#369

Pharmakon - Bestial Burden (Sacred Bones)



[T]he music – hums, clangs and muffled booms – wields an ominous, oppressive power, especially on headphones, that can create a feeling of queasy horror, even for those unaware of the record’s backstory. — Phil Freeman

#368

Oren Ambarchi & Eli Keszler - Alps (Dancing Wayang)



[I]f Flower and Corsano approximate a peyote experience, opening the third eye to intimations of eternal bliss, then Ambarchi and Keszler offer nasty home-made acid, full of strychnine and guaranteed to give you neck cramps for hours. — Daniel Spicer

#367

Robert Curgenven - Sirène (Recorded Fields)



Its material is entirely pipe organ sounds taken from churches at Lanteglos, Lelant, Ludgvan and Towednack (...); the art is all in the layering of the sounds, pipe on pipe, phantom chords and overtones. — Brian Morton

#366

Electric Funeral - Total Funeral (Southern Lord)



It’s hard to tell one Electric Funeral song from another. They’re almost all between 90 seconds and two minutes long, and each starts with a rising shriek of feedback, before the guitar riff cuts in with its blindingly fast buzzsaw sound (...). But each song is a blast, and 53 of them in a row manages to make 95 minutes feel like five. — Phil Freeman

#365

Jacaszek & Kwartludium - Catalogue des Arbres (Touch)



Michał Jacaszek’s latest takes the evocations of birdsong in Messiaen’s Catalogue D’Oiseaux as its conceptual starting point, finding similarly rich organic pickings in the complexity of trees. — Abi Bliss

#364

Tom Chang - Tongue & Groove (Raw Toast)



[T]he group get into a space, with Cleaver’s snare drum ringing like a trash can, Lightcap’s bass twanging like phone lines in a storm, and Chang’s guitar a bonfire of metallic noise, that recalls Miles Davis and John McLaughlin going at each other for half an hour on Big Fun. — Phil Freeman

#363

Dub Spencer & Trance Hill - William S. Burroughs in Dub (Echo Beach)



It’s mainly in heavy dubwise territory with hypnotic interludes, and there is a certain satisfaction in catching Burroughs’s croak emerging with familiar dry and dusty wit or observations on the disintegration of society. — Steve Barker

#362

Sleaford Mods - Divide and Exit (Harbinger Sound)



Williamson gives vent to a voice that would otherwise stay locked in his head. Discontent is everywhere in the UK now but for the most part it’s privatised: blunted by alcohol and anti-depressants, or directed into impotent comments box spite and empty social media outrage. — Mark Fisher

#361

Anne Hytta - Draumsyn (Carpe Diem)



She makes use of different tunings and on a few tracks opts for the sweet tones of a viola d’amore, an instrument fitted, like the Hardanger fiddle, with sonorous sympathetic strings. — Julian Cowley

#360

Various - The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (Sub Rosa)



Russolo’s noise makers are sonically intractable, but with Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld, Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Ulrich Krieger and Mike Patton among the contributors, this is an exhilarating anthology of imaginative noise work. — Julian Cowley

#359

Logos - Cold Mission (Keysound)



[A]nother album that managed to reconfigure the music of a specific genre by freezing its sense of momentum, and producing similarly elegiac results. — Keith Moliné

2013

Wire 15 (1)
James Blackshaw & Ludomyr Melnyk - The Watchers (Important) +#347
Various - Wandelweiser und so Weiter (Another Timbre) +#348
John Edwards & Okkyung Lee - White Cable, Black Wires (Fataka) +#349
Pat Thomas - Al-Khwarizmi Variations (Fataka)
Mainliner - Revelation Space (Riot Season)
Lee Patterson & Vanessa Rossetto - Temperament as Waveform (Another Timbre)
Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest (Warp)
NOHOME - Nohome (Trost)
Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program - Back on the Planet (Brainfeeder)
DJ Sprinkles - Where Dancefloors Stand Still (Mule Musiq) +#355
Tom Johnson / Samuel Vriezen - The Chord Catalogue / Within Fourths / Within Fifths (Edition Wandelweiser)
Robert Haigh - Darkling Streams (Primary Numbers) +#356
Omar Souleyman - Wenu Wenu (Ribbon Music) +#356
SOS - Looking for the Next One (Cuneiform)
NRSB-11 - Commodified (WeMe)

record of the year
Tom Johnson / Samuel Vriezen - The Chord Catalogue / Within Fourths / Within Fifths (Edition Wandelweiser)