Preserved for posterity as four-track tape recordings, Konrad Becker’s Piano Concertos for 4 Pianos have finally crossed the digital divide. While the man behind the music has been anything but listless, these recordings have until now, laid fallow for upwards of 25 years, making this the first release of his acoustic music. Originally used for the performance series Program for the 100% Resocialization of the Devil in 1982-83 and the experimental opera Parzival in 1984, the pieces are redolent with low-end perfumes, thick metallic fogs, and percussive walls of splendor. The simultaneous play of four roaring pianos creates music rife with subterfuge and illusion.
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It has been roughly four years since the last Boduf Songs album (2015's Stench of Exist), but Mat Sweet is finally back with his seventh full-length. There are few artists who are as tirelessly focused on exploring a narrow stylistic niche as Sweet, so it was fairly easy to (correctly) predict what Abyss Versions would sound like: hushed vocals, slow-motion arpeggios, seething tension, and quiet intensity. However, the details are always a surprise and I was especially eager to hear this particular release, as its predecessor felt like an inspired creative breakthrough that added a bit more color and rhythmic dynamism to the Boduf Songs' vision. Perversely though, Abyss Versions does not build upon those particular innovations and instead makes a hard turn in the opposite direction: more understated, more intimate, more austere (though there are a pair stellar exceptions at the end of the album).  Despite that turn even deeper inward, Abyss Versions is yet another characteristically fine album, as Sweet unveils a solid batch of new songs that brood, creep, and smolder in all the right ways.
This impressively ambitious double album documents (in necessarily excerpted form) a month-long installation that ran during NYC's Storefront for Art and Architecture's 30th anniversary celebration back in 2013. Its true roots go much deeper than that, however, as Six Microphones is the culmination of a project that Robert Gerard Pietrusko has been fitfully struggling to perfect for almost two decades. It is easy to see why it took so long to realize, as Six Microphones is the sort of complex, process-based experimental music that only an electrical engineer or a rabidly gear-obsessed noise artist could hope to fully comprehend. Thankfully, grasping the intricacies of Pietrusko's system is not a necessary prerequisite for appreciating the resultant sounds, as Six Microphones is a quietly hypnotic symphony of drifting feedback that deserves a place alongside Nurse With Wound’s Soliquy for Lilith and Toshimaru Nakamura's No-Input Mixing Board experiments as a significant and inspired work of self-generating sound art.
Matt Johnson's first full-length release of new (or new to the public) music in over a decade is a collection of 26 short themes for the film by Gerard Johnson. There's no "hit single" and the music is not reflective of any of his mainstream LP releases for any phase of his career. However, it's a fantastic treat for those who have collected his singles over the decades, as there is a lot of commonality with the more thematic B-sides that have graced his short-players throughout the ''80s and early '90s.
Conceived while Jack Rose was on tour with Dave Shuford's (of No-Neck Blues Band) D. Charles Speer project, Ragged and Right is easily the most rocking thing Rose ever recorded. The band spends much of their time toying with Shuford's country-rock sound, and though Jack's talent and unique signature are definitely present, he disappears into the music more often than he dominates it.
Even as far as falling back into their historical release pattern of an album paired with an EP of unique, yet contemporaneous material, the resurrection of Godflesh has done everything possible to honor their legacy. A World Lit Only By Fire does not exactly see the band picking up where the last album, 2001's Hymns left off. Instead it goes back further into their history, to the era most Godflesh fans wish they had never left.
Frederik Sevendal has been a fixture in Oslo's experimental music scene for years, establishing himself as both an excellent guitarist and an imaginative purveyor of twisted Lynch-ian ambiance. His latest release, a mixture of old and new recordings, captures him seamlessly blending brooding Badalamenti-esque dread, drugged folk jangling, and strangled guitar noise into a very unique and disquieting (yet unexpectedly melodic) whole.
It is hard to believe that Tim Hecker is still managing to pull fresh rabbits out of his hat seven solo albums into his career, but Virgins is an expectation-defying monster of an album.  While it certainly still sounds like a Tim Hecker album in a broad, general sense, several of these pieces feel far more like dissonantly avant-garde classical music than anything resembling laptop soundscapes or crackly ambient music.  I mean that in the best possible way, of course, as this is easily the heaviest, most complex, and most disturbing thing that Tim has ever done.  It is also the best.
Collecting tracks from this Polish duo's limited CDR and tape releases, this album is also one of the first to be released on a Western label, exposing them to a wider audience. However, with the harsh nature of their sound and the (intentionally) painful mastering of the album, I don't sense much crossover success, but there really doesn't need to be.
Earlier this year, Wolfgang Voigt resurrected his long-dormant experimental imprint Profan as a home for his more unusual projects. One such project is his foray into atonal neo-classical piano work, an endeavor that first went public with a 12" EP in 2008. That EP has now been expanded into an identically titled album with rather mixed results, as Voigt's inspired attempt to meld minimal techno and dissonant avant-garde piano music is simultaneously brought to exciting, visceral fruition and flogged exasperatingly to death.
