Ask Al Swainger what his music is and he will, with a bassist's patience, decline to tell you. The album's liner notes confess that the question is the hardest one he faces, and that every tidy answer shaves off the strange, fragile and unresolved parts that made the work worth doing. *Impure Imagination*, the third record from his Pointless Beauty project, is the sound of a man refusing to be filed. That refusal could be tiresome in lesser hands. Here it is exhilarating.

A fader at zero is a promise as much as a silence. The channel is open and the signal is waiting, and everything depends on the hand that moves it. Jasmith, a Singapore-based producer who tracked this single in England, has built a whole song around that moment, and the result is a confident, polished piece of electronic pop with a thesis it never has to shout.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives in the dead of a Scandinavian winter and makes you feel, briefly and thrillingly, that the walls of your own house are thinner than you thought. *WORLD-ENDING FIRE*, the self-titled debut from the Uppsala duo of the same name, is one of those records. It is also, as it happens, one of the most quietly extraordinary things to come out of the Swedish forest in years.

Johnny O.'s original is a love song of the old, certain kind, the sort that announces a girl and a destiny in the same breath and never stops to ask whether the girl has been consulted. Watch Me Die Inside, the Cyprus-based project orbiting the enigmatic figure of Aleph, takes that certainty and holds it up to the light until it starts to look like something else: a man talking to a mirror and calling it a woman.

Somewhere between a Bristol basement in 1995 and a Berlin dance floor in 2002, a door was left ajar. Inverted Mirror has walked through it with a single synthesizer, a drum machine's worth of nerve, and a conviction that the avant-garde and the earworm were never meant to be enemies. "Automatic Earth" is his debut, the opening transmission from a project promising three singles and then an album. If the rest keeps this standard, the signal will be worth following.

Bristol has a long record of producing music that sounds as though it were made in a damp basement by someone who has seen through everything. Lucian Lacewing makes his in a bedroom, a smaller room with a better view of the ceiling, and this four-track mini-album is the sound of a man lying on his back and watching the plaster turn into weather.

Twenty years is a long time to leave a song waiting, and most songs would have sulked. Tarita, the solo project of Chennai-based psychologist Dr Sindhuja Sankaran, wrote "The Death of Peter Pan" at 21 and released it at 41. In between it lived on an old IBM laptop, unproduced and unheard, losing a stanza somewhere along the way like a sock in a launderette. That the wait has produced something this tender, rather than something merely nostalgic, is to everyone's credit.

Most songs about emotional difficulty are in a tearing hurry to resolve it. A key change arrives to heal the wound, and a chorus swells to announce that everything is fine now. Brian Kovacs, a Chicago-area bassist with 33 years in the trade, declines the transaction. "Holding Space" is a song about sitting with what cannot yet be mended, and it has the nerve to sound exactly like that: unhurried, low-slung and quietly stubborn.

Somewhere in downtown Miami, in a studio apartment the artist cheerfully calls tiny, a sculptor who never quite stopped being a sculptor has been chiselling sound. No marble, no mallet: the raw material was a singing bowl, a handful of bells and a set of wind chimes, and the chisel was a computer screen on which each tone was rendered as a waveform to be studied, nudged and polished. It sounds like the premise of a gallery installation that would make you check your watch. The result is a record that makes you check your hips instead.

Anthony Wayne Langston has chosen a stage name that sounds like a hedgerow philosopher, and the record behind it has the same unhurried, weathered wisdom. *Still, the World*, ten songs released on April Fools' Day with no foolery in sight, is the work of a Californian who understands that a good melody needs no apology and that a plain feeling, plainly sung, can hit harder than any amount of cleverness.