An album that finds Cantu-Ledesma orchestrating perhaps the most gorgeous ambience of his career so far.

They massage the album's plentiful organic charges into a sonic puzzle with an almost symphonic reach, one that's as challenging, bounteous, and ultimately unknowable as anything you'll hear this year.

It probably wasn't hard for Koze to look beyond house, because it never completely won him over. Knock Knock makes a case for others to do it as well.

In some ways it's arguably dubstep's first concept album, an expansive and visionary "what if," a dreamscape of a post-globalization, collapsed multicultural society where cultures collide uncontrollably.

Sakamoto has made a workaday logbook into something transcendent, partly because of its intimacy. Whether it's one of his major works is a question for future historians, but coming amidst an ongoing struggle with cancer, its bravery is defiant and splendid, the sound of an artist's soul laid bare.

There's an intense and cautious feeling to Sakamoto and Nicolai's approach, keeping everything at a constant volume and introducing changes only gradually. Glass is good for close listening, trading narrative for pure texture and mood.

Throughout the album's darkest passages we're struck by a sense of possibility: that everything Richard has endured, fought for and overcome has merely allowed space for beautiful new beginnings.

Sinephro's spaces not only feel full of life, they're built with the very sounds of it, too, reminding us not to take it for granted.

We Stay Together isn't a retread of Passed Me By, it's a continuation--but there are signs of life this time.

Theory Of Colours works equally well as a collection of chill-out jams or club tracks for DJs. It's a dance floor album that isn't all that concerned with the dance floor, which makes it a pleasure to listen to from front to back.

It's in this border between a club setting and the divine that Fountain comes alive. Using her voice as a modular system, Pramuk suggests a ritual that's both folkloric and futuristic.

Fire is a classic-style Bug album, just with everything turned up to 11. It's more intense, but the rhythms are familiar and the format is the same.

On an initial spin, the record's cold sheen is its most appealing quality. But what makes it so replayable is the layers that emerge once it thaws.

Working Class Woman is special because it looks beyond the personal highs and lows of touring to the cracks in the foundation of a lucrative club culture that requires constant, exhausting effort to achieve some semblance of stability.

Whether he's rapping about stripping copper out of abandoned houses or addiction, Brown manages to wring humor and, somehow, relatability out of grim personal stories.

It's hard to argue with the result anyway: Its slow build and aching vocals stand out as a purposeful moment of perfection on a record chock full of them.

Adorned with production that's as sympathetic to UK underground dance as it is to modern R&B and classic soul, Devotion is a classy affair that delights in its own refinement yet stays pinned to the earth, a talented singer and songwriter realizing her potential at just the right moment.

Loscil's tenth album for Kranky sheds light on unexplored aspects of his well-established sound. That he makes subtle breakthroughs via the decay and manipulation of a single brief recording makes Clara a quietly impressive achievement.

Not sequenced in simple chronological order, Livity Sound feels like a real album even when you know it's not. That's a testament to the unity of their aesthetic and the clarity of their vision, with three years' worth of tracks from three different producers all sounding like they could have been made in the same session.

Shepherd's flawless Eglo catalogue had the power to coax his followers off the dance floor with him, and Elaenia's sophisticated sense of musical accomplishment ought to keep them there.

For Those Of You stands apart as a significant step up in Leeds' journey to carve out and master his own musical form.

While Demdike fans will have heard a lot of this stuff by now, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker are still better than just about anybody else in the way that they thread found sound, field recordings, library music and generated sounds and beats... one hell of a package.

Martin and Robinson cycle through stages of grief, derision, self-hatred and abject loneliness with an honesty that could make you flinch.

Piñeyro taps into the rarefied air of so many early IDM records, a mix of beauty, nostalgia and melancholy.

Like any such grand project, it's daring and indulgent, occasionally weighed down by its own pretence, and the result is several songs on the album that seem to unspool in no direction in particular. But that unwinding is usually gripping, and like the other two albums Björk's recent renaissance—Utopia and Vulnicura—Fossora stuns more often than it doesn't.

The slow-motion throbs of Davachi's warm, uncluttered electronic pieces achieve something intensely serene. On her new album, Gave In Rest, the music occupies the peaceful spaces she found lying between religious and secular realms.

Even the most careful listener will be left wondering what it all means. Luckily, Boards Of Canada have laid out a riddle we won't tire of teasing out, embedded in a timeless sound unlike any other.

On Loom, she takes her interest in found sound to a gloomy, thought-provoking new depth.