Alexander Varty

It was a happy, happy day in June when I went out to a yard sale and came back with a complete audiophile sound system for less than the sticker price on an iPod Nano. My new Magneplanar speakers have one small issue, though: they reproduce great analogue recordings with 3-D fidelity, but they don’t really like big digital pop and rock productions. So I’ve let them pick this year’s list.

Bob Brozman, John McSherry, and Dónal O’Connor
Six Days in Down
Irish music can sound fidgety and twee, but American slide-guitar magician Bob Brozman brings an almost shamanic edge to John McSherry’s uilleann pipes and Dónal O’Connor’s fiddle.

Listen to "Beer Belly Dancing" by Bob Brozman.

Charming Hostess
The Bowls Project
Although it sometimes seems that there are two different albums fighting for prominence here—doom-laden avant-garde interpretations of ancient Sumerian texts versus amped-up covers of gospel classics—both are delivered with gut-wrenching power and wild imagination.

Listen to "Bound and Turned Aside" by Charming Hostess.

Nels Cline Singers
Initiate
The man who’s made Wilco worth listening to does the same for the oft-reviled idiom of jazz-rock fusion with this double-disc package, split between kinetic studio recordings and an incendiary live set. Bonus points for Simon Norfolk’s gorgeously appropriate cover and booklet photographs, featuring the baleful cybernetic gaze of Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider.

Listen to "Floored" by Nels Cline Singers.

Benoí®t Delbecq
Circles and Calligrams and The Sixth Jump
Okay, so I’m cheating by listing two discs here. But French pianist Benoí®t Delbecq and his Vancouver-based label, Songlines, once discussed releasing these two very different CDs as a double album, rather than separately and simultaneously. In any case, they just won France’s prestigious Grand Prix du Disque for Delbecq, thanks to Jump’s muscular, African-inspired trio jazz and the hallucinatory prepared-piano soundscapes of Circles.

Listen to "Circles and Calligrams" by Benoí®t Delbecq.

Brian Eno
Small Craft on a Milk Sea
Brian Eno no longer rides the cutting edge; in fact, several Small Craft tracks are oddly reminiscent of Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd. But the ambient inventor hasn’t lost his knack for utterly seductive sonic landscapes.

Listen to "Emerald and Lime" by Brian Eno.

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba
I Speak Fula
Bassekou Kouyate plays the ngoni—a simple hunter’s lute from rural Mali—the way an electric guitarist might: standing up and rocking out. But he doesn’t so much break from tradition as update it, introducing fresh excitement to an ancient and atmospheric sound.

Listen to "Ladon" by Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba.

Owen Pallett
Heartland
This one-man pop opera about a prairie farmer’s homoerotic attachment to a charismatic religious leader—or something like that, anyway—is a dizzying blend of minimalist composition and narrative panache.

Listen to "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt" by Owen Pallett.

Alasdair Roberts & Friends
Too Long in This Condition
Scotland’s finest tunesmith dips into the deep well of traditional song for 10 ghostly ballads (plus one guitar instrumental written by his dad). The past has rarely been so eerily present.

Listen to "Long Lankin" by Alasdair Roberts.

Saeid Shanbehzadeh
Iran: Musique du Golfe Persique
A startling introduction to Afro-Iranian music, courtesy of the age-old connections between Zanzibar and the Persian port of Bushehr. If this sounds like a shirtless wild man playing bagpipes while dancing to tranced-out African beats, well, that’s exactly what it is.

Listen to "Dance" by Saeid Shanbezadeh.

Stian Westerhus
Pitch Black Star Spangled
A big part of the fun of listening to Norwegian guitarist Stian Westerhus’s first solo CD is trying to figure out how he creates sounds you’ve never heard before. Whether working with bit-crunching effects pedals or simply using high-volume distortion and feedback, he’s clearly the latest improv-guitar genius to emerge from the vital Scandinavian scene.

Listen to a preview for Pitch Black Star Spangled by Stian Westerhus.