The pipe organ has undergone quite a renaissance in recent years, as the instrument’s uniquely sonorous, room-filling sound understandably holds a lot of allure for many contemporary drone artists. However, French composer Maxime Denuc is something of an intriguing outlier in that regard. On this, his first release for Caterina Barbieri’s light-years imprint, Denuc wields a “hand-built Max/MSP sequencer” to precisely control the instrument via MIDI and unleash “dense clouds of impossible-to-play notes that ricochet backwards and forwards through history.” Notably, that last bit is a reference to Denuc’s ambitious efforts to imagine “a point of creative symbiosis between the Catholic church and the ecstatic dancefloors of the early '90s.” While blurring baroque music and progressive trance into a single unified vision is an admittedly cool trick, doing it in an entirely beatless way undeniably limits the idea’s potential a bit. Consequently, some of the strongest pieces on _Club Imperial_ tend to be the less conceptually radical ones that nod to the more ambient/kosmische side of krautrock visionaries like Popul Vuh. light-years The opening “Hallucinogen” makes for quite a killer statement of intent, as Denuc kicks off the album with a rapid and flutelike arpeggio Ouroboros that gradually expands with celestial chords and deep bass notes to impressively delirious effect. While it is undeniably a clear album highlight, it is also one of the most perfect iterations of a template that recurs throughout the album, so the other highlights tend to be the pieces that either depart from that formula or add some kind of inspired twist to it. In “Atlantis,” for example, Denuc slows his lush and anthemic trance-inspired magic into a bleary ambient piece that slowly snowballs in intensity until it lands somewhere between an organ mass and the infinitely looping bliss of a great Celer piece. Elsewhere, “La Paloma” is the album’s finest variation on its rich central theme, as Denuc revisits the rapidly fluttering arpeggios of “Hallucinogen” with a bit more instability and the mid-song surprise of a vibrantly shimmering and smeary new layer.

This latest full-length from Alex Cobb (the man behind the Students of Decay and Soda Gong labels) is a fascinating departure from his usual fare, as it was inspired by a recent stay at a Zen Buddhist meditation retreat. The unusual title alludes to a short poem that Cobb wrote as “an attempt to transcribe the experience of intensive zazen through a simple image of a chair tied to a faucet by a length of rope.” In musical terms, the experience led him to work exclusively with a Serge Modular synth and “an almost entirely dry signal path, interrupted only by small, intentionally deployed instances of reverb.” In essence, the Serge “invites direct engagement with the slippery materiality of electricity itself,” which seems to have been an ideal match for Cobb’s newly heightened powers of patience, restraint, and control. To my ears, this is quite possibly his finest album to date, as its two longform pieces are gently psychotropic deep drone nirvana. Pentiments The album is divided into two sidelong pieces that are each composed of two parts. In the brief opener “The Chair I,” a harmonium-like drone languorously oscillates and subtly expands beneath subtly spacey streaks of slow-motion melody. While it is the most conventionally “ambient” piece on the album, it does feature a few more nuanced elements that foreshadow the pleasures to come, as oscillations quietly speed up and slow down and a bleary cloud of quivering overtones gradually forms and hovers above everything. In the lengthier “The Chair II,” a deeper, hollower drone conjures both a similarly bleary oscillating haze and a gently pulsing and subtly shifting rhythm.

This latest statement from this shapeshifting Oslo producer is quite a radically deconstructed foray into “decelerated, spectral dub.” The album borrows its title from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elusive, haunting, and uncategorizable 2021 film of the same name, yet Villain was also greatly inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s writings on “internally recalled sounds inaudible to others.” As befits an album inspired by said iconic deep listening visionary, _Memoria_ is a deeply immersive and mesmerizing bombshell that absolutely requires headphones (or at least a building-shaking soundsystem) to reveal the full scope of its beautifully nuanced, vividly realized, spatially rich, and legitimately otherworldly vision. It is also fitting that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “sound as memory” rumination features a bit of a science fiction twist, as pieces like “Entre Nosotros” may very well be the most boldly futuristic iteration of dub that anyone will release this year. Smalltown Supersound After a brief yet gorgeous intro (“Labour of Imagination”) of deep exhalation-like chords and sensuous flutes that feel like a descent into a hallucinatory Peruvian rainforest, Villain gets right to the serious business of blowing minds with the aforementioned “Entre Nosotros.” While it is ostensibly just slow-motion dub techno with a bit of industrial hum, the magic lies in the sound design, as the groove feels unsettlingly viscous and a bit like the churning and throbbing of a vast subterranean machine. More glibly put, I would describe it as the seismic and gelatinous cosmic horror dance party of the year, but a ghostly, murky, and overlapping piano concerto gradually drifts into the piece as well and floats throughout space like Keith Jarrett transmitting phantom improvisations from the afterlife (which would be quite a neat trick, given that he is still alive). The following title piece is something of a sound design gem as well, as a faint sheen of ambient music drifts over a churning and shapeshifting landscape of industrial throbs, buzzes, and hums. Hell, I think there might also be the ghost of a buried rave anthem in there as well.

I believe this is Andrew Chalk’s first release for Cincinnati's Students of Decay, which is a bit surprising given that the artist and the label have long shared a close stylistic sensibility. Fittingly, this auspicious occasion is celebrated with something of an unusual release in Chalk terms, as _Mystical Obscurant_ is billed as “a rare opportunity to encounter the expansive character” of his sprawling oeuvre “in miniature.” Given how understated Chalk’s vision tends to be, however, that feature will likely be imperceptible to all but the most devoted heads. To be fair, there are certainly pieces here that recall various eras from Chalk’s four decades as one of ambient music’s most sublime and iconoclastic composers (“sacred guitar minimalism,” “smudged keys,” “environmental sound and loop-based constructions,“ etc.), yet the unifying theme has always been an unwavering devotion to quiet, simple beauty and that remains true again here. Students of Decay There is a reason that Chalk himself always has little to say about each new release, as his career feels like an obsessive lifelong attempt to convey something profound and ineffable. Consequently, the only truly salient information anyone needs about _Mystical Obscurant_ is that it is yet another fine Andew Chalk album, as he has quietly carved out a niche that is uniquely his own and almost every fresh dispatch from that niche is a tiny glimpse of heaven for the converted. For me, the piece that best captures the singular beauty of Chalk’s exquisite craftsmanship is probably “Against the Tide,” which is little more than a gently whistling, murmuring, and shimmering haze, yet it perfectly captures the magic of shifting patterns of light passing through gently swaying blinds on a sleepy summer day. That said, the opening “The Seed of Sorrow” is a sublime bit of sorcery as well, as Chalk’s palette is reduced to just a slow-motion melody of lazily streaking notes with long decays that form ephemeral harmonies with the dying embers of the previous notes.

This collaboration between four Michigan-based underground music lifers is something of a dream supergroup for me, as it brings together my favorite ambient/space rock duo with one of my favorite songwriters (Fred Thomas of Saturday Looks Good To Me). Sadly, Fred is off the clock as a songwriter for this one, but the consolation prize is that this is my first exposure to his Optigan Conservatory bandmate Frank Rotondo, who is the leader of the long-running Detroit-area free music ensemble Laughing Gas. The result of this long-gestating union of old friends is a series of drone-based improvisations that were later fleshed out and enhanced with overdubs and edits. Stylistically, it lands quite close to the twinkling and shimmering guitar bliss of classic Windy & Carl (which is perfectly fine by me), but there are also some fresh and compelling innovations that leave me hoping that this album is the beginning of something more rather than just a mere one-off. Kranky The opening “Conductor” makes for a representative if teasingly brief introduction to the pleasures that follow, as a slowly flanging synth drone is gradually fleshed out with sustained harmonium tones and a pleasantly disjointed and disorienting calliope-like motif. That last bit is the part that most sets this quartet apart from most other purveyors of spacy psychedelic drones, but there are also some cool tingling frequencies that are more felt than heard.

This sixth album from English slow-motion guitar magician Dean McPhee is something of a major creative leap forward, as he has newly expanded his arsenal of gear to now include a “powerful 18-inch subwoofer” and a wooden snare percussion pedal. While such a modest expansion would likely be a complete non-event for most artists, it is a massive development for McPhee, as his overdub-free real-time minimalism is now enhanced with an impressively solid approximation of a Jamaican dub-style rhythm section. In short, Dean McPhee is now a proper one-man band. Unsurprisingly, that enhanced palette unlocks a whole new world of rhythmic and dynamic possibilities that McPhee puts to especially inspired use in the titular side-long closing epic yet this whole release is remarkably strong, as it feels like a great single backed with a fine pair of languorously psychedelic zone-outs. Bass Ritual The opening “Indica Fields” captures McPhee at his most lean and focused, as he manages to condense all of his usual epic tropes into a mere 5 minutes of simmering slow-motion folk/desert blues. Aside from the winding and circular melodic hook at its heart, “Indica Fields” is most notable for the echoing decay of the wooden snare and its looping bass line, which is the first of the album’s many nods to McPhee’s dub inspirations. For me, however, the crucial difference between a great Dean McPhee piece and a merely good Dean McPhee piece is whether or not I am blindsided by some kind of showstopping transition or dazzling effects pedal showcase. As it turns out, “Indica Fields” boasts two such passages, as one solo feels like a skyful of streaking comets, while another beautifully segues from backwards melodies to shimmering washes of rippling arpeggios.

Billed as this Los Angeles-based composer’s “most ambitious work to date,” this overwhelming triple LP collection brings together five solo pipe organ compositions, a choral suite, a collection of “interludes” for microtonal ensembles, and a new longform chamber piece. Notably, Davachi recently completed a doctoral study in timbre, phenomenology, and critical organology and _The Will of Tongues_ very clearly feels like the fruit of all those years of research, which is another way of saying “this is extremely challenging music.” The emphasis is primarily upon “compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade” and that list covers “iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure.” In short, this is one for the deepest of deep listeners, as Davachi brought in a sprawling and eclectic cast of guests ranging from avant-garde luminaries like Eyvind Kang to a microtonal brass ensemble to a Renaissance flute consort for a durational yet time-dissolving deep dive into the minutiae of timbre and harmony. Late Music In one of my favorite sketches from Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show (“The Music Scholar”), the endlessly hilarious Jon Wurster calls in pretending to be a jaded and relentlessly namedropping record store owner who proceeds to dismiss absolutely every good band ever. After casually trashing everyone from The Beatles to Big Star, he gradually reveals that his taste has become so sophisticated that he can now only listen to field recordings of complete silence recorded by one specific artist.

This latest full-length from the Stockholm-based Lewis is billed as a “a deceptive recording with veiled melodies and clandestine bangers,” which feels more or less apt to me. Stylistically, _Opening_ feels more like an eclectic grab bag of commissions, sketches, and cool ideas than it does a focused and fully formed statement like _Ingrid_ or _Thankful_ , but her collaborative albums are frequently collections of similarly short, spontaneous-sounding pieces and those tend to be every bit as rewarding as her more composed longform work and that remains true here as well. Aside from its comparative brevity and eclecticism, _Opening_ ’s other defining trait seems to be a fondness from playfully manipulating and looping orchestral samples, which makes it one of her more nakedly melodic and less noise-gnawed releases (though there are still plenty of beautifully frayed and blown-out textures to be found among these brief and sublime vignettes). Editions Mego The opening “Ta Min Hand” is the first and the best of the album’s many clandestine bangers, as it quickly evolves from the sounds of hissing rain and dripping subterranean ambiance into a downright rapturous ascending melody of sensuously smeared and swooping sax with fitfully sharp and distorted edges. Eventually, instability triumphs and the melody breaks free of its obsessively looping structure to leave behind a jazzy sax solo in a blown-out and echoing miasma of noise.

This second installment of Kevin Martin’s Ladybug series pairs the Brussels-based producer with Tokyo-based torch singer Masumi Yamamoto. While this single was my first exposure to her work, Martin has been a fan of her Friday Night Plans project since at least 2023, as he proclaimed her _Visitors_ to be his favorite album of the year in Boomkat’s annual artist list extravaganza. Given that Martin himself is again the driving force behind the music and the production, _Ladybug 2_ understandably shares a lot of stylistic similarities with the previous Dis Fig installment (haunted vocals, spartan instrumentation, long ghost trails of hissing decay, and big post-industrial vibes), but the trip-hoppier aspects land closer to Portishead than Massive Attack this time around. Or, as the album description more colorfully puts it, “a dream journey from _Twin Peaks_ to Kingston, Jamaica, via Bristol.” Pressure The single this time around is entitled “Miss U” and it roughly sounds like a stripped-down Portishead performing in a cavernous industrial space. Aside from the fact that Portishead are one of Bristol’s many iconic trip-hop pioneers, however, the resemblance mostly comes down to just the sound of Masumi’s voice and a pervasive vibe of ghostly slow-motion heartache. Pressure’s perceived _Twin Peaks_ element likely comes from Masumi as well, as her solo work can sometimes resemble a bleary and nocturnal Julee Cruise-style chanteuse time-stretched and blurred into ambient dub. With Martin at the controls, however, the musical palette is reduced to just a slow-motion kick drum stomp, a clap, a high hat, deep sub-bass, and a pair of frayed and stormy dub chords. In theory, the existence of those chords makes _Ladybug 2_ a bit more musically expansive than its predecessor, but in practice it feels similarly stark because the bass line is much less central.

Despite being a fairly devout Bill Orcutt fan for the last decade or so, I never followed his Fake Estates imprint too closely until recently, as it seemed to exclusively be a destination for his most mischievous, obtuse, and unapologetically indulgent ideas. Over the last few years, however, the imprint has blossomed into the home for an increasingly audacious and endearingly demented series of software experiments and batshit crazy conceptual releases that bear almost zero resemblance to his more celebrated guitar releases yet feel every bit as essential. Fake Estates While _A Mechanical Joey_ remains my clear favorite among his Fake Estates forays, _The Four Louies_ (2024) stands as an equally bananas example of Orcutt's cracked vision, as he gleefully mashed up two very different primitive, iconic, and polarizing pieces of music: the Kingsmen’s slurred and incomprehensible frat party anthem “Louie Louie” and the punishingly repetitive chord deconstruction of Steve Reich’s “Four Organs.” Admittedly, I could not get into the relentless plunderphonic repetition of _The Four Louies_ at the time of its release much, but Orcutt has ingeniously managed to breathe new life into the piece with this raucous performance from last March, as his star-studded live band improbably transformed the simplest riff of all time into raw, roaring, and ecstatic drone freak-out.

This amusingly titled new series of maxi-singles is devoted to collaborations between heavyweight dub auteur Kevin Martin and a resolving cast of like-minded female artists. Naturally, the first installment is devoted to Martin’s recurring collaborator Dis Fig (Felicia Chen), as the two previously worked together on 2020’s excellent _In Blue_ album (Hyperdub) as well as the 2025 single “Silent.” Self-described as a “hallucinatory heat haze,” this “tale of post-break-up trauma” is very different from any of the duo’s previous pairings, as Dis Fig’s dark and spectral twist on soulful pop songcraft becomes the canvas for a series of bass-heavy, blown-out, and static-ravaged dirge-dub mutations. Pressure In some ways, the actual single (“Vanishing”) is more of a conventional pop song than anything on _In Blue_ , as it is just over three minutes long and features both a sensuous bass throb and a melodic chorus hook. In most other ways, however, it heads very much in the opposite direction, as it is quite a cold and minimal piece and one of its most prominent traits is that the crawling groove seems to be dragging a squall of moaning, hissing, and echoing nightmares in its wake. In fact, it arguably resembles an undead Massive Attack performing in a haunted underground parking garage, which is an aesthetic that I would generally prefer over hearing an actual Massive Attack song these days. In characteristic The Bug fashion, it is also quite a minimal piece, as the actual music is essentially just a cool bass line, Dis Fig’s voice, a high hat, a kickdrum, and a snare, but it becomes considerably more minimal in the four variations that follow. The throbbing bass and the static-gnawed ghost trail of delay, however, remain very much the stars of the show.

This quietly mesmerizing and unconventional Australian artist has had quite a unique trajectory, as she first began releasing music as Honey Stretton in London back in 2016 and her debut single ("The Thrill of Loneliness") was a massive hit by indie standards. She followed that success with an EP (_Wail_) later that same year but soon vanished from public life and moved back to rural Australia to tend the animals on her late grandmother’s farm. While she was alone on the farm, however, she recorded a host of new songs on a nylon string guitar and some borrowed gear while enduring one of the most catastrophic bushfire seasons in Australian history and the rampaging COVID outbreak. Eventually, one of her friends persuaded her to release those new songs and they ultimately became 2023’s _Soon_ album, which resulted in an opening slot on a Mount Eerie tour, international critical acclaim, and a reissue on Phil Elverum’s P.W. Elverum & Sun label. This follow up dissolves her lovely and intimate songs much deeper into ambient abstraction, as it feels like a series of hypnagogic tropical mirages and beachside field recordings mingled with flickering and elusive glimpses of beautifully hymn-like songs. P.W. Elverum & Sun/Brierfield Flood Press/Lima Limo _Tairn_ (which means “landholder) was similarly self-recorded in isolation, as Stretton relocated to the small coastal village of Tabourie Lake, where she reconnected to her community by joining a regional choir, observed the migration of whales, and went for regular “blue hour” swims in the South Pacific. All of those elements proved to be significant inspirations, as did a trove of family home movies filmed in Tokyo back in the early ‘90s before Hana’s birth. In particular, Stretton was fascinated by a clip that depicted “distant mountains, and Stretton’s young family looking over the valley in the soft static of one Japanese summer evening” and “a simpler, more connected time.” Armed with a few acoustic instruments and a previously unused synth that her family had purchased during their Tokyo years, Stretton “began recording music directly to that footage - letting the images dictate the melody” and weaving in “voices, insects, weather, movement, and the ambient sounds of the valley.” In essence, this album is a lovingly crafted and impressionistic soundtrack to a hazy and dreamlike VHS dispatch from the blissful time just before her own conception.

This latest opus from INA GRM director François Bonnet’s Kassel Jaeger alias is a characteristically enigmatic and conceptual affair, as its Latin title means “under the thing, under the substance, under the matter.” However, it apparently also doubles as a reference to a chapter in Victor Hugo’s 1866 novel _Toilers of the Sea_ which recounts a man’s struggle for survival in the aftermath of a shipwreck. While the deeper significance of the latter association admittedly eludes me, it was clearly an inspiration for Bonnet, as the album’s arc gradually evolves from more cavernous, subterranean sounds towards the ambiance of a deserted island. Unsurprisingly, the journey between those two points is a beguiling and hallucinatory rabbit hole of shadowy mystery, as Bonnet’s talent for conjuring vivid, immersive, and otherworldly soundscapes has few peers in the realm of production and sound design and his visions are always unique and imaginative. Shelter Press I have been a fairly devoted fan of Kassel Jaeger’s eerie and abstract dreamscapes for a while now, but it took me a bit longer than usual to warm to this one, as its early moments have the feel of a noise-gnawed dark ambient album recorded in the Paris Catacombs. Thankfully, Bonnet soon transcends those gloomy beginnings, but they are certainly a thematically appropriate place to start, as he describes his vision for this album as “the concrete beneath the concrete...the immanence of sounds…their becoming…a driving force, like a tide.”

This is the first major release by this Belgian composer under his given name, as Jolan normally records as ‘t Geruis. He did previously self-release a digital album (_#7_) as himself back in 2024, but that was followed by another 't Geruis release. Consequently, I am not sure if this counts as a name change or if Jolan has some kind of personal stylistic delineation that determines which name feels right for which albums, but _Sublime Lenteur_ (“The Amazing Slowness”) still sounds a hell of a lot like ‘t Geruis to me. While that is a perfectly welcome state of affairs, this album does have its own distinctive character which may possibly be related to its inclusion in Lost Tribe Sound’s seasonal mood-driven "Moss & Melee" series. Then again, maybe not. Mystery abounds. In any case, this is an impressively strong album, as Jolan’s usual bleary and smudged ambient vision is beautifully enhanced with hypnotically looping melodies on degraded tapes that place his work a bit closer to minimalist auteurs like Celer and William Basinski than usual. The shadowy and dreamlike moods, however, are still distinctly Jolan’s own. Lost Tribe Sound According to Jolan, this album first began to take shape in October 2024 during “long and solitary walks in the woods” through fog, snow, and rain. Frequently, he would return from those walks feeling inspired and he soon noticed that his music began to feel like a “direct translation” of the thoughts and impressions that emerged while immersing himself in nature, seasonal transformation, and solitude. To be fair, he could have plausibly said that exact same thing about any of his previous albums, yet _Sublime Lenteur_ does feel like an improved and enhanced distillation of the simplicity and meditative, quiet beauty of earlier ‘t Geruis albums. In fact, the opening “Ressac I” probably represents my Platonic ideal for great ambient music, as it is essentially just a sensuously looping chord swell that eternally dissolves into a reverberating fragment of melody. While that may sound quite simple on its face, Jolan’s artistry lies in the way the entire piece feels flickering, frayed, and unstable, which makes the loop feel mesmerizingly cyclic yet eternally changing. Instead of sounding like a mere well-crafted loop, “Ressac I” instead feels like a precarious and ephemeral bit of heaven that I wish would extend into infinity.

With a debut EP and four albums released since their inception 15 years ago, Chicago supergroup Anatomy of Habit have not stopped evolving and mutating, and _Paired Sentinels_ demonstrates this continued evolution in occasionally drastic ways. Fronted by Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded, Intrinsic Action, The Fortieth Day) on vocals and synths, the five-piece band’s meshing of almost all forms of "heavy" music continues to take a turn to almost conventional music forms, but never at the cost of their intensity. self-released That word, "intensity" has been an appropriate descriptor for AoH's work since their debut LP in 2011. Given the noise/power electronics/hardcore adjacent personnel, that comes as no surprise. Besides Solotroff, the band features Isidro Reyes (a member of all three of the aforementioned Solotroff projects) on metal percussion, guitarist Alex Latus (Still), Sam Wagster (Mute Duo) on bass guitar and lap steel, and drummer Skyler Rowe (Mute Duo, Still). For all the pummeling heaviness, a greater amount of subtly and nuance started to creep in on 2021’s _Even if it Takes a Lifetime_ and 2023’s _Black Openings_ , which becomes even more notable here.

First issued back in 2009 as the inaugural release from Berlin’s short-lived Humming Conch label, _Capri_ is one of the more polarizing highlights from the project’s early years, as it is a bit of a stylistic outlier. While released the same year as Danielle Baquet-Long’s untimely passing, these pieces feel like a ghostly and gently psychotropic transmission from a much happier time, as Will and Dani recorded this album in a single room over a series of summer nights during a residency on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Assembled using a modest yet eclectic palette of organetto, piano, strings, horns, acoustic guitar, and Dani’s field recordings from the island, the album is billed as a concept album/”idyllic imagining” collaged from “fragmented vignettes, brief moments, and suspended shimmers” and it certainly delivers on that promise, as it primarily resembles a series of brief and hallucinatory mirages. Given that, _Capri_ feels very much like a languorous and impressionistic haze of shifting moods and scenes rather than a batch of substantial compositions, but these pieces cumulatively cast quite a mesmerizing and unique spell. Two Acorns This expanded edition of _Capri_ is its first physical reissue since its initial release, but I believe most of the added pieces previously surfaced digitally back in 2012 after Stephan Mathieu remastered the album for an intended triple LP release that was reluctantly abandoned due to high production costs. After a decade-plus delay, however, those triple LP dreams have finally been realized (along with a double CD format) and this new incarnation includes seven pieces that had to be cut from the original CD due to time restrictions.

This newest album from French Alps-based composer Andy Cartwright is billed as “Seabuckthorn's most rhythmic effort to date,” as he inventively transforms simple hand percussion and kitchen pans into hallucinatory and ritualistic rhythms with a host of time-stretching, pitch-shifting, and fragmenting production techniques. The album’s title is, of course, a reference to the timeless adage “no one ever steps in the same river twice, for they are not the same person, and it is not the same river," as Cartright found himself noticing how the landscape of his daily mountain walk subtly changed from day to day. It is certainly an apt title, as the obvious parallel here is that this iteration of the Seabuckthorn’s vision still features all of the same wonderfully haunted rustic folk dreamscapes as other recent Seabuckthorn albums, but they now feel very different due to their unusual percussion elements. The same could be said of the percussion itself, as Cartwright’s modest array of toms, woodblocks, and chimes are psychotropically reshaped into something akin to the “sci-fi tribal” aesthetic of Rapoon and Zoviet France. Lost Tribe Sound In hindsight, last year’s _A Path Within A Path_ album offered a teasing glimpse into this project’s imminent evolution, as the slow-motion, ritualistic percussion of the Dean McPhee-featuring highlight “Shadow of the Land” would feel right at home on Never the Same River. In keeping with that theme, this album’s big guest (William Ryan Fritch) lends his talents to a similarly great piece, as “Things We Cannot See” blossoms into a ghostly, slow-motion waltz with a languorously sad and sensuous violin/viola melody.

This wonderfully spacey new guitar duo is an offshoot of prolific New London, CT psych-rock collective Slyne and The Family Stoned (not to be confused with the UK’s Sly and The Family Drone, of course). Appropriately, that ensemble is centered around pun-loving guitarist Michael Slyne, but Bent Light finds him in a much more ambient/drone mood than usual. Slyne’s co-conspirator in this project is occasional Family Stoned member and pedal steel guitarist Russell Linder, who was amusingly immortalized in the title of The Family Stoned’s _Russ Never Sleeps_ album. Aside from their usual instruments, the two artists employ an array of tape loops, pedals, and shortwave radio transmissions to conjure the sort of twinkling and gently psychotropic reverie that is absolutely begging to be played in a planetarium (though the album description’s helpfully notes that a deserted drive-in movie theater during a snowstorm would be an appropriate setting as well). Memory Waste The album is divided into two side-long pieces that were apparently recorded in a cold and damp basement last spring during a bout of severe allergy symptoms (“nose dripping, mouth breathing, eyes itching, blurred vision”), which goes to show that sublime beauty can blossom in the most unlikely and unexpected places. In the opening “Gain,” Linder’s languorous and meditative pedal steel casts a spell of dreamlike tropical exotica over a subtly trippy backdrop of warped and murmuring tapes and snatches of distorted voices plucked from radio waves. Slyne’s guitar is similarly understated, as he enhances the “moonlit lagoon” vibe of Linder’s pedal steel with a host of quietly melodic improvisations and echoing scrapes and string noises. While that may not sound like radical new psychedelic territory on paper, the magic lies in the duo’s perfect balance of elements, as the piece has the feel of a floating, sensuous, and undulating sound collage with a wonderfully hallucinatory and unpredictable undercurrent of mysterious submerged voices, tape hiss, and animal-like howls that beautifully fray, smear, and quaver in the piece’s final minutes.

This ambitious new release from Florida-based sound artist Josh Mason is the third installment in Greyfade’s _FOLIO_ series (“a full-length music edition in hardcover book form”). The book, billed as "a nonlinear travelogue of the states of Florida," is a collection of impressionistic, elliptical, and poetic ruminations on Mason’s oft-surreal environs that are “intended to be experienced simultaneously” with the music. That is quite a cool and unique idea, as it gives the album’s nine hallucinatory modular synth soundscapes a loose narrative arc and a dreamlike (and humid) sense of place. Mason’s vision is also a fresh twist on both modular synth albums and ambient music, as he sets out to capture the very specific and Lychian ambiance of brutalist concrete, decaying billboards, humming air conditioners, omnipresent mosquitoes, gas station churches, dimly lit showers, and flickering motel signs. Greyfade According to Mason, _Kicking A Dark Horse_ “was built around a modular synthesizer framework that operates on streams of binary data” that “resists intuitive control” and “made no immediate sense to him.” That was a deliberate choice, of course, as Mason views that constraint as “a way of forcing outcomes that surprise even their maker.” In that regard, Mason shares some common ground with artists like Merzbow and Nurse With Wound, as he essentially creates a living modular system of “spinning plates” that he manipulates live, then starts recording only when “he feels them arrive at the right momentum simultaneously.” Similarly, Mason also purposely misuses and abuses his gear to yield strange and unusual sounds, patterns, and textures, with “oscillators clocked far below their operational thresholds, bit-depth data routed through mismatched converters, and delay lines treated as percussive instruments.”

This ambitious and aptly titled new album from upstate NY synth wizard M. Geddes Gengras is something akin to a wild and eccentric game of the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse, as Gengras handed off his raw synth recordings to a wide and varied array of collaborators and offered them “creative carte blanche” for their additions (albeit with minimal instructions). The idea is a playful and somewhat ingenious expansion upon how Gengras’ beloved modular synthesizers work, as “each new element added to the chain affects the whole, which can produce unexpected results.” As evidenced by this album, the same is definitely true of collaborators as well, yet Gengras also took inspiration from other chance-based composition strategies such as John Cage’s I-Ching experiments or Autechre’s complex algorithmic mutations. As far as I know, however, no indeterminacy-inspired composers ever recorded an album quite like this one, as _Guest List_ is a charmingly playful and freewheeling fun house of wild and audacious aesthetic collisions and juxtapositions. Hausu Mountain In a way, _Guest List_ seems like an album that Gengras was always destined to make, as his entire career has been eclectic, freewheeling, and collaboration-filled, as I first encountered him through his seemingly ubiquitous presence on every good Not Not Fun project in the early 2000s and he has since blown me away at least once with both his outsider techno alias (Personable) and his collected Moog works. He has also taken quite a deep dive into Jamaican dub production techniques with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones, as the two launched the dancehall imprint Duppy Gun after collaborating with The Congos in 2011. In short, Gengras is a guy who has seemingly tried his hand at damn near every possible strain of arty underground music at this point.

This latest collaboration between Irisarri and Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard alias is billed as the duo’s second album, which admittedly makes sense from a “new material” standpoint, but gets a bit murky given that the duo’s previous releases were a hybrid live/studio album and a live album that featured two previously unreleased pieces. Much like 2024’s _Impossibly distant, impossibly close_ , _Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun_ is again something of a hybrid release, as the raw material was recorded live over a three-day residency at Berlin’s Morphine Raum. Some additional recordings were later made by Irisarri back at his studio in New York, but the more captivating bit is what emerged after Zen layered, subtracted, and reassembled the final recordings at his own studio back in Rome. The result is not what I would have expected, as Irisarri and Zen’s individual styles largely dissolve into a series of unusually minimal and understated mood pieces. Black Knoll Editions The duo’s palette for these recordings were the expected modular synths and bowed guitars, but there were some unexpected twists this time around as well. The biggest one is that cellist Martina Bertoni and violinist Andrea Burelli share composing credit for a couple of pieces, but I was also a bit surprised to discover that Irisarri’s characteristic veil of frayed and corroded textures is mostly absent. The duo also note that rotary speakers played a central role, as did Morphine Raum’s 1970s mixing console and an array of microphones stationed throughout the room. According to Irisarri, “At moments I genuinely couldn’t tell if a sound was coming from me or from Abul. It stopped feeling like two people making decisions and began to feel like we were inside a system moving on its own." While I have absolutely no idea how much Abul/Zen later reshaped those performances, I certainly share Irisarri’s sentiment, as the lines between the duo’s synth sounds and processed guitar sounds has never been blurrier. Also, I could have sworn that there was a saxophone in “Blue Descent,” so I may also actually be losing my mind altogether.

_Furafauna_ is the culmination of three years of work by Thorsten Soltau (who sometimes works under the name Femurl, with both names attributed to this album). Consisting of four pieces and two remixes, one by Troum and one by Sewicide, he dabbles in a wide variety of mostly (but not exclusively) electronic structures. Elements of abstract noise, glitching digital, and traditional composition all are present at various points, culminating in a dense and at times challenging but engaging album. Black Rose "Astafel" opens the disc with a spoken word passage that relents to spacious tones and an underlying bit of noise. Here, he meshes higher pitched tones mesh with a low synth pulse while including spoken passages met with far off clattering. Soltau mixes in some plucked strings to counter the more inorganic sounds that dominate the piece. "Lullaby for the Extinct" features some similar components, such as deep pulses, processed voices, and dramatic swells of synthesizers. Again, he implements the sound of strings, but this time plucked and bowed, with subtle processing to give an organic sensibility to the piece. Both of these pieces feature the legendary Ralf Wehowsky (RLW) on "virtual instruments," which may explain some of the continuity.

Robert Poss’s post-Band of Susans work has covered a significant number of styles, however what remains consistent is his omnipresent guitar. Having worked in traditional song-like structures, music for dance performances, and pure abstraction, I have always been impressed by his solo work. _Kepler’s Choice_ is a collaboration with E-Clark (Edward) Cornell, making for Poss’s first collaboration in a number of years. As a lengthy CD split into eight pieces (the shortest clocking in at close to six minutes), there is a lot to digest here, with a sound heavily steeped in modern classical composition. No Sides The title piece opens the disc and features the two playing with dynamics, with frequent swells of sound rising and then being pulled back. This provides a sort of stuttering structure that—coupled with the hard panning of the segments—makes for a pleasant sense of disorientation. Layers build and rich tones underscore, which a provide a solid foundation on which the two stack. Comparably, the following “the ripple effect from an emotional error” (preserving the capitalization structure of the song list) is more grounded. Acoustic guitar from Poss blends with rising, delicate sections of what could be synths conjuring a sense of drama, punctuated by rich piano passages. Throughout its 11-and-a-half-minute duration the two push the work into a multitude of spaces: first electronics and cavernous tones into glitching and a guitar-centric sound.

Newly issued on vinyl for the first time ever, _Interstate_ was arguably both Monolake’s full-length debut and the only fully collaborative release from the original duo of Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. While it has not yet become as revered as some of Monolake’s other early albums, the reasons for that are primarily due to context rather than quality, as its predecessor _Hong Kong_ was a collection of the project’s killer run of singles of the iconic Chain Reaction label, which would be quite a tough act to follow under any circumstances (and this was definitely not the follow up that any Chain Reaction fans were expecting). Field/Monolake _Interstate_ was also followed by quite a hot streak from the more conventionally beat-driven and Henke-centric iteration of the project, yet this album remains a very cool and unique outlier that lands quite a bit closer to cutting-edge sound design than it does to classic dub techno fare. In an oblique way, however, this short-lived incarnation of Monolake turned out to be even more influential than their beloved former label, as Henke and Behles spent much of the ‘90s co-creating the Ableton Live software together and Interstate is an eclectic (and electric) showcase of all of the wild and boldly futuristic new Max/MSP sound processing techniques that were about to rewire the electronic music world forever.

This deeply unconventional Montreal-based duo of poet Deanna Radford and sound artist Jeremy Young have been fitfully recording together since 2017, but this is their proper full-length debut. While I have been a fan of Young’s solo work and other projects for a while now, Cloud Circuit is a different animal altogether, as the duo seek to craft music inspired by “communication glitches and lost connections.” In more concrete terms, the pair’s aesthetic is centered around the processing and deconstruction of Radford’s spoken word performances while Young weaves surreal and textured backdrops from oscillators, radio transmissions, tapes, found sounds, and the occasional piano or organ. A number of eclectic Montreal luminaries (Sam Shalabi, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, etc.) turn up to party as well, as does Sun Ra via his writings, but Radford and Young make quite a compelling team in their own, as this album hypnotically blurs the lines between spoken word, sound collage, and field recording in such innovative fashion that many of these pieces feel like actual songs with hooks despite lacking nearly all of the usual elements of traditional songcraft. Watch That Ends The Night Records The opening “An Introduction to Cloud Genera” provides an appropriately surreal and representative introduction to the Cloud Circuit vision, as Radford dispassionately muses on an array of cloud-related themes over a shuddering and undulating percussion loop and a shimmering haze of drones. As Radford notes, clouds are always evolving and the same is true of Cloud Circuit, as her voice gradually splits off into two channels that move about spatially and her words are umpredictably broken up into decontextualized sound fragments. On Young’s end, the underlying rumble gradually becomes more intense, crackling, and textured, which roughly mirrors the trajectory of Radford’s voice.

This latest release from NY-based saxophonist/composer Bertucci continues her bold expansion into improbable and adventurous new territory, as it is a commissioned collaboration with German flutist Norbert Rodenkirchen. The two artists first met back in 2019 after a performance by Rodenkirchen’s early music ensemble Sequentia and Bertucci was immediately fascinated by both Rodenkirchen’s collection of ancient flutes and all of the folklore and tuning/notation challenges inherent in recreating Medieval music. When Bertucci landed the opportunity to record at The ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe back in 2023, the stars were finally in perfect alignment for the two artists to collaborate on something special and unique that inventively blurs the lines between past and future. The resultant work is something of a shapeshifting beast that has morphed from an eight channel spatialized live performance to an infinite durational installation to a 34-minute stereo album. To my ears, there is probably nothing else on earth quite like it, but it falls in roughly the same avant-garde ballpark as Maryanne Amacher, Phill Niblock, and Catherine Christer Hennix. Cibachrome The album borrows its title from a quote by a former Carthusian monk explaining why the monastery’s Chartreuse production was decreased (despite high demand) during the pandemic to allow the monks more time for their spiritual concerns. It is a perfect title, as one of Rodenkirchen’s flutes is a replica of a vulture bone flute that dates from as far back as 37,000 years ago and the duo’s Pythagorean tunings date back to Ancient Mesopotamia circa 600 BC and are based on the mathematics of the natural world. Much like the monks, Bertucci and Rodenkirchen see the current age of “scorched earth capitalism” as an ephemeral chapter in a story that spans millenia and predates America, Christianity, capitalism, electricity, and Western turning systems. Then again, maybe it won’t be ephemeral in the way that I hope, as Bertucci seems particularly fascinated with the more apocalyptically inspired strains of early music and notes that experiencing a total solar eclipse made her feel “connected to the experience of my ancestors from ages ago, of a primeval confusion, sense of humility and wonderment at the awesome power of the skies.” It is probably safe to say that this album is her valiant attempt to re-capture that singular feeling.

The latest solo album from this NY-based avant-crooner is an impressively wild evolution from his previous work, as _Romance Wake Naming_ feels like a heartfelt yet feral homage to “the experimental and even hip-hop roots of industrial music.” Embracing “mangled breakbeats” and “cassette cut up experiments,” Trecka’s latest vision lands in fascinating and novel new terrain that lies somewhere between harrowing late-period Scott Walker and snarling and chaotic interpretations of New Romantic pop hits by a gaggle of insalubrious Wax Trax! miscreants like Revolting Cocks. Fittingly, one of those Cocks (Ministry’s Paul Barker) even makes a guest appearance, as does Meat Beat Manifesto (albeit in sampled form only). These songs can admittedly be quite a cacophonous and unstable concoction at times, but the best moments beautifully channel the raw and chaotic “anything goes” intensity of a great bygone era in underground music. The Garrote The opening “Rumors of Survival” provides a wonderfully churning and blown-out introduction to the album, as Trecka repurposes a mbira sample from the late Jamie Branch into a clattering, pulsing, and rhythmic ball of noise. That said, Trecka’s Scott Walker-esque vocals were admittedly a bit more of an acquired taste for me, as I have seen them previously described as “David Bowie at his most untamed,” which can be a somewhat jarring element in this particular context. I would personally go with “New Romantic vocalist with the intensity dialed up way too high to feel like pop anymore,” but I am mostly a fan, as the wailing and primal catharsis of those vocals are the heart of the album and they are also the thing that transforms these pieces into a raw, direct, and unique artistic statement rather than just a mere homage to some cool ‘80s industrial artists. Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention that Trecka is generally quite a cool and adventurous vocal artist, as his frayed and howling melodies are ingeniously enhanced with a vibrant host of cut-up and swooping samples and layers.

As evidenced by the many intimate and autobiographical passages about self-doubt, numbness, and creative frustration it contains, this latest album from James was “forged from the fire of internal struggles.” Fortunately, all that inner turmoil ultimately resulted in an absolutely killer album that feels like a massive artistic breakthrough, so I guess it was all worth it (though James herself may strongly feel otherwise). The catalyst for James’ reinvention unexpectedly came from her work producing Anysia Kym’s _Confession_ EP, which “gave her the experience of a more 'pop' setting and the tools and insight to work her instrumentals into more conventional shapes.” The ingenious bit is that James’ new embrace of pop-inspired song structures provides an accessible shape to some very ambitious, radical, and non-pop enhancements in her production techniques and beat crafting skills. The final piece of the puzzle is that James tagged in a host of eclectic guest vocalists who seemed to know exactly what was needed to transform her stuttering, blurred, and shapeshifting instrumental tracks into sensuous, hook-packed left-field pop magic. Hyperdub The most unexpected of the many guest vocal performances is unquestionably Low’s Alan Sparhawk, who urges everyone to make love (rather than war) over a backdrop of gently rolling rock drums and bleary electric piano. To his credit, Sparhawk makes a surprisingly credible soul vocalist in this unfamiliar context, but “Peak Again” is definitely an outlier for a whole host of reasons. On the considerably more outré side of the spectrum is the Miho Hatori-featuring “Flatline,” as Hatari sensuously sings in both Japanese and English over pitch-bent synth chords and a skittering, convulsive, and glitch-ravaged groove. The straight-up hip-hop of “Ending Us All” is another wild detour, as Le3 bLACK raps over lo-fi smeary synths and some killer live drumming from Fyn Dobson. Elsewhere, Anysia Kym takes the mic for the album’s hottest would-be single, as “Score” is a perfect marriage of intimately underproduced vocals, jazzy electric piano chords, gently trippy flutes, and squelchy futuristic percussion. Tirzah contributes a simmering and seductive gem as well, as “Habits and Patterns,” beautifully blends hushed and melancholy heartache with invasively destabilizing and jackhammering loop spasms.

This is the second full-length that Carla Dal Forno has released since returning to her native Australia and those sunnier environs continue to have a welcome warming effect on her songwriting. She has also grown considerably more eclectic and inspired in both her instrumentation and her assimilation of fresh influences over the last few years while her songwriting talents have sharpened significantly, as this “album of quiet upheaval” is a hook-packed, intimate, and refreshingly sincere collection of would-be indie pop hits about heartache, yearning, desire, and every other deep human emotion that matters. In that regard, _Confession_ is a significant leap forward, but Dal Forno is otherwise still the same bass-wielding post-punk chanteuse as ever. Kallista Amusingly, I noticed the other day that Dal Forno self-described her early Berlin work as “lone kosmische misanthropy,” which is quite a far cry from her current stripped-down and bass-driven Young Marble Giants-style indie pop vision. The interesting bit is that Dal Forno’s radical stylistic transformation happened without her making any major foundational changes to the essence of her sound: ten years after “Fast Moving Cars,” she is still essentially making bedroom pop magic from little more than a bass, a drum machine, and some honest and introspective musings about life, heartache, and relationships. The only thing that truly changed is that she gradually cleared away all the murk, gloom, reverb, and rigidity to let in some welcome light, space, warmth, fun, and leftfield inspiration. In short, she focused entirely on being real, human, and direct and jettisoned everything that diluted or blunted those aspects. There is one semi-throwback to Dal Forno’s Blackest Ever Black past, however, as the rubbery slow-motion stomp of “Nighttime” feels like it should have been THE shadowy, bloodless Berlin party anthem of 2016.

This latest full-length from guitar visionary Sarah Lipstate is a bit of an inspired outlier, as she has expanded Noveller’s usual guitar-centric palette to include a baby grand piano, percussion instruments, and an impressively Lynchian guest vocal performance from her occasional bandmate Iggy Pop. I suspect that such evolution was inevitable, however, as Lipstate now has a new studio and has been landing some relatively high-profile soundtrack work since moving from Brooklyn to LA in 2020. Naturally, the demands of commissioned work would certainly influence her working methods and inspire some new techniques and textures. In another way, however, _I Am The Weather_ can be seen as a return to Lipstate’s roots as well, as she spent years learning classical piano before she reinvented herself as a self-taught guitarist at age 17. As is often the case with bold creative evolutions, there are admittedly a few growing pains and missteps lurking among these nine pieces, but the bigger story is that such moments are interspersed with a few of the most beautiful pieces that Lipstate has ever recorded. Experimentia The most immediately striking piece on the album is unsurprisingly the lead single “The Girl Who Was Death,” as Iggy Pop’s unsettling and gravel-voiced monologue unfolds over a shapeshifting and increasingly howling, fragmented, and nightmarish backdrop. While this is the first time that the two artists have worked together on a Noveller piece, their collaborative relationship first began back in 2019 with a spoken word performance of Dylan Thomas’s "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" that landed on Pop’s _Free_ album. Unsurprisingly, there is a cool riff at the heart of the piece and Pop has some great lines, but the more impressive achievement is that “The Girl Who Was Death” feels plucked from an imagined/non-existent episode of _Twin Peaks_. While it is undeniably cool and attention-grabbing, that outlier is a bit too brief and Iggy Pop-centered to quite capture Lipstate at the full height of her powers. Fortunately, there is quite an impressive run of mid-album pieces that swing the balance in the other direction.

Previously a digital-only release as part of Francisco López's _Two-Headed Snake_ series of collaborations, this split release between him and equally legendary composer Éric La Casa features the two working independently, but from shared source material. What exactly that source material is never becomes entirely clear, but it gives a consistency between two very different, amazing works. Swarming The source material specified is just 11 years of "objects and spaces," so any clear identification beyond what occasionally sounds like field recordings is pretty much impossible. Certain characteristics of sound appear clearly throughout both artists' compositions but utilized in noticeably different ways.

This latest album from Sublime Frequencies co-founder and Cairo-based expat Alan Bishop’s long-running and eclectic solo project is a bit of a pleasant surprise, as he enlisted an absolute murderers’ row of talented collaborators to record a collection of mostly original new instrumental pieces. Notably, the album is billed as “drifting closer” to late-period Sun City Girls albums like _Funeral Mariachi_ , but that kinship is mostly true in a general sense rather than a stylistic one, as _Malarial Dream_ is unusually lean on covers and often feels like the work of a formidable full band. It also mirrors _Funeral Mariachi_ in its comparative listenability, as both Bishop’s solo career and Sun City Girls have their share of prickly indulgences and eccentricities. Obviously, Bishop remains the same idiosyncratic chaos element as always, but _Malarial Dream_ places him at the center of a collection of Middle Eastern-inspired desert-psych jams recorded with an incredible international cast of killer improvisors. Abduction The album opens with the short and punchy “Rock N’ Roll,” which is evidently one of the album’s two “obscure covers,” as Bishop’s Dwarfs of East Agouza bandmate Sam Shalabi is credited as the composer. He also happens to be the one rockin’ the oud in the thorny and droning central riff, but the album’s strongest moments tend to be the less muscular and rock-inspired pieces that follow. In “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin - Part 2,” for example, Bishop and Huda Asfour trade acoustic guitar and lap harp motifs over a pleasantly rolling percussion rhythm and a gently flanging synth drone. Amusingly, Part 2 bears little resemblance at all to the version that appeared on Sun City Girls’ _Bright Surroundings_ , anyone who has been feverishly waiting three decades for its sequel to appear will likely experience some rough cognitive dissonance.

This first meeting between NYC-based composer/conceptual artist Branciforte and Belgian jazz pianist Dumoulin is an impressively ambitious and mindbending “musical dialogue” recorded over the span of two days. Both artists played separate Fender Rhodes electric pianos with their “own array of processing and effects” while Branciforte further spiced up their interaction with “a custom live editing system designed to process both musicians' outputs in real time.” The physical album is similarly unusual, as Branciforte describes it as a “multi-disc object” that divides these eight pieces into four 3” CDs that can be played in varying sequences (along with one normal-sized disc that contains the full 70-minute album in its entirety). I can certainly understand why Branciforte decided to go big with the packaging, as _ITERAE_ is an absolutely mesmerizing and landmark release that beautifully blurs the lines between classic Oval-style glitchery, psychotropic _Bitches Brew_ -style dark magic, and the lingering otherworldly dissonances of a great Morton Feldman piece. Greyfade As Branciforte describes it, _ITERAE_ ’s “eight modular sections hover between form and abstraction, precise sonic architecture and dream-like flow,” but a more reductionist and concise term like “ambient-adjacent” would probably suffice as well, as there are a lot of flickering and dreamlike drones at that heart of this release. That said, these pieces are considerably more harmonically complex and subtly dissonant than actual ambient music.

This is the first time that Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête) and Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) have recorded together as a duo, but the two politically minded artists are long-time friends who have been collaborating in various forms for years. The pair initially began working on pieces together in Montreal back in the summer of 2023, but the project got understandably derailed by the Palestinian genocide, which left Moumneh with “a complete artistic block and the inability to articulate what people are living through.” In the summer of 2024, Oberland invited his friend to Paris in the hopes of reawakening his creative spirit and the two worked “day and night” to shape a new vision together. Notably, Oberland often “took the lead” in steering the album, which was a bit of a pattern-breaking role-reversal for Moumneh (who co-runs the Hotel2Tango studio with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in addition to his central role in JIMH). The resultant album is quite a freewheeling creative explosion that pushes each artist into compelling and unexpected new terrain. Constellation The most surprising pieces are definitely the first two, as Moumneh’s lead vocals are digitally harmonized in a way that arguably resembles a melancholy robot. While I tend to loathe anything resembling auto-tuned vocals, that bold decision actually serves both pieces quite well, as their melodic vocal hooks provide a nice counterbalance to their more dirge-y/doom-y elements (roiling tremolo-picked guitars, slow-motion drums, distorted bass). Notably, both two pieces are arguably also the most stylistically indebted to Oberland’s Oiseaux-Tempête work, but “Dagger Eyes” in particular blows up that template with a killer mutating synth motif and a structure that blossoms into something resembling futuristic synth-driven Arabic emo. Elsewhere, “The Serpent” is a completely different left-field bombshell, as a buzzing bass throb propels a driving techno groove that unrelentingly snowballs in intensity beneath Moumneh’s digitized and chant-like vocal laments.

Constructed from field recordings and found sounds and mutated into collages further refined via live performances, Andrew Anderson’s latest album is a final construction of these elements that have gone through multiple stages of processing and abstraction. Although most (but not all) of the building blocks that make up _Thresholds_ have been modified into something completely different, it is the times in which these identifiable sounds bleed through that make the record even more unsettling but continually engaging. Elevator Bath The field recording elements of Anderson’s work are apparent from the very opening of "Until My Blood Contains All" with squealing brakes cutting through open spaces, all surrounded by rain drenched in reverb. He blends in reversed shimmers, with the various sounds drifting between what sounds like environment, and what sounds like music. The overall looping structure enforces the latter, and a clear intensity increases throughout. Again, as a balance, Anderson joins fuzzy, crunching noise with some stretched, almost musical sounds slipping through. The piece clearly transitions from being environmentally focused to a structured, musical one. A gentle melody is extended under sputtering, collapsing sounds and fuzz drenched broken radio layers.

This long-running solo project from Posh Isolation co-founder Christian Stadsgaard has gradually evolved from its modest minimal techno beginnings into a vision that inventively blurs the lines between harsh noise, ambient, and contemporary classical. While he has certainly kept one foot firmly rooted in the noise scene with collaborative releases with Merzbow, Evil Moisture, and Government Alpha, the overall arc of the project has mostly been towards striking the perfect balance between beauty and violence. His most notable success in that regard before now was probably the static-gnawed ambiance of 2024’s _The Night Has Passed Already_ , but _The Vanity Project_ feels like another big creative breakthrough, as the more beautiful elements have a more timeless/sacred feel this time around that puts some significant distance between Stadsgaard and his peers in the contemporary ambient milieu. Also, both Merzbow and Government Alpha turn up to help ensure that Vanity Productions’ sharper edges remain every bit as visceral and snarling as ever. Northern Electronics The opening “Hoarfrost” provides an especially haunting and sublime introduction to the album, as a brief haze of whines and brittle piano fragments unexpectedly blossoms into lush organ drones that subtly warble and shimmer in pleasantly trippy ways. It gets even better from there, however, as a looping two-note “dial tone” melody fades in to provide a haunting, unconventional, and short-lived melodic hook before the piece evolves into a killer final stretch that sounds like a warmly beautiful organ mass with a seething and enigmatic undercurrent of tape loop noise squall.

This latest opus from the Brooklyn-based composer/puppeteer is the second part of a planned trilogy that began with 2023’s _Tin Iso and the Dawn_. Notably, that last album absolutely floored me and was easily one of my favorite releases of the year, so my expectations for this next installment were quite high indeed. Happily, _Osni the Flare_ is yet another stunner, but it feels like a bit more like a score to a larger work than it does a stand-alone album. That makes sense, as it is exactly that, yet the same was true of its predecessor as well—the music and visual elements just seem to be more intimately intertwined this time around. That is perfectly fine by me, as Allen’s concise self-description of their art as “building a world with music & puppets” is a literal (if understated) fact that wildly undersells the sheer magic and wonder of this expanding mythology brought to life through a virtuosic ballet of music, marionettes, and light. RVNG INTL  It is fair to say that I am not normally the target demographic for either puppetry or self-created mythologies unless they are coming from an endearingly unhinged outsider art direction. However, I am eternally drawn towards artists with a bold and singular vision like a moth to a dragon’s ember and Allen certainly fits the bill in that regard. Unsurprisingly, the execution of that vision is yet another crucial consideration, as everyone knows someone who can make the most mundane anecdote seem absolutely mesmerizing and someone else who can make even the most dramatic events seem punishingly dull. Allen is very much one of the former rare souls who can seemingly make anything seem beautiful and poetic. Moreover, telling this particular story has consumed the last decade of Allen's life and it absolutely shows. This project feels like both a life’s work and a genuine labor of love painstakingly chiseled to perfection. In fact, I was genuinely amazed that this album only took three years to make given that Allen played every instrument while simultaneously crafting the hauntingly surreal puppet world that the album inhabits (and there was plenty of sound design involved as well).

Looking over his discography, _Conclusio_ marks the first solo work from Asmus Tietchens since 2022’s _Schatten Ohne Licht_ , which is quite a significant stretch for him. He has been consistent with his collaborations, but solo material has been less frequent in recent years. Compared to the previous album, _Conclusio_ is less sparse in its construction, and instead is rather dense, focused, and quite intense, while consistently displaying Tietchens’s careful crafting of sound. Die Stadt One consistent thing on the 12 individual pieces that make up the album, all of which are traditional song length, is Tietchens's employment of drastic shifts in volume and dynamics, with occasionally shocking results.

This is the debut release from the duo of Brian Foote (Nudge/Kranky/Peak Oil/False Aralia) and Paul Dickow (Strategy/Community Library), but the two artists have been collaborating off and on for roughly a quarter century now. Notably, however, there is absolutely no stylistic carryover from the duo’s previous projects together (Nudge and Fontanelle), as _High Cube_ is the musical equivalent of an ‘80s Trapper Keeper featuring a bitchin’ camaro, palm trees, and the word “California” in bright pink neon letters. I suppose the same could be said of any number of forgettable vaporwave artists, but Foote and Dickow also bring serious production chops and some more eclectic influences to their bleary and simmering post-modern dance party as well. My best attempt at describing their shared vision is “it sounds like contemporary dubplates of ‘80s Japanese ‘city pop’ infected with subtle strains of early techno and hip-hop,” but the vibe is what truly matters here and _High Cube_ beautifully evokes nothing less than an imagined and hypnagogic late-night drive through ‘80s Los Angeles with the top down and the breeze in my hair. Geographic North The hazy, neon-soaked, and vaguely retro-futurist world of High Cube was apparently a deliberately chosen “narrative mood,” which is quite an unusual wavelength for two artists to share, but I have no idea how often Foote and Dickow improvised together before they ultimately found this direction. I bring that up because the duo specifically note that the album’s direction was not defined by their gear choices. Despite that claim, however, the pair’s gear and working methods did loom large in this album’s conception in other ways, as they worked with strict, self-imposed constraints: “five machines, a one-hour timer, and a total ban on overthinking.” While Foote and Dickow do note that _High Cube_ takes a “drier, sparser, and decidedly chunkier” approach than their previous work as a result of those decisions, the most significant impact from their newly constrained working method was that it forced them out of familiar patterns and allowed something new to organically grow as “an accident of chemistry.”

This wild second collaboration between French producer Simon Aussel and Egypt-based singer/poet/trumpeter Abdullah Miniawy is the latest installment in Dekmantel’s UFO series championing “ranky darkwave funk and industrial textures, jagged body music and overall destructive energy from the world’s most talented and tenebrous souls.” Notably, very few of those descriptors overtly apply for most of this particular album, as _Dying Is The Internet_ feels like a bit of Trojan horse in which auto-tuned vocals, accessible songcraft, and big hooks transform subversion into a series of Arabic club-friendly bangers. That curious approach seems to fit the album’s philosophical intent appropriately, however, as the two artists envision the album as “reflection on the nature of club culture and digital fatigue” in which the internet has become “less about sharing ideas and more about surviving in a digital business ecosystem." While I unsurprisingly have absolutely no idea what Miniawy is singing about as a functionally monolingual American, he certainly brings a visceral intensity to Simo Cell’s endlessly inventive and cutting edge techno visions. Dekmantel The press release for this album describes Simo Cell as “a leading light in contemporary leftfield club music, twisting up adventurous rhythms and flamboyant production in pursuit of a perpetual freshness for the floor,” which feels accurate to me as a casual fan of his shapeshifting “bass-heavy minimalism” over the last few years, as the only real constants seem to be continually reinvention and a talent for razor sharp sound design. Abdullah Miniawy, on the other hand, is a bit of an enigmatic chaos element for me, as he is known as a singer, poet, trumpeter, author, and actor and his musical output has largely been a varied series of freewheeling and eclectic collaborations that blur the lines between techno, jazz, and Arabic music. On _Dying Is The Internet_ , he is most prominently a vocalist, lyricist, and trumpeter, but he is also credited with composing the beatless, hallucinatory, and hazed out instrumental “Tear Chime.”

This latest opus from the eternally evolving Cécile Schott continues her recent fascination with synth-centric compositions, but the resemblance to any previous Colleen releases begins and ends there, as these five pieces feel like a bold leap into challenging and surprising new territory. The album’s title (“Free before the ending”) alludes to Schott’s 2024 decision to learn to swim again after three decades of water phobia, which is an exceptionally rich metaphor about navigating an “unstable environment…its discomfort, the doubts about your abilities and the reality of facing your own limitations.” In keeping with that theme, the sea is itself an excellent metaphor for this album, as Schott casts aside familiar melodies and patterns to plunge into a vision that is churning, alive, unpredictable, and uncharacteristically visceral. Thrill Jockey It is not surprising that Schott’s uneasy relationship with water loomed large in her life in recent years, as she moved to Barcelona in 2019 and notes that “the sight of the Mediterranean Sea made me feel this limitation more and more acutely with each passing year.” Alert readers may note that the world as a whole started to go to shit in greatly accelerated fashion soon after that, so Schott’s dread of the seemingly infinite, unknown, and unpredictable expanse eternally lurking on her horizon mirrored an increasingly threatening and unpredictable era for humans in general. The trigger for Schott’s transformational life event came during a performance in the Azores (her 250th live show, coincidentally), as she was struck by the dolphin-filled natural beauty of her surroundings and realized that she needed to “stop making excuses” and get in the fucking water. Unsurprisingly, her triumphant return to the sea proved to be a revelatory experience that “catapulted” her into a more physical and active life and she considers the album “an ode to movement, to the body, to water, to urgency; to repairing old wounds, overcoming personal blocks and starting all over again.”

This latest release from the seemingly endless Muslimgauze archive is a bit of an enigma and a surprise, as it was apparently “assembled posthumously” from “previously unreleased material.” Admittedly, that half-true claim could reasonably be made about A LOT of archival Muslimgauze album releases that have surfaced in the years since Bryn Jones’ untimely passing in 1999, but the difference is that this album was assembled by Staalplaat rather than being one of the many “finished” albums that had previously only surfaced in a limited edition or simply got shelved and forgotten about due to the staggering pace with which Jones churned out albums in his lifetime. Staalplaat In the world of Muslimgauze, however, normal distinctions between albums and eras are blurred into meaninglessness, as at least three of these pieces have been released in very similar form as well. If normal rules applied, such obvious recycling would definitely annoy the hell out of me, but these eight pieces feel right together and capture some of the more killer grooves of Muslimgauze’s mid-’90s Indian/Bhangra-inspired work.

Seemingly a post-script to David Jackman's subscription series of CDs that were conceptualized as a single piece, these two 7" records both continue the themes of the eight albums that preceded them. With one as Organum Electronics and the other under his own name, one of the singles is an extension of what had come before, but the other seems to venture into new spaces, which I suppose may or may not be indicative of a future direction in Jackman’s work. Die Stadt Available individually to the public, or in a colored vinyl double 7" old school gatefold package for the subscribers, the construction of these two singles is aligned with Jackman's history of presenting two slightly different variations on the same sound. "Fiire," as Organum Electronics, is the one that is most representative of the discs that made up the subscription set. Taking that almost-but-not-quite harsh noise blast sound that has been consistent with his use of that name, the relative brevity adds to the intensity. Over the two sides, I can almost detect some of the elements of his non-electronic work (bells, ravens, etc.) bleeding through the jet engine blast, but that could be entirely a figment of my imagination. Like the long form works, however, the endings of the pieces are just as jarring as the openings.

Back in 2022, Bill Orcutt released his excellent _Music for Four Guitars_ album, which led to the formation of a killer touring quartet featuring fellow avant-guitar luminaries Shane Parish, Wendy Eisenberg, and Ava Mendoza. Orcutt clearly found that experience inspiring, as he later started a similarly formidable trio with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller. In keeping with that theme, _Music in Continuous Motion_ is yet another album composed for a quartet of guitars, but this one “pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism” and “discrete, mechanistic precision” of its predecessor to embrace a more melodic, human, and performance-driven aesthetic. While Orcutt himself impishly summarizes this latest direction as “a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” my own take is that it feels like a spiritual descendant of the best bits of Glenn Branca, Gang of Four, Built to Spill, and Archers of Loaf with a distinctly Orcutt spin. Unsurprisingly, it also feels like yet another great album from one of the most reliably compelling and singular guitarists around. Palilalia To my ears, the opening “Giving unknown origin” is the piece that best captures Orcutt at the height of his powers, as it features a bright and memorable melody, an incredibly cool and intricate central motif, and plenty of snarl, bite, and obsessive repetition. He also makes incredibly effective and dynamic use of the stereo field, which makes it possible to discern how all of its masterfully interwoven moving parts are evolving and interacting. While I certainly dig the various riffs and melodies and the shifting dynamics, “Giving unknown origin” is also an excellent showcase for some of the more general aspects of Orcutt’s vision that I love, such as the way he balances machine-like pattern repetition with more viscerally slashing elements. The best bits feel like a duel in both a literal sense (staccato rhythmic interplay) and a more profound and abstract sense (beauty vs. violence, order vs. chaos, etc.). Also, I would be remiss if I did not also note that I was surprised to discover that Orcutt can unleash taut, angular, and urgent-sounding riffage as well as any ripping post-hardcore band, which is not something I would have guessed from his previous work.

This “ambient transsexual” homage to Bruce Springsteen’s _Nebraska_ (“his dark night of the soul with red text on a black background”) was inspired by the eleven months spent in Iowa after “avowed club rat, alt pop star aspirant, and sophisticated film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli hauled herself and her two parakeets there from Bushwick unto the relative quiet and spaciousness of the plains.” Unsurprisingly, that move was a bit of a culture shock, as OHYUNG traded raves and Brooklyn nightlife for “prairie sunsets, transgender care bans, all-ages hardcore shows, screaming hog farms, corn reaching for the heavens, tornado sirens, big beautiful skies, the world’s largest truckstop, and a brutal winter,” but she also notes that Iowa gave us Arthur Russell, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Transcendental Meditation as well. Fittingly, the album mirrors that unique mixture of beauty and menace and shares Springsteen’s own pared-to-the-bone starkness, which is quite an unexpected and haunting reinvention in the wake of 2025’s stellar pop-minded opus _You Are Always On My Mind_ yet remains every bit as compelling (if not more so). Self-Released In a roundabout way, it seems like OHYUNG could not have made _Iowa_ without making a “pop” album first, as it got her thinking about what remains “when she removes the scaffolding” and “grinds up the bones of the song.” Notably, she did not treat that as a purely rhetorical question and concluded that the answer was “ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, and late-night gloom.” To my ears, it seems like OHYUNG used that as the starting point of Iowa, then built upwards from there using a palette of “mangled chorales, lo-res rips of devotional music, surreptitious field recordings, and assorted synth pads.”

The premise of this quixotic tour de force admittedly sounds like a joke that went waaay too far, which certainly explains why Bill Orcutt agreed to release it on Palilalia before ever hearing a single note, as his own _A Mechanical Joey_ occupies similarly improbable and seemingly deranged terrain. As Philip Sherburne sagely observes in his album notes, "This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all." In reality, however, _Autechre Guitar_ is the end result of a multi-decade labor of love for Parish, as he has made a career out of challenging and unexpected covers and his wife is quite a big fan of Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s singularly inscrutable, obtuse, and time-bending techno mutations. Consequently, making an album like this one has probably always been Parish’s inexorable destiny. Palilalia Before the album was released, I was predictably quite curious about how the hell Parish was going to pull off such a feat, yet I was also mystified about why he would even want to attempt such a thing in the first place (aside from the sheer challenge of it). Notably, Parish has covered electronic artists before, but _Repertoire_ ’s cover of Aphex Twin's “Avril 14th” notably singled out one of the most nakedly beautiful and melodic pieces in Richard James’ oeuvre and Autechre are definitely not an act that I associate with timeless melodies. Parish would certainly beg to differ, however, as Autechre’s melodies are the heart of this album (though few will be surprised that he chose to focus primarily on their comparatively accessible early ’90s work like _Incunabula_ , _Amber_ , and _Tri-Repetae_).

This latest transmission from the Opalio brothers is the result of a major creative breakthrough of sorts, as they recently had the epiphany that their signature “spontaneous composition” process could also work in reverse as well. Always metaphysically minded, the Opalios realized that infinity itself was passing through their compositions, as the revelation that they could now play with time in either direction was both creatively liberating and also kind of heavy in a Zen/cosmic sense (“a flux with no beginning and no end, apparently always the same yet always different, that flows in an eternal becoming”). In less mind-expanding terms, that means that this album’s two longform pieces were created by subtracting layers from a spontaneous composition that had already reached “the apogee of the real-time creation.” The effect of that temporal sorcery is impressively dramatic, however, as _IN∞FI∞NI∞TO_ captures MCIAA at their most hypnotically minimal and hallucinatory peak. Elliptical Noise The heart of this album is essentially just two deceptively simple motifs: a murmuring backwards pulse and and a sliding and fluttering tone that leaves smeared and pulsing after-images in its wake. The combined effect is quite an evocative one, however, as it feels like I am sitting on a desolate alien beach watching a swirl of psychotropic seagulls swooping and diving as waves rhythmically roll in from the sea.

This latest album from Christian Schoppik feels like a bit of a curious outlier or comparatively modest release in the wake of last year’s stellar _Unterhaltungen Mit Larven Und Überresten_ , but it is a characteristically fascinating one nonetheless. Schoppik’s collaborator this time around is Matthias Kremsreiter, who debuts his new Roudi Vagou alias but normally records as alibikonkret. While the two artists certainly share a fondness for dark psychedelia and haunted atmospheres, _Taghelle Nacht_ (Daylight Night) feels like a completely new vision that suggests a Bavarian twist on _Grey Gardens_ experienced from the perspective of a ghost and DJed by The Caretaker’s haunted Victrola: a slow-motion drift through the moldering, dust-covered ruins of a once-opulent seaside mansion in which vivid memories of the past continually bleed into the present in subtly unsettling and hallucinatory fashion. Quindi As befits an album with such a mysterious and elusive vision, _Taghelle Nacht_ is divided into two halves (like a split release) with Roudi Vagou credited with the first eight pieces and Läuten der Seele with the rest, but the differences between the two artists are so blurry that they are largely irrelevant. The reason for that is two-fold, as the album feels like a series of impressionistic vignettes shaped from the same small palette of samples and instruments and the more melodic bits tend to flicker and vanish like phantoms (“snatches of song drift by like dreamlike fragments, and achingly tender flourishes fleetingly appear and retreat”).

I had admittedly become a bit numb to this prolific Kenyan producer’s steady stream of ambient releases in the years since he first burst onto the scene with 2020’s _Peel_ , but this second Editions Mego album is one hell of a stunner. Fittingly, _Kin_ first began to take shape in 2021 when KMRU discussed his vision for Peel’s sequel with label head Peter Rehberg, but that particular vision was unsurprisingly put on ice with Rehberg’s untimely passing. After about a year, however, KMRU gradually returned to that material and a rather different and noisier vision began to take shape instead. Partially inspired by distorted guitar sounds of KMRU’s youth, the viscerally snarling and smoldering _Kin_ sounds like one of his stronger ambient albums was doused with gas and set ablaze. Fittingly, that vision is reminiscent of some of the best bits of Pita’s _Get Out_ and Rehberg’s former bandmate Christian Fennesz turns up to the party as well, which makes _Kin_ feel like both KMRU’s finest album to date and an improbable late-period return to Editions Mego’s golden age. Editions Mego The opening “With Trees Where We Can See” provides a fairly representative (if condensed) introduction to _Kin_ ’s pleasures, as a thick and viscous-sounding synth motif languorously loops while a crackling and sizzling veil of distortion steadily intensifies. While that is hardly groundbreaking territory in the “power ambient” realm, KMRU’s approach is a bit more layered and mysterious than most, as a whistling and howling melody gradually starts to emerge from the sea of noise. While that particular piece clocks in at a mere three minutes in length, the overall trend throughout the album is that the longer pieces tend to undergo the most magical and sublime transformations (though the 20-minute closer “By Absence” is a more improvisatory and bird song-enhanced exception to that rule).

This mesmerizing opus from NYC-based composer Irisarri first began its life with a chance meeting at MUTEK in Mexico City, as a conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp regarding how technology shapes perception led to an invitation to a collaborative residency at Uncloud (located in a former psychiatric prison in Utrecht). Appropriately, that original topic relates closely to the album’s overarching concept, as _Points of Inaccessibility_ reflects the pervasive isolation and alienation that has resulted from living illusory digital lives (“we inhabit spaces saturated with signals, yet the possibility of genuine contact becomes increasingly remote”). Schilp’s visual research also played a significant role in the album’s shape, as Irisarri’s sounds were processed through “custom point-cloud software patch that produced images in continuous flux” in which “visuals flickered, dissolved and reformed like memories that resist coherence, functioning as a digital Rorschach that reflected the observer’s own perception.” The music achieves a very similar end, as warm and beautiful forms endlessly blossom and dissolve in a roiling ocean of static. Black Knoll Editions Notably, Schilp’s own process required “a continuous stream of sound in real time,” so Irisarri’s initial recordings at Unsound were mostly of bowed guitar drones processed through various pedals and looping systems. Admittedly, that approach sounds like business-as-usual for Irisarri, but the album continued to evolve further once he returned to his home studio, as he fleshed out the original recordings with synth, Moog bass, and strings while remaining as faithful as possible to the original performances.