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Christopher King, the artist behind Symbol, has been prolific for a number of years, as the founding member and guitarist for This Will Destroy You, creating film scores, and spending time in other local Austin bands. Online Architecture, however, is his first truly solo release. Across six compositions juxtaposing lush electronics with decaying analog media, the album has a familiar warmth while never shaking the feeling of something sinister just beneath the surface.
Andrew Lagowski's S.E.T.I. project has been constructing dark ambient dramas with an extra-terrestrial sensibility for over 20 years, blending unidentifiable electronic passages with moments of identifiable synthesizers or samples, and Final Trajectory is the culmination of that. Culled from 30 years of recordings, this album drifts from fascinating to terrifying, much like massive expanse of the universe that influenced it.
I have noted in the past that few artists are quite as chameleonic as Barn Owl, an observation that Jon Porras seems to have taken as a challenge, as he has now gone and made a dub techno album.  While I do not think that he should necessarily quit his day job, the better moments of Light Divide make it seem like Porras has been doing this forever.  In particular, the opening, "Apeiron," is 7-minutes of warmly hissing greatness.  The rest of the album is not quite on the same level, but it is certainly a pleasant and well-executed stylistic departure nonetheless.
Without a doubt, the fact that Klara Lewis is the daughter of Graham Lewis (Wire, Dome, He Said) is going to garner a significant amount of attention for Ett. While hopefully it helps to spread awareness of its release, by no means does she need to rely on her father’s reputation to garner acclaim for this album. Her penchant for deconstructing dance music into something completely different may be genetically inherited, but this is entirely Klara's show, and a brilliant show it is.
In many respects, July marks a huge leap forward for Nadler, as she moves from self-releasing her work to joining the very hip and influential Sacred Bones and Bella Union labels while enlisting some impressive and unexpected collaborators along the way in violist Eyvind Kang and Sunn O))) producer Randall Dunn.  Despite those seemingly major changes, however, July still sounds exactly like a Marissa Nadler album and continues her evolution into of the best songwriters around these days.  I am not necessarily sure that it is her best album ever, but it certainly comes very close if it is not.  At the very least, it boasts a couple of the most achingly beautiful songs that I will hear this year.
My only defense for sleeping on this oft-dazzling album last summer is that nothing makes me wince quite like the word "Moog" these days, as I am sick to death of vintage synthesizer revivalism/fetishism.  That regrettably over-saturated realm is where Gengras shines, however, and several of the pieces on this compilation/retrospective are so great that they easily transcend both their genre and my subjective hostility towards it.  In particular, the 12-minute "Magical Writing" stands as an absolute masterpiece of warm, immersive, and gently hallucinatory drone that should not be missed.
Nao Sugimoto's Spekk label had been doing an excellent job of establishing itself as an excellent source of abstract hybrids of organic and synthetic sounds that were sometimes challenging, sometimes beautiful, but always captivating. Because of that, the label’s disappearance after 2011's Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns album by Janek Schaefer was disheartening. When these two new releases appeared, I was hoping that they would be a return to form, and that they are.
Suzuki Junzo has spent much of his career shifting between gentle, almost jazz influenced guitar playing and full on unhinged distortion, both as a solo artist and with projects such as Astral Traveling Unity. That hopping between extremities remains solidly in place on Portrait of Madeleine Elster, which is almost evenly split between gentle, jazz influenced playing and maximum, room clearing distortion. Its best moments, however, are when the two worlds overlap with one another and create an entirely different beast.
It has been a very long time since a formal Diane Cluck album has surfaced, as even the collages/odds-and-ends collection Monarcana dates from nearly a decade ago.  However, she has been far from idle during her "hiatus," touring regularly and releasing an irregular trickle of excellent new work through both a tour CDr and her ongoing (and ambitiously mis-named) "Song-of-the-Week" project.  Of course, the downside to that piecemeal approach is that the bulk of these new pieces (and their arrangements) will already be quite familiar to devoted fans, but those who have not been closely monitoring Diane's recent activity have a couple of her finest songs ever awaiting them.
Eamon Sprod records music in the field, but don't mistake the product of his labor for a field recording. In some hands microphones and tapes are used to capture the buzz of insects or the sound of rain pelting the land—whatever the subject might be—with the intent of faithfully reproducing those sounds later in a living room or in a pair of headphones. Replication is the documentarian's craft. Sprod's is magnification. He singles out particular noises, brushes them off and, like a geologist or an archaeologist, excavates them from the sediment of ordinary commotion. His efforts yield an enlarged world of microscopic rhythms and porous surfaces, small remnants that point to the unbroken environments from which they were culled. But Sprod re-purposes those extractions as musical vehicles too, for both re-hearing and re-imagining the world.
