The compilation album has a shabby reputation, and usually deserves it: a hurried shuffle of old favourites, a couple of scraps to tempt the completists, a contractual obligation with a sleeve. *Elf* is a different animal. Its title is German for "eleven", the number of tracks Roland Wälzlein, who records as Fish And Scale, has chosen from his musical journey so far and set beside brand-new pieces. He has hung them the way a good curator hangs a retrospective, so the older work looks freshly lit and the new work looks as though it has always lived there. The result is cohesive, atmospheric and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather wonderful.

Some songs announce themselves with a fanfare. This one arrives like a confession made after midnight, when the pretence has worn off and only the truth is left standing in the room. "Holding on to You" is Ersin Secrin at his most unguarded, a ballad built not on spectacle but on the ache of knowing better and doing it anyway.

Berlin has given us plenty of cold, clinical electronic exports over the decades, but Oskar Brandt's debut single arrives from an entirely different tradition: the swelling, string-drenched confessional, built for widescreen and delivered with the nerve of someone who has nothing left to lose. "Now or Never" is not a cautious opening statement. It is a gauntlet thrown down, and Brandt clears it with room to spare.

Six minutes and ten seconds is a long time to ask a listener to sit still, and Project D.S.F spends every one of them earning the privilege. "Transformation," the latest cut from the "Uncharted Networks" EP, is a piece that refuses to announce itself with a hook or a chorus, instead unspooling like a reel of film shot somewhere far beyond the reach of a satellite dish. It opens on hush and static, the kind of tentative electronic murmur you might associate with a control room going dark, before the strings creep in — not lush, not yet, but wary, as though they too are waiting to see what the silence contains.

Something rare has landed on our desks this week, and it arrives wearing the wrong shoes on purpose. "Deaf Inside The Cult" opens on a single sustained drone, a low hum that could be a tuning fork left to rot in a cathedral, before a drum machine stumbles in like it's late for its own funeral. The Ghostly Pulse have made a career out of sounding like they don't quite trust their own instruments, and here that mistrust curdles into something genuinely thrilling.

Pascal & The Shades have built a reputation on patience, and "Spirit of the Cactus," in its Desert Mix form, is perhaps the clearest statement of that ethos yet. This isn't a song so much as a slow ritual, unfolding at the pace of heat shimmer on tarmac, and it asks the listener to surrender rather than follow.

Roland Wälzlein has never much cared for tidy categories, and "Holy Man" makes that abundantly clear within its opening bars. Recorded live in the studio, the piano sits close and unadorned, each note allowed to hang in the air a beat longer than convention would permit — a decision that rewards patience rather than punishing it.

Berlin's bedrooms have produced stranger and less lovable things than this. Kate Pending, working with nothing more exotic than patience and a modest home rig, has taken Luke Tangerine's original *Exoplanet* — a track already fond of its own nostalgia — and done the hardest thing a remixer can attempt: she has left it recognisable while making it hers.

There is a particular kind of music writing — born somewhere between the inkstained fervour of the late-seventies weeklies and the wide-eyed generosity of the blogosphere at its best — that knows a small, strange, brilliant thing when it hears one. "Parlin Papito," the solo debut from Bromsen frontman Karlo Bromsen, is exactly that kind of thing: a record so disarmingly modest in its ambitions that it sneaks past your critical faculties entirely, and by the time you've noticed what's happened, you're already three plays deep and grinning like an idiot.

Cities are notoriously difficult to translate into sound without lapsing into cliché — the accordion, the postcard chord change, the tourist-board shimmer. Bodo Bifroest sidesteps all of it. "À Travers Paris" doesn't try to paint the Eiffel Tower in synth pads; it captures something harder to notate: the particular hush of a city after midnight, when the pavements go glossy under sodium light and every stranger seems to be walking somewhere important.