1. Various Artists – Modulations & Transformations, Volume 4
The best archive of new electronic and post-electronic, activist and non-activist music was this Mille Plateaux series. Volume 4 is the most baffling, and full of cool contradictions.
2. Sun Ra – The Singles
The hero on whom all can agree – from postcolonialists to pop musicians, from afrofuturists to archaeologists of the essential – died at the start of a decade that became his alone. The last Gesamtkünstler of the century will project beyond it the longest.
3. X-102 – Rings Of Saturn
This stands for Detroit techno as the best electronic music of the decade; for Sun Ra’s influence; and for Jeff Mills’s genius.
4. Timbaland – Tim’s Bio: From the Motion Picture: Life From Da Basement
The best crossover beat of the decade. What Prince was for the 80s.
5. Son of Bazerk – Bazerk! Bazerk! Bazerk!
A project unfortunately abandoned at the decade’s outset: to confront James Brown, Led Zeppelin, and Sam & Dave.
6. Gas – Zauberberg
You asked for Germany? Here are Thomas Mann, Wagner, and Schönberg combined in the medium of cushioned delirium.
7. Red Krayola – Fingerpainting
The reconstruction of the incomplete avant-garde lashes with the force of negative dialectics against the attempt to reconstruct Neue Musik as sacred object.
8. Prefab Sprout – Andromeda Heights
Does almost the same thing, but with a music one can cuddle up to.
9. Pere Ubu – Ray Gun Suitcase
Main point: Side effects.
10. The Melvins – Honky
Their never-ending history of heavy metal as high Conceptualism remains open-ended.