Way back in 2006, Chris Herbert released the excellent Mezzotint on Kranky, an album that established him as one of the most compelling drone artists around at the time.  Since that hugely promising beginning, however, he has remained largely dormant, surfacing only rarely and struggling to find the time to work on new material.  Thankfully he eventually found it, but this pair of releases did not come easily, as they are both culled from material dating back to 2007.  Despite that period of inactivity and the patient composition process, however, Herbert is remarkably still at the top of his game.  Aside from some parts of the Wintex EP, these new pieces perhaps lack some of Herbert’s earlier melodic immediacy (listen to Mezzotint’s "Let’s Get Boring!"), but he more than compensates for that through hypnotic depth and rich texture.  In fact, I think at least one of these releases may very well be a masterpiece.
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Field recordist Jana Winderen’s latest finds her indulging her long-standing passion for capturing the sounds of hidden environments yet again, this time in and around the Barents Sea region of the Arctic Ocean. Using an array of specialized microphones and a great deal of editing, she has woven the resultant decontextualized sounds into an immersive suite of frozen and mysterious desolation.
This cassette is the debut solo release from Andrew Fogarty (also of Boys of Summer and Toymonger) and it builds on the same dreamy electronic textures as his other projects. Caught somewhere between '80s sci-fi soundtracks, sound effects, and drifting electronics, the music on this EP is a shimmering blend of styles and sounds.
This is a tantalizing set of early '70s reel-to-reel tapes by Soft Machine co-founder Ayers: lovely, intimate, and enlightening stuff by an idiosyncratic talent who made it look easy while giving off an allure of privilege, trippiness and innocence somewhere midway between Howard Marks and Christopher Robin.
A lot of artists find inspiration in the works of H.P. Lovecraft but very few capture the essence of his horror. Metallica's "The Call of Ktulu" is a classic piece of thrash but it comes nowhere close to the cosmic terror and unease of Lovecraft's prose. Similarly, Alexander Hacke and The Tiger Lillies’ Mountains of Madness was a loving but ultimately camp tribute to the author. However, here the Southampton trio have honed their sound to create the same sense of dread that made Lovecraft’s stories so disturbing.
Moving past his more abstract work from the Trans- series of releases, Carsten Nicolai instead opts for a more rhythmic electronic work that, while not well suited for the club, demonstrates his knack for turning pure chaos into rhythmic composition, even if it can’t be danced to.
This URSK series by Utech has been establishing itself as a force in bringing wider attention to projects that otherwise may have lingered in obscurity. For example, this Malaysian band has had only a few, very limited releases before, but with this higher profile disc more will get to hear this distinctly unique take on dark, murky free jazz. 
At its core, this spilt CD has monolithic foundations of thick, oily, viscous slabs of broken-down and tar-black overdriven guitar and feedback. Here, the Australian Grey Daturas' familiar line in bonecrushing doom-laden oppression is ably bolstered and reinforced by the equally weighty French female-fronted Monarch, both outfits commanding an impressive array of heavy weaponry. Between them, their down-tempo gargantuan dirge is seemingly capable of crushing whole continents. One gets the impression that they would like to physically obliterate the miles between Australia and France if they could, and for the most part it succeeds.
The second, larger installment of their collaboration,following a double-3” on Phonometrography, is another deep slicing into the insurmountablevisions that make both peerless examples of sound artists driven by discoveryand new substance over stylized forms. It is also another immaculate package as expected from Hafler and Die Stadt.
