I have actually been postponing this into irrelevancer, hoping to assemble some halfway comprehensive list of everything that has knocked me down over the past year-plus. I can't do it. I needed a headstart in early December and I slipped up. The profusion of remarkable listening experiences this past year has been staggering. So... A noncomprehensive small clutch of favorites from 2002 or thereabouts: 1. Jack Rose: RED HORSE, WHITE MULE (Eclipse) (gorgeous fingerstyle guitar stylings) 2. Andrea Neumann and B. Beins: LIDINGO (Erstwhile) (after the slight disappointement, for me, of the Fennesz/Polwechsel, this actually knocked me out...it might not be either's best work, but it's a doozy) 3. Cee Lo: CEE LO GREEN AND HIS PERFECT IMPERFECTIONS (a real freak, assured me that my dislike of Missy Elliott's music is probably a dislike of the styles she's mining and working with; Cee Lo's appearance on Letterman [?] in 2002 was unreal: gritty, freaky, gospel) 4. Hate Eternal: KING OF ALL KINGS ("no editing"? huh? powerful, intense, and perhaps unfortunately, militaristically sympathetic...but fucking bad) 5. Steffen Basho-Junghans: WATERS IN AZURE (Strange Audio Attractors) (see #1, albeit completely different; universes inside an acoustic guitar) 6. Luc Ferrari: CYCLE DES SOUVENIRS (Blue Chopsticks/Drag City) 7. El-P: FANTASTIC DAMAGE (Definitive Jux) 8. Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, IMPULSION (Empreintes Digitales) (more intensely great concret; MCSM does a track or two here that almost sound like cutups of some of the new school of improvising trumpeters---Doerner, Kelley, Hautinger, etc., by way of Dixon and McPhee of course---totally cut-up and multitracked. That isn't wholly accurate, but it's remarkable, esp. considering these pieces are from '70-'81) 9. Darkane: EXPANDING SENSES (the fucking baddest; intense and churning) Shaken, not stirred: DJ/Rupture: GOLD TEETH THIEF (Violent Turd, reissue) Madlib: BLUNTED IN THE BOMB SHELTER 2 Many DJs: AS HEARD ON RADIO SOULWAX, PT. 2 Reissue heaven: Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers: THE COMPLETE SPECIALTY RECORDINGS (Specialty) Trevor Wishart: JOURNEY INTO SPACE (Paradigm) SMAK 1 + 2 (Skam) Nagisa Ni Te, ON THE LOVE BEACH (JagJaguwar) Fennesz: FIELD RECORDINGS (Touch) Charley Patton: SCREAMIN' AND HOLLERIN' THE BLUES (Revenant, 2001) Giacinto Scelsi: STRING QUARTETS and other pieces (Naive-Montaigne) H.N.A.S. reissues on Dom-America, esp. IM SCATTEN DER MOEHRE THU20: NANCY/HET ARCHIEF (Alluvial, cdr reissue) Disappointments: Flaming Lips: YOSHIMI BATTLES THE PINK ROBOTS (Warner) Missy Elliott: UNDER CONSTRUCTION Primal Scream: EVIL HEAT Ekkehard Ehlers: PLAYS Late to the punch: Alfred Schnittke's String Quartets Lou Reed: METAL MACHINE MUSIC High Rise: LIVE Helmut Lachenmann Kaffe Matthews Yes, I did: Finally dropped load of cash at Stockhausen-Verlag. Hoping for that "Om" moment. God! This list has nothing to do with me. I have skiploads of lists. I need to make another lists. I'll make three more lists. Dammit! I would really enjoy seeing others' lists, if you haven't posted yet. One last gasp of OCD listmaking, please? -----s np: Luc Ferrari nr: Mary Ann Doane, THE EMERGENCE OF CINEMATIC TIME