The result of what could only be described as serendipity, an ad-hoc trio of current/former Boston luminaries Vic Rawlings and Michael Bullock joined up with Lebanese trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj on a short tour after a single gig together, two sets of which are presented on this disc.  Although recorded only five days apart, the two shows are actually quite different in character and feel, but both show improvisation at its best.

Run DMC once said that a DJ could be a band, or at least that's how Chuck D paraphrased them.  Dissecting that statement, it is perfectly logical to assume that a slab of vinyl could be an instrument, and this new disc from Philip Jeck proves that.  Working live with record players, junk shop records, old Casio SK keyboards and recorders, Jeck has made a warm, nostalgic album that both personal and inviting.

While Z'EV has been performing since the 1970s, this emerged back in 1981 on Backlash Records as his first studio album. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its release, German-based label Die Stadt has reissued it as a limited CD, housed in the original LP-sized packaging along with a hand-made insert.

Reissued with bonus tracks and detailed sleeve notes, this album highlights the period where Bryars moves from his previous style involving the synthesis of non-musical sources, loops and an almost standard (but beautiful) orchestral arrangement. Here he composes for small ensembles and includes piano and vibraphone almost anywhere he can. This is a very different Bryars to the one I am familiar with, very different but still utterly captivating.

Back in 1988 the intention was to sequence these mainly instrumental tracks for release amidst the mostly vocal pieces from the same session. Had that happened, then Sun City Girls' best known release Torch of the Mystics would have been the rarest of beasts: a consistently excellent double album.

With each new release, Anthony Mangicapra’s Hoor-Paar-Kraat becomes more distinctive and adventurous. I have enjoyed previous releases, some feeling more finished than others, but In Eros Veritas is probably the stand-out of the lot. Here many of the elements and approaches that work particularly well in other pieces come together like lesser metals mixed to form an alloy, creating a far stronger album.

With a title like this, it would take some level of ineptitude not to guess what this album sounds like. The only fear from such a title is that it will either be campy hipster metal or that it cannot possibly be awesome enough to live up to such a lofty title. Previous releases from Lair of the Minotaur rule out the former worry instantly, and only seconds of listening prove the latter completely unfounded.

Matthew Bower's reappearance as Skullflower a couple years back has already yielded a slew of releases that, while retaining his love of all things noisy and guitar based, has shown frequent stylistic shifts.  This, the first installment of Utech's "URSK" series (after concluding the excellent "Arc" series ) is nearly an hour of full on feedback and guitar shriek that, for all its harshness is immensely listenable and demands to be listened to VERY loudly.

HNIA have the ability to weave music out of the wispiest of substances, with every note issuing from their music seeming veritably to shine with the brightest of lights. This four-track EP is no exception, with delicacy and sparkling coruscations tumbling deliciously and lazily from the speakers, and scattershot glints pinging off in all directions.

This recording is something of a rarity: the sound artist Yoshi Wada, ex of New York but now living and working out of San Francisco, very rarely commits his works onto any kind of commercial platform. The Appointed Cloud is a recording of a live performance from way back in 1987, of an installation created in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science. It displays all the hallmarks of Wada's abiding interest in accidental tonalities through the use of drones, a home-made 80-pipe organ, bagpipes, a siren, and percussion of various species.

Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have abandoned their usual working methods for their new album. Gone are closely mic'd, digitally processed samples of non-musical objects, and along with them the heavily conceptual processes that have often made the liner notes of past Matmos albums as much fun as the music itself. In their place: synthesizers, synthesizers and more synthesizers.

As intimidating as it is impressive, this third and final collaboration between Norway's BJ Nilsen and the Icelandic duo (of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson) is exceptional. Combining the sort of dynamic and dramatic soundscapes of The Hafler Trio with a darker and less directional approach, the trio have made the sort of uneasy listening that is difficult to bring oneself to listen to but is inescapable once it starts.

The inevitable fallibility of magnetic media can, while being frustrating as all hell to an artist, provide the impetus for an even better creation.  Oxide represents such a creative disaster: old cassettes and reels of tape had been accidentally subjected to moisture damage. Instead of tossing them, Scott Konzelmann strung them up and pulled what he could off of the decaying tape and built this new work out of the remnants in his first full length release in quite awhile.

Believe it or not, the title only gives a taste of the irony put to tape here. Over the course of 19 songs, Lazy Magnet rummages though almost every form of popular music, sometimes covering several genres in space of a few seconds. Band leader Jeremy Harris and company have the musical chops to pull off such a scatterbrained project, but the silly lyrics and non-stop pastiche get to be wearing.

Body and voice, the two oldest iinstruments known to humankind, are the only ones featured on this album. The group, which is all female by the way, uses rhythmic call and response chants to give archaic stylings to contemporary performance art. The concept in of itself is great, but the Boys' rejection of songwriting makes for a repetitious listening.

Released the same year as Nature Unveiled, Current 93's second full-length record is more uneven than its predecessor and less coherent. Time has been kind to Current 93's debut, but Dogs Blood Rising feels a little like Tibet's leftover thoughts and ideas forced onto record. It nonetheless boasts of several outstanding moments and marks Tibet's first obvious movement away from the trappings of the so-called industrial culture.

The immediate aftermath of Jane's Addiction's disbanding yielded an even split of its membership into two unusual projects.  Flamboyant frontman Perry Farrell and drummer Stephen Perkins formed Porno For Pyros, darker and even more psychedelic than their former band.  With far less popular success, bassist Eric Avery and guitarist Dave Navarro started Deconstruction, a one-time project with the former taking on vocal responsibilities.

This slice of progressive folk music from the summer of 1970 is a charming recording by the duo of David McNiven and Angie Rew augmented by a rhythm section of Danny Thompson and Terry Cox, on loan from Pentangle. What's so funny about youthful possibility and childhood memory?

The tenth studio album by Jack Dangers' main musical outlet takes a maximalist approach, combining apocalyptic dubstep and industrial-strength breakbeats with the assimilative spirit of a beat hacker. In the process, he creates an album true to the MBM legacy: one foot in cyber-age cross-genre multimedia assemblage, and one foot firmly planted in the timeless psychedelic ocean of sound.

Having made themselves a household name with their drone collaboration with Sunn O)))'s Altar album, as well as their "breakthrough" (ugh) album Pink, the overly prolific trio have set the bar high with this new full length album.  They manage to keep the quality high, though they still don't stray far from the template, and are perhaps heading more and more into conventionality.