At this point, it is quite clear that The Inward Circles project is the home for Richard Skelton’s darker impulses, dealing primarily in brooding ambiance, churning violence, and grinding horror.  The big difference between Skelton and similar artists, however, lies in his scope and intensity.  This latest EP, a soundtrack to Skelton’s short film Beyond the Fell Wall, does not disappoint in those regards, as Skelton essentially creates an melancholy and spectral world, then ferociously rips it apart.  Unfortunately, it does not quite scale the heights of either The Inward Circles' debut or Skelton's amazing previous soundtrack (Memorious Earth), being a bit too short, bombastic, and single-minded to offer much more than a satisfyingly heavy catharsis.  It is still a solid and worthy release, but it is not quite "Richard Skelton" good.
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The strongest Legendary Pink Dots album of 2015 snuck in just under the wire as a digital release, with a delayed vinyl version expected in a few months from new Spanish label Abstrakce.  Intended as a "secret" sister album to the earlier Five Days, Quantum Bleats sounds a lot more like the work of an actual band, though it is no less fragmented and hallucinatory.  Everything feels a lot more deliberate, melodic, fully formed, and evocative this time around: there are a number of beautifully orchestrated passages, snatches of playful cabaret, and muscular bass lines lurking amidst all of the usual free-form psychedelic sprawl.  While it probably focuses a bit too much on the ambiguous no-man's land between "song" and "abstract experimentation" to rank among the Dots' best work, it is nevertheless quite clear that most of Edward Ka-Spel’s more inspired recent ideas found their way here.
Scale, repetition, and variation have a way of bringing Morton Feldman to mind whether or not Feldman has anything to do with the matter at hand. The matter in this case is Mike Majkowski’s Bright Astonishment of the Night, the second of two full-length albums he released in 2015. The other, 
Following up 2014's Der Totenkopf and last year’s reissue of The New Crimes, Moreno Daldosso’s newest album draws from both his past and present works, resulting in a dark and disturbing record that largely manages to achieve Daldosso’s artistic vision, with the exception of a few missteps along the way.
On this new tape, the prolific Evans draws from the styles he has worked in heavily before: noise, electro-acoustic, and ambient, but Brittle bears the mark of all without sounding like any one in particular. The two lengthy pieces cover a significant amount of sonic territory, and he makes remarkably diverse and complex compositions from a world of unidentifiable sound.
This drab duo first emerged a few years back as bloodless hipster darlings, their aptly-titled 2013 Matador debut Impersonator overflowing with the sort of sentiments one might encounter in the first half of an Abilify commercial. Given frontman Devon Welsh’s incidental familial connection to the world of Twin Peaks, it’s mildly amusing how much of his gloomy music with Matthew Otto recalls Julee Cruise’s songs, albeit ones hastily covered by Coldplay.
The Opalio Brothers have been on quite a hot streak in recent years, as both Psycho-System (2013) and Abstract Expressionism for the Ears (2014) were massive, tour de force plunges into hermetic, all-consuming, and completely otherworldly psychedelia.  The Dance of Oneirism masterfully continues the distillation of MCIAA's ever-evolving and singular vision, weaving its eerie, lysergic, and wonderfully disorienting spell in just under a hour (remarkably concise, given the duo's history).  As expected, it is yet another near-masterpiece of insular and visionary outsider genius and emphatically reaffirms my belief that absolutely nobody goes deeper or is more intent on scrambling minds than Roberto and Maurizio Opalio.
The culmination of two years of work and employing synthesizers, other electronics, and a 15 piece classical ensemble; N°3 is an ambitious and expansive work that is completely congruent with Vantzou’s aspirations. Lush and complex, the bulk of these pieces lie between epic drama and quiet intimacy, but are never anything but beautiful and compelling.
After seeing it performed by Phillip Bush, Greg Stuart, and Joe Panzner at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in downtown Los Angeles, the complexity in Michael Pisaro’s A Mist Is a Collection of Points cracked open. Scored for piano, percussion, and sine tones, the recorded version of A Mist presents itself transparently as a three-part composition with clear melodies and sharp edges. The piano is prominent, the sine tones thin and exact, the cymbals and crotales metallic, concentrated, centered. Their sounds are, in some ways, measured and containable, the opposite of a mist, which slips past the senses and confuses them. But watching Greg Stuart bow his crotales in the first section, seeing him react to Phillip Bush’s playing in the third, and searching for the places where the sine tones began and the acoustic resonance ended—that displaced and de-centered the entire piece. It turned its apparently fixed points into movable objects and transformed the music into a suspension of atoms and waves, detectable, though masked, in the superbly recorded and mastered document released by New World Records.
Originally released in 1987 and first reissued in the mid 1990s on CD, Ecobondage is one of Merzbow’s seminal works, and also one of my earliest experiences with his vast discography. Presented as a double LP reissue (with included CD), the album feels like an appropriately deluxe edition that captures a high point of Masami Akita's too often overlooked, but superior junk noise era.
