The Official Thompson's Furtive 50 of 2010

Hello you! At one point it seemed very unlikely that I'd post this Christmas the now-traditional Furtive 50 listing of my favourite albums of the year. Mostly I suppose because I've been on the road so much, and had so little time away from work projects, I've not been chasing new music in recent months to anything like the degree that I have in previous years. Also, of course, one currently finds more present than ever in the front of the mind a nagging question about the best use of one's time. Could I really justify the rolling-out, in business-as-usual mode, of an exercise that's always so incredibly expensive of time and concentration?

Well, yes and no, was my conclusion: so I'm presenting this year a Furtive 50 Lite, more suitable perhaps for these straitened times. I haven't wanted to get bogged down in it as I customarily do (and always curse myself for doing, sooner or later); on the other hand, the brave new world I'm trying to work for in these turbulent times -- or any of the temporary autonomous zones we might inhabit on the way -- would hopefully contain more exciting music, not less: and I do think one way of accessing brains, for the purposes of a little beneficent rewiring, is through the ears.

The downscaled Furtive 50 therefore contains brief comments on the first ten albums in the list, and then a simple packdrill of the remaining 40. (In recent years, all 50 have had little reviews, and then another 50 albums have been listed as honourable mentions: a ludicrously over-the-top enterprise, really, though I'm sure many regulars will miss it, as have I to a degree.) There's also a playlist of tracks from the top 20 albums followed by an assortment of other particularly notable items from the year, including a fair sprinkling of pleasing cover versions, cos you know how a good cover makes my socks roll up and down.

As always, I'll be pleased to hear your thoughts; and as ever, if there's anything here you like, please consider legitimately purchasing the album in question, as directly as possible from the artist, and in object form if you can. I'm not pro- the music industry machine as such, but I doubt many of the artists represented here make much of a living from what they do, and I reckon we should hope to value them in every way we can.

Buon appetito, team!

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#1 The Books, The Way Out

The Books amaze me, man. Their humane, meticulous art operates at such vertiginously high resolution, it's a wonder they ever release anything at all. This, their fourth album, is the first they've issued since 2005's exquisite Lost and Safe, and when I heard it was on its way after this five year hiatus, my initial reaction was, ooh, I hope they haven't rushed it. How do they do it?! If anything there's an even greater concentration of detail in some of these collages than we've heard previously, the Twombly-like spaciousness that has always characterised their aural fields occasionally giving way to the elaborate, lurid, neurotic busyness of a Lari Pittman or Kenny Scharf (especially on the hurtling luge-ride of 'I Am Who I Am'). These visual-art analogues are not, I think, misplaced: The Books have always been about geometry and spatial relationships, about a rigorous mathematics of patterning, a rectlinear musical language of fifths and picture frames, offset by the melancholic poetry (half-found, half-contrived) of their cut-up tape sources. Here, they're drawing mainly on fragmentary utterances snipped from the output of new age gurus, tele-evangelist types and self-help merchants; this might seem over-explored territory, worn-out even, but it suits The Books quite perfectly, not least in its exhaustion: their constructions have always implied a wry critical engagement with the zones where language and identity fail to endorse each other, where meaning and saying are always performances, and where conscious artifice can be depended upon to reveal the most about who we secretly are and who we yearn to be. Not, by and large, ecstatically received by jaded critics hungry only for whatever's next, The Way Out reminds us that actually we haven't heard this yet, however familiar it may seem at one level; a more careful attention draws out the abundant strangeness of words rewritten slightly out of sync with the structures that would normally locate them, and the remoteness of strangers in their most intimate acts of self-exposure. It's a creepy album at times, uncomfortably close, but for insight and pointedness it's in a class of its own; and as ever with The Books, its intense, often claustrophobic spaces are always ventilated by a benign carefulness, ineffable poise and a dry wit smart enough to make you laugh out loud and gasp with surprise at the same time. No hesitation in calling The Way Out a great work of art.

#2 Sam Amidon, I See The Sign

Three of the very most amazing experiences I've had this year have been in a room with Sam Amidon. I saw him live for the first time in May at Bush Hall, where some minor sound problems led him to abandon his mic altogether at a couple of points and just sing, unamplified, from the front of the stage; and more recently at Cafe Oto, where he was close enough to touch -- though I didn't: I mean how would you ever let go? And then there was the moment earlier in the year when I sat down with this, his third album proper, and played it through from beginning to end, not moving, scarcely breathing. There is no musician I can think of anywhere in the world whom I revere more than Amidon, not yet thirty and as shockingly unguarded in his stage presence as he is dizzyingly accomplished as a singer and multi-instrumentalist. The previous record, All Is Well, was at the top of the Furtive 50 a couple of years ago, and underscored the key sequence in my piece with Jonny Liron, Hey Mathew; so I couldn't have been more excited or more apprehensive in coming to the new album. And, perhaps inevitably after all that, it's a stunner. What really grips is the immense skill with which Amidon finds the material that best suits his voice, with its quiet ardour and its turns alternately towards the raw and the mellifluous. Perhaps the voice is at its best in the live setting, where it searches out the room and its audience so engagingly, almost imploringly; littler and more constrained in the recorded environment, it nestles instead within Nico Muhly's sparklingly clever arrangements, and cosies up to duetting partner Beth Orton, especially on 'You Better Mind'. In the end there is just a trace of politeness about the record, which is not so much wrong as irrelevant (though it sits interestingly alongside the eschatological strain in a couple of the lyrics); the most striking moments are those where that impeccable restraint helps to build pressure, not least on the matchlessly compelling title track and the gorgeously delicate curveball cover of R Kelly's discomfiting 'Relief'. No doubt about it, Sam Amidon is the real thing, realer than we're used to, a musician of rare gifts and uncommon grace.

#3 Tristan Perich, 1-Bit Symphony

Let's begin by reminding ourselves that iTunes is not yet even a decade old. (It reaches its tenth birthday on January 9th, if you want to send a card.) Ten years ago the only music files I had on my hard drive were a handful of tv theme tune clips that sounded as if they were being played on wax cylinder, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. But of all the albums listed in this year's 50, the number that I own in some material form is precisely four: and perhaps the weirdest aspect of this is how quickly and painlessly I've (and, may I venture to say, we've) uncoupled the idea of recorded music from the idea of the object as delivery platform. As someone trying to think hard about non-commodity art practices, I might be expected to revel in the receding importance of the object -- and obviously, as those personal stats suggest, I'm at least seduced by the speed and convenience of the download and the storability of information (after all, I keep the equivalent of upwards of 8000 compact discs in a little grey box on my desk) -- but actually I'm increasingly concerned with questions around preserving the space in which we have a tactile, sensual relationship with manufactured materials. In that context, no album I heard this year was more thrilling and engrossing than Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony. Thrilling partly because I had to send away for it and wait for it to come in the mail; partly because it's a gloriously elegant piece of design; and partly because, strictly speaking, object though it is, it's not actually a recording. 1-Bit Symphony is not a CD, though it comes in a CD case. What you see is a rudimentary-looking electronic circuit, which includes a headphone socket at the side of the case. Plug in, flick the little switch, and you're off: what you suddenly hear burbling torrentially in your ears is, at a stretch at least, a live performance. 1-Bit Symphony is programmed directly onto the microchip that sits in the middle of the circuit: turn it on and the work is 'performed', you might say. One-bit music is the aural equivalent of a monochrome bitmap image and as such it has a certain ugliness: but scaled up to meet Perich's ambition in writing symphonically for it -- and, Lord knows, he's not kidding around -- the mismatch becomes remarkably moving, almost overwhelmingly so, with thick pixellated tonal swarms buzzing in and around your cranium: imagine the Ride of the Valkyries developed as a game for the Sega Mega Drive, scored by Glenn Branca for an orchestra of a hundred stylophones, and you're just beginning to get there. Undeniably an amazing achievement both in concept and execution, in some ways it ought to be a pretty grim experience, and certainly it's gruelling, but for long stretches it's also like plugging your headphones directly into the national grid on Mardi Gras: fascinating, oddly emotive, and bursting with life.

#4 The Soft Moon, The Soft Moon

One of the most characteristic sounds of 2010 turns out to have been what, in relation to vinyl LPs and cassette tapes, we used to call 'wow and flutter' -- that slight pitch modulation that indicated a little warp in the plastic or a tiny variation in the turning of the capstan. It's an effect that later artists would aim for on purpose: think of the slow grinding tremolo Kevin Shields deployed on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless -- I still remember a friend coming round to my college room as that album played on cassette, and insisting that my tape machine must be broken or the batteries must be running down. Later still, it became part of the tonal language of electronica artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. It's an interesting extension of the idea of noise, or low fidelity, as an index of human authenticity: the failure of the machine, the fallibility of the recorded object, as if digital memory could only finally be trusted if it could be made to sound as hazy and inefficient as its organic equivalent. It's an element in several albums I'm listing this year (especially on Twin Shadow's brilliant track 'When We're Dancing'), where it seems to speak to a nostalgia for the vulnerability of vinyl or tape, the wounded-animal imperfections that help make pop music crucially lifesize, and that enable a near-holy communion between the stranded individual in her suburban bedroom and the recorded artefact that ventriloquizes her doubts and submerged desires. What's important about The Soft Moon (actually a solo project by San Fransisco musician Luis Vasquez) is that it seems not to simulate, with a fan's affection, the wow-and-flutter post-punk of Joy Division or early Cure or the stark electro-dramas of The Normal, but simply to pick it up and extend it into a contemporary era where the austerity and desperate alienation of the late 70s are starting to bite again but the scattergun nihilism of punk won't provide for the requisite critical response. Track titles such as 'Dead Love' and 'Sewer Sickness' suggest the mood of this extraordinarily compelling album, but what really makes it work is the precision and tautness and energy of these songs, their resounding hollowness. The propulsion and wavering dissonance of 'Tiny Spiders' and the exhilaratingly caustic 'We Are We' feels as urgent now as the best of its antecedents did thirty-odd years ago: leaving this listener, at least, with a lasting sense not of bleakness or desolation but rather, actually, of a romantic and visionary project, smartly conceived and startlingly made.

#5 Oneohtrix Point Never, Returnal

Crazy but true: the fifth best album I've heard this year is in large measure slightly disappointing. Or, to put a more positive spin on it: 'Nil Admirari', the first track on Returnal, is probably the most ecstatically beautiful five minutes of abstract recorded sound I've put in my ears since the highest points of Astrobrite's Whitenoise Superstar. It's a hectic and ravishing multiple pile-up of splintering noise, eerily distorted voice channelling devotion or anguish (or nostalgia for the heyday of Digital Hardcore), broken Argos catalogue beats and, right at the back, someone playing the church organ at your dream wedding; it's formidably complex but not so chaotic as to be illegible -- a virtuosic piece of sound organization, which serves partly to remind you how much music (not least capital-N Noise) actually fails as design. It's also completely unlike the remainder of the album, which is much more like the Oneohtrix we know and love: a warm aquarium of analogue synth tones, hardly moving forward at all for the most part but scintillatingly alive with refracted light and sometimes exerting an irresistible undertow. As ever, Daniel Lopatin draws on pretty much the whole history of electronic ambient, with particular redolences here of Klaus Schulze and (perhaps surprisingly) of The Orb at their chilledmost, making it an adaptable record whether you're after a deeply immersive, attentive listen, or simply a comfortable bed for a Sunday afternoon when you're mostly concentrating on something else. It's very lovely indeed -- and a terrific companion piece to the Emeralds album (below): ah, Editions Mego we love you longtime -- but I do hope that that opening squall might be indicative of a direction that Lopatin might be interested to explore further.

#6 These New Puritans, Hidden

Probably more column inches and blog furlongs have been written on this album than almost any other record this year, both avidly pro and implacably anti (and one or two points in between). I still don't know quite where I stand with it, and that in itself suggests to me that this is a genuinely significant and worthwhile piece of work. Certainly it's not what one might have expected after the band's debut Beat Pyramid a couple of years ago, which was jagged and vigorous and kind of fun, albeit in an alarming sort of way. Well, they've retained the jagged for Hidden: but aside from that, boy, it's something completely different. The only record of modern times that I can think of that's in any way comparable is Scott Walker's The Drift, which I hated (as indeed I imagine I may end up hating Hidden, though I doubt it). I think there are two points of correspondence: a strenuous seriousness of purpose that frequently places the band walking that ticklish line between sobriety and sententiousness; and an ambitiousness in terms of the sonic palette employed (here, most prominently, a brass and woodwind section, with rudimentary but effective arrangements by frontman Jack Barnett) that actually, paradoxically, ends up producing a sense of continuity that borders on constraint. (Oh, bassoon, again?) Also, 

like The Drift, it's astonishingly well recorded. But crucially, unlike the Walker album, it doesn't end up being only about itself and its insulation as a quasi-fictional space; on the contrary, it sounds like a bleeding-edge dispatch from a contemporary world that's still coming into formation. Its musical referents, particularly its pivotal fixation on the modality of the minor second, speak to a culture of aggressive globalisation (and to a resistance to that culture) and to a diachronicity that seems discriminating and argumentative, even if it's not always clear what exactly its argument is; the postmodern supermarket has been blown to smithereens and These New Puritans come across like a whole tribe picking through the wreckage, a Lord of the Flies choir stranded in Dalston Kingsland Shopping Centre. For a group who initially seemed like they might be not much more than a superior pack of art-school scamps, they've seriously stepped up to the plate here. Hidden welcomes careful listeners.

#7 Four Tet, There Is Love In You

Kieran Hebden has never been less than interesting, but he's only intermittently made work that's approached greatness; not counting some of the output from his collaborative duo with the awesome Steve Reid, you'd probably have to look back to Rounds (2003) for an album that really, yknow, slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God. (It's not too much to ask, is it?) But this release from the beginning of the year is unmistakeably the work of a master, not just in glimpses but without a moment's lapse. Considered as a whole set it's probably the most straightforward material we've had from Four Tet: it's luminous in its clarity, undistracted, artful but not attention-seeking. There Is Love In You eloquently speaks in a solar-powered, ozone-infused language of blips and tinkliness, spinning intricate webs that seem to entangle tiny fragments of female vocals, and secured by perky, fresh-sounding three-dimensional beats. Dance refuseniks (*raises hand, malcoordinatedly*) will have fun: it makes bits of your body move, more-or-less intelligently, whether you like it or not, but it never really threatens to drag you out of your seat. That said, Hebden is superb at shaping the ride of a track, to the extent that the structures of some of these cuts may exert some emotional traction and you could easily never know why. No record this year does more to make the naked golden pleasures of naked golden pleasurefulness seem as though they might, after all, be enough.

#8 Tobacco, Maniac Meat

As reliably, it now seems, as the Trumpton clock -- never too quickly, never too slowly -- Anticon somehow manages to continue to tell the time of that intriguing parallel future love paradise that Seal will only ever visit during bouts of food poisoning. Presumably they must on occasion put out a record that feels irrelevant: but shucks, I've never heard one. This year brought as beautifully blighted a crop as ever: Dosh's restlessly inventive (if slightly overstuffed) Tommy, and Cerulean, the decidedly odd but truly scrumptious debut from Baths, as well as Josiah Wolf's sublime Jet Lag (listed below). My pick of the bunch though is Maniac Meat, the second album from Tobacco. Tobacco equals Tom Fec equals one-fifth (but the biggest fifth) of Black Moth Super Rainbow: and fans of that band's perfumed wooziness -- like a 70s Flake commercial finally tipping over into the drug-saturated orgy it's been primly pretending not to notice it's inciting -- will recognize almost everything about Maniac Meat except its harum scarum drive. Where the smokiness of BMSR is a languid purple haze, Tobacco belches the yellow sulphurous smog of the knackered exhaust on Satan's very own second-hand Firebird Trans-Am. I think it's fair to say that no animal was unharmed in the making of this picture: nothing makes it to disc without being passed through Fec's arsenal of marmalizatrons, from the self-obliterating vocals to a bank of analogue synths that sound like a kitchen full of souped-up food processors and handheld vacuum cleaners absent-mindedly humming imaginary ringtones. Even special guest Beck emerges from these wreckages sounding bloodied and a little cut-up. And yet the effect as it hits your ear is perfectly agreeable, even cheerful, full of confidence and swagger: chaps, this is a very sexy record, and you'd be advised to let it have its filthy-dirty way with you, safe in the knowledge that in the morning, neither of you will remember a damn thing.

#9 Chris Burn / Philip Thomas / Simon H. Fell, The Middle Distance

Hard to imagine the Furtive 50 that didn't have a Simon Fell record hovering somewhere in its loftier echelons: hard to imagine and foolish to try. In another superb year for Simon Reynell's enterprising and imaginative Another Timbre label, any one of at least half a dozen discs could fairly have been included in this list -- and in addition to the Cornford/Rogers album below I should also at least mention by name Angharad Davies and Axel Dörner's very fine AD (possibly the record least like Huey Lewis & the News's Fore ever to be released) -- but in the end the name in the gold envelope is The Middle Distance, from the label's clutch of piano-centric releases at the top of the year. Ladies and gentlemen, on your left you will hear the dependably brilliant Chris Burn, who has long been a crucial figure in the landscape in which I attempt to orient myself (I'll give you a clue, it looks a bit like the cover of the album); to your right, Philip Thomas, whose work I know less well, something I'll obviously have to rectify. Thomas's piano is flagged as "prepared" but Burn's close and not-unboffiny attention to techniques of extension and modification in improvisation means neither of them exactly brings the plangent tones of a Richard Clayderman to proceedings. Fell, at the centre of the sound image but seldom one to 'hold' a centre in the anchoring way you might associate with improvising bassists (unless you can get anchors with helium in), is as acutely mobile and suggestive as ever. What the trio describes is an abstract field teeming with life, even at its most reverberantly quiet; full of micro-encounters and blink-sized incidents, so carefully planned in the moment of their execution and so imaginatively heard in the same moment by the three musicians that you might understandably over-credit serendipity for the incredible effects of these intelligences at work. A record I can't imagine ever becoming familiar: quite possibly the reverse.

#10 Keith Fullerton Whitman, Generator

Now here's a name that I didn't know at the start of 2010 but which seems to have popped up in all kinds of places with almost alarming frequency over the past few months. Whitman's most lauded work of the past year is probably his fascinating and virtuosic Disingenuity but it was the earlier Generator that really made my cochleas do happy twinges. I'm afraid I'm not enough of a tech-head to really appreciate what's going on procedurally in these recordings: as I understand it, though, the seven tracks (ranging in duration from ninety seconds to 23 minutes) are essentially untreated, improvisatory performances with analogue synths, where multiple signals are sent to the instrument(s) in parallel and the music arises out of the sorting and processing of those signals, and Whitman's live shaping of the output. I've no idea how revolutionary this is as a method -- the proper synthy fanboys seem highly excited by it -- but the results certainly sound exceedingly lovely: layers of arpeggiation creating some captivating patterns of interference which some reviewers have likened to the effects of op art. There's a clarity to these pieces which is very attractive and refreshing, and a fecundity to the best of them (particularly the astounding "Generator 2", which, if it really is being created extempore, strikes this layperson as a very remarkably achieved feat) that seems to unite all the best virtues of minimal electronica and maximalist tendencies in IDM. What could easily be austere is entirely accessible, but it's driven by an integrity and an experimentalism that appear wholly uncompromised. Generator is likeable and admirable in just about every way.

And the remaining 40:

#11 Sufjan Stevens, The Age of Adz; #12 Henry Threadgill Zooid, This Brings Us To (Volume II); #13 Owen Pallett, Heartland; #14 Emeralds, Does It Look Like I'm Here?; #15 The Burns Unit, Side Show; #16 Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; #17 Jónsi, Go; #18 Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma; #19 Twin Shadow, Forget; #20 Les Savy Fav, Root For Ruin

#21 So Percussion / Matmos, Treasure State; #22 Kelley Stoltz, To Dreamers; #23 Oval, Oh; #24 I Am Kloot, Sky At Night; #25 Taylor Deupree, Shoals; #26 Paul Dunmall / Chris Corsano, Identical Sunsets; #27 Tinashé, Saved; #28 Norma Winstone, Stories Yet To Tell; #29 Yellow Swans, Going Places; #30 The Daredevil Christopher Wright, In Deference to a Broken Back

#31 Teebs, Ardour; #32 Midlake, The Courage of Others; #33 Perfume Genius, Learning; #34 Yeasayer, Odd Blood; #35 Caribou, Swim; #36 Gil Scott-Heron, I'm New Here; #37 Beach House, Teen Dream; #38 Kate Rusby, Make the Light; #39 Josiah Wolf, Jet Lag; #40 M.I.A., MAYA

#41 Grace Petrie, Tell Me A Story; #42 Laurie Anderson, Homeland; #43 Toro y Moi, Causers of This; #44 Sky Sailing, An Airplane Carried Me To Bed; #45 The National, High Violet; #46 Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty; #47 Violens, Amoral; #48 Stephen Cornford / Samuel Rodgers, Turned Moment, Weighting; #49 Konono N° 1, Assume Crash Position; #50 Diskjokke, En Fin Tid 

And here's some listening matter:

Track listing:

1 The Books: 'I Am Who I Am' from The Way Out (Temporary Residence)

2 Sam Amidon: 'I See The Sign' from I See The Sign (Bedroom Community)

3 Tristan Perich: 'Movement 1' from 1-Bit Symphony (Cantaloupe)

4 The Soft Moon: 'We Are We' from The Soft Moon (Captured Tracks)

5 Oneohtrix Point Never: 'Nil Admirari' from Returnal (Editions Mego)

6 These New Puritans: 'Hologram' from Hidden (Angular Recording Corporation)

7 Four Tet: 'Angel Echoes' from There Is Love In You (Domino)

8 Tobacco: 'Lick the Witch' from Maniac Meat (anticon.)

9 Chris Burn / Philip Thomas / Simon H. Fell: 'Looking Ahead Seeing Nothing' [extract] from The Middle Distance (Another Timbre)

10 Keith Fullerton Whitman: 'Generator 1' from Generator (Root Strata)

11 Sufjan Stevens: 'Get Real Get Right' from The Age of Adz (Asthmatic Kitty)

12 Henry Threadgill Zooid: 'It Never Moved' from This Brings Us To, vol. II (Pi Recordings)

13 Owen Pallett: 'Keep the Dog Quiet' from Heartland (Domino)

14 Emeralds: 'Shade' from Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Editions Mego)

15 The Burns Unit: 'Trouble' from Side Show (Proper Records)

16 Kanye West: 'Dark Fantasy' from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella)

17 Jónsi: 'Sinking Friendships' from Go (XL Recordings)

18 Flying Lotus: 'Zodiac Shit' from Cosmogramma (Warp)

19 Twin Shadow: 'When We're Dancing' from Forget (4AD)

20 Les Savy Fav: 'Dirty Knails' from Root for Ruin (Wichita)

21 The Daredevil Christopher Wright: 'Hospital' from In Deference to a Broken Back (Amble Down)

22 Jim O'Rourke feat. Haruomi Hosono: 'Close To You' from All Kinds of People Love Burt Bacharach (AWDR)

23 Junip: 'Always' from Fields (City Slang)

24 So Percussion / Matmos: 'Treasure' from Treasure State (Cantaloupe)

25 Paul Dunmall / Chris Corsano: 'Identical Sunsets' from Identical Sunsets (ESP Disk)

26 Elbow: 'Mercy Street' from Mirrorball/Mercy Street [single] (RealWorld)

27 Scoutt Niblett: 'Strip Me Pluto' from The Calcination of Scout Niblett (Drag City)

28 Caribou: 'Kaili' from Swim (City Slang)

29 Shamantis / Justin Bieber: 'U Smile (800% Slower Version)' [extract] (via Soundcloud)

30 Gayngs: 'Cry' from Relayted (Jagjaguwar)

31 Take That: 'What Do You Want From Me?' from Progress (Polydor)

32 Tony Bevan / Dominic Lash / Phil Marks / Paul Obermayer: 'Box of Frogs' from A Big Hand (Foghorn)

33 Kelley Stoltz: 'Rock and Roll With Me' from To Dreamers (Sub Pop)

34 Miniature Tigers: 'Mamma Mia' from Truffles (Modern Art)

35 Seafieldroad: 'Fucking Manchester' from There Are No Maps For This Part Of The City (Biphonic)

36 I Am Oak: 'O-ku Monogatari' from Sou Ka (Rainboot)

37 Beck: 'Need You Tonight' from Kick (via Beck.com Record Club)

38 Norma Winstone: 'Sisyphus' from Stories Yet To Tell (ECM)

39 Wyatt, Atzmon, Stephen: 'What A Wonderful World' from For The Ghosts Within (Domino)

40 Sam Amidon: 'Walking On Sunshine' from Sun Salute: A Tribute to Katrina and the Waves (Brooklyn Vegan)

Usual disclaimers apply: if you own the copyright in any of these recordings and wish it to be removed, please just say.