How Dominick Fernow made the transition from home taping noise artist to celebrated techno musician still baffles me. I do not think it was a trajectory anyone could have imagined or expected, but that is exactly what happened. To that fact, Remember Your Black Day makes for his first LP proper amidst confusing limited tape formats and vinyl collections of out of print material. To that end, it does sound like a fully realized album, but is still distinctly Vatican Shadow, for better or worse.
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I suspect Not Not Fun deliberately release one album every year that I would absolutely love, hoping that I will miss it in order to punish me for not paying more attention to them.  I have no idea what 2012's masterpiece was (there almost definitely was one), but Gagged in Boonesville has now joined Peaking Lights' 936 (2011) in instantly flooring me upon first listen.  Stylistically, it most closely resembles what I would expect if Jandek and Dirty Beaches teamed up to make an indie pop album, yet it is somehow far weirder and more disturbed than even that highly improbably event could be.
There are precious few bands out there that can create the same manic sense of terror and legitimate fear that The Body does. The duo of Chip King and Lee Buford push the sounds of doom past just slow, de-tuned guitars and apocalyptic lyrics into something much more tangible and real. With a diverse gathering of collaborators, Christs, Redeemers just furthers this into their most intense and varied work to date.
Affiliated with the Schimpfluch-Gruppe collective, Marc Zeier has managed to be one of the lower profile members of the loosely-knit group, and also one who’s work is perhaps the most understated. Without the visceral, nauseating organic sounds of Rudolf Eb.er or the occasionally jolly, punk-tinged absurdism of Joke Lanz, Zeier’s work has been one that emphasizes the sound more than the presentation. Not an overly prolific composer, Sub makes for a major release in its two-disc duration and use of recognizable, but still heavily treated everyday sounds to create a work that captivates as well as terrifies.
For their second collaboration, Steven Stapleton and Graham Bowers take the elements that worked so well on Rupture and push them outwards into something more bewildering, but equally as compelling. Pomp, ceremony, showbiz and a cryptic approach to musical arrangements, this is a powerfully odd and oddly powerful work by the duo. As much as I enjoyed Rupture, its heavy subject matter prevents it from being a regular addition to my listening schedule but Parade fills that gap perfectly.
Following a visit to the Tate Gallery and seeing JMW Turner’s paintings, Burkhard Stangl began working on a way to represent these painted landscapes as musical soundscapes. Focusing on Turner’s unfinished works, Stengl never truly gets into the same sphere as Turner. The resulting album is a collection of superficially nice music that has little below the surface, in opposition to the elegance and depth of Turner’s masterful compositions.
For some reason, my favorite albums always seem to be those that come from unexpected places, a trend that delightfully continues with this third effort by Belgium's Bram Bosteels.  I was vaguely familiar with Bosteels already, but only because I had previously heard 2011's Barra Barra and casually dismissed it as "a bunch of murky soundscapes for obscure theater productions."  After hearing this latest effort, however, I found myself desperately rummaging around my house in vain hope of finding and revisiting my long-forgotten copy of its predecessor.  Hokus Fokus is absolutely deranged in the best possible way, resembling nothing less than an extremely disturbing carnival-themed nightmare.  This is easily one of the strangest albums in recent memory.
Ba Da Bing have officially blown my mind yet again, following their 4LP reissues of the epic Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and The Snowbringer Cult trilogy with an even more ambitious project: reissuing 2009's incredibly rare and overwhelming Daughter of Darkness cassette series as a massive 8LP box set with hand-painted album art (which took months to complete).  While it is not the best Natural Snow Buildings album by any means (no band can make a uniformly great 8-hour album), it is still quite a good one and it is unquestionably their longest, which offers a unique appeal all its own.  There are probably are not too many people who find the prospect of plunging into a seemingly endless rabbit hole of roiling, hallucinatory, quasi-ritualistic drone very appealing, but those who do have probably just found their Holy Grail.
