The world of pop music was hardly ready for the Velvet Underground's first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968's White Light/White Heat was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety…

The Diablo Swing Orchestra dates back to 1501 in Sweden, where history tells the tale of an orchestra that played like no other. With music so seductive and divine that the ensemble overwhelmed audiences all over the country, and people from all social classes took them to their hearts. Their performances rapidly earned a reputation of being feral and vigorous and gained the orchestra a devoted crowd that followed them around…

On the occasion of its 40th anniversary (1974-2014), the Arditti Quartet, one of the most famous groups in contemporary music, has chosen to record, for the second time and this is an occurrence sufficiently rare that it bears emphasizing , the complete string quartets of Brian Ferneyhough. The pieces on these discs immediately weave an auditory spell and well illustrate this composer's brand of complexity, i.e., writing reputed to be unplayable for the instrumentalists but providing a definite pleasure for the listener, caught up in the headiness of a universe without limits or vanishing point. This 3-CD set will not only be one of the indispensable releases of 2014 but also the best way to apprehend the music of a fundamental composer whose intense writing, emancipated heir of Schoenberg, remains radically expressive, chaotic in appearance but sublimated here by the freedom and excellence of the interpretation.

How much shit can one take? Well that depends. If it is being served by the quirky Polish trio 100nka—featuring guitarist Tomek Leś, bassist Adam Stodolski and percussionist Przemek Borowiecki—there may not be quite enough. Their music is rather undefinable, jumping and sneaking as it does into odd nooks and crannies…

Some Live Noggin is the 1996 live album by noise rock band Noggin. This was a cassette-only release put out by Plastic Duck.

For all of his many attributes, one thing Frank Zappa most certainly was not is commercial. Presumably, the title of this collection is ironic. Strictly Commercial: The Best of Frank Zappa is a compilation not of the composer's hits – he only broke the Top 40 on one occasion, with "Valley Girl" – but rather, a collection of his best-known material, from "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" to "Sexual Harassment in the Workplace."…

Released in 1988, Guitar may be the most important and ironically one of the least-known entries in Frank Zappa's voluminous discography – which spans over seven-dozen LPs as of this writing. His proficiencies as a composer and instrumentalist have long been lauded. However, anthologies of this nature provide an outlet for the remarkable breadth and depth of Zappa's manual dexterity and improvisational scope, which can now be enjoyed on a myriad of levels…

Pleasure Ground is the 2006 album by Dominick Fernow , known under the pseudonym Prurient. This was released by the Providence, Rhode Island company Load Records and features four songs.

The first live album compiled from various performances on Frank Zappa's 1988 world tour (his final outing), Broadway the Hard Way is composed mostly of new, vocal-oriented material. The tone throughout is highly political, with Zappa taking potshots at such targets as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson and other televangelists, Jesse Jackson, C. Everett Koop, and so on…

This ambitious and beautifully produced two-CD set includes nearly all of Iannis Xenakis' chamber music for strings, piano, and strings and piano combined. Chamber music constituted a small part of the composer's output, since large ensembles and large forms were vehicles more commensurate with the aesthetic of his monumental, granitic music. There are no small pieces here, though; in each of these works, ranging from solos to a quintet for piano and strings, Xenakis was able to express his uncompromising vision no less ferociously than in his orchestral works. While all of the pieces have an elemental character, many with a visceral punch, the actual sound of the music is surprisingly varied, and the individual works have distinctive and individual characters. In spite of the weightiness and rigor of the music, the tone is not necessarily heavy, and some pieces, like Evryali for piano and Dikhthas for violin and piano, have moments of what could almost be described as whimsicality.

Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention is a transitional album that sees Zappa turning away from rock and putting more time into his Synclavier compositions. This is a year away from the computer-only (minus one live track) Jazz From Hell…

Of all of Frank Zappa's discography, Thing-Fish must be his most controversial, misunderstood, overlooked album. Obviously, it is not a masterpiece, but reducing it to a compilation album with a racist plot distorts the reality…

Released in October 1984, Them or Us is Frank Zappa's last studio rock album (unless one counts Thing-Fish). It contains a little of everything for everyone, but most of all it has that cold and dry early-'80s feel that made this and other albums like The Man From Utopia and Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention sound dated pretty quickly. The record begins and ends with covers…

Shock The Monkey Aaron Ellis Remix is the 2016 album by monkeymonkeymonkey (the artist name is actually the word "monkey" repeated 45 times). It could be a group, it could be one person, it could be no one. Some of these songs are done with power and precision while other songs, no one knows what the fuck they're doing.

Bish Bosch is, according to Scott Walker, the final recording in the trilogy that began with 1995’s Tilt and continued in 2006’s The Drift. Its title combines urban slang for the word "bitch" and the last name of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Like its predecessors, Bish Bosch is not an easy listen initially. It's utterly strange, yet alluring. Musically, Walker is as rangy and cagey as ever. His players have worked with him since Tilt; they know exactly what he wants and how to get it. A string orchestra arranged and conducted by keyboardist Mark Warman, and a full symphony on three cuts are also employed. The lyrics on Bish Bosch are full of obscure historical, philosophical, medical, geographical and cultural allusions. For instance, subatomic science, a dwarf jester in Attila the Hun’s court, St. Simeon, and an early 20th century fad all appear in "SDSS14+3B (Zircon, A Flagpole Sitter)." Elsewhere, Nicolai Ceausescu, Nikita Khrushchev, the Ku Klux Klan, and God himself show up. While Bish Bosch is another exercise in artful pretension, it is the most accessible entry in this trilogy and well worth the effort to get at it. Themes of decay are woven throughout these songs – of empire, of the body, of language and religion – yet they are often complemented and illustrated by wry, pun-like, and even scatological humor.