This "musical illustration" of the events occurring in the brain following a lethal stroke is a dramatic, chilling and emotional portrait. Musically, it is removed from anything else Nurse With Wound have done (even if it does touch on similar influences as the rest of Steve Stapleton’s body of work) as Bowers adds a more composerly hand to Stapleton’s surrealist drift. Bowers and Stapleton have crafted something unique that does not fit neatly into any categories, even amongst Nurse With Wound’s expanded horizons. This is draining, devastating and utterly compelling.
Two sides of a paranormal equation are presented in this cluster of songs. Decorated with primitive drums, avant drones, eclectic voices, and an array of stringed splendor, the two groups arrive at a meeting ground in the crossroads, with the arcane formulas of folk magic flowing down one street, and the poetic musings of a post-modern bard immersed in his lyrical wonderland on the other. Where one is ecstatic in the throes of Dionysian abandon, the other zones out into a haunted, rarefied Aethyr.
The year's first contender for top honors comes from violinist and composer Eyvind Kang. This new full-length on Ipecac sits among his major works, displaying a rare breadth of compositional talent, spectacular playing, and raw emotion.
Loops of Your Heart is Axel Willner, better known as The Field for his three albums to date on Kompakt. His debut full-length under this new moniker sets aside the minimal techno formulae of his primary guise for a far more ambient experience. Unfortunately, he discards many of the distinct characteristics of The Field in the process, downplaying his established strengths.
It seems that I badly underestimated William Basinski, as I stopped following his career several years ago out of frustration with his apparent creative stagnation.  His methods and conceptual underpinnings have certainly evolved steadily, but it seemed like the end result was always something murky, free-floatingly melancholy, and endlessly repeating, regardless of how he got there.  Then I heard this 2009 album and was unexpectedly floored.  Basinski seems to have found whatever it was that he was missing.
This English guitarist's first full-length is just as impressive as last year's excellent Brown Bear EP, but displays quite a significant and somewhat unexpected evolution.  Rather than playing up the psychedelic touches and constant sense of motion that made his earlier work immediately gratifying, Dean has taken the more difficult and distinctive road of shifting his emphasis more strongly towards space and decay.  Thankfully, his melodies are usually strong enough to support that potentially perilous decision.  As a result, Son of the Black Peace is as much a bold artistic statement as it is a great album.
Craig Tattersall and Andrew Hargreaves are The Boats, a UK duo that have an exceptional ability to mix abstract electronics, shoegaze drones, and jazz-influenced acoustic drumming into a singular work that sounds like no one else. The small symphonies and genre hopping on here are simply brilliant and unique.
In their third collaboration, Christian Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto go for a more conceptual approach: Sakamoto recorded 24 piano improvisations to open concerts during a Japanese tour, each within a different key. These 24 pieces were then handed over to Fennesz, who added his touch to them. The result is a compelling, if sprawling, work of gentle improvisation.
This archival release, captured live in Philadelphia, is a valuable companion piece to the previous Bardo Pond and Tom Carter session, 4/23/03, which was originally released on CD nine years ago, and is receiving a vinyl reissue this week. It is a joy to hear another side of Carter and Bardo Pond playing together, this time in a live setting.
Earlier this year, Lovely Music reissued Robert Ashley’s 1978 landmark Private Parts album and now along comes its follow-up: 1979's similarly groundbreaking and idiosyncratic Automatic Writing. On its surface, this album remains a haunting and uneasily dreamlike affair, as it anticipated both ASMR and the evolution of ambient music by several decades and still sounds improbably contemporary today (or perhaps just too singular to feel like it belongs to any era at all). Beneath the surface, however, lies something far more fascinating and deeply conceptual than mere ambient music (or most late 20th century modern composition, for that matter): Automatic Writing is the culmination of Ashley's experiments in using his mild form of Tourette's Syndrome as a compositional tool. Unsurprisingly, making such a quixotic endeavor work proved to be quite a challenging and oft-exasperating undertaking, but Ashley's five years of trial and error ultimately resulted in one hell of a strange and memorable album.
