In the duo 39 Clocks, Juergen Gleue upset everyone from beer-loving Bavarians to Joseph Beuys. Apparently, shitting on organs, playing vacuum cleaners, mocking the art world and using a drum machine saw them regularly abused and hurled from a variety of scenes. Phantom Payn Daze is the sound of Gleue recorded solo in the 1990s after a period over-immersed in drink and drugs. It adheres to the Clocks' version of beauty: as simple as rural blues and raw as early psych-pop, with a beguiling twang and metronomic propulsion looking ahead to Tarwater and back to The Velvet Underground.
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Tim Hecker has made a career out of releasing reliably excellent albums, but aside from rare departures like 2002's Van Halen-inspired My Love is Rotten to the Core, he has always stuck very closely to the hissing, crackling melancholy that he is known for. Ravedeath, 1972 certainly contains more of that (which I am perfectly happy with), but finds Hecker edging out of his comfort zone a little more than I would expect.  The raw material for this album originates from "live" recordings made with a pipe organ at a Reykjavik church, and that organ often emerges from Hecker's digital fog in surprisingly pure form.
Dawnbringer is Chris Black, a contemporary metal musician who writes and produces all of his own material and performs most of it on record. His fourth full-length album is superb, finding inspiration in traditional heavy metal forms and injecting them with Black's own character and creativity.
Psychedelic folk stalwart Ben Chasny's newest album speaks volumes through its packaging. Small observations hint at the nature of the music within: tranquil cover art picturing three hand-painted, mystic animal figures; a dedication to the late Dr. Ragtime in the liner notes; and the album's vivid title, Asleep on the Floodplain, referencing a peaceful state of rest and rejuvenation amidst a greater chaos.
Liz Harris is becoming an increasingly complex and compelling artist, as her discography has started making unexpected leaps into the past that feel like leaps into the future.  Originally recorded in Portugal in 2011 with only a four-track and a piano, Ruins feels like a bold yet natural progression from last year's excellent The Man Who Died in His Boat (itself recorded from 2008 and 2010).  Consequently, it is completely unclear whether Liz is moving towards a simpler, more naked approach in general or if this is just a one-off experiment before she unleashes another salvo of reverb-soaked dreaminess à la Alien Observer/Dream Loss.  Regardless of its place in Grouper's continued evolution, however, Ruins is yet another fine album, boasting several of Harris's strongest compositions to date.
Franz Kafka died of starvation on June 3rd, 1924, his throat cinched by laryngeal tuberculosis. The intravenous delivery of food to sick patients wouldn’t be invented for another 35 years and the swelling in Kafka’s throat caused by the infection made swallowing even water difficult. Forbidden from speaking by his doctor at the sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, Kafka would often communicate with his friends and visitors by writing small notes on scraps of paper. Some such scraps were less notes and more fragments or disconnected ideas, phrases impossible to understand without context. It’s something Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, recalls in the opening pages of the booklet that accompanies Joseph Clayton Mills’s The Patient. "Usually these notes were mere hints; his friends guessed the rest," he writes. Mills, accompanied by Olivia Block, Noé Cuéllar (Coppice), Steven Hess (Pan•American, Haptic, Innode), and Jason Stein take a shot at interpreting those fragments on this record, using Mills’s textual score to trace a line around Kafka’s final abraded thoughts.
Drumm’s latest is quite an unusual and expectation-subverting one, given that his previous releases for the label have largely been genre-defining noise masterpieces. Trouble is definitely not that, nor does it bear much in common with any of Kevin's other major efforts.  Billed as "54-minute excursion into the netherworld of the audio spectrum," the piece is an extremely quiet and amorphous experiment in queasily dissonant harmonies that teeters dangerously close to being complete silence.
Following quickly on from last year’s …Sun, Broken…, Mugstar have extended the formula that blew me away on that previous album and have made an impossibly shimmering, psychedelic and, most importantly, rocking album. Lime may not rewrite the history of rock music but it does act like the fruit it is named after, it cuts through the senses in a most pleasant fashion.
