I am not particularly familiar with any of the four artists involved in this unexpectedly audacious and unique album, but Celadon is definitely a kindred spirit to Important's previous iconoclastic, raga-influenced drone epics by Catherine Christer Hennix.  Charlemagne Palestine is yet another artist that unavoidably springs to mind, but favorably so: while this album is anything but derivative, Maja Ratkje and her collaborators share his willingness to take drone music into some very dissonant, uncategorizable, and cathartic territory.  Put more bluntly: Celadon is probably not for the average drone fan, as Ratkje's vocals gradually build to an almost demonic, window-rattling intensity, but it is nevertheless a bold, striking, and deceptively ferocious artistic statement that is like absolutely nothing else that I have heard.
The New Crimes is a dense, imposing boxed set in the way that legendary noise collections such as Ramleh's Awake and Sutcliffe Jugend's We Spit on Their Graves are. Previously released in 1995 in an edition of 10, this material obviously did not receive significant exposure. Murder Corporation might not be amongst the most well known of Italian noise artists, which is a shame given the diversity contained on these eight discs. However, the brown and murky, analog heavy lo-fi sound is one that can at times be impenetrable and oppressive. Though daunting, the varying approaches Moreno Daldosso uses in composition result in a diverse, yet still bleak and violent piece of art.
Turn off the mechanical, logic-soaked part of your brain and sympathetic resonance sounds like a magic trick, and looks like one too. It’s the phenomenon that explains why opera singers can shatter glass from across the room with nothing but their voice. Whether bright or ominous, the spontaneous ring (or explosion) of an untouched body or an unplayed string is provocative. It is a sign of sound’s invisible inner life, the one that has nothing to do with intentions or compositions, the one that John Cage implied when he suggested that writing music was a means of "waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord." That is the sort of life Mike Majkowski is after on Neighbouring Objects, his latest cassette on Astral Spirits. The title suggests sympathetic resonance abstractly, but it also describes Majkowski’s instrumentation, which for the first time includes bass guitar, accordion, piano, and percussion alongside the core of his double bass. Magical though it may seem, Majkowski uses these tools to emphasize both the affective and the measurable, more physical properties of sound.
In a perfect world, an artist of Amara Touré’s caliber would need no introduction at all, but the real world is weird and mysterious enough to definitely warrant one in this case, so here it is: Touré’s innovative, sensuous, and sexy Cuban-influenced grooves basically ruled the nightlife in Cameroon and Senegal for roughly two decades, but he only recorded a handful of songs and then disappeared without a trace around 1980.  This collection compiles all of his known singles as well as his sole album and it is all great.  To my ears, this is a lock for the most crucial reissue of the year.
Initially I was not sure what to expect from this pairing. I know Sachiko's solo work can be a varying mix of beauty and ugly, and Junko via Hijokaidan, which is always intensely, yet brilliantly abrasive. On Vasilisa the Beautiful, harshness is the clear winner. Two vocal performances of raw throated dissonance over a bed of electronics, recorded live, makes for anything but an easy album to listen to.
With these two near-simultaneous releases, Joao Da Silva's Luciernaga takes two different approaches to his not quite noise, not quite musical. To the Centre of the City in the Night is the more fleshed out release, with its five pieces running the gamut from bowed string drones to harsher electronics. Tile II, a follow up to the similarly titled release from last year is more immediate, which is fitting a super-limited tape and free digital release. They are two sides of the same coin, with both being enthralling in their own ways.
With only a handful of releases available, Granite Mask is quite an enigma. Little information about the project can be found online, and the artwork on their output is abstract to stay the least. The lack of information is fitting their murky, abstract sound, which does a brilliant job of mixing conventional electronic rhythms with dissonant, abstract blasts of noise.
Initially founded as a side project of Club Rialto, with the line-up expanded over time to include the likes of Roel Meelkop and Frans de Waard (so a veritable who’s-who of Dutch experimental music), THU20 has been sporadically active since their formation almost 30 years ago. This set collects compilation pieces and unreleased live performances largely from the 1980s and early 1990s, and acts as an excellent overview of this period, while still managing to compliment their studio albums.
I hate to throw around the woefully overused phrase "great lost album," but Aguirre stumbled onto something quite amazing with this record.  I have no idea if Tim Robertson is still involved in music at all these days, but in his teens he was a church organist who traveled the world with his missionary parents.  After returning to Barcelona following a few years in Africa, he bought a four-track and spent two years obsessed with the idea of creating music "for future temples on Neptune and Saturn."  Eventually, that bizarre phase passed and Tim threw out all of his recordings except for two tapes, which he gave to his (presumably bewildered) parents as a gift.  Roughly 20 years later, those surreal experiments have now publicly surfaced thanks to a chance meeting in a thrift store.  This is "outsider" music for sure, but its guileless simplicity and elegiac beauty nevertheless place it very high in the pantheon of early New Age fringe-dwellers.
This sort of dark, atmospheric work has always been a favorite of mine, but too often I find the records hard to discern from one another. Between the Horizon and the Abyss does not have this problem at all, because while there is a consistency from piece to piece, it is far from monochromatic. Each individual composition has a distinct sound and mood that makes for a dynamic, ever changing piece of music. That variation from piece to piece is where this album excels.
Mentiras may be BOAN's first release, but the duo of vocalist Mariana Saldaña and José Cota (who also record as SSLEEPERHOLD) previously made up two thirds of Medio Mutante, who also mined similar classic synth-centric sounds. Working exclusively with classic equipment and embracing the limitations of such, the result is a wonderfully vintage feeling album of five songs that capture an era while having their own unique identity at the same time.
During their prime, Zoviet France pioneered a strain of music variously known as either ethno-ambient or sci-fi tribal, but they quickly moved on and nobody since has quite been able to quite fill the resultant void for me.  Others have certainly tried, but they usually have an "overwrought" or "overproduced" feel that dispels whatever illusion they are trying to evoke.  Consequently, I was absolutely delighted to find out about Phil Maggi and his eerie, mesmerizing, and loop-based sound collages.  Maggi's aesthetic is exactly what I was looking for, particularly on 2011's Ghost Love.  His similarly fine (if not even better) new album is a travelogue of sorts, culled from field recordings and snatches of traditional music accumulated during a 2011 trip through Umbria, Italy.
I have been a fan of Piotrowicz’s electronic, usually modular synthesizer-centric work for a number of years now, and I have quite enjoyed following his evolution and development as an artist. With Samoobrona, however, I went in with some trepidation. Not because of my lack of faith in his work, but more the nature of the recording: a radio play exclusively in Polish. I was happy to find, however, that his electronics are still the primary element throughout the two side-long compositions and even without following the narrative, the result was enthralling.
An artist working primarily with guitar used in abstract compositions, Jeff Barsky, also known as Insect Factory, does an exceptional job of carefully using effects and processing to create complex compositions, rather than chaotic walls of sound. On this solo cassette and older split LP, he avoids the temptation to simply run his instrument through a battery of guitar pedals on every song and instead uses that technique sparingly, along with less obscured, more conventional playing. It is his careful balance of texture and mood with conventional melodic playing that makes his work fascinating.
Haley Fohr's Thrill Jockey debut finds her again returning to the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter vein that first surfaced on 2013's Overdue.  There is a new twist though: Fohr is now backed by a full band of Chicago music scene luminaries in additional to returning collaborator Cooper Crain (of Bitchin Bajas).  The result is quite a strange, kaleidoscopic, and temporally dislocated one, drifting from inspired experimentalism to '70s-style folk-rock to something resembling Diamanda Galas fronting a Led Zeppelin cover band.  Personally, I vastly prefer her experimental side ("Dream of TV" is absolutely stellar), but there is no denying the singular power and otherness of Fohr's voice.
Given how much I loved Cascade, my curiosity about this more ambitious companion album made for quite an impatient month of anticipation.  Unfortunately, now that The Deluge has finally arrived, I do not know quite what to make of it.  My initial gut feeling was that Basinski's added intervention diluted a piece that was already perfect and complete, but it has since grown on me quite a bit with repeated listens.  While I still feel that Cascade is the superior album, The Deluge mostly balances out its flaws with some higher highpoints than its predecessor.  Also, it will likely hold a lot of appeal for anyone who has always wanted to love William Basinski, but wished he were more dynamic (though I personally prefer him as just an invisible guiding presence).
I think I can safely guarantee that no one familiar with Ren Schofield’s work has ever wondered what a new Container album might sound like, nor have they likely exhausted much time wondering about what its title would be: LP is yet another dose of no-frills, bludgeoning, percussive, and noise-damaged anti-dance.  The only real change is Schofield has become a bit more skilled, a bit wilder, and a lot more aggressive since his last album.  Part of me admittedly misses the more "human"-speed, mid-tempo grooves of past Container albums, but LP is probably Ren’s best work in this vein by a landslide, as he has trimmed down his song lengths and dramatically ratcheted up his visceral intensity.  This is an absolutely bulldozing album.
Ramiro Jeancarlo's solo project has only been active for a few years, but with these releases the Miami artist has refined his own insular version of electronic music with the assistance of a sprawling vintage synth collection. This album captures his two primary styles: weird electronic experiments and catchy, song-like pop outings. Even though the overall feel may be different, Jeancarlo manages to tie them together to result in a diverse, yet unified sounding album.
Florida is not known for hosting a secret enclave of synth bands, but this split cassette tape indicates that there are at least a few projects hiding amongst the tourist traps and meth labs. Burnt Hair and Ars Phoenix both work with similar instrumentation but the final product differ drastically between the two. The latter makes for catchy, if a bit bleak, pop songs while the former is depressive, bedroom electronics, resulting in a wonderful combination of similarities and differences.
Andrew Hock has carved out a niche for himself as a guitarist for bands including Psalm Zero and the recently deceased Castevet, but this makes for his first truly solo release. Crystalline Privative Opulence, featuring additional wind instrumentation by Jeremiah Cymerman and Davindar Singh, showcases his skill with a guitar as well as electronics but more so his sense of composition amongst these two side-long songs.
