MARK McGUIRE - Along The Way

Combining his needly, shimmering, Gottsching-like leads with a slew of other instrumentation that's more layered, nuanced and detailed than previous efforts, Along The Way's continuous suite, while more of an expansion of his palette than an outright departure, somehow simultaneously sounds both more mature and more lighthearted than anything we were expecting to hear on this first for Dead Oceans by the former Emeralds guitarist.

"The first sounds we hear on Along The Way are strummed acoustic guitars, and we hear more of them throughout, but this isn’t a guitar record. Instead, McGuire piles on the layers: Guitars, synths, mandolins, drum machines, sighed vocals, sounds that could be any of those things but could also be bird noises or whatever. It’s a mellow, contemplative, staring-longingly-through-your-window-on-a-sunny-day kind of record, and it’s way too aggressively pleasant for anyone to seriously call it “drone.” When the drum programming clicks in, you could almost be listening to pastoral ambient techno, except that the focus is never really on the beat, or on anything else for that matter. The parts with vocals (processed, flat, multi-tracked, conversational, often wordless) can sound a bit like solo Panda Bear. Other times, it’s like the score to Friday Night Lights if Peter Berg had been into Fennesz instead of Explosions In The Sky. And because it sounds like all these things while simultaneously sounding like none of them, Along The Way practically feels like its own genre of music, a new hybrid that calls out for a name like Balearic Blues or Astral Noodle or Ambient Sunburst Glop, or maybe even something that isn’t terrible." - Stereogum

BOHREN & DER CLUB OF GORE - Piano Nights

The dead of winter is not only the perfect time of year for Piano Nights' release, but also for one to acquaint themselves with Bohren's gloomy, haunting take on jazz in general, a catalogue that now runs (trudges?) a daunting eight albums deep.

"There's something about the brooding pace, the somber saxophone and the wistful keys of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore's music that evokes the imagery of midnight city streets more vividly than it seems music should be capable of capturing. Of course, when your music is often referred to as 'noir jazz' because it exists as a distant, moody offspring of noir film soundtracks, it benefits from the previously existing association that the noir era created between low-key jazz and dark cities. But there’s a reason this type of music was specific to that style. These instruments, when played at this brooding, lustful pace, simply ooze the shadowy, melancholy feelings that are naturally associated with rain highlighted by streetlights, fog illuminated by headlights, and jazz bar stage lights filtered through cigarette smoke." - Sputnik Music

VA - I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990

With such labels as EM, Numero and RVNG/FRKWYS having already issued solo and collaborative material (both old and new) from Iasos and Laraaji (both featured herein), and the post-noise/nu-new-age/neo-kosmische tape-trading heyday just having passed, what better time than now to honour the roots, peak and decline of this most earnestly transcendental (and unabashedly tacky) of American private-press scenes?

"Ever marvel at how much experimental indie music these days sounds like Enya? This smart, trippy, well-annotated archaeological dig helps explain why, connecting the dots between psychedelia, electronic music, yoga soundtracks, drone art and Muzak, showing how musicians questing for enlightenment through sound birthed a mainstream market niche, and then a hipster touchstone. Inspiring stuff." - Rolling Stone

"Though most new age music has rightfully been associated with the cynical postmodern business of sonic backdrop music of the 1980s, '90s, and early 21st century, it was originally an outgrowth of the spiritual adventurousness of the 20th, particularly during the late '60s and '70s. Light In The Attic presents the first overview of the genre from the private-press side—in other words, its most authentic expression, since the vast majority of the records surveyed here were released by artists who had no regard for economic remuneration. This set collects 20 tracks from both well-known and hopelessly obscure musicians and places them in an historical and qualitative context which focuses on musical adventure and/or spiritual intention—most of what's here was released long before the genre became an industry. This is the music of the true believers." - Allmusic

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER - R Plus Seven

Landing somewhere between the chopped-up samples of 2011's Replica and MIDI-synth simulacra of the sort that James Ferraro mischievously dropped with that same year's Far Side Virtual, Daniel Lopatin's first album for Warp alternately scrambles and soothes, with most of its ten tracks flitting from glossy hyperactivity to meditative, minimal nu-new age.

"Aesthetically, Lopatin's palette for R Plus Seven consists of familiar tropes: its 10 tracks are full of brash and staccato timbres, constructed upon repetitive, nonsensical, and dislocated samples, as if fast-forwarded through. He appears curiously preoccupied by reinventing only the most piercing of preset instruments. There are liberal helpings of dyspeptic cheesiness, and his MIDI-patch choirs put the 'phony' back in polyphony. But unlike Lopatin's preceding releases, a complex compositional strategy is afoot here. There is almost no formless wandering, and the album feels far more like a carefully constructed and well-paced narrative than a slapdash assembly of half-baked ideas." - The Quietus

"Lopatin is a composer who is primarily interested in the possibilities of splicing together synthetic instruments, subliminal frequencies, and the inherent uncanniness of everyday sounds. He's less interested in guiding his alien orchestras to a finessed crescendo than he is prone to hard cutting each melodic phrase, scrambling and twisting each rhythmic pattern, and running every chance of emotional catharsis into a strategically placed oblivion...The most commonly used sound across R Plus Seven is the human voice. It rampantly appears—singing, hiccuping, speaking, gasping, groaning, etc.—in all 10 of the tracks, but not a single syllable or vocal tone is 'real,' so to speak. Whether sampled or synthesized, every voice—which, it should be noted, is the most organic musical instrument there is—was altered or constructed in some digital fashion, never once performed or recorded 'live' for these compositions. There's something subtly dissociative about listening to appropriated voices for nearly an hour, and Oneohtrix Point Never knows it." - XLR8R

BRAIDS - Flourish // Perish

Now a trio following the departure of keyboardist/secondary singer Katie Lee, Braids' production and songwriting on sophomore effort Flourish // Perish sounds to these ears like a leap in the right direction past their Native Speaker debut, harkening back to such turn-of-the-millenium leftfield electronic pop touchstones as Kid A and Homogenic while sounding completely of this era (especially when they lay on the sidechaining, the occasional coats of which still somehow seem subtly applied).

"A lot of music is spoken about as being 'dreamlike,' but that tag can be used erroneously. Not all dreams are woozy, out-of-body experiences. Some are precise, and vital and unnerving at the same time as being otherworldly. Flourish // Perish is dreamlike, but in the sense that it reflects the true, bizarre and beautiful depths of the human brain, and dredges up sounds and lyrics that resonate with deeply felt emotional states.

This might sound like a stretch, but it's important to realise how brilliant Braids are at getting inside your head. The Canadian art-rock band specialise in twisting traditional song formats with electronic touches and out-there, often sexually charged lyrics. Raphaelle Standell-Preston sings with birdlike delicacy over skittering percussion, expressive bursts of electronic fuzz, and cascading keyboard melodies. She connects with the listener with the directness of Björk at her best, over backings that recall Radiohead's more successful electronic experiments." - Time Out London

DAWN OF MIDI - Dysnomia

The most recent album in Thirsty Ear's Blue Series that's seemingly come out of nowhere to surprise and impress us (the last such instance perhaps being last year's Shipp/Spaceman/Noble/Coxon Black Music Disaster session), Dysnomia is a continuous suite of clicking, pulsing, well-honed electronic minimalist jazz, but minus the actual electronics, and in so reducing basically throwing down the gauntlet at likeminded, longer-standing acts from the rock side of the spectrum such as Battles (to give a listen, stream the entire album via the band's SoundCloud page).

"There's been plenty of jazz groups that tried to reach out to the rock kids in recent years—The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau (both trios, incidentally) have shown up on the radar with covers of indie-rock songs, though the covers feel more like like a bait-and-switch operation to get a wayward rockist into their more straight-ahead jazz charts. Unlike those groups, Dawn of MIDI aren’t interested in coddling the uninitiated into the world of trading fours and Dmaj11 chords. On Dysnomia, they more interested in, or rather wholly focused on, rhythm. It's a new bridge out of traditional jazz to the rest of the world, and it's built with obsessive precision...It sounds close to an acoustic Beak> session playing a Steve Reich composition, though even closer to something totally unprecedented." - Pitchfork

JULIANNA BARWICK - Nepenthe

Evoking the wordless ethereality of the Cocteau Twins and Sigur Ros, Julianna Barwick's new album is stunningly beautiful. It's not surprising to see she collaborated with Alex Somers, whose 2009 album Riceboy Sleeps similarly captures ambient sounds from the heavens.

"Over the course of her recordings leading up to this third album, Brooklyn-based solo musician Julianna Barwick's vaporous compositions were largely the product of infinite layers of her own voice, looped and processed into misty, near-cosmic realms.

Spreading out across a wide range of octaves, her mostly wordless vocalizations found a specific state of emotional transparency that could instinctively communicate by turns feelings of harrowing darkness, contemplation, fear, and confusion—or even an understated humor. No small feat, being able to say so much without any conventional language, and Barwick pushed her atmospheric songs to new places, adding subtle layers of guitar and piano to her walls of voices on 2011's The Magic Place. With Nepenthe, the depth of her sound expands even further, including more collaboration and experimentation than ever before, without ever losing the direct approach that guided her earlier work." - Allmusic

DARK - Dark Round The Edges

Proto-metal, psych-prog, private-press: if any of these plosive descriptors lead your pleasure center to light up in anticipation, then pay attention to upstart label Machu Piccu's second reissue, an English group whose lone album was originally issued in 1972 in a run of only 50-odd copies (but could have just as easily come out via the esteemed likes of Vertigo)!

"Axeman Martin Weaver from Wicked Lady joined up with the Dark right before this was recorded, so that’s his fuzz you’re hearing, which should give you some indication of what this sounds like. A more sophisticated, proggier Wicked Lady perhaps, a Wicked Lady with more in the way of 'songs' rather than freakout jams, though this gets bluesy/jammy at times too." - Roadburn

"To be sure, other groups may have taken the formulas further or assembled a heavier, freer slab of psychedelic boogie, but concision and melody count for a lot in the lysergic world that Dark inhabited. Although Dark disbanded soon after the LP was published, cultish interest inspired a brief and well-received reunion in 1996. More than four decades after their lone LP was waxed, Dark Round the Edges deserves to be visited anew." - Tiny Mix Tapes

HOLDEN - The Inheritors

Effectively splitting the difference between an approach seemingly (perhaps moreso earlier in his career?) influenced by the likes of Four Tet and Caribou, and one a bit more grey-scale and rough-around-the-edges (comparisons could be made to both Geoff Barrow/Portishead/Beak>'s recent work, as well as The Knife's last album's instrumental offcuts), James Holden's second record sounds as strangely substantial as the ancient/otherworldly runestone on its cover.

"If Holden was already starting to push the boundaries on his debut, The Inheritors is techno music not so much fragmented as smashed into tiny pieces; rocks ground into sand and cast into the ether. The Inheritors draws as much on ancient Pagan rituals, the repetitions of Steve Reich, Elgar's pastoral majesty, prog-rock, krautrock and Aphex Twin at his wilful best, as it does from the output of Detroit's techno pioneers." - The Quietus

"Calling James Holden a producer might not be correct. He’s more of a playground engineer. Since putting out his first single at age 19, the English DJ has fallen in love with the work, play, and joy of making music. A serial remixer, he created the label Border Community as an arena for artists like Nathan Fake and Misstress Barbara to stab at the edges of what gets grouped under the 'electronica' umbrella. True to form, The Inheritors, Holden’s first LP since 2006′s The Idiots Are Winning, spills over with math, color, and life." - Consequence of Sound

THUNDERCAT - Apocalypse

Two years ago, Thundercat's debut album The Golden Age Of Apocalypse slowly but surely won over enough of us here to reach #11 on our Staff Best Of 2011 chart, and the pared-down title variation for this follow-up seems fully fitting, as Stephen Bruner's funky fusoid tendencies and falsetto vocal melodies continue to set him apart from any of his 'beat scene' peers, but with a slightly darker, barer tinge to it all this time around, due in part to the passing of keyboardist collaborator and friend Austin Peralta, to whom last track "A Message For Austin" is dedicated.

"The chord this record strikes hardest is an emotional and highly personal one; it’s a record that conveys with exceptional delicacy the transition from relative naivete to a more reflective and worldly view. For most of us, this happens in our twenties: much has been written on the subject of the 'lost years' when we establish, or fail to establish, relative stability, and peace with ourselves. For Bruner, this transition seems to have been provoked by a tragic event, but for most of us, it’ll be something experienced painfully and gradually for the better part of a decade.

Apocalypse is very literally a rewarding and difficult second album, with its roots in tragedy and loss and its furthermost fronds in hope and moving forward, an album that challenges listeners with an incredible level of subtlety, hidden depths and wash of openly expressed emotion. It might even just be the album that best sums up what the Low End Theory beat scene in LA has always been about: the perfect blend of virtuous technicality and cosmic self discovery with a message delivered wrapped in genuine human warmth." - Drowned In Sound

RODION G.A. - The Lost Tapes

Crackling with distorted organ, synth, guitar, drum machine and live kit, this archival set from Strut reveals a persecution-skirting hybrid made between 1978 and 1984 by Romania's Rodion Rosça, one that in hindsight can be slotted somewhere between Kosmische prog and the punky sci-fi defiance of Heldon's Richard Pinhas, all while maintaining a degree of regional tradition in its scales and melodic lines, aligning Rosça and band with the psych-rock of their Turkish neighbours just across the Black Sea.

"In the late '70s and early '80s in communist Romania, Rodion Ladislau Roșca and his band Rodion G.A. created a hybrid of electronic music, psychedelics, and progressive rock that, decades later, has revealed itself to be remarkably ahead of its time. After years of obscurity, and only a handful of singles ever released officially, Rodion’s music is finally getting the recognition it deserves" - Wax Poetics

"This is some of the raddest music you’re likely to hear this year: rad in its overall excellence, and radical in its forward-thinking nature, sounding so even today, though recorded at the height of Ceausescu’s suppression and censorship." - The Quietus

PETER JEFFERIES - The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World

A punky, piano-led solo debut placing proper emphasis on Jefferies' weathered baritone and world-weary yet outwardly-engaged lyrics, this is a crucial document of the '90s New Zealand cassette underground thankfully brought back to life by ever-discerning, primarily archival left-field label De Stijl.

"Last Great Challenge... is a claustrophobic, private-sounding collection that ranges from homegrown, tinny post-punk to melancholic piano ballads to fucked up tape manipulations to the sound of a man singing calmly (and resignedly) while he does the dishes." - Pitchfork

"Though no one’s gotten around to writing a book on it yet, The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World nonetheless stands as one of the singular singer-songwriter albums of all time, existing on a sparsely populated plane with Pink Moon, I Often Dream of Trains, Blues Run the Game, Our Mother the Mountain and not many others. In a sandy voice that soothes and slashes, Jefferies offers a compassionate, piercingly lucid view of the endeavor of life, all our pain and small glories rendered in tones both harrowing and tender. On piano, drums and percussion, he pounds out melodies that roar, sweep and lilt, accompanied on many songs by the serrated guitars of a variety of players." - De Stijl

SEAN NICHOLAS SAVAGE - Other Life / DIRTY BEACHES - Drifters/Love Is The Devil

As anyone who saw him play here during recent NXNE festivities can attest to, Sean Nicolas Savage is a magnetic performer, whose off-the-cuff, quasi-karaoke, romantically rebellious songbook (mainly documented via cassettes and downloads, until now) has influenced enough hometown peers to have inspired an entire covers collection. With its tales of heartbreak and renewal, the first half of Other Life is especially lyrically devastating.

Meanwhile, fellow Montrealer Alex Zhang Hungtai's sophomore full-length sees him retain his Alan Vega-influenced croon, while replacing the loops and samples of his debut Badlands with an array of live-played, distorted drum machines and synths that, while naturally indebted to Suicide, also inventively and soulfully nods to a wide variety of related dark/outsider music of 30+ years past, from coldwave and industrial post-punk à la Cabaret Voltaire to the 'electronic body music' of DAF. 

ELUVIUM - Nightmare Ending

A return to form for the producer of one of the alltime great ambient/classical albums, 2007's Copia. After an ill-advised journey into vocal music on his last album, 2010's Similes, Matthew Cooper has returned to his instrumental roots on his latest, with the exception of one track featuring guest vocals from Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. This new album has already jumped to the top of my Best Of 2013 list.

"Intended as a follow-up to 2007′s Copia, Nightmare Ending incubated while Cooper dove down a more pop-oriented channel in 2010 with two EPs and a full-length. Featuring both vocals and something like percussion for the first time, Similes showed that Eluvium’s elegiac movements could be mapped onto the verse-chorus-verse blueprint. This experiment in constraint proved to be the exercise necessary to finish Nightmare Ending, a double album that plays out as the sum of all Cooper has learned through Eluvium. The title could allude to the release that comes after a long period of creative frustration—the feeling of finally getting it all out." - Consequence of Sound

COLIN STETSON - New History Warfare, Vol. 3: To See More Light

With Bon Iver's Justin Vernon providing guest-vocal cameos (including "Brute"'s uncharacteristically heavy-metal 'Cookie Monster barking') on this follow-up for Constellation (replacing Laurie Anderson and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden's contributions to Vol. 2), Stetson's multi-mic'ed roars and circular-breathed sax cycles continue to pummel with a delicate fierceness that's halfway between the dark ambience of Tim Hecker (whose work has likewise been mixed by Ben Frost) and the vein-busting baritone blowing of Mats Gustafsson.

"The physicality of Stetson's efforts is apparent here. The longest track at 15 minutes, 'To See More Light' is his crowning triumph. Stetson maintains the structure of the piece, building upon his circular breathing to create a hypnotic and trance-like state. About halfway through, he slows the proceedings to produce a heavier vocalization and thumping sound that crests into a zenith of growling energy." - All About Jazz

THE HAXAN CLOAK - Excavation

Bobby Krlic's sophomore full-length as The Haxan Cloak (and debut for young-'n'-bleak English imprint Tri Angle) contains enough growling bass beds, spooky string samples and spacious, heaving beats to satiate anyone looking for another contemporary artist to add alongside such other doomy/dreadful electronic heavyweights as Ben Frost, Raime, Emptyset, and labelmate Vessel.

"Thematically, where The Haxan Cloak was a descent into darkness, Excavation represents the ascent into light that directly follows it. The differences between the two LPs run further than their mood and themes, however; for this second album, Krlic has flipped his approach to composition and sound design on its head. Where his debut was rooted in the raw, natural tones of classical instrumentation, its follow-up deals in electronic timbres and heavily processed effects. As such, Excavation shares many traits with its predecessor while still sounding like a unique proposition; here, Krlic makes no attempt to repeat the tricks of his debut, and creates a hugely worthy successor to it as a result." - XLR8R

"Krlic takes full advantage of the album form, often stretching his songs to more than ten minutes. The result is something truly narrative—this isn't the kind of record you'd play on shuffle. In the title track's two parts, we're taken through a sonorous tunnel only to be dumped into an empty pit of despair, all static and hissing hellmouths. With 'The Mirroring,' those dissociative drones collect themselves back into fire-and-brimstone techno." - Resident Advisor

THE KNIFE - Shaking The Habitual

Seven years after the increasingly influential Silent Shout, The Knife return with nearly 100 minutes of serious play, as even the hookiest tracks here get their parameters totally tweaked and toyed with, stretching out song lengths and upending expectations. To paraphrase the pair, without them electronic pop in 2013 would be a lot more boring!

(The single-disc edition omits "Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized," a wispy twenty-minute Eliane Radigue-like boiler-room feedback drone, as well as the lyric sheet/comic strip posters found in the 2CD set.)

"Against all odds, Shaking The Habitual is the best work Karin Dreijer Anderssen and her brother Olaf have ever done and a candidate for 2013's best album, period. Think of Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition, John Lydon’s (and Jah Wobble’s) famously abrasive masterpiece, with coherent politics and forward motion in the grooves. Hell, forward motion in the drones. Think of if Liars’ percussion monsoon Drum’s Not Dead was all it was cracked up to be. Think of last year’s Swans album, The Seer, if it was composed and programmed protests rather than improv goth comedy." - Paste

"With their last album, 2010's Tomorrow, In A Year—an opera about Darwin's Origin of the Species, recorded with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock—The Knife demonstrated their desire to think big; unfortunately, they also fell into the trap of thinking that ambitious, 'difficult' music shouldn't be very fun to listen to. So it's a huge relief to see them diving back into the seas of jouissance with Habitual. From the very first flicker of cymbals and finger snaps that opens the album, they tap into an electroacoustic universe whose glassy, metallic timbres ripple across the flesh, and whose rubbery tones undulate deep in the gut. They've never sounded more in tune with the materiality of sound or the sonorousness of the physical world." - SPIN

VA - Change The Beat: The Celluloid Records Story 1980-1987

As recounted in this promotional short video, it could be argued that Celluloid's unique cross-Atlantic aesthetic was born the moment that French impresario/BYG Actuel co-founder Jean Karakos chanced upon NYC bassist/producer/multi-scene Zelig figure Bill Laswell; Change The Beat is a long-overdue look at one of the few early-'80s labels able to successfully unite the then-burgeoning B-boy movement with both the U.S./Euro no/new waves as well as that era's African diaspora. 

"With a selection that jumped from early hip-hop to deconstructed European disco, and from downtown NYC experimental head-trips to early fusions of world music with funk, jazz and art-damaged punk, Celluloid was truly a harbinger of things to come.

Winding your way through so much unbridled creativity is like stumbling into an avant-garde toy box filled with outrageous oddities, many of them sprouting dangerous, sharp edges. Having bought every Celluloid record I found for decades, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the label's catalogue, but there's an impressive amount of stuff here I've never heard or heard of.

Blessed by being in the right place(s) at the right time, and having the smarts to take advantage of the considerable opportunities that came their way, Celluloid Records sits comfortably in the file of independent labels that got it right from start to finish." - Blurt

MOUNTAINS - Centralia

Brooklyn duo Mountains earn their name once again with this set of unmoving beauties. Seven slo-fi improvisations stretch over a luxurious 67 minutes populated by Mountains' characteristic blend of acoustic and electronic sounds perfect for the long-haul listener.

"If the likes of Pontiak and Barn Owl conjure scorched plains and endless prairies then labelmates Mountains—the chillaxed twosome of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg—are charting boundless ocean depths. Centralia, their third full-length for Thrill Jockey, could easily soundtrack a deepwater Herzog-ian journey in some sort of chuntering submersible. The voyager will be greeted by shoals of goggle-eyed fish, waving fronds, elegant fan-like structures that breathe and eat through tubes and strange, lonely creatures clad in shimmering bioluminescence." - BBC

"Ears still virgin to the inspiring neo-psychedelia of Mountains will find a perfect place to begin exploring their discography with Centralia. While so much ambient- and drone-based experimental music is essentially meaningless, forgettable work that roughly replicates the same sonic recipe popularized by Brian Eno in the '70s, the distinctive melodies and forward-thinking-yet-beautiful experimentalism heard in Mountains' music put them in a league of their own." - Exclaim!

BEAK> - >>

Having already self-released 2012 full-lengths from his Quakers and DROKK collaborations, Geoff Barrow has had an especially fruitful past year in the studio; this follow-up (if you don't count their crucial role as Anika's backup band) from Barrow's live-off-the-floor trio with Matt Williams and Billy Fuller, though, is an especially striking, darkly menacing effort, full of off-kilter oscillator wobbles, pristinely recorded Silver Apples-style drum primitivism, and vocals muffled to the point of indiscernibility.

"The groggy post-punk fidget of Bristol's Beak> is erected on antiquated, simplistic, intentionally demanding limits. The trio write in the studio, record in one room at the same time, don't do overdubs, and use outdated digital recording rigs that have as much capability as a 24-track tape machine...The result of their labors is masterful second album >>..., a perfect mix of robotic human rhythms intertwining with humanized electronic textures: krautrock grooves melt into This Heat avant-punk minimalism, and Devo performs through a mouth full of cottonballs and a stomach full of Codeine." - SPIN

"[This] trio’s Neu!-like pulsations are boosted by droning synths ('The Gaul'), crunchy guitar ('Wulfstan II'), suffocating bass ('Kidney') and disquietingly distant vocals ('Deserters'). Menacing and paranoid, this second album makes satisfying sense in 2012, and even leaves you grateful to live in a chaotic world." - NME