It takes me a year or two to find things, so not all of these were released this year. VA - Improvised Music from Japan. Perhaps this is cheating because it's so big, but what a great collection. My favorite discs are 3 (with the Yoshimitsu Ichiraku Cymbal Orchestra) and 4 (with Otomo's Blue Kite), but the whole set is amazing. Lionel Marchetti - Sirrus. Marchetti's become quite prolific with concrète and improvised releases lately. This one is an early work getting its first release, very well done. MIMEO & John Tilbury - The Hands of Caravaggio. John Tilbury's piano battling the electronic hordes. One of the best settings of an acoustic instrument in an electronic setting, and IMHO one of the best Erstwhile releases. Reinhold Friedl & Michael Vorfeld - Au défaut du silence. Bernhard Günter's trente oiseaux label released this improv album from two members of the fabulous new music ensemble Zeitkratzer, playing inside the piano and the cello. Arve Henriksen - sakuteiki. The trumpet player from Supersilent performing solo work, inspired by Japanese Shakuhachi music. Lutz Glandien - 5th Elephant. Glandien, Chris Cutler, and tuba player Michael Vogt spent a week or so in a studio but couldn't come up with anything worthwhile. Glandien returned to the material over several months and put together a superb, high energy album from the studio work, very much in keeping with Cutler's ReR aesthetic. Naked City - Live. No intro or commentary required. John Zorn - IAO. Ditto. Peter Gabriel - Up. My favorite pop album of the year. Great to see him back with new material. Janek Schaefer - Invisible Architecture #3. Live concert from a turntable whiz, layered loops from the white noise in between the tracks and other less identifiable sources. Top books: Francois Furet - Passing of an Illusion, a history of the idea of communism. Alan Furst - Night Soldiers, a fictional account covering much the same territory as Furet's history -- Caleb Deupree cdeupree@erinet.com