Phil Western and Mark Spybey together again! Well at least for two tracks that is. Dead Voices on Air, one of Spybey’s many projects, once again takes us to new and exotic locations. Amid their album photography on the digipak we’re whisked to far-off Argentina amid the beautiful landscape of Patagonia taken by Argentinean artist Marco Roberti. In addition to his collaboration with Western, Spybey enlists American-Serbian singer Ivana Salipur to assist on the title track, a track that is inspired by the Serbian poet Desanka Maksimovic, a poet perhaps most famous for poems regarding the atrocities committed by German soldiers during World War II. The album is Dead Voice on Air’s 14^th and their 2^nd collection released on seminal Lens Records. Songs range from ethnic world ambience to experimental to pure relaxing ambient. I’m constantly amazed at how Spybey and likeminded audiences are able to create such intense ambient pieces that just ooze attention-grabbing passion. Yet another notch on the proverbial belt of essential for DVOA.

The original “Dub Side of the Moon” was released in 2003 as a homage to Pink Floyd’s legendary and essential iconic “Dark Side of the Moon”. It spent an incredible 7 years on the Billboard Charts having sold over 200,000 copies worldwide. Here, Easy Star All-Stars have assembled a re-interpretation of that heavy bass reggae dub remix collection featuring a unique dub producer taking their shot at spacey dub. Today’s dub is a burgeoning genre with influence as wide ranging as the old school classic Jamaican reggae dubs and b-side mixologists, bass-heavy groove, roots reggae kinks, and now more on the techno flip dub-step. 10 Ft Ganja Plant and Dubmatrix are two artists that lend a hand towards roots dub. Groove Corporation grasps a futuristic re-rub for “Time”. Alchemist’s remix of “Money” is perfect groovy dub-step where the bass cascades with spooky synth stabs and tons of reverb. Adrian Sherwood’s use of echo is just flabbergasting – I swear the sound bounced off my sound system reverberating off of my vital organs. However the true gem on the album is from little known Kalbata. Signed to Soul Jazz Records, Kalbata is Israeli-born and his “Any Colour You Like” is a four-minute shuffle of tech-step rhythms lightened with modular synth noise and shimmies of electro funk. Add in the four bonus tracks and you have yourself a healthy dose of some of the best dub covers you’ll ever hear. Essential.

Alan Wilder, he of Depeche Mode fame, is the mastermind behind Recoil. Over the past several years, he has collaborated with countless artists to write, record, and play alongside including luminaries and lesser known artists such as Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas McCarthy, Joe Richardson, and Maggie Estep among many others. “Selected” is a collection of past tracks, remastered and remixed. While many artists that release these sorts of albums are trying to do so for the fans or simply to make a quick buck, Recoil’s “Selected” seems far removed from both of those commonalities. Instead what I hear is a band that wants to re-create an identity by mashing together so many past diverse ones. I hear a man who wanted to re-introduce himself to some and provide a nice introduction to those who’ve never heard of Recoil before. Granted Recoil isn’t for everyone, it’s not always a particularly danceable electronica group. It doesn’t pretend to know the latest trends or clichés in electronic music. However this is a two-disc set that combines to go in two different veins. The first being one that tries to collapse into a sound that doesn’t waffle from one track to the next and indeed feels like a full-length concept album. The second disc is all of the remixes and that’s where things pop and weave like a great boxer in the ring. You never know what to expect but you find yourself rooting him on from track to track. Wilder may never fully come out from behind the shadow of his former band, but Recoil is most certainly several steps out of the gate already.

Being a two-time Grammy nominee must come with a lot of pressure and expectations, each album and song being further scrutinized and dissected. But Carmen Rizzo seemingly shakes all of that pressure off time and time again. His resume includes co-writing on Oakenfold’s “Bunka” and Seal’s “Seal 2” with remixes of Tiesto, BT, and collaborating with Jem and Esthero. Career-wise he has also worked with such luminaries and music industry faves as KD Lang, Pete Townshend, Morissette, and Coldplay. On “Looking Through Leaves” he populates his songs with minimal dark electronics forging a surreal soundscape that is dauntingly vast. Joining Rizzo are guest vocalists Shana Halligen (ex-Bittersweet), Kate Havnevik, Grant Lee Phillips, Rosey and January Thompson. Together it’s a gorgeously flexible exploration of the next direction of electronic music and scoring. Oh and by the way, he’s set to donate an exclusive remix of his “Bring the Mountain Down” that features Grant Lee Phillips to the David Lynch Foundation.

Cascading loops with dark soundscapes and Latin-influences and velvety melodies, “Pequenas Canciones de Amor” reminds me of something off of Acuarela Discos out of Spain. Inflected indie rock noodles throughout this stirring experimental album. Exploring a variety of styles, O Paradis deploys a king’s ransom worth of diverse instrumentation. But the one all encompassing common denominator is heady vocals and a knack for crafty a finely tuned song. There’s seventeen tracks here that bridge the gap between Euro-pop, indie-pop, electronica, experimental, and abstract. I love it. Thank you Tourette Records!

Interesting remix of the original tracks from Species of Fishes albums “Songs of a Dumb World” and “Trip Trap” were utilized throughout this rather lengthy 56 minute jaunt into experimental music land. Muslimgauze is known for their Arabic influences and brooding electronica with an interesting mixing technique. They shed some of that here with shimmering electronic stabs and manic looping techniques that have sometimes only percolated in the backdrop of past endeavors. I found this remix album to be fantastic and totally fascinating. Worth a deep dive for the adventuresome music listener for sure.

Two tracks written as a non-song but one long-form poem that is both spoken word and sung lyrics by Chris Connelly and his varied assembly of guests, “How This Ends” is the soundtrack to doom and melancholy. Featuring contributors such as Sugar Bullet’s Izi Coonagh, Tania Bowers of Via  Tania fame, Bill Rieflin known for his diverse work with bands such as R.E.M., Ministry, and Swans, and David Levine, “How This Ends” is a stark soundscape devoid of true composition but glowing red with the pulse of improvisation and controlled chaos. There is more than just harsh white noise and penetrating terror; indeed there are sinewy lines of piano, synth pads, and underlying rhythms. But it all centers around the poem, a flowing free-verse of intrigue and a glimpse inside the melting pot of Connelly’s genius and showcases him as a Renaissance Man and artist. Perfect for the left-of-center crowd who strives to find a unique gem out there.

Trangendered artist famous for paintings for Psychic TV album releases and more recently for her self-released lo-fi albums, Val Denham collaborates with Black Sun Productions for this brooding and dank experimental electronic excursion. Beginning the album is a spoken word reading of Charles Dickens “A Tale of Two Cities” with a Coil-esque backdrop drone. No surprise on the Coil reference as Massimo and Pierce have their tight ties with Coil in the past. Sexual undertones perverse the soundtrack collapsing words into a separate entity that is both instrument and vision all at once. Industrialized rhythms dominate some of the tracks while the druggy green visions of “Absinthe” portend their influence with cooled keyboards and manipulated loops.

Astonishingly gripping dark ambient and noise that is filtered through brainy nuances of druggy soundscapes, Maurizio Bianchi’s latest on Tourette Records (I’ve never heard of a more fitting moniker for an experimental music record label). There’s a depth here yet an urgent sense of brevity that counterbalances each of the six tracks. Not to say that these are quick ballads of bright white noise; indeed the shortest is just a tad under 8 minutes in length. Instead each tune focuses on a sense of manic solitude wrapped in looping and manipulated electronic pulses and waves. Beautiful, sad, and emotional, “YNOHPMYS” will challenge everything you previously thought about experimental music living up to ‘symphony’ the backwards album title suggests.

Featuring seven remixes of their “Filmezza” adventuresome album, Delicate Noise’s latest remix album casts its net wide across the globe in search of artists to re-rub their music. With young-and-upcoming electronic musical groups reaching far and wide from such places as France, Japan, Iceland, Canada, Italy, Spain, and the U.K., “Filmezza Remixes” has repaved the highways that the original concreted. Throughout the album there are elements of bleak and stripped down electro house, minimal soundtrack and psychedelic art, art-noise, atmospherics, and synthetic electro. Eclectic and essential.