En su número de diciembre del año pasado, la revista Artforum publicó una serie de listas de lo mejor del año según artistas, críticos, etc. Pensé que no las leería nunca, pero después recordé que esta revista está en los fondos de algunas librerías electrónicas universitarias, así que aquí están tres de las cinco listas que he encontrado (las otras dos son de Robin Rimbaud y Ryoji Ikeda).

Vashti Bunyan

1 Lambchop, OH (Ohio) (City Slang) From the first listen-oh (love).

2 Brian Wilson, That Lucky Old Sun (Capitol Records) Of course, a miracle. This album throws me from nostalgia to confusion, and back. I was in a park in Los Angeles recently when Brian Wilson walked down the path, and it was all I could do not to run to him and fling my arms around his neck crying, "Do you know how much you meant to me?" But I didn't. British reticence, or good sense-I'm not sure.

3 Vetiver, Thing of the Past (Gnomonsong) Lead singer Andy Cable's voice has a quality like no other, quiet and gentle, but it can reach right into the heart. Cabic also searches out brilliant but obscure musicians in the dollar bins of secondhand record stores. Vetiver's recent covers album serves as a good guide to what drives his band.

4 Mike Heron and Georgia Seddon at the KCRW World Festival, Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles I've known Heron since 1970. Hearing Seddon say, "Now I'd like to introduce my dad," and seeing him walk onstage at the Hollywood Bowl this past June moved me enormously. Listening to them play beautiful Incredible String Band songs that are so familiar to me was certainly one of the best nights of the year.

5 Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid (Polydor Records) It feels as if they have delivered every last bit of their souls into the building of this magnificently emotional albumdeservedly the winner of this year's UK Mercury Prize. Lead singer Guy Garvey is one of the nicest people I have ever met. He once brought me lemon, honey, and ginger when my voice was faltering.

6 The Heritage Orchestra at Royal Festival Hall, Meltdown Festival, London This performance of Vangelis's Blade Runner sound track-mixed live by Massive Attack (the curators of this year's Meltdown)was an extraordinary achievement for the London-based collective of musicians, as the synthesizer-only original was never scored for real instruments. The authence erupted at the end.

7 Shlomo The rhythms and melodies that Shlomo-a beatbox artist from London, whom I first heard in Moscow-produces with only his mouth and a microphone are mesmerizing. He has been involved with all kinds of musicians, from Bjòrk to Damon Albarn, and yet he has no solo recordings. Maybe next year.

8 Monica, "The Boy Is Mine" (duet with Brandy), The Boy Is Mine (Arista Records) This may be cheating, as it is from a decade ago-but I've been looking for the original version from Monica's solo album for a long time, and finally found it on eBay this year. The first bars of intricate, harplike notes transfix me every time.

9 John Renbourn I hadn't heard Renbourn (from the 1960s band Pentangle, but also a solo and hugely influential guitarist) play live since we were both young, but this past spring I was delighted to find him performing at a friend's Scotland wedding-masterful as always. Some guests kept on talking and I wanted to stand up and say, "Do you know who this is?" I get mad when anyone onstage is laying themselves bare and, still, the conversations grow louder.

10 Max Richter, 24 Postcards in Full Colour (FatCat Records) These musical glimpses are all short and sweet-which resonates for me, since my songs are often under two minutes. In the past I have watched Richter work like a whirlwind, where notes fly from him like sparks yet always land in the right places, creating music that is calming and dreamlike. He is such a contradiction.

Damon Krukowski

1 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies Eno and Schmidt's set of instructional cards for solving creative problems originally printed in 1975-is now available as an iPhone application. Instead of checking messages, you can draw one of its "worthwhile dilemmas" to direct your next move, such as: "Fill every beat with something."

2 1970's Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Sublime Frequencies) In the pre-synthesizer days of rai music explored by this album, every beat was filled with driving hand percussion, passionate call-and-response vocals, and (surprisingly) trumpets. The lyrics aren't translated, but titles such as "He, Who Doesn't Own a Car" and "I'm Still Getting Drunk . . . Still" tell you everything you need to know.

3 Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted-Baghdad, 1925-1929 (Honest Jon's) An elegy for a cosmopolitan culture lost to generations of ethnic conflict. As the introductory notes explain, "By the time the Jews left en masse in the early 1950s, there was a gap in Baghdad for instrumentalists who could play Iraqi music." That music turns out to have been part Jewish, part Egyptian, part Indian, part Turkish-and all melancholy.

4 Mutant Sounds (http://mutant-sounds. blogspot.com) If music blogs are the new radio, Mutant Sounds is a pirate station that broadcasts noise obscurities by and for freaks. Lately they've been on an '80s cassette kick; I've enjoyed the titles and artwork for recordings like Deus Ex Machine's SAD and Magic's Marionette Karma so much that I dare not listen, for fear of ruining the dream of how they might sound.

5 The Music Tapes, Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes (Merge Records) Billed as the Music Tapes' first release since 1999's 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad, this album sounds more like it was recorded fifty years ago. Turns out that bandleader Julian Koster used a '30s wire recorder to capture this ghostly, funny, melodic-yetatonal pop opera.

6 Conlon Nancarrow, Studies for Player Piano (Other Minds) Nancarrow (19271997) created these compositions-newly available in a remastered four-CD setby hand-punching the paper rolls for player pianos. The more holes, the less space in the music. The most spectacular examples employ a density and speed that no human player could achieve.

7 Helena Espvall & Masaki Batoh (Drag City) A stylistic and linguistic surprise from two experimental rock musicians-one based in Philadelphia and the other in Tokyo-this album consists almost entirely of traditional folk songs, sung in cellist Espvall's native Swedish. When Batoh (leader of the psychedelic band Ghost) chimes in with vocal harmonies, these recordings reach a kind of pan-national hippie ideal.

8 Allan Kaprow, How to Make a Happening (Primary Information) This year Kaprow's 1966 instructional LP was reissued for the first time by the excellent new publishing house Primary Information. Kaprow's Fluxus infomercial sounds dated to my ears, but when I play it for my students, they immediately start making music together.

9 Electric Africa Record collectors have flooded into Africa, and the result has been some dazzling new CD compilations documenting the sounds of postindependence electric music in Nigeria (Nigeria Special, Soundway), the Congo (Rumba Rock, African Pearls), and Benin and Togo (African Scream Contest, Analog Africa), to name just three of my favorites. The era of cheap global travel may be drawing to a close, but crate-diggers have already made the most of it.

10 Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, Bloom (Opal Limited) Another interactive iPhone application for Eno. (Has he found his new medium?) Thirty years after the landmark Music for Airports, Eno has again written an ambient piece for a locus of both high-speed communication and aimless drift: the cell phone. Bloom, which Eno describes as a "music box for the 21st century," embraces that drift and makes it beautiful.

Brigitte Fontaine

1 Portishead, Third (Mercury Records) The 1990s outfit came back this year even better than before, with great new sounds yet the same strong charm. Beth Gibbons's voice is un enchantement. You can listen to it all day and night.

2 The Gossip, Uve in Liverpool Sony BMG) Beth Ditto is a bullshot. She is a bomb. Her music is very rock 'n' roll, but her voice is thin, high, powerful, and all gospel, making the group follow her lead like a crowd of flies. Have you noticed that both Ditto and Portishead's Gibbons, unlike other female singers, do not act like whores?

3 Wasis Diop (musical director), Koulsy Lamko (writer and executive producer), Ze Manel (composer), Bintou Wéré, un Opéra du Sahel (Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris) For this first opera ever to concentrate on the Sahel region-a strip of land stretching across northern Africa-fifty dancers were accompanied by several musicians and actors speaking in various Sahelian languages. The show's direction, music, and choreography were unforgettable.

4 Areski Belkacem, Le Triomphe de l'amour (Polydor Universal) Belkacem, my favorite compositional partner, has made only a few solo recordings since the '70s, when we first began our collaborations. On this album, he offers a kaleidoscopic blend of very French music and Berberian (his family roots) modal melodies and rhythms. His voice is simple and beautiful.

5 Mariza, Terra (EMI) A very pretty woman with closely cropped blond hair and black eyes, this young Portuguese singer of fado is so good-sad, as the folk tradition requires, and yet also merry.

6 Nina Simone, "Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux" A Single Woman (Elektra/ Asylum) The lyrics of this song are based on a poem by Louis Aragon, and its despairing words stir me. Her voice is both strong and gentle-I only met Nina once, but it was a long, tender meeting.

7 Carla Bruni, Comme si de rien n'était (Naïve) She married the awful and incompetent French president Nicolas Sarkozy, but in spite of that fact, Bruni here recorded something naked and honest. While there is nothing on the album that knocks you on your ass, she sings all right.

8 Alain Bashung, Bleu pétrole (Barclay Universal) Even with words that are little more than gibberish, this sorcerer charms me every time. The musicians on this record are wonderful-particularly Marc Ribot on guitar-but their music is even better onstage, where the sound will suck you in. Bashung is a great artist, though it's sometimes a pity that he knows it all too well. Bises to him.

9 Pietra Montecorvino, Napoli Mediterranea (L'Empreinte Digitale) This beautiful Neopolitan fairy is truly amazing. Her voice is strangely husky, sometimes bellowing and sometimes low. She sings like a girl who has slept in the streets for a long time. But it may only be Neopolitan technique.

10 Sonic Youth and Brigitte Fontaine, Unpublished records This year I rediscovered two unreleased pieces I recorded seven years ago with Sonic Youth, whom I adore. I regret that my ex-record company refused to hand over the rights to these songs for the group to use on a CD and DVD.