Jonas

Boulder, CO

Jacob Garchik's The Heavens. This music sounds ancient. It reaches into your chest and pulls out your soul and shows it to you. It sounds like it was just waiting for Garchik to come along and write it.

Jacob Garchik "Creation's Creation" contains more in its 80 seconds than most songs do in eight minutes.

Irene Diaz. Alt.Latino played snippets of a version of "I Love You Madly" that won't be released in full until February, but was enough to win me over.

Jacob Garchik. I grew up playing two instruments--the piano by choice the the trumpet by force. Since childhood, then, I've been biased against brass. Occasionally, a musician would do something to accent a song with a trumpet or trombone and I would like it. But it's only been recently that I've slowly started to warm up to this category of instruments. Even with this recent warming, I hardly expected my favorite album of the year to be entirely brass.

Sufjan Stevens' addition to his Christmas project. I've liked what he's done with it up to this point, but this "let's play around in the studio and release whatever we come up with" was awful.

Erik Sundman playing at the Salvation Army.

Why would I pay so much attention to music I don't like that I remember the song or album's title?