Maximalism is in vogue for electronic musicians right now. With the rise of commercialized dubstep (aka "brostep"), this trend is unlikely to be reversed in 2012. Luckily, John Talabot is making fantastically balanced, listenable dance music a bit left of center; his debut album, ƒIN, downplays the genre's current above-ground trends in favor of his own nuanced production.

This album is a collection of songs that musically are on the listenable side of mediocre but are let down by poor vocals. It’s obvious they’re aspiring to being underground metal titans like the Melvins or High on Fire but they aren’t showing much promise. Ladrón is the sound of competent musicians capable of throwing together pretty good songs but lack the spark of excitement to set them apart from their peers.

The artists featured on this compilation aim to merge Costa Gröhn’s field recordings of a church and of a funfair to create a unique document representing Hamburg. The majority of the artists featured here struggle to create much worth listening to as they are limited by a poor selection of starting materials. It’s a nice idea but it doesn’t quite come together.

Jakob Olausson follows up his acclaimed album Moonlight Farm with another entrancing record. Its hypnotic quality comes partly from song structures which seem looser than they actually are, and from the stark contrast between emotionally raw lyrics, some sparkling guitar notes, and his doubled or heavily echoed voice.

This live recording from 2009 sees Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter team up with Fabrizio Palumbo, Paul Beauchamp and Julia Kent to perform one of, if not, the classic Nurse With Wound album Soliloquy for Lilith. I cannot pretend that they have succeeded in recreating that amazing work but they have made something equally engaging if aesthetically different to the original. Stapleton is still acting as an aerial or a receiver for the basic sound but the other players build on it to form an entirely novel and separate entity.

Despite a career spanning decades as both a performer and music theorist, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan rarely played in front of a microphone. This album is just an instance in his artistic life, recorded in Bombay only a handful of years before his death but it shows a singer in his prime. His command of his voice and reverence for his art comes through the fog of the 78 recordings with a vigor undiminished by time or culture.

Between this and the recently released Imikuzushi live collaboration with Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke, Ambarchi's work is drifting more and more into the realm of "music" rather than his more abstract tendencies. While the collaboration is a full on psychedelic rock blast, Audience of One is a more restrained, structured affair that features, among other things, an Ace Frehely cover.

As one of many of Dominick Fernow's many aliases, the debut of Vatican Shadow in 2010 could have ended up another one-off project to never be heard from again. However, going in a rhythmic direction rather than just harsh noise made for a project that stood out among its peers. Here, the second release and first full length is re-released on vinyl with a significant leap in sound quality.

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.

As much as I enjoy all of the musicians involved, the recently reincarnated Fenn O'Berg has thus far failed to recapture the deranged magic of their early years for me.  They can still be quite good though (and occasionally surprising).  These recordings from their 2010 Japanese tour share some of the muted, brooding tone of 2010's In Stereo, but also demonstrate that this laptop trio has not entirely abandoned their more wild, spontaneous, and absurdist tendencies.  I'm not sure if that necessarily makes In Hell stronger than its predecessor, but it at least seems a bit more striking and memorable.