Catherine Christer Hennix has certainly had a very curious career, to say the least: she worked at MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab in the '70s, was a research professor in mathematics at SUNY New Paltz, studied with Pandit Pran Nath and LaMonte Young, collaborated with Henry Flynt, and made some singularly challenging and adventurous music that somehow never got formally released until her 1976 performance of The Electric Harpsichord was finally issued by Die Schachtel in 2010.  Now in her mid-60s, Hennix has beautifully capitalized on the belated interest in her music to become the reigning queen of deep, Eastern-influenced drone.  This latest release is not a far cry from last year's fine Chor(s)san Time-Court Mirage album, but it is every bit as good (if not better).
Troller's debut album is the perfect example of the imagery not matching the music. The late 1980s metal woman on the cover and script font screams some sort of early thrash revival, when the album contained is actually a lush, bleak piece of electronics heavy death rock from this Austin, Texas trio. The result is a disc that definitely feels rooted in that era of smeared mascara and smoke machines, but with a clearly modern day sensibility.
Splitting most of his time between his blackened southern rock behemoth Horseback and playing guitar for the alternative country Mount Moriah, Jenks Miller has not had much time to record true solo work. Spirit Signal is technically his third solo release, following Approaching the Invisible Mountain and the intentionally difficult Zen Automata Volume One, and is comparatively a more fleshed out album in the traditional sense, while still retaining a distinct stripped down, truly solo sound.
The name of the game is "metal" for this collaboration between Vainio (Pan Sonic) and Nordwall (Skull Defekts, Sons of God), both in the genre and literal sense. Fragments of Sunn O)))'s deconstructed riffs, plate reverbs and Einsturzende Neubauten's earliest days all show up here, in a wonderfully cohesive, oppressively dark recording that is surprisingly organic, given all its metal trappings.
The worlds of free jazz and harsh noise have always shared a lot of commonalities: both eschew the limitations of structure and melody for the sake of pure tone and texture, and both can either come across as structured, compelling chaos, or inane, boring noodling. Burning Tree have managed to straddle that line between jazz and noise as well as few other artists have, and with unrelenting brutality, on this first full length release that stands with the titans of both genres.
If Keith Rowe and Graham Lambkin haven't produced one of the most mind-bending records of 2013, they're at least high in the running. Making A shares its name with 
There is something endearingly heroic about The Dead C, as they have been gleefully blurring the lines between inspired deconstructionist rock and messy, half-assed indulgence to widespread indifference for almost three decades.  Unsurprisingly, this latest release finds them obstinately splashing about in the same ambiguously muddied waters as ever.  I suspect these two fairly challenging long-form pieces are unlikely to win the trio any new fans, but they are absolutely certain to please the already indoctrinated, as they rank among the group's finest.
Pitre's latest offering is a fine companion piece to last year's stellar Feel Free, achieving a similar outcome through composition rather than computerized randomization.  Built upon Duane's now-characteristic pointillist plucking, shifting drone swells, and Oliver Barrett's swooping and sliding cello moans, Bridges delivers yet another swaying, languorous reverie that I could happily listen to in an endless loop.  It may not quite scale the heights of its predecessor, but that is more of a commentary on Feel Free's brilliance than it is upon Bridges' shortcomings.  In fact, in many ways, Bridges displays an impressive evolution.
Rashad Becker is a fairly revered and influential figure in experimental music circles due to his role as the resident mastering genius at Basic Channel's Dubplates studio.  That association is a bit deceptive here, as anyone expecting anything resembling dance music will be spectacularly wrong-footed by his debut release. Becker has taken abstract experimentalism into some very exotic, disorienting, and gloriously wrong territory.  I do not think I will hear a stronger or more unique noise (or utterly uncategorizable) release this year.
