Actress, Ghettoville (Werkdiscs/Ninja Tune) British electronic-music artist Actress (aka Darren Cunningham) hails from the same quasi-grimestep/post-IDM interzone that’s home to artists as disparate as Burial, Kuedo, Flying Lotus, Lone, and Zomby—in fact, Lone and Zomby have released music on Cunninghan’s Werkdiscs label. But Actress also takes as reference points a few hipper bits of music-­critic catnip: Suicide‘s menacing throb, Throbbing Gristle‘s creaky protoindustrial noise, and Cabaret Voltaire’s surface grit. Actress’s fourth full-length, Ghetto­ville, is being promoted as a sequel to the project’s debut, 2008’s Hazyville, but out of everything Cunningham has released so far, the new one is probably least like that album—like Autechre, he’s ventured further and further into abstraction and distortion over the years. Ghettoville‘s 16 tracks sound more like demos or sketches than fully realized songs, and at times that can be trying. When the album connects, however—with the lo-fi Timbaland stomp of “Corner” or the chopped-and-screwed quiet-storm cut “Rap”—it carries enough emotional and intellectual heft to match Actress’s best work. —Tal Rosenberg

David First, Electronic Works 1976-1977 (Dais) A few years after David First used the Buchla 100 analog synthesizer at Princeton’s outpost of Columbia University’s Electronic Music Center to make these raw, in-your-face recordings, he made no-wave-inspired punk rock, first in Philadelphia and then in New York (most memorably with the Notekillers). And a few years before he began to explore electronic music, he was playing free-jazz guitar with pianist Cecil Taylor. But as First says in the liner notes to Electronic Works 1976-1977 (the first release of this material), “I felt that as awesome as it was, the free jazz concept was already codified into something I could not properly crack into and mess with.” Using the endlessly reconfigurable, touch-controlled Buchla 100 satisfied that desire, and these five noisy, churning pieces have little in common with the polite, eggheaded synthesizer music typically made during his period. Instead First layers dive-bomber sirens, harsh squeals, and rubbery pulses (and on “Moody,” ferocious electric guitar) into visceral soundscapes that tear through the air like dull machetes. —Peter Margasak

Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Chambers (Captcha) The Mexican duo of Lorena Quintanilla (Lorelle) and Alberto Gonzales (the Obsolete) plays garage-psych that takes cues from the hypnotic repetition and everything-bleeds reverb-and-delay aesthetic of, say, Wooden Shjips—then adds a little more classic rock and a little more volume. The opening track of Chambers, “What’s Holding You?,” ends with a classic psych move: as the song’s slow-burning trip fizzles, lashes of effects-drenched, warbling guitar gently pan from one side of your brain to the other. The driving, upbeat “Sealed Scene,” with its Oh Sees-like rhythm, is hard to deny—simple and fun, it’d make a great single, even with the delay-treated guitar snaking all over the background. The band is tighter than ever before—even on the slower, dirgier songs, where it sounds like Lorelle’s sultry vocals are oozing into the dark, incense-fogged recesses of a seance chamber, the playing is sharp. —Kevin Warwick

Various artists, Warfaring Strangers: Dark­scorch Canticles (Numero Group) If we’re gonna be real, the only things worth writing hard-rocks songs about are sex, drugs, and black magic. You also find a lot of all three in fantasy fiction and its close cousins, role-playing games, whose aficionados started to cohere into a distinct subculture right around the time that heavy metal was coming into its own—it was probably inevitable that there would be crossover between them. For what’s possibly the most arcanely themed collection they’ve yet produced, the pop archaeologists at the Numero Group have compiled 16 pristine examples of the microgenre they call “wizard rock” (no relation to songs about Harry Potter). The lyrics are full of sorcerers, barbarians, and demonic summoning rituals, and the song titles are frequently lofty (“Cry for the Newborn,” Twelve O’Clock Satanial”), but despite the high-concept stuff (in all senses of the word “high”) the music itself has the lean tautness of Ozzy-era Sabbath. If this sounds like the niche you’ve been waiting your whole life to find, you might want to hold off purchasing Darkscorch Canticles until May—that’s when Numero plans to release a deluxe limited edition that comes with a fully playable RPG, wherein you take on the role of one of the bands from the compilation, questing across a D&D-style fantasy world in search of a record contract. —Miles Raymer