After more than ten years of silence, ex-Harry Pussy guitar player Bill Orcutt released ‘An New Way To Pay Old Debts’, an acoustic hardcore blues record that sounds heavier than all the eclectic guitar records in your collection. It was the best album of 2009... feature :: by Joeri Bruyninckx

Utech Records is a label out of Milwaukee that puts out some of the most cutting edge releases in avant-garde music today. Great care is taken to mate the visual effects of the album art with the music itself. Working primarily with artists that experiment in noise, acousmatic, and other genres of a darker shade, each Utech release offers a unique listening experience... feature :: by Dave Miller

The first thing that makes a Usurper show such a thrilling experience is the sudden and palpable sense of self-awareness that squirms over the audience as these two Edinburgh-based self-professed “luddite twins” take their seats and begin, playfully but sincerely, to investigate their apparatus. The particular sense of the audience’s predicament is perhaps common to a lot of dynamically slight electro-acoustic improvisation and yet there is something about the way these two crunch, gobble, spit, contort and twang their assortment of metallic globes, combs and racks tonight that brings a peculiarly refreshing lo-brow, often very comic charm to what is usually a much more academic and “accomplished” endeavour. .. feature :: by Joe Luna

It's hard to believe that 2009 was only ONE year because so much happened that it felt like the last year of the decade sort of swallowed the whole damn thing. For us, it was a good year. If you weren't so lucky (and we were damn lucky), I hope 2010 is full of sparks. But this about all the good and bad tunes that came out last year, and there was a lot of them. Hopefully you'll be as excited and surprised as we were at just how varied our writers' picks were this year. Adios 2009. .. feature :: by Brad Rose

Alright, 2009... a total motherfucker of a year with so much happening, where to start and where to end... yeah, I don't even know. But let's take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?.. feature :: by Brad Rose

This past month, while laid up with that nasty flu bug, el-g’s recently re-issued “Tout Ploie” LP arrived in my mailbox from S-S Records and found its way to the turntable. What emerged from the speakers sent my already scattered mind reeling. Here was a record that was, at turns, soothing and sophisticated and, in other places, freakishly psychedelic, mixing French pop ballads with more contemporary acid-folk stylings. Post-illness listens have only deepened my appreciation for this album. So, in an attempt to seek some clarity about the origins of this album and its mastermind, I contacted el-g (a.k.a. Laurent Gerard) for an interview, to which he kindly agreed. Our series of e-mail exchanges, however, proved to be as mind-altering and as delightfully disorienting as the music itself. Welcome to el-g’s world, where everything is sprinkled with a little “schizo sugar”. .. feature :: by David Perron

Kimberly Dawn is an artist run micro label producing limited edition sound recordings primarily released on 3" CDRs. The label works with a wide variety of artists with a commitment to personal vision in their work that transcends genre restrictions. .. feature :: by Dave Miller

Recently I've started thinking about how I ended up so attracted to unconventional music. That's the word I use to describe a lot of the music I listen to -- 'unconventional.' To me, there isn't any better way to phrase it. Referring to a whole motley of disparate genres and sounds -- drone, free jazz, noise, psychedelia, warped pop, and so on through all manner of weirdness -- the lone common element amongst all the noise is a defiance of custom. Of course, music has been spurning convention for a long time now, and genres we would presently call 'conventional' were often considered nothing short of rebellion when they first arrived. .. feature :: by Michael Tau

A couple of years ago, I moved from Brussels to the countryside because I decided that, instead of working harder, I would start to live cheaper. Well, that was a stupid idea. I live nearby the German border now, and the most nearby city is Liège, in the French speaking part of Belgium. But what was my point again? Oh yeah: that’s how I got to know general utility man Pierre-Yves Bihet and his Young Girls label. I wanted make up a label profile with him. But of course, that didn’t work out either. .. feature :: by Joeri Bruyninckx