As some part of the Acid Mothers Temple nexus of forward thinking rock musicians in Japan, Junzo Suzuki’s Miminokoto keeps the psychedelic freakout tendencies in check, but the trio isn’t afraid to push their folksy sound into rawer, less conventional territory. Compared to his recent Pieces for Hidden Circles, the full band setting helps to create a more diverse and rich tapestry of sound that bears his mark.
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Emeralds' guitarist Mark McGuire tends to record and release new works at a somewhat superhuman and overwhelming pace, most of which are extremely limited and scattered over a number of different labels (making life pretty damn hard for the casual Emeralds fan). Thankfully, however, Weird Forest have stepped in and reissued two of Mark's better hopelessly unavailable tapes, now remastered by the ubiquitous James Plotkin.
Nearly a decade ago, Jim Thirlwell released a pair of instrumental albums under the then-new guise of Manorexia on his own Ectopic Ents label. While he hasn’t released anything new from the project since, he has been steadily shaping the Manorexia sound into something rather far removed from its origins through a series of sporadic performances arranged for chamber ensemble. The Mesopelagic Waters is the end result of those efforts, re-envisioning a selection of those embryonic tracks as a harrowing and skillfully rendered modern classical suite.
Rhythm is often a matter of togetherness. It binds songs like mortar, measures melody and harmony, marks the entrances and exits of instruments, and draws distant ideas into close proximity, if not for the sake of a single voice, then for the sake of single performance or a unified work. Though they are a quartet of two contrabasses, percussion, and guitar, Sult rejects that mode of timekeeping on Svimmelhed. Repeated patterns and measured distances are supplanted by an anatomical focus, on the particulars of steel and nylon strings, plastic drum heads, and wooden bodies. Sult break the gluey qualities of their instruments into atomic elements, then separate and catalog them like isotopes or tints and shades of a mother color.
Magnus Granberg’s fourth composition for Another Timbre—and second album under his own name—borrows its title and some of its musical material from 
Winged Victory's second full-length album is an hour-long score composed for a dance piece by the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer Wayne McGregor, but the line separating such an endeavor from AWVFTS's traditional activities is thin at best.  First glimpsed earlier this year with the slightly more experimental Atomos VII EP, Atomos offers exactly the sort of the slow-moving, neo-classical melancholia that I have grown to expect from Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran, but with some subtle, yet significant, evolution in both their compositional approach and their instrumental palette.
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.
With two different generations of Italian electronic artists coming together, Maurizio Bianchi and Dedali stick closer to its title than the more industrial tinged harsher noise I was expecting.  The four pieces hint at Bianchi’s initial new age-y sound from his late 1990s reappearance, but manage to stay on the good, experimental side of that, with Dedali’s contributions providing a contemporary sheen.
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.
