Long-time musical partners Anna Domino and Michael Delory take ten songs from the public domain and recreate them in their own image: the cool detachment of Domino's voice and non-traditional arrangements contrasting with narratives of treachery and murder. As they previously did in 1999 with their much-heralded album Songs from My Funeral.
Matt Waldron has obviously had little to do lately judging by the landslide of irr. app. (ext.) releases that have recently come available. Ranging from very old archival material to more recent compositions (including collaborations with Nurse With Wound and Diana Rogerson), Waldron has unleashed a Pandora’s box of sonic delights on the world. Widely available as downloads from his own site and as limited edition CD-Rs elsewhere, these releases build on an already impressive but far too limited back catalogue.
Roughly ten years ago, BBC's Radio 4 sent Chris Watson to Mexico to record one of the final continuous cross-country trips for Mexico's passenger rail system.  The resultant album is a narrative collage that uses those recordings to aurally recreate that unique and memorable journey.  I'd definitely say he succeeded quite impressively at that specific technical objective, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a great album.
While they have never been especially prolific, Esplendor Geométrico's discography is still a surprisingly daunting and disorienting thing to navigate, due to their many compilations, reissues, disappearing record labels, and stylistic shifts.  Sheikh Aljama, now reissued for the first time since 1994, was originally recorded between 1987 and 1988 and was one of the final albums of the band's crunchy and noisy early era.  It is also unique for incorporating Arabic influences.  I'd be remiss if I didn't say that that particular assimilation was not especially skillful or seamless (especially when compared to Muslimgauze), but the album's hypnotically bludgeoning beats make such flaws seem totally irrelevant.  This is one of Esplendor Geométrico's finest efforts.
This latest slice of heaven from Ian William Craig has quite a curious provenance, as it was assembled from orphaned pieces dating all the way back to 2014's landmark A Turn of Breath. As such, it is not exactly the proper follow-up to Centres, yet it is every bit as great as I would expect such an album to be. Notably, Thresholder is far from a collection of disconnected outtakes and middling material, as the pieces are all roughly tied to a commission work relating to quantum physics and space. As befits such an inspiration, Thresholder very much focuses on Craig's more experimental and abstract side, unfolding as a hallucinatory and dreamlike collage of woozily swooning angelic vocals in a crackling sea of distressed tape loops and hiss. If Centres is the album where Craig's gift for songcraft came into full bloom, this is the companion piece that illustrates the full depth of his textural and production brilliance.
Scott Morgan's latest album is quite a surprise, at least by Loscil’s eternally understated standards.  Partially inspired by hearing Philip Glass’s  Koyaanisqatsi score on a worn VHS tape, Monument Builders finds Loscil being a pulled in a number of different directions at once while still being held together by the unifying thread of Morgan's warmly hissing and elegantly blurred production aesthetic.  The result is quite an atypically epic and chameleonic Loscil album, but the material is strong enough to quell most of my misgivings about Morgan's stylistic tourism.
While the title is in reference to the source material (field recordings in Ancient Olympia, Greece), it also serves as an appropriate name for these two monumental artists coming together. Linked only by the use of the same raw materials, both Lopez and Thanasis Kaproulias create very different, yet powerful worlds of sound.
Paring a recently released new work with a digital-only remastered reissue from the label, there is a decade of time elapsed between these two compositions, in which Roden’s evolution as an artist can be heard, particularly in his use of digital processing and composing.
Zola Jesus (effectively Nika Roza Danilova) made a huge artistic leap in 2010, transitioning from the lo-fi, gothic post-punk of The Spoils to the sweeping, synth-driven drama of her twin EP releases, Stridulum and Valusia. The two EPs were a grand step forward for Danilova, upping the drama quotient with two fistfuls of dark, cinematic songs. Conatus continues her winning streak, functioning as a distillation and subtle refinement of the ideas put forward on last year's EPs.
Sebastian Banaszczyk has been strongly refining his craft in "sound recycling," or essentially utilizing limited, conceptually relevant recordings as the only basis for compositions. These two separate albums, for two distinctly different dramatic performances, have some consistencies between them, but each stand on their own as distinct works, as well as representing the next stage in Bionulor's discography.
