This year has been a good one for those of us in the department of slow and boring music. As I tried to stay on top of the new releases this year it always felt like there was too much to digest. I blame this on the artists that decided to release 20 things this year. Yet there are other artists like Stars of the Lid , who have not released a major album in 6 years. So I've compiled a list (in no particular order) of what stood out to me. And I wrote some poor descriptions for each album.

White Rainbow – Prism of Eternal Now – Adam Forkner aka White Rainbow takes the best elements of psych rock, prog, new age, and ambient and blends them into this transcendental headtrip. However, this album is way above meandering hippy jams. Each song is a highly composed soundscape – he splits the album into both psychedelic guitar work and blissed out meditations.

To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie – The Patron – This is the debut full length from this Minneapolis duo. This album is a strange combination of sounds – like Wolf Eyes meets Broadcast. Noise and ambience blend with ethereal female vocals creating a spooky but well constructed environment.

Stars of the Lid – And Their Refinement of the Decline – SOTL finally returned this year with a masterpiece double album. Its’ lush and gentle music may be a perfect sleep aid but at the same time if you listen closely you will discover an intricate and powerful album.

Yellow Swans – At All Ends – My favorite Yellow Swans to date. At All Ends focuses less on the harsh noise and more on the immense and beautiful drone of distorted guitars and subdued vocals. The desert theme of this album is perfect.

Loren Dent – Empires and Milk – An amazing ambient release from one of Austin’s own. This is a quiet record but dreamy and ethereal in the most perfect sense. The music is excellently composed with orchestral, field, and guitar sounds all mixing together to create one surreal album.

Kemialliset Ystävät - Kemialliset Ystävät – This is a collective from Finland but I want to believe one schizophrenic man made this album. So many sounds are thrown into one awesome mess of sound. Abstract, psychedelic, and otherworldly but also composed, melodic, and rhythmic enough to remain listenable.

Fabio Orsi and Gianluca Becuzzi – The Stones Know Everything – These two Italian drone masters keep releasing quality stuff. This album feels very organic, even though it is not filled with field recordings. Each song is a river of layered spacious sounds and gentle melodies flowing together perfectly. Really beautiful sh*t

Isengrind – Golestan – This is the solo album from the female member of a duo out of France, Natural Snow Buildings. This is album could best be described as space folk. Acoustic instruments and floating voices combine to make walls of sound.

Gultskra Artikler - Kasha Iz Topora – This album is bizarre and hard to describe, yet I find it more interesting with each listen. It’s the work of Russian electronic artist Alexey Devyanind. I had trouble thinking of a description of this. Here’s what Boomkat wrote: the album is as if someone “dubbed all kinds of disparate fragments of audio on top of one another, somehow resulting in a ghostly archive of weird acousmatics, unidentifiable bowed screeching and things that go bump in the night”.

BJ Nilsen – The Short Night – The perfect winter album. This is like the frozen tundra in audio form. I know that sounds stupid but the long trembling reverberated sounds of tracks such “Viking North” make me think of vast areas of pure whiteness. But I enjoy the connection with the icy north – it gives the album its own place.

other favorites:
Eric Copeland - hermaphrodite
Black Dice - Load Blown
Blues Control - Puff
Rhys Chatham - A Crimson Grail
Opitope - Hau
Shepherds - loco hills
Raccoo-oo-oon - Behold Secret Kingdom
Soft Circle - full bloom
Graham Lambkin - Salmon Run
etc.