Roy Montgomery, Scenes from the South Islands (side A)

By 1995, Montgomery had access to a simple looper, to create the types of live guitar layering that Fripp & Eno used tape loops to create in the mid-'70s.  Scenes from the South Islands features relatively short tracks which owe an obvious debt to Evening Star.  Where Fripp's playing was purposely restrained, Montgomery's can sometimes be busy, without ever distracting from the ambience.  The liner notes enumerate the then-current consumer gear which facilitated the making of Scenes from the South Islands.  Technology had suddenly made it possible to create an intimate, personal version of this music on a very low budget, and Scenes from the South Islands is one of the first memorable examples an artist having done so.  The packaging includes the CD insert and tray card inside of the LP cover, and the CD cover itself, which is a beautiful gray photo, is simply pasted on a white jacket.

The Fall, Rollin' Dany (12" EP)

This 5-song EP from 1986 followed This Nation's Saving Grace, with Brix Smith still playing with the Fall.  Its strangest quality might be the repetition of the same 5 songs on both sides.  The EP kicks off with a cover of Gene Vincent's "Rollin' Dany"—like the cover of "Mr. Pharmacist" on Bend Sinister, its traditional structure foreground's the classic rockabilly and garage influences in the Fall's work.  The originals on the rest of the EP follow a less traditional song structure, but still emphasize the rock 'n' roll elements within the group's sound.  A few brief excursions into abstraction turn up, but the songs quickly fall back into structure.  The playing is relatively tight and the sounds and arrangements fit together in this rock context, with only Brix's very bright vocal sound leaping out.  The undistinguished packaging is one of the less memorable in the Fall's lengthy discography.

Astral Social Club, Star Guzzlers (side A)

Neil Campbell has been an established underground figure since Forced Exposure released Durian Durian in 1992.  After working with A Band and Vibracathedral Orchestra, he's focused for the past few years on solo work under the name Astral Social Club.  Star Guzzlers features two untitled, side-long tracks built of slowly-evolving drones and patterns, with additional abstract sounds floating over the top.  Side A is a mellower track vaguely reminiscent of Roy Montgomery, with a slow build from the middle to the end.  Side B varies more, with a loud and vaguely aggressive section in the middle.  The album as a whole sounds overly bright and present.  The simple cover photograph of a starfish looks great, and it also looks good repeated on the center stickers.

Bruno Meillier & Toshimaru Nakamura, Siphono (CD)

When I learned of this collaboration, I expected incongruous results.  I'm familiar with Meillier from his saxophone playing in the '80s with rock bands Les I and Etron Fou Leloublan, so I expected such extroversion.  Instead, 2000's Siphono is a textured electronic album, and a really good one, far more like Toshi Nakamura's work from this era than anything I'd hear from Meillier.  Toshi's albums range from incredibly sparse to rhythmic patterns.  Siphono includes both modes, evolving from tracks with a foundation of pulsing energy, including the 22 minute first track "Quick Quick Slow", to more open-ended pieces.  Strange and diverse sounds ride over the top of these patterns, and it's hard to tell if the sounds are electronic or organic in origin.  The packaging looks nice too, with a simple single-color design on nice card-stock that's folded and glued into a sleeve.

Ferdinand, En Avant (side A)

Etron Fou Leloublan bassist Ferdinand Richard's 1984 solo album En Avant claims to be eight songs in eight languages.  Calling the tracks here "songs" feels like a bit of a stretch.  The vocals tend to be more cut-up and poetic than melodic, they're often speed-adjusted, and they rarely follow any recognizable structure.  The music is built around Richard's excellent bass playing.  The bass is always recorded direct, which, as the foreground instrument, pulls it away from a rock context, and it also sounds very different from the vocals, cello, and drums that are recorded with microphones.  The playing is excellent, the structures are weird and interesting, and the manipulated vocals (in different languages) give the album a distinctive character.  The cover painting is memorable, but the bold colors don't exactly match En Avant's subtlety

Dead C, Secret Earth (side A)

2008's Secret Earth feels a bit like a throwback Dead C album, and an impressive one.  The emphasis here is consistently on the band's rock side, with distorted guitars, vocals, and Robbie Yeats's propulsive drumming.  There are occasional textured breakdowns that fit more with the group's mid-era and recent work.  The throwback also shows the group's evolution, as even the heavy parts are more subtle and evolve more slowly.  The pop impulse of songs like "Sky" never shows up—in this rock-like context, plenty of freedom is left to the listener.  The minimal packaging fits perfectly, with a computer-enhanced nature photo filling the front and white space filling almost the entire back.  The sound of the album is far brighter than the group's early work, with a frequency balance more aligned for a radio hit than the appropriately thick mid-range that defined the group's classic sound.

A Story of Rats, Thought Forms (side A)

I discovered A Story of Rats (Garek Druss) from his collaboration with Pussygutt on 2008's Sea of Sand.  2011's Thought Forms is Druss's first solo album, and my first extended exposure to his work as leader—it's not a purely solo album, though, as there are different collaborators on each LP side.  Where the collaboration with Pussygutt was thick and heavy, Thought Forms is more spacious.  Some sounds sustain as drones, where others pulse and provide movement.  There is even distribution of sounds throughout the spectrum, and panning is used nicely to create space.  The sounds themselves, which are abstract and hard to identify, tend not to have aggressive attack or distortion, but instead can often be murky and primitive sounding.  The beautiful packaging has a hand screened cover on thick white paper and a hand screened insert on textured black paper, but I had trouble finding the album title anywhere.