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.

I am not at all surprised that Jim Jarmusch has finally made an album, but given his past links to folks like RZA,  Mulatu Astatke, and Tom Waits, I did not exactly expect his musical debut to be a duet with a Dutch lutenist.  As it turns out, however, Jozef van Wissem turns out to be a very comfortable and effective foil for Jarmusch's rather abstract guitar work.  While this isn't a deep or substantial album by any means (despite the grandiose implications of the Swedenborgian title), it is nevertheless quite a warm and likable one and it never sounds at all tossed-off or overwrought.

This album is hailed as boasting the most energetic and concise songs of White Hills' career, which seems like a very ill-advised direction for the band to take, given that they are not a band known for great songcraft.  I look to them solely for drugged-out, guitar-worship excess—trying to be direct and hard-hitting does not suit them at all.  Fortunately, they still balance their punchier songs with several prolonged, space-y freakouts.  When those avoid sinking into self-parodying extremes, they can be absolutely brilliant.  I just wish that there were fewer uneven, underwhelming, and frustrating moments between them.

Tomkins is of course more well known for his power electronics work as Sutcliffe Jugend, he (as well as SJ partner Paul Taylor) have been using their own label, Between Silences, to release a multitude of experiments and improvisations. Here, Tomkins goes into a more experimental electronic direction, including seven full discs of material inspired by Japanese pachinko halls.

A posthumous release from this composer, with help from Will Guthrie (percussion) and Elisabeth Gmeiner (violin), there is a significant use of space and ambience from this otherwise noise-centric artist. With its unconventional instrumentation and coda/remix by Schäfer’s collaborator and friend Zbigniew Karkowski, it is a fitting tribute.

Collecting a number of cassette only releases from the '80s, this CD box set charts Colin Potter’s development over the course of about ten years. While the styles he employed are drastically different to his current mode of working, this collection covers everything from Kosmische soundscapes to quirky BBC Radiophonic Workshop style tunes. However, it is possible to hear the embryonic forms of what he is now doing; this may be ancient history but it is a narrative with some meaning today.

Robert Henke has long been an influential elder statesman in the worlds of electronic music and sound design (he's partially responsible for the ubiquity of MacBooks), but Ghosts seems to indicate that it is a role that he is not entirely comfortable with.  Much of the album is every bit as sparsely futuristic, cerebral, and ominous as I have grown to expect from Monolake, but there are also some uncharacteristically blunt nods to some of dance music's more aggressive strains.  The success of that aesthetic experiment is certainly questionable, but Henke has otherwise completed yet another minor masterpiece of razor-sharp focus and clarity.

I can't remember the last time that I was this wrong-footed and bewildered by an album.  Ostensibly, this is a soundtrack for a silent Ho Tzu Nyen film, but it is difficult to imagine music this jarring accompanying anything.  It's also quite difficult to process that this is even a Black to Comm album, as it sounds mostly like being terrorized in a nightmare by Scott Walker or an undead Jamie Stewart.  I am not sure that is necessarily a good thing (a bit nerve-jangling, actually), but Marc Richter has definitely convinced me that he is capable of making some very bold, unique, and uncompromising music.

Robert Haigh’s latest piano-based album is his first for US-based label Unseen Worlds. It has a finely crafted pace with such richness and delicate variety that even the most languid and pristine tracks avoid the doldrums of melancholy.

Few people have played as crucial a role in shaping the experimental music landscape as Terry Riley, yet his impact and historical significance have not necessarily translated into a discography of timeless classics ("Poppy Nogood" excepted). This particular reissue, originally released on Shandar back in 1972, still sounds remarkably fresh and contemporary though. Part of that is pure luck, as we are currently in the midst of an aesthetically similar analog synthesizer renaissance, yet these two improvised performances would probably seem immortal and transcendently consciousness-altering in almost any cultural context. Though the two pieces take somewhat different paths and evoke different moods, the overall experience is like being present at an organ mass that slowly transforms into a mass hallucination where all the notes bleed and swirl together in a lysergic haze of otherworldly harmony.