Joseph Raglani uses sine/square wave generator, synth, guitar, voice, melodica, flute and electronics on five intriguing and accessible pieces. The engaging tension, emotional depth and narrative sensibility in Of Sirens Born feels similar to watching a film about explorers entering a strange landscape.

The Dots are as focused and as diverse a group as I can name. For over 25 years they've been releasing record after record of bizarre and colorful music. Even with such a voluminous catalog behind them, their output remains completely unique and peerless. Plutonium Blonde is a trance-like, somewhat awkward record that meshes their eccentric pop sensibilities with dark, aggressive machine music.

As well as releasing some of the most important and exciting music of the 20th and 21st centuries, Sub Rosa have also acted as archivists when it comes to recordings of important non-musical artists. Previous releases from their aural documents wing include fantastic recordings by Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, W.S. Burroughs and a series of recordings covering avant garde art in Belgium over the course of the 20th century. This third volume in this Belgian art series covers the main movers and shakers of Belgian contemporary art from just before the Second World War up to the late 1970s. Overall it is a valuable but flawed document that needs more supplemental material to be fully of use to the public and academia at large.

Visual artist Jesse Pep'er, whose hallucinatory artwork adorns the covers of albums by the likes of Edward Ka-spel, Maëror Tri, and Kenji Siratori, finds inspiration in similar territory for his debut album. While not every song evokes the same majestic grotesquerie as his paintings, the best tracks are every bit as otherworldly on this solid, if a bit uneven, album.

The latest from Poland's Mort Douce is named after a poem by John Siddique. Given the title, I expected to be besieged with insect chittering or else the maddening rush of descending swarms. Instead, the sounds are almost geological, like dropping a microphone into the center of the Earth and amplifying minute tectonic shifts, documenting the secret life of continents.

Using mostly guitar, Martin Kränzel explores foreboding vistas on his latest album as Wicked Messenger.  He makes the instrument almost unrecognizable in his depiction of gathering darkness and thunderous portent.  Heavy and chilling, these five tracks do an excellent job of sustaining a mythology of dread.

On this album, C.db.sn (aka Chase Dobson) makes beat-driven electronic music named after a variety of sea creatures like moral eels, anemone, and jellyfish. It's an appropriate theme, for this music, like the ocean, simultaneously soothes and invigorates a restless mind. While some of it may seem a little straightforward, Dobson adds enough emotional textures to keep the songs both absorbing and refreshing.

This Portland, Oregon group is probably my current favorite instrumental rock act (basically ever since Battles got all goofy). I've loved all the live shows I've seen and of all their releases on Neurot, Temporary Residence, Important, and Latitude, this, their first release of 2008, is easily my top pick. Here, the group utilize their arsenal of gear and found sounds to showcase their matured compositional skills, exploit some fine riffs, and weave songs together with sounds to make a seamless and blissful 32+ minute record.

While Grails' second release of the year isn't a mis-step, I simply don't find that I'm captivated by the melodies contained herein. For the second time this year the group have produced a 30+ minute long collection of pieces of epic magnitude, however, I'm often left waiting for songs to develop, and then let down as some of these pieces seem like incomplete thoughts when compared to the previous release.

After having explored the experimental possibilities inherent in the grand piano on his 1986 album Notturno, Tietchens visited the human voice on the 1988 follow up Aus Freude Am Elend. On it, this musical innovator raids recordings of religious ecstatics, people shouting and making love, people singing, and others, using these ‘stolen’ voices to create new frameworks, decontextualised and deconstructed, and in the process rendering the human voice as richly complex an instrument as any woodwind or stringed example. Under Tietchens' analytical gaze and craftsmanlike manipulation, we are left with something that is at once familiar and exotically alien, a veritable menagerie of species paraded before the gaze and designed to both appal and enthral equally.

I really do hope that this officially sanctioned seven-inch remix is the start of an avalanche of Jandek reworkings. This inspired idea of placing someone (so wrongly) regarded as unlistenable in a more acceptable modern context is genius.

When judged alongside both the artist's masterful debut and its formidable successor, this self-released album tragically underwhelms at just about every percievable opportunity.

Jason Molina will never be accused of holding back.  Through the years as Songs: Ohia and The Magnolia Electric Co, he has proven himself over and over again to be both a prolific songwriter and tireless performer, churning out a stream of excellent albums and perpetually on the road for what seems like 13 months of the year.

Black One does exactly what is expected from a Sunn O))) record, it drones and feedbacks like a reliable fiend. While it’s nothing groundbreaking in terms of an evolution of their sound, it does provide some subtle new twists on their trademarked detuned riffing.

This is the sound of a thrash band sent into the bush andforced to beat their way out with twigs. Everything here, from the warbled acoustic pickin’ to the LightningBolted two-note spasm ascensions, is worn with a genuine conviction, theprimacy of frayed roots, dirty levity and the private knowledge that endurance isgod in this new landscape.

Constellation
On previous albums, Do Make Say Think played their own blend ofpsych-rock with jazz influence in an effort to explore the stars andplanets, drifting off into their own orbit. Occasionally, as on theirlast album, they got so close to the stars that they brought back somedust here and there, or they gathered sunlight and a planet'satmosphere through which to project their instrumental structures,resulting in a fluid and pleasant listen. For their fourth album,however, they've created a work of true beauty, as though they'velanded on a new planet they can finally call their own. Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymnis best listened to as a whole, or on vinyl where it is split intothree thematic parts. Overall the album is a step more towardscohesion, with every song blending into the next and creating animmersive feel. Structurally, the parts of the record are separated bytheir slight differences, with the first area covering blending guitarwork, the second infusing more horns for flavor, and the last sectionbleeding into sliced structures with effects and dischordant cacaphony.Ultimately, it all gives way to the hymnal "Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!,"with full organ computer glitch wonder and western guitar with afterschool chorale. It's as though the experience and different sides ofthe band—sometimes warring for control before or finding their way outonly here and there#151;are now one, omniscient and comfortable,allowing for a full, varied, and complex sound that covers a lot ofground and never sounds disjointed. Every song tells a story, turnspage after page, building to a truly bright and vibrant climax thatwhen finally reached makes the whole journey seem all the moreworthwhile. Do Make Say Think are growing into themselves with everyrelease, and their latest shows a comfort and complacence that can onlyserve them well in the future.

samples:

• Frederica
• Auberge le Mouton Noir
• Horns of a Rabbit

Quatermass
Here is another electronic, beat-based album that plays the game of "Ilove it/I hate it." The atmosphere is mostly dark, the beats thick andchugging, and the melodies somehow buried inside walls of static noiseand time-warped samples. There's the first problem: sometimes themelodies never get a chance to come out and play. As a result, I'm leftlistening to a somewhat boring, somewhat repetitive drum track thatdoesn't have the power to carry the song by itself. Unfortunately, thealbum is produced in such a way that each song inevitably has someincredible sounds on it but they're completely attenuated by the waythey're thrown into the backgroud and lost beneath a plethora ofeffects. But then, amazingly, all that wishy-washy noise comes togetherfor a few brief moments and gives birth to an explosion that comesclose to relieving the tension and weariness of the first few minutesof the song. This is how "Flesh Wound" opens up the album and it seguesinto the infinitely more entertaining "Gargantuan." I imagine one ofthose dolls that has a slinky for a neck bopping around to this rubberyand dynamic wall of beats only to have a stick of dynamite send it intothe great beyond. "Gargantuan" has nearly the same production style as"Flesh Wound," but manages to pull it off by allowing the repeatingdrum and melody patterns to weave a bit more intricate and diverse bodyof sound. "Boiled In Blood" is a bit more low-key than anything else onthe album and it provides a nice break from the havoc of the first twotracks. It unfortunately gives way to more standard four-on-the-floordance music that sounds horribly distorted and only covers up whatseems to be the most interesting elements dying in the background. Andso this process continues throughout the duration of Don't Be Scared.I either love it or I hate it. Not much changes in terms of production:it's all pretty muddy and eventually this makes the entire album feelfar too homogenous. The formula either works for some of the songs orit doesn't. This up and down experience ends up making the whole albumfeel dull; it's just hard to sit down and listen to the whole thing allthe way through.

samples:

• Flesh Wound
• Boiled In Blood
• Don't Be Scared

G. Gonge
The recordings made by Christoph Heeman and Achim Flaam as HirscheNichts Auf Sofa has an appealingly built-in obsolescence. The bulk ofthe original catalog was released in small cassette and vinyl editionson Germany's DOM records, and with the exception of the five LPsrecently re-released in deluxe CD editions, most of the music remainsextremely scarce, making it great fodder for obsessive collectors.Unfortunately, many HNAS-related satellite projects such as MiesesGegonge, Duka Bass Band and Speck Nusseck have remained unreleased andlargely ignored. Recently G. Gonge Produktionen released this series ofCD-Rs, issuing six of the rarest DOM cassettes. Be warned: these discsare unofficial bootlegs, the original recordings have not beendigitally remastered, there are no bonus tracks and the packagingconsists of xeroxes of the original tape sleeves. Despite theselimitations, it's great to be able to hear the music again for thefirst time. Listening to these recordings 20 years after makes menostalgic for a lost age when esoteric and experimental underground DIYcassette labels flourished, not yet having been rendered obsolete bythe digital revolution. Creeping into this world of throwaway musiqueconcrete, off-kilter improvisation and drug-addled musical in-jokes islike rummaging through the dusty attic of a 90-year-old schizophrenicwho obsessively saves everything; it's a series of clues with nosolution, flashes of momentary inspiration and frustratingly stillbornideas. In short, the stuff of life.

MIESES GEGONGE, "LIVE"
Mieses Gegonge are something of a mystery, but they appear to be asister group to HNAS, having shared the credit for the first HNAS albumAbwassermusik. The material on this CD is culled from two liveperformances in 1985. The sound is very strange indeed: a twistedcombination of arrhythmic percussion together with horribly phased anddistorted vocals. The treated voices and drums are immediatelyreminiscent of the "psych-out" sections of classic Can constructionslike "Halleluwah" and "Aumgn." However, Mieses Gegonge is all psych-outwith no breaks for coherence. Bizarre chants and ululations quaver andripple across layers of randomly beaten skins and gongs, reverbed andwarped into oblivion. If anyone attending these performances wasn't onat least three hits of fine Dusseldorf acid, I feel sorry for them. Therecording is shitty and wracked with distortion, which adds interestingbursts of high-frequency noise that contribute to the lunacy. Imagine apost-lobotomy 23 Skidoo trying to cover The Master Musicians of Jajoukawith nothing but a saw and a zither and William Bennett playing oneroom over, and you might begin to approximate the experience of Live.It's a uniquely fucked sound that will appeal to jaded listenerslooking for a surreal thrill.

samples:

• Salz
• Bernogesang
• Edelweiss

DUKA BASS BAND, "FRAULEIN CASANOVA"
Duka Bass Band appears to be a trio consisting of Lasse Laudrup, Martin B. Klaeren and Sven Nykvist. On Fraulein Casanova,they are joined on a few tracks by Christoph Heeman and Achim P. LiKhan of HNAS, and Heeman also produced the album. The Duka Bass Band'ssound is a fuzzy, primitive clamor of clueless post-jazz improvisationsthat meander aimlessly and appear to fly in several differentdirections at once. It has a certain amateurish quality and a creepysubterranean feel that appeals to me, although I couldn't say exactlywhy. In the exclusively German liner notes, Heeman muses "Fraulein Casanovais for me a jerking step forward into the natural alreadyness ofmusic." Perhaps this dodgy AltaVista translation should not be trusted,but it's as good an explanation as any for the oddly surreal freeplaying on display here. The opening track is the seven-minute"Zauberformeln," which means 'magical formulas.' It's an aptdescription for the mysterious forces that transform the sound ofdeficiently played clarinet, organs and drums into a strange alchemicalgold that is more than the sum of its components. There are momentsthroughout Fraulein Casanova that touch on elements of firemusic improvs, belabored Shaggs-style guitar, and in the case of thelast track (whose title loosely translates to "For God, 1000 Years IsLike a Day"), a ramshackle psych-folk jam not dissimilar from therecent work of Sunburned Hand of the Man. This is my personal favoriteof the six bootlegs, and I look forward to further recordings by thismysterious post-industrial jazz trio materializing at some future point.

samples:

• Zauberformeln
• Fraulein Casanova
• Yukka Palmen

SPECK NUSSECK & DIE LEGENDAREN FETTBOYS, "DANCEMUSIC FUR DICKE BACKER"
It's anyone's guess who the hell Speck Nusseck or The Legendary FatBoys are, or where they come from, or what masochistic weirdoencouraged them to record Dancemusic Fur Dicke Backer.The answers to these questions are not readily apparent, and they maynever become clear. The only thing we have to go on are the seven songscomprising Dancemusic, for which the word "annoying" seemswoefully inadequate. Plodding drum machine rhythms and randomly pluckedbass compete with vocals shouted into a megaphone backed by lamekeyboard effects which underscore the mess. I'm tempted to call thisoutsider music, but that would suggest that it is charmingly sincereand/or amateurish music that has worthwhile elements. Unfortunately,Speck Nusseck are neither charming nor sincere, and they are not worthanyone's time. They appear to be influenced by the edgy post-punk ofSection 25, the noisy effrontery of Throbbing Gristle and even themotorik beats of Neu!, but they are terribly unequal to the job ofpaying homage to their heroes. The best thing that can be said aboutthis album is that it is mercifully short, and would likely make anexcellent way to get rid of the last few people still hanging out inyour living room after the party is over.

samples:

• Ochsenaugen
• Schokoguss
• Zweibelbrotchen

HNAS, "ICH KANNTE EINEN GUMMIBAUM"
HNAS are invariably compared to Nurse With Wound, and more often thannot to the detriment of Heeman and company. It seems that they areforever doomed, relegated to an obscure footnote in the NWW story bywriters and critics, who seem unable to realize that HNAS use their ownunique strategies to portray their particular brand of audiosurrealism. HNAS does not revel in the exaggerated psychedelicgrotesqueries of Steven Stapleton's work — their tactics are sloppier,less calculated, and in many cases even stranger. The seminal krautrockband Faust is a much more analogous comparison. Heeman and Khan's pathwas paved by Faust's willfully messy LPs that cycled through disparatehalf-formed musical ideas and random piss-takes. Ich Kannte Einen Gummibaumis a good demonstration of their distinct sound. The first trackcreates a creeping quasi-rhythmic industrial atmosphere, recalling theearly work of Laibach, but Heeman's deliberately muddy production andmuffled sounds of voices, distant guitar solos and graveyard organs adda nebulous mystery belonging to HNAS alone. The second track, "Kill DenAchim" is culled from a live performance, and finds the band in agloriously anarchic phase. A woman screams violent provocations backedby oblivious, repetitive electric guitar licks and sheets of live noiseand distortion. On "Ich bin ja besser," a disco record is obscured bylayers of cacophonous whalesong. Track five loosely translates to "AWinter Without Skin Problems," in which a disintegrating chamberorchestra fights against encroaching electronic squalls. The last trackis an extended 25-minute construction combining silly-cum-sinistervocal mutations alongside nonsense percussion. The lunacy segues into alengthy section of concrete tape edits, combining impressionistic pianopieces with field recordings and samples drawn from German televisionand radio.

samples:

• Quietschend laut und ungestum
• Kill den Achim
• Ein Winter ohne Hautprobleme

HNAS, "THE UNCOLLECTED ULTRA RARE & UNRELEASED"
Another in a trilogy of rare HNAS cassette titles issued by G. Gonge, The Uncollectedis an odds-and-sods anthology, collecting tracks from out-of-printcompilations and rare cassettes, as well as some previously unreleasedmaterial. As such it is an uneven and incoherent listen, but with aband as unorthodox as HNAS, that's hardly a problem. Most of the tracksare in the jagged cut-and-splice style recognizable from mid-80's HNASalbums. It feels a bit like an audio version of the absurdist photo andtext collages found in early punk zines. More than once these piecesdigress into the stoned chatter and laughter of a group of youngGermans, who I can only assume to be Christoph, Achim, and friends.Recording and including this unseemly screwing-about on their albumstakes the music out of the realm of the dryly conceptual oravant-garde, and into the "anything goes" realm of DIY homeexperimentalism. That said, there is also much that is musicallyimpressive among these songs, as in the noir queasiness of "DemPetermann zu Ehren," a dark piano dirge. "Was wir von Cassetten halten4" is a phased electronic piece with looped sing-song vocals recallsearly Current 93. "Wie ein Bock am Michekstag" is similar to the workPeople Like Us, juxtaposing dialogue samples from a "Learn to SpeakSwedish" tape with a kitschy exotica loop. The final song is a rare andlovely track by Duka Bass Band: more demented post-jazz with sinisterundertones.

samples:

• Dem Petermann zu Ehren
• Wie ein Bock am Michekstag
• Schenk mir eine Kuckucksuhr (Duka Bass Band)

HNAS, "DIE DREHORGEL ALS FEUERSPRITZE"
The first track of Die Drehorgel Als Feuerspritzewas recorded live in 1984, the title roughly translating to "TheParadoxes and Secret Sciences of the World." It's one of the bestpieces I've heard HNAS' prolific oevre, a murky sound sculpturecomprising long-form synth drones and gothic organ swells. The sticky,shapeless drones and burbling moogs converge into caverns filled withfloating stone obelisks that chisel strange patterns into thelistener's consciousness. The piece develops using an interior logic, adreamlike coherence that slowly asserts itself over the course of halfan hour. "Barenklammer" was recorded for an as-yet-unreleased HNASvideo, and contains some of the same source material as the firsttrack, quite reminiscent of the synthesizer arpeggiations andavant-rock noise that characterized Tangerine Dream's Electronic Meditationalbum. The third track pushes my PANIC buttons: a manipulative noisepiece that plays like Bernard Herrmann's string tribute to Whitehouse.The layered voices and random bass slaps of the last track evokes Crasscovering a Hildegaard von Bingen chant while tripping on mushrooms.This is a concentrated effort by HNAS, and its single-minded absurditymakes it the most consistent of the three HNAS CD-Rs reissued by G.Gonge. As more of these rare recordings come to light, perhaps HNAS canfinally crawl out of the long shadow cast by Nurse With Wound andreveal themselves to be every bit as unique, talented and vital.

samples:

• Paradoxa und geheime Wissenschaften dieser Welt
• Barenklammer
• Macht der Glaube krank?

Fat Cat's reissue of the first two Animal Collective releases on one double-disc should not only come as a pleasant surprise to those who discovered the group with this year's excellent Here Comes The Indian, but should also raise the question why it took almost 4 years for the Brooklyn-based project to be courted by a large label. Created by and originally credited to only two Animal Collective members, Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished was self-released on Animal Records in 2000.

23five
23five came into the public eye as the label vehicle for soundartist-types, peddling the kind of stuff I'd see in the MoMA gift shopand pass by thinking it just wouldn't be the same outside an austeregallery space. Now only 6 releases into stride, the label has proved mewrong several times over. One needs only to hear Furudate &Zbigniew's World As Will II to see why. The opening minutes ofCoelacanth's sophomore release, however, left me with second, or ratherthird, thoughts. The Glass Sponge begins with a sparse scraping,thumping, and clanging that seems on the brink the ever-arty black holeof inaccessibility. After a few minutes, droning bell tones andtempered feedback ease their way in, making the piece more substantialbefore, as quickly as it began, the music fades into silence. Thoseopening bits were merely a prelude to the real meat of track, a sort ofsecond act comprised of layered static and an enriched texture oflulling feedback and prolonged bell tones. Stuttering vocal utteringsrise from drone and static layers that sound truly oceanic. Song titleslike "The Leaden Sea" and "The Violet Shell and Its Raft" lend a marinetheme to The Glass Sponge that feels apt in relation to the music. (Thename Coelacanth, also, refers to a prehistoric fish recently discoveredto still exist). All four tracks exhibit an approach to drone musicthat is both texturally rich and emotionally resonant. Tracks rangefrom gentle, inviting trips across static that gurgles and glimmerslike actual liquid to eerie passages where hollow drones and squealingfeedback rise from the depths. The Glass Sponge is host to a multitudeof bizarre, untraceable sounds as well. Various throbbings, tinkerings,and knockings find comfortable home in Coelacanth's sound world, givenoverture in the album's first moments, making it increasingly hard tobelieve that any of this was gathered from public performance as thenotes describe. This is beautiful, thoroughly engaging, and uniquemusic, no doubt more appropriate headphone music for pretending yourbed is a liferaft than for strolling the museum floor. 

samples:

• The Electric Hydrometer
• The Leaden Sea
• The Violet Shell and Its Raft