It has been quite a long wait since the last proper Black To Comm album (2009's wonderful Alphabet 1968), so it was an absolute delight to have Marc Richter unexpectedly re-surface in December with an inspired return to form (and one of the year’s finest and most singular albums).  While this latest release understandably bears almost no resemblance to Marc’s decidedly outré soundtrack for EARTH (2012), it also does not seem to follow any obvious, linear progression from his previous work either. Black To Comm is its own self-contained, anomalous world of vibrant, hallucinatory sound art brilliance, resembling nothing less than the beautiful nexus where drone, space rock, psychedelia, and the flickering unreality of late-night semi-consciousness meet.
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Considered "lost" for the better part of the past decade, these two live pieces, commissioned for a performance in Berlin, has some unexpected moments for those familiar with these two composers. Steve Roden and Frank Bretschneider blend their strengths of subtle electronics and improvisation, but also bring in some surprisingly conventional beats and rhythms, resulting in an unpredictable, yet diverse and gripping record.
Regler, the Swedish combo lead by noise artist Mattin and Anders Bryngelsson (Brainbombs) is anything but subtle in their approach to music. On this double CD set, they lay out exactly what to expect from the disc titles: Noise Core is the group (featuring Henrik Andersson on bass) doing an hour of noisy, almost grindcore chaos, while Free Jazz is the trio plus Yoann Durant on sax, making an hour of vaguely jazz tinged racket. It’s not for everyone, but it is an impressive work no matter what.
The word "dance" does not come to mind when I see Ralf Wehowsky's name, so I was intrigued by this collaboration from its title alone. Johannes Frisch is not known for working with electronic beats either, so the fact that they appear here in anything but a conventional sense is not that surprising. Between Wehowsky's electronics and Frisch's double bass, shards of dance music appear but extremely deconstructed, and blended up with free jazz and electronic experimentalism.
For the third installment of his all field recording based Epoch series, López presents material collected at somewhat more conventional sounding locations, at least for an American such as myself. Captured at various parks and nature preserves throughout Cuba and both the Southeast and Southwest of the United States, the sounds are no less fascinating than his rainforest-centric previous entries in this series.
The noise/orchestral ensemble, lead and directed by Reinhold Friedl, have performed the work of power electronics titans Whitehouse before, with their 2010 Whitehouse Electronics release drawing heavily from the band’s final three albums. Following recent performances of Metal Machine Music and collaborations with Keiji Haino, Whitehouse succeeds even more than its predecessor by taking a wider swath through the nearly 30 year catalog, and even featuring an all-too-brief vocal contribution by William Bennett himself.
Benjamin Finger's fractured and skittering first release for Digitalis is not entirely without precedent, as he previously dabbled with techno beats a bit on 2010's For You, Sleepsleeper, but it is still quite a departure from the dreamy, hallucinatory soundscapes that I normally associate with him.  As far as departures go, I would say Mood Chaser is quite a good one, as Finger successfully translates his skewed psychedelic sensibility into a disorienting and kaleidoscopic dance party.  Though it is perhaps a bit too over-caffeinated to quite stand with his best work, this is certainly an exuberant, weird, and fun effort in its own right.
This reissue of Amir Abbey's 2011 cassette is not quite as strong as last year’s Movements of Night LP, but it certainly boasts enough inspiration to justify Students of Decay's decision to rescue it from out-of-print cassette purgatory. Although Amir covers a perplexing amount of stylistic ground and occasionally errs on the side of being too derivative, he has admittedly chosen some very cool artists to emulate (Popul Vuh, for example) and tends to excel at most of the genres that he delves into (shoegaze, drone, etc.).  That unevenness and shifting vision prevents The Silent March from quite succeeding as a complete album, but a few of the individual pieces are quite compelling.
On what I assume will be his final release of the year (although with his prolific output its hard to be sure), Kevin Drumm's Wrong Intersection is a single piece with a sound that fits its somewhat sinister title and ambiguous artwork perfectly. It might not be as aggressive as some of his other works, but Drumm excels in setting an exceedingly bleak mood via a constantly shifting dynamic, and a healthy bit of extreme frequencies as well.
