Following a visit to the Tate Gallery and seeing JMW Turner’s paintings, Burkhard Stangl began working on a way to represent these painted landscapes as musical soundscapes. Focusing on Turner’s unfinished works, Stengl never truly gets into the same sphere as Turner. The resulting album is a collection of superficially nice music that has little below the surface, in opposition to the elegance and depth of Turner’s masterful compositions.
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For some reason, my favorite albums always seem to be those that come from unexpected places, a trend that delightfully continues with this third effort by Belgium's Bram Bosteels.  I was vaguely familiar with Bosteels already, but only because I had previously heard 2011's Barra Barra and casually dismissed it as "a bunch of murky soundscapes for obscure theater productions."  After hearing this latest effort, however, I found myself desperately rummaging around my house in vain hope of finding and revisiting my long-forgotten copy of its predecessor.  Hokus Fokus is absolutely deranged in the best possible way, resembling nothing less than an extremely disturbing carnival-themed nightmare.  This is easily one of the strangest albums in recent memory.
Ba Da Bing have officially blown my mind yet again, following their 4LP reissues of the epic Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and The Snowbringer Cult trilogy with an even more ambitious project: reissuing 2009's incredibly rare and overwhelming Daughter of Darkness cassette series as a massive 8LP box set with hand-painted album art (which took months to complete).  While it is not the best Natural Snow Buildings album by any means (no band can make a uniformly great 8-hour album), it is still quite a good one and it is unquestionably their longest, which offers a unique appeal all its own.  There are probably are not too many people who find the prospect of plunging into a seemingly endless rabbit hole of roiling, hallucinatory, quasi-ritualistic drone very appealing, but those who do have probably just found their Holy Grail.
For the longest time, I could not understand why people were so excited about this act, but last year's Carter Tutti Void album re-ignited my curiosity enough for me to give it another chance.  While it still remains a mystery to me how Factory Floor became so quickly revered, their first real full-length is intermittently wonderful and dramatically better than much of their earlier work.  Obvious Chris & Cosey comparisons aside, this trio is definitely onto something uniquely their own, stripping their thumping, retro-dance formula down to little more than a beat, a simple modular synth pattern, and Nikki Colk Void's appealingly languorous sexy-android-on-heroin vocals.  As it turns out, that is all they need.
Lee Stokoe has been active for two decades but has maintained a relatively low profile with limited and self released recordings, with his biggest claim to fame having spent time with the legendary Skullflower. Like that band’s head Matthew Bower, Stokoe works heavily with guitars and a legion of guitar pedals, but the result is less raw and aggressive, and more hypnotic and minimalist. Across these two side-long pieces are repeated, meditative drones that seem to lurk just out of view, in a distant fog or mist.
In a spate of recent releases, Room40 label head Lawrence English has produced three very different works on the always beautiful Winds Measure label, with some recorded as far back as a decade. While he utilizes field recordings from Japan and Australia on all three, each one sounds nothing like the other but all are indicative of the Australian artist’s ability at capturing and manipulating familiar sounds into something else entirely.
Gilbert has not been a prolific solo artist even after departing from Wire, but whenever he has released new material, it has been of the utmost quality, and this record is no different. A concept album on global warming and floods in collaboration with Beaconsfield Art Works (David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin) is no different. Mixing treated field recordings and electronic instrumentation, Diluvial is another high water mark in his impressive discography.
Much of Daniel Lopatin's work has been characterized by uncertainty. Even in his best moments, there was a hesitance, an aversion to commitment which staggered the fluidity of his material. In his initial presentations of synth arpeggios, there was the voice of a burgeoning artist struggling to move past process, to bridge the gap between idea and execution, to make a full measure. On R Plus Seven, Lopatin has fully realized this goal. Filled with a stupefying sureness, this record once again finds Daniel reinventing his style from the ground up, combining the dated provinces of new age music, soundtracks, and corporate ambience into something tremendous.
This Chicago band’s career trajectory has been a singularly impressive and curious one, as they have somehow managed to continually reinvent their sound while still getting exponentially better with each new album.  Era makes that trend seem even more remarkable, as Disappears have made yet another huge leap forward despite tampering with what was arguably their best feature (Brian Case's dissolute-sounding, deadpan vocals) and losing drummer Steve Shelley to Lee Ranaldo's new band. As it turns out, neither are missed, as the band more than compensate by paring their aesthetic down to pummeling, machine-like precision mingled with great hooks and well-placed eruptions of chaos.
With Gates of Atlantis, Phelios (the solo project of Martin Stürtzer) has created a soundtrack in search of a film. It has a distinctly cinematic tone and structure to it, and even follows a loose narrative structure. However, there is far more than incidental sounds and music cues here, and it simply is too complex and varied to function with any other media.
