Lee Stokoe has been active for two decades but has maintained a relatively low profile with limited and self released recordings, with his biggest claim to fame having spent time with the legendary Skullflower. Like that band’s head Matthew Bower, Stokoe works heavily with guitars and a legion of guitar pedals, but the result is less raw and aggressive, and more hypnotic and minimalist. Across these two side-long pieces are repeated, meditative drones that seem to lurk just out of view, in a distant fog or mist.
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In a spate of recent releases, Room40 label head Lawrence English has produced three very different works on the always beautiful Winds Measure label, with some recorded as far back as a decade. While he utilizes field recordings from Japan and Australia on all three, each one sounds nothing like the other but all are indicative of the Australian artist’s ability at capturing and manipulating familiar sounds into something else entirely.
Gilbert has not been a prolific solo artist even after departing from Wire, but whenever he has released new material, it has been of the utmost quality, and this record is no different. A concept album on global warming and floods in collaboration with Beaconsfield Art Works (David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin) is no different. Mixing treated field recordings and electronic instrumentation, Diluvial is another high water mark in his impressive discography.
Much of Daniel Lopatin's work has been characterized by uncertainty. Even in his best moments, there was a hesitance, an aversion to commitment which staggered the fluidity of his material. In his initial presentations of synth arpeggios, there was the voice of a burgeoning artist struggling to move past process, to bridge the gap between idea and execution, to make a full measure. On R Plus Seven, Lopatin has fully realized this goal. Filled with a stupefying sureness, this record once again finds Daniel reinventing his style from the ground up, combining the dated provinces of new age music, soundtracks, and corporate ambience into something tremendous.
This Chicago band’s career trajectory has been a singularly impressive and curious one, as they have somehow managed to continually reinvent their sound while still getting exponentially better with each new album.  Era makes that trend seem even more remarkable, as Disappears have made yet another huge leap forward despite tampering with what was arguably their best feature (Brian Case's dissolute-sounding, deadpan vocals) and losing drummer Steve Shelley to Lee Ranaldo's new band. As it turns out, neither are missed, as the band more than compensate by paring their aesthetic down to pummeling, machine-like precision mingled with great hooks and well-placed eruptions of chaos.
With Gates of Atlantis, Phelios (the solo project of Martin Stürtzer) has created a soundtrack in search of a film. It has a distinctly cinematic tone and structure to it, and even follows a loose narrative structure. However, there is far more than incidental sounds and music cues here, and it simply is too complex and varied to function with any other media.
Robert Piotrowicz's LP from earlier this year, 
A side project of members of Blessure Grave, Soft Kill does bear a resemblance, but one that focuses less on the folk tinged sound of that band and instead emphasizes the more post-punk elements. In some ways, Circle of Trees is a step backwards from their debut An Open Door: The live drums are replaced by a rigid machine and the overall production seems a bit more sparse, but it also gives the record a distinct sound, and along with it a few more uptempo moments than others in their catalog.
Staalplaat's latest pair of excavations from Muslimgauze's supernaturally bottomless vault is a bit of a surprise, as these two albums contain some of the best material to surface from the departed Bryn Jones in a very long time.  While a good portion of Tandoor Dog has admittedly appeared before, it was only as part of an extremely limited 4LP set that virtually no one has, while Izlamic Songs is an entirely unreleased, fully formed, and coherent album.  To my ears, Izlamic Songs is probably the better of the two (it has higher peaks, at least), but both intermittently capture Jones at the peak of his aberrant and bludgeoningly percussive dub genius.
