Combining two previous tape releases, with a special edition including a third remix CD, the enigmatic German project defy any sort of classification or clear genre identification. The trio of Christian Dräger, Eric Bauer and Nils Lehnhäuser pull bits of ambient, jazz and drone together without ever fully locking into one style.  The pieces here drastically range from conventional structures to unadulterated, foundation shaking pure bass tones.
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Polish artist Sebastian Banaszczyk once again demonstrates another leap in compositional development with his Bionulor project. This work, a 3" CD constructed from sounds extracted from Erik Satie's piece of the same name, features some noticeable elements from the original piece. As a whole, however, it has a sound that is unquestionably the work of Banaszczyk.
With a true collaboration happening between these two bands, I was not expecting any sort of subtlety or restraint, and my initial thoughts were proven to be true. I was, however, planning to hear a lurching mass of distortion and excruciating vocals, and that is exactly what is here. Neither artist clearly fits into the standard metal templates, and with them working together here, that is all the more apparent.
The first volume of Gengras's Collected Works was unexpectedly one of my absolute favorite albums of 2013, so I was looking forward to this follow-up with a great deal of anticipation.  As it turns out, my expectations were way off the mark, as New Process Music is nowhere near as great as its illustrious predecessor.  However, it is equally worth noting that it is not trying to be: this album is a different beast altogether.  While The Moog Years captured Gengras at his haunting, long-form compositional peak, New Process Music instead documents a series of brief experiments in harnessing the squiggling, burbling chaos of a small Eurorack modular synth.  The results are certainly interesting, but anyone seeking something beautiful or sublime should definitely look elsewhere.
Second in a trio of inaugural cassette releases from Yucatán, México's Lengua de Lava, Harness joins two live performances recorded on the same night at Oberlin College's Fairchild Chapel. The first documents the gutsy force of Joe Panzner and Greg Stuart's machine noise, the second catches Jason Brogan and Sam Sfirri in slow-death mode, twisting canine howls and malfunctioning equipment into avian distress signals and seismic events. Each duo treats their material differently, but the attention paid to physical properties and processes links them. It's a detail picked up and echoed in the superb artwork from Matthew Revert, who channels the corrosive elements of both pieces into a frayed and intricate scrawl.
2013's Era was a criminally underappreciated monster of an album that marked an significant, unexpected surge forward in forging a distinctive and wonderful aesthetic all Disappears' own.  I am not sure quite what I expected from this follow-up, but it certainly was not still another dramatic evolution.  That is exactly what I got though.  While I still give Era the edge from both a songwriting and simmering menace perspective, Irreal takes its predecessor's hypnotic, machine-like precision and echo-heavy minimalism and runs with it.  Admittedly, the band's brilliance is primarily stylistic this time around, but Disappears have nonetheless provided yet another thoroughly bad-ass avant-rock tour de force.
A reissue of a self-release from the enigmatic Grant Smith, the sound on this disc fits squarely in the world of guitar noise, but with a significant amount of development and variation within each of its six untitled segments. Sometimes harsh, sometimes pensive, and sometimes melodic, it results in a wonderful, mysterious album that is enjoyably unpredictable.
Will Thomas Long has been less prolific as of late with material as Celer, his minimal ambient project. That longer space between releases has made each one all the more memorable, and that is no different with Sky Limits. Even though it is conceptually about the ephemeral nature of life and experiences, stopping to listen to these quiet pieces makes for a great metaphor of life on a grander scale.
Bastard Noise was not as prolific in 2014 as previous years, with only a handful of releases appearing. From that handful, these two are very different in their respective approaches, with Live at Babycastles consisting of a single long-form piece recorded by the duo of Anthony Saunders and Eric Wood, and Uncertainty Principle being two short pieces in collaboration with two well known Japanese artists. The sound, however, stays consistent: a subtle, at times ambient series of sounds that manage to get very noisy, but never lose their direction.
