This year, I tried to take a more scientific approach to the Top 10 list, making a pile of my favourite recordings from 2011, grading them according to their relative ambition, and then listing the winners in alphabetical order. Take note, however: a couple of items here made the cut simply because they sound really, really good.

Tori Amos
Night of Hunters
Even by Tori Amos’s standards, this is a grandiose project: a 14-song cycle, inspired by classical composers ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Erik Satie, that spans continents and millennia alike. Remarkably, it works.

Geoff Berner
Victory Party
Vancouver accordion prophet Geoff Berner ups his game by hiring Montreal’s Josh “Socalled” Dolgin to produce, but not before polishing his songcraft to a steely shine. Has anyone said more about Israel’s unsteady course than Berner does on the parablelike “Oh My Golem”?

Björk
Biophilia
The Icelandic pixie’s 21st-century course is less singular than it might seem, at least to those of us who’ve been exposed to the contemporary choral music of Scandinavia—but knowing this doesn’t make Biophilia any less otherworldly.

Dixie’s Death Pool
The Man With Flowering Hands
Lee Hutzulak’s painstakingly assembled collages suggest that he’s the Phil Spectre of the local scene, and the misspelling is entirely intentional. Ghostly, moody, and at times shockingly visceral, his music—which draws on jazz, folk, and abstract noise—exists in a gorgeous and singular interzone.

Huun Huur Tu
Ancestors Call
I’m cheating a bit: Ancestors Call is a 2010 release, but it landed on my desk a week after I’d filed last year’s Top 10. If I’d heard it earlier, it would have bumped Brian Eno down to number 11—not a bad testimony to the strange beauty of this Tuvan band’s charged, shamanic overtone singing.