GRM Works, by France-based Argentinian composer Beatriz Ferreyra, is perhaps a key new entry in the wonderful Recollection GRM series by Editions Mego, which represents an important documentary move towards producing a new set of archival materials of one of the birthplaces of electronic music, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales as founded in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. The history traced by the collection is one of differing voices for the context under which we usually place the GRM in the development of electroacoustics, in the sense that it becomes a beacon for a modernism that is not fully dedicated to the machine. Its serialist, more formally avant-garde counterpart, best exemplified by composers like Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz Stockhausen and later Pierre Boulez, set out for the conquest of sound in a scientific approach intimately compatible with that geared towards the dominance of nature, a mechanical environment to be transcended…

Coin Coin Chapter Three is one of the best albums of 2015.  How do we know this already?  Because in the modern era, there has never been a year in which ten albums were better than this one.  Matana Roberts is a true original, and this album is a true original; there’s nothing else like it on the market.  It’s not even like the last two installments of the 12-chapter series.  This may confound recommendation engines, which may pick up hints of Gil Scott-Heron or The Last Poets, but otherwise be thwarted.

The deep, bluesy jazz of Coin Coin Chapter One:  Gens de Couleur Libres (2011) is nearly absent here, sublimated into hints and mirages.  But gone also are that album’s plaintive, out of control screams (“Pov Piti” – ouch!), reduced to a single, soft, off-key “come away with me” late in the album.  The big band that made…

Last month, Montreal’s Kohlenstoff Records released a trio of experimental releases on the same day: new works from Liz Helman, Line Katcho and Ezequiel Esquenazi.  Each of these works has its own distinctive appeal.  This is no surprise from the label who recently brought us winning works from Adam Basanti and Maxime Corbell-Perron; the label continues to go from strength to strength.

London-based artist Liz Helman has been active in installation and video work for the past decade, but The Truth Inside is her first album.  Her particular focus is on reflections of “dislocation and displacement,” which would make her music a perfect match to the writings of Andre Aciman (especially False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory).  Her sounds are all over the map, pun intended: from field recording to drone, and on earlier recordings, a touch of synth and even industrial (“out of this world”).  It’s…