10. The North Sea - Bloodlines (Type)
The North Sea has long been Brad Rose's best project in my opinion. For the past few years Rose has moved past the neo-folkisms of his earlier work and began to explore much darker, much noisier corners. Bloodlines is his best work yet: a giant, menacing, pitch black masterwork, all crumbling cities and factories gone manic, decaying and blazing out of control. Brutally dark, the album is really two long tracks broken up into three movements each. Each track is a seething, ferocious mess of noise and decay, static, smoke, wheezing last breaths. Drumming by the ever-brilliant Mike Weis of Zelienople helps propel these full side pieces into terrifying new places, his drums wooshing like demonic gasps and clattering like mutilated church bells. Listen to this album, just not before you go to bed lest the blackest of nightmares haunt your sleep.
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9. ALTAR EAGLE - Mechanical Gardens (Type)
Brad Rose shows up again this time with his wife Eden Rose. The two haved created the years finest pop album, a shimmering, exuberant electro-pop wonder run through a sonic meat grinder. Slabs of static and white noise just barely contain exuberant, out-there pop music with honest to goodness hooks and everything. Totally unexpected and completely wonderful.
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8. En - The Absent Coast (Root Strata)
En is the new duo of Maxwell Croy and James Devane and The Absent Coast is their first album, an extremely lovely and melancholy drone record. Dense and immensely lush, the duo uses, among an army of other instruments, a bowed koto to produce shimmering soundscapes. The Absent Coast swells almost to the point of overflowing, a vast, drifting sea of sound.
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7. Erik K Skodvin - Flare (Miasmah)
Erik K. Skodvin the man behind Svarte Greiner and is one half of the mysterious duo Deaf Center but here for the first time he releases a record under his own name. The change makes a lot of sense since this is quite a new direction for Skodvin. Whereas Penpals Forever (and Ever), the fantastic vinyl release on Digitalis earlier this year under the Svarte Greiner moniker was unrelentingly dark, an absolute must for the dark minimalism fan, Flare is wistful, melancholic, perhaps even more classical-tinged. Guitars quietly smolder, metalic scrapes echo from some distant place, static crackles from forgotten phonographs, creaking pianos whisper in dusty attics, strange vocals call out from the mist, violins and cellos wail and moan evoking some barren wasteland. Although much of the darkness and menace is retained from Skodvin's Svarte Greiner recordings, this is perhaps his most developed, nuanced, and rewarding release yet.
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6. Xela - The Sublime (Digitalis Limited)
The final installment in the Digitalis Limited cassette trilogy, The Sublime is possible the darkest, most arcane, and most accomplished piece John Twells has graced us with yet. Ghostly choirs call from deep beneath a sea of crumbling, quietly pulsing noise that somehow both glows and engulf the listener in haunted darkness across two expansive tracks. The Sublime is the soundtrack to excavating ancient crypts and cathedrals long buried and unseen for a thousand years. An enveloping, graceful, and gorgeously hauting pair of synthesizer masterpieces from one of the genre's finest, this is long sold out on tape but will be getting the vinyl treatment courtesy of Dekoder as with the previous two installments, The Illuminated and The Divine.
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