​Homeboy Sandman is a spiraling autumn of light from Queens, a rapper whose flow at once sounds like a metaphysical brain drain and a physically fit slice of verbal gymnastics. With a career built on battle competitions, hosting nights at the Nuyorican Poets Café and some guerilla F train flyering, he's finally signed to Stones Throw records. There, he dropped the six-song Subject:Matter EP, which matches the tirelessly bent label's affinity for woozy beats and uniquely blurry rapping. Opening track "The Miracle" is a three-minute chorus-less wonder, though it doesn't suffer from any lack of melody as Sandman's rubbery flow follows the musical peaks and valleys with aplomb.

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​Brooklyn's Virgin Forest is stick-to-your-ribs indie rock courtesy of 80% of Phosphorescent, fueled on Townes Van Zandt and heavy metal thunder. Their sophomore album (and first for Partisan), Easy Way Out (due January 31), mines similar Neil Youngish territory as Phospho, but is more Ragged Glory than Gold Rush, the restraint jettisoned over for some unrestrained rockers. "Don't Be Afraid" is a mix of shadow-staring doom-folk, Eagles-gone-loftpunk guitar shimmer and an irresistible splatter of fuzz bass.

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​Francis Harris is the given name of the Brooklynite who usually records as Adultnapper, the minimal techno icon who's punker upbringing leaves him never too afraid to get funky, cantankerous, mischievous or just plain noisy. His first full-length under his birthname (due February 7 via Scissors & Thread) is a remarkably personal statement wrapped in triple vinyl, a requiem for his father, who passed away in February 2010. His micropulses are fleshed out with no shortage of cellos, horns, gorgeous Arthur Russell melodies, skipping fuzzwash and dubby textures; mixing everything low to give the album a delicate feel. "Pharoah In the Morning" pairs a gracefully honked trumpet and some Björkian swoon—a perfect meld of atmosphere and melody for fans of Nicolas Jaar or Dirty Projectors.

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​Brooklyn's Elika is another great addition to the shoegaze revival that's been swaddling New York like a technicolor dreampopcoat for the last four years. But the retro-futurist duo spills their gooey textures on their laptops, exploring a human and delicate version of the electrogush of M83 or Ulrich Schnauss. Elika's latest album, Always The Light (due March 5 via shimmergaze depot Saint Marie Records), revels in firefly-blinking electropulse, gushy woosh and the dusky Madonna-gone-indie melodies of vocalist Evagelia Maravelias. First taste "No One Gets Lost" hums like a choir of harmoniums teaming with a glitchy drum machine, deeply exploring themes of life and loss.

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Knomia

​Doom-folk lifer Larkin Grimm is known mostly for 2008's desolate, pastoral daymare Parplar and her colorfully wry outlook (her hilarious MySpace post about attending SXSW in 2009 is required reading). The last four years have been nothing short of monumental for Grimm; she moved to Spanish Harlem, left her record label, married fire-breathing art-star Master Lee and gave birth to her first child. And if "Paradise and So Many Colors" is any indication, her new album Soul Retrieval (due in February) is naturally optimistic and lush, fueled by the sunny mutations of exotica. Starring members of Vetiver and Extra Life, as well as Jesse Sparhawk on harp and Bowie producer Tony Visconti behind the boards and on bass, "Paradise" is a manic slice of shiny textures (er, so many colors) and euphoric background coos, all backed by an Yma Sumac-inspired rhythm that pulses with electricity.

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​New York sound artist Nickolas Mohanna is the real Sound of the City. The noises of our rainy days, planes flying overhead or whatever's happening on Mott Street are dutifully documented on his digital recorder, then stretched out and distended (via synth and guitar) into majestic drone worlds. The enveloping Oneohtrix Point Nostrand Avenue gush of his second album, Reflectors (out now via Preservation, limited to 300 copies), takes the atmospheres we experience every day and transmutes them into a glorious, enhanced, superatmosphere appropriate for the type of New York that Snake Plissken would escape from. The album's final track, "Particles," ultimately turns a plane taking off from La Guardia into a gorgeous, darkly hued, skipping, fractal zone-out.

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​Hunny is the turn-of-the-millenium "return of the rock" played out in real time; it formed when the members of YIMBY-approved Staten Island dance-pop crew Paragraph got bored with glossy beats and threw their drum machines in the trash. The bruising grunge-metal gnashers' debut I'm History was recorded (and partially written) in 10 hours, a melodic version of the pre-major sludge-pop released by Melvins and Bleach-era Nirvana. Vocalist Michael "Super 60" has a voice that peaks out into a throaty gargle—hear it on the title track, which combines drunken, gently tuneless Mudhoney party-crash with Super 60's Cobain-like ability to scream two notes at once.

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​New York cultural mash-up experiment TriBeCaStan is part of a growing number of local groups like Nation Beat who dive so deep into the melting pot that borders become burned away—even the name "TriBeCaStan" is meant to evoke an imaginary republic defined by New York cool, explorer energy and outer space vibes. Archduke of the Forward Guard John Kruth describes their upcoming album, New Deli (due January 31 via EverGreene) as a "mosh of influences," and unlike, say, global groovesters Gogol Bordello, it's hard to even find where one begins and another ends: African folk, Ethiojazz, zydeco, gypsy-rock, Indian scales, Japanese flutes, Carnival rhythms and good old-fashioned free-jazz freakouts. "In TriBeCaStan we like to shift gears a bit," says John Kruth about "Bed Bugs," which is not the first song in this column to pay tribute to our itchy friends. "So the song starts off with this very tribal, otherworldly African sound and then leaps across the ocean to the Carribean. We are truly universal. Or, as Sun Ra would say, 'Uni-verse? Why just one? Omniversal is more like it!'"

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Andy Newcombe/Flickr

​Ever since Weasel Walter relocated to Brooklyn a few years back, no wave's ambidextrous enfant terrible has been almost obnoxiously busy. His countless performances at Death By Audio, Zebulon and Issue Project Room have single-handedly made our loft-punk and freak-jazz shows exponentially uglier, meaner, more violent, more savage and more awesome. As a performer, Walter values speed, volume and venom, all of which are amply present on Ominous Telepathic Mayhem (out now via ugEXPLODE), his collection of high-velocity freestyles with some of New York's most bleeding-edge improvisers (Peter Evans, Mary Halvorson and Darius Jones) and London's Alex Ward. Walter is obviously adept with the Joey Baron-style jazzblast that usually makes his wall-of-sound improvs bustle with bile, but presented with only one sparring partner at a time, his sputterburst is both violent and fragile. On "Let's Get 'Em," he teams with YIMBY grad Mary Halvorson in front of the stage at Zebulon for a slapstick blur of punches, stabs and Beefheart grindcore.

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​The bleary, blurry, bleaky MV Carbon has been a staple of the New York avant-garde since relocating here from Chicago in the mid-'00s. After lurching up from the No Fun circuit as one half of Metalux, she's been renown for her nauseous reel-to-reel tape manipulations and cello sawing—which you could catch everywhere from a residency at Issue Project Room, scoring Warhol films at the Metropolitan or the P.S. 1 Warm Up. Her latest solo outing, Dislodged Perehelion (released via Ecstatic Peace and limited to 300 copies), is a bowel-twisting slurry of decaying tapenoize, shimmering synths, broken drum machine loops and Carbon's no wave yowl. "Sidewalk Scrapes" is a busy splatter painting where you can hear traces of Sonic Youth's Goo-crunch and Lydia Lunch's downtown sniping deep inside a dizzying swamp of noise, not to mention a fairly rocking sample of some '80s mersh-metal.

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