival that has plagued me for the last few years, the more substantial pieces show that Chantler is a formidable composer with a vibrant and distinctive style of gnarled and grainy unpredictability.  When Chantler is good, he is extremely good.

Lamentably, I have not been following Thomas Brinkmann’s career at all until now, as I had unfairly assumed that he was exclusively a techno producer and probably not of much interest to a connoisseur of the fringes like me.  As it turns out, however, his releases for Editions Mego are quite radically experimental and very much to my taste, particularly this one.  A 1000 Keys has its roots in an intriguing and ambitious premise: Brinkmann basically converted the sound of a grand piano into binary code as a "fatal homage to minimalism and a consequent denial of virtuosity and the idea of creative genius."  Naturally, that claim was more than enough to pique my interest, but I would not have stuck around for very long if that concept had not translated into such a gloriously visceral and dissonant tour de force.  Brinkmann decisively delivers on his bold promise, taking the more chromatic and violent strains of modern classical piano composition to an impressively inhuman extreme.

Considering Rasengan! is a documentation of the first performance this pan-European free jazz quartet ever had together, the balance of unity and chaos here is exceptionally well done. The two pieces that make up this 36 minute performance drift between what sounds like perfect synergy between the players to some all out messes of sound, both of which I have always felt is essential for this style of music. Which, of course, means this is a very impressive record.

Following their recent split release with legends Controlled Bleeding, this newest work from Sparkle in Grey retains the band’s improvisational flexibility, but lightens the mood somewhat. Brahim Izdag takes a lot of directions, from complex post-rock excursions to traditional folk sounds and much in between, but somehow the band still manages to make it sound like a cohesive and unified, if somewhat sprawling record.

This duo’s latest collaboration is a score composed to accompany Philippe Garrel’s haunting 1968 silent film Le Révélateur, which Lattimore and Zeigler have been intermittently been performing across the US since its debut at Ballroom Marfa’s 2013 silent film festival.  Naturally, Lattimore's harp is the most prominent element, imbuing these pieces with an eerily dream-like and rippling "music box" feel.  However, Zeigler’s presence is much more conspicuous here than it was on their previous Slant of Light (2014), balancing the delicate harp motifs with a bevy of synths, processed guitars, and lovely accordion-like melodies.  In general, I am not enthusiastic about soundtracks disembodied from their visual component, but this is an atypically good one, finding the perfect understated balance between whimsy, melancholy, menace, and surreality.

For better or worse, Marielle Jakobsons’ first solo album for Thrill Jockey continues her evolution away from her darker and heavier early work into more mellow, gently psychedelic territory more in line with her Date Palms project.  On the one hand, that makes sense, as Date Palms is probably the most popular of Jakobsons' many endeavors and quasi-New Age revivalism is still more or less in vogue.  On the other hand, I tend to loathe just about anything that resembles toothless pastoral burbling, regardless of who is making it.  Consequently, this direction is not for me much of the time.  While there are admittedly a few faint traces of the Jakobsons’ more distinctive and compelling past scattered throughout Star Core, this album is mostly significant for continuing the ambitious expansion of her palette and for being the first time that Marielle sings on record (as far as I know, anyway).  Also, the album's closing two pieces are sublimely mesmerizing.

Infinite Floor may be his first solo record proper, but Austin's Dylan Cameron has honed his craft as a producer and engineer in that scene for a number of years now. That technical expertise shines through on the eight songs that comprise this record, a suite of songs that ooze with rhythm, yet also a depth and complexity that rivals the most nuanced of electronic artists. Strong rhythms, infectious melodies, and amazing production all come together as an excellent record.

The cover for Stop Time is meant to convey the nature of the tool used to compose it, an invention of Robin Hayward’s called the Hayward Tuning Vine. The idea behind it is to spatialize (and colorize) the relationship between just intervals played, in this case, on a baritone saxophone, a cello, and a microtonal tuba. At the performance from which this album is drawn, each instrumentalist was illuminated in a color corresponding to the pitch he played on the Vine. If the pitch shifted, so did the color. Those pitches were in turn fed to a surround-sound system and projected into different parts of the performance space. In the move to recorded medium, the spatial-visual element is partially flattened, making the slow accrual of rhythm, texture, and harmony the music’s driving feature.

High-volume, high-velocity, whiplash-inducing noise torn screaming from the guts of a haywire machine. As the Pilgrim Talk website notes, Ian M. Fraser programs his computer to make noise. Once finished, circuitry and code do the rest, no human interaction required. The result is so quick-moving and chaotic that absorbing it in the first four or five listens is about as likely as a windshield absorbing a brick in a hurricane.

 

While it has only been seven years since my first exposure to Jenks Miller's Horseback (2009's The Invisible Mountain), the amount of change and evolution the project has undergone is astounding. What began as classically minimalist Sabbath worship veered toward psychedelic southern rock and has now come back as an idiosyncratic electronic record full of untreated vocals and captivating melodies. Even with this wide variation in sound, Dead Ringers manages to stay consistent with Miller's previous body of work while still sounding like a different, but no less amazing beast.

Little Annie’s latest solo album is a bit of a freewheeling evolution upon her recent cabaret/torch song work with pianist Paul Wallfisch, though Wallfisch was notably still involved in the lead single "Dear John."  For the rest of the album, however, Annie alternately collaborated with Toronto multi-instrumentalist Ryan Driver and Brooklyn electronic trio Opal Onyx.  Naturally, the more rhythmic and spoken-word-themed electronic pieces are the more dramatic departures, recalling some of her ‘80s work as Annie Anxiety.  While the Driver pieces show a considerably more subtle change, that seems to be the more significant and (presumably) more lasting one, taking Annie’s "chanteuse" persona in a more lush, lively, and conventionally beautiful direction.  Also of note: the title piece is easily one of the finest pieces of Annie's career.

Following up the concept of their most recent works, the duo of noise artist Mattin and Brainbombs member Anders Bryngelsson have again chosen to subvert two niche genres of music and attempt to recreate them in their own, deconstructed noise rock style. In this case, one album of Harsh Noise Walls, and the other three lengthy treatments of various subgenres of heavy metal. Unsurprisingly, the duo's reconstruction of this music ends up being less about imitation and more of a study and critique of what is expected by those specific styles.

Blizzard is a luxurious reissue of a CDr Aaron Dilloway originally put out on his Hanson imprint back in 2009, presented here in high quality double vinyl. Dilloway and Robert Turman recorded these four pieces together during an actual blizzard, which not only further enhances mood, but also seems to creep in throughout these lengthy compositions. Largely based upon analog synthesizer and tape manipulation, the duo not only captures the frigid, isolated mood of being caught in a massive snowstorm, but the sounds of one as well.

The quartet of Nakama (Adrian L√∏seth Waade on violin, Ayumi Tanaka on piano, Andreas Wildhagen playing drums, and Christian Meaas Svendsen providing double bass) expand upon their use of silence in juxtaposition with experimental jazz from their previous record, Before the Storm, into this newer, more conceptually structured work. The album is based upon Svendsen's structuring, which instructs the performers to improvise their playing reacting to a visual structure, giving the work an additional layer of complexity that makes the album all the more compelling.

M. Geddes Gengras’s Collected Works (The Moog Years) was a huge album for me, but one of reasons that it is so great is that it distilled the best material from several tapes and several years of work.  I wish such retrospectives were more frequent: Gengras’s prodigious output has an exasperating tendency to dilute his artistry, as he is extremely restless in his creative evolution and it seems like every new step winds up publicly documented.  That tendency is probably cool for obsessive fans, but it also has the unfortunate result of leaving a voluminous wake of releases that fail to live up to their potential.  Granted, Gengras is never short on ideas–I just wish he would linger on them long enough to craft something lasting and great more often.  Consequently, this latest record under Gengras's analog techno guise is quite a wonderful surprise, capturing him in unwaveringly fine form.  This is exactly the kind of album that I was hoping for.

Hallow Ground continues their impressive recent run with two vinyl reissues from these erstwhile Coil collaborators and eternally provocative and intriguing iconoclasts.  Both of these releases were originally issued as very limited CDrs on the band’s own Anarcocks label in the mid-2000s, so they never managed to get the attention that they richly deserve, making this quite a worthy pair for a vinyl resurrection (one more so than the other, admittedly).  Unsurprisingly, the Coil influence is quite strong on both, as Massimo and Pierce traffic primarily in stuttering, hallucinatory electronics and eerie moods.  In fact, Jhonn Balance himself even contributes vocals (of a sort) to Toilet Chant’s "E2 = Tree 3."  If Black Sun Productions are derivative of Coil here, however, they seem to have been focused primarily upon the bizarre and unpredictable fare of the Unnatural History series.  More Coil-eque music in that vein is certainly fine by me, but each album also boasts at least one piece that admirably transcends that long shadow to blossom into something wonderfully beautiful and unique.

For their fourth record, the duo of Kane Ikin and Paul Fiocco took a different approach, and decided to revisit fragments of previous recordings that lay forgotten on various hard drives and cassette tapes for a multitude of years. Beginning with these elements, they then reworked the material and recorded new parts, making these recordings a sort of hybrid of unreleased works and new material. Because of that, In The Lens may at times feel more like a collection of songs rather than a full-fledged album, but that is no major detriment considering how well these compositions are executed.