Ranging wildly, though never falling far from the '70s

There may be no synthesizer more chameleonic than the Arp, which has provided cosmic tones for Sun Ra, Stevie Wonder’s earthy funk, the monstrous stomp of “Frankenstein”, even the voice of R2D2. So it’s fitting that in naming his solo project Arp, Alexis Georgopoulos has himself shape-shifted with each album. As a member of Tussle, he played pliant dancepunk, while Arp’s first album In Light basked in the gentle kosmische tones of Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. His follow-up moved more toward dystopic drones and the drum machine-propelled songs of Cluster.

With More, Georgopoulos ranges wildly, though never far from the 1970s. Opener “High-Heeled Clouds,” with its buoyant upright piano line, could come right out of John Cale’s Paris 1919, while the gentle “Daphne & Chloe” with its “bah-bah”s serve as an elegant update of The Velvet’s “I Found a Reason.” Cribbing from the VU playbook is nothing new, but Arp also investigates those who did the same, like Bowie and Eno. “A Tiger in the Hall at Versailles” mixes wordless vocals, puttering drum machine and harpsichord like some strange “Heroes” outtake. And the catchy “Judy Nylon” namechecks Eno’s girlfriend and emulates the buzzing siren guitars and snare thwacks of “Camel in the Needle’s Eye.”

Arp is prudent to pull from resources besides glam, though. Tucked into the album’s corners are field recordings, audio collage, a smattering of doo-wop saxophone. And at the center is “Gravity” a six-minute exercise in minimalism dedicated to the mesmeric pianist/composer Charlemagne Palestine. Accruing overtones on piano, Georgopoulos layers strings and fuzzed guitar, the piece building to an ecstatic peak; he then strips it back to reveal the analog synthesizer at the heart of it all.

African and Western, traditional and modern, mashed together in a way that defies separation

When in the 1980s African artists began to make their way to world music circuit, the biggest acts — Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Ali Farka Touré — were also the most unadulterated, their music with clear lineages back to their highlife, juju and griot roots. But in the 21st century, the African acts most likely to break through are instead a messy and bright jumble of genres. The Very Best, the acts on the Shangaan Electro comp and Cape Town’s John Wizards offer a panoply of sounds both African and Western, traditional and modern, mashed together in a way that defies separation.

As the music project of John Withers — in conjunction with Rwandan vocalist Emmanuel Nzaramba — John Wizards dials back the cacophonous density, aggressive BPMs and neon-bright synths of their contemporaries. On their debut, they instead meld together the languid, leisurely sounds of everything from reggae to R&B slow jams. Chameleonic opener “Tet Lek Schrempf” feels dreamy but soon picks up the pace, with shimmering synths and pygmy song at its core. “Limpop” percolates in neon bubbles much like Shangaan Electro would, but cuts the latter’s 160 BPM rate with some chillwave. “I’m Still a Serious Guy” evokes the synthetic tropical sound of Level 42 and I-Level, but the vocal melody of Withers here most resembles Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, who was once criticized for aping African music. John Wizards suggests that the heartiest musical sound might be a mutant strain.

A new artist with an old soul moves between art song and dramatic pop

Avant-garde aficionados might recognize Anna von Hausswolff’s surname. Her father is the distinguished Swedish sound artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, and for just over the opening 10 minutes of von Hausswolff’s second album (and first to see release stateside), one might mistakenly think she’s followed in her father’s footsteps, as “Epitaph of Theodor” and most of “Deathbed” are filled with her mesmeric pipe organ explorations, flares of electric guitar and martial drumming. And then Anna’s own pipes arrive at “Deathbed”‘s midway point, revealing an astonishing voice that immediately arrests upon its entrance: gentle, fraught and full of gravitas.

On “Mountains Crave,” she evokes Beach House’s Victoria Legrand, while at other moments she’s as elegant as Elizabeth Fraser and Lisa Gerrard, as unsettling as Nico. Across Ceremony‘s 13 tracks, von Hausswolff moves between art song and dramatic pop, sometimes dreamy, other times as visceral as Sunn O))). No matter the backing, her stunning voice is shadowed by her assured pipe organ accompaniment, which was recorded at Gothenburg’s vast Annedalkyrkan — its centuries-old valves glimpsed on the album cover. Throughout, von Hausswolff strikes a balance between the abstract and the personal: “No Body” pulses with growling feedback and dark drones, while the folk-tinged “Liturgy of Light” is one of the year’s most elegiac songs, revealing a new artist with an old soul.

Equal parts afternoon block party, beach come sunset and sweaty basement dance party

It’s fitting that the D.C.-based electronic music duo Beautiful Swimmers snuck their full-length debut Son out digitally just before the Fourth of July weekend. Their celebratory sound, bright and booming, is an idyllic summer soundtrack. Equal parts afternoon block party, beach come sunset and sweaty basement dance party, it shows the love Ari Goldman and Andrew Field-Pickering evince for dance music of all stripes.

Like Daft Punk, the duo has a fondness for the sort of dance music made right after disco’s bubble went bust in 1979. But rather than the lite jazz and yacht rock that followed in the ’80s, Beautiful Swimmers instead favor the tinny synths of boogie, the earliest canned handclaps of hip-hop, the first forays into repurposing 808s for house music. A track like “Spetzi” features the sort of plastic-tropic rhythms that Sly & Robbie stretched around Grace Jones in the Bahamas. And somewhere between the freestyle whistles and fake rainforest frog chirps arises the Sam Records-era funk of “Swimmers Groove.” But as we near album centerpieces “Running Over” and “New Balance” (as well as the anthemic finale “Big Coast”), the Swimmers get down with ecstatic house music, be it from Larry Heard’s South Chicago apartment, Madchester, or on the sands of Ibiza.

And yet despite waxing, laser technology and Mach 3 shaving razors, the beard persists, not just as symbol of a Luddite or simply a lazy, perhaps unemployed dude but as a symbol of stark defiance. Note the revolutionaries who double as cults of personalities, due (surely in no small part) to their facial hair, like Fidel Castro, Nikolai Lenin, Malcolm X, Hailie Selassie and the Smith Brothers. Or more to date, 2004 World Series champs the Boston Red Sox, who struck back against the Evil Empire typified by George Steinbrenner’s clean-cut Yankees. Remember: When beards are outlawed, only outlaws will grow beards.

But can there really be a musical genre based solely on a secondary sex characteristic? Well, as we’ve seen, the decision by an adult Western male to grow out his facial hair has profound societal repercussions, so it makes sense that it has musical ones as well. Sure enough, the hirsute artists listed here do indeed work along the margins. Such unshaven gents appear throughout the world of music — be it in the fields of jazz, folk, rock, blues, or reggae, their music renders such genre tags obsolete, as their individualistic art regards few boundaries.

Scruffy, nonconformist, symbolic, idiosyncratic, survivors or survivalists, that is what a beard implies in these nicked-up and razor-burned times, suggesting persons that trailblaze and follow paths less traveled. This is what truly characterizes and unites these artists, even more than their imperials, goatees, van dykes, soul patches, fu-manchus, handlebar moustaches and straight-up thick, verdant beards.

Members of The Devastations explore new directions

A decade ago, Melbourners Conrad Standish and Tom Carlyon comprised the frontline for the Nick Cave-indebted art-rock trio, The Devastations, releasing three noir-ish full-lengths and earning praise from The Birthday Party’s Roland S. Howard along the way. But by the time of their last studio album in 2007, drum machine pulses and dusky electric keyboards pointed toward new directions, which are explored now as the duo Standish/Carlyon. On their debut album, Deleted Scenes, those skittering but subtle beats are foregrounded and deliberate. First single “Nono/Yoyo” finds Carlyon’s guitar in Durutti Column mode, fragmenting and echoing around an 80 bpm snare as Standish mewls about the vagaries of love in his best Nu-Romantic falsetto. His voice is at its fragile best on “Gucci Mountain,” which mixes a drugged pace with a shimmering synth melody. And while “Industrial Resort” suggests smokestacks and rust belts, it chugs along like a lost Balearic classic. For the album’s sunny moments though, buzzing closer “2 5 1 1″ suggests not a summer jam but the dog days, made lethargic with humidity.

Moving a few paces from his Loveless fixation

Not that Ulrich Schnauss could have predicted it, but the Berlin-based electronic music producer picked a fine moment in 2013 to stop gazing down at his shoes and move a few paces away from his Loveless fixation. His previous two albums, 2003′s A Strangely Isolated Place and 2006′s Faraway Passing Trains drew heavily from My Bloody Valentine’s glorious smeared mascara sound, but aside from it taking him six years to follow up Trains (rather than 22), there’s little in common with that old template of his. With My Bloody Valentine’s wholly unexpected return, his timing could not be better.

Schnauss favors clarity on A Long Way to Fall, which you can tell from the opening coruscations of “Her and the Sea,” the vocal haze he previously favored (and at times got lost in) has evaporated. The synth pads are clearly defined, the modular synth lines contrast against the ambient washes. A harpsichord-like melody shimmers atop the Boards of Canada-like skip of “Like a Ghost in Your Life.” Elsewhere he strikes a balance between a glowering, almost-rock tone with gentle ambience on “I Take Comfort in Your Ignorance” while dulcet New Age tones intermingle with crisp snares on “A Forgotten Birthday.” It doesn’t always work, as the drum programming of “The Weight of Darkening Skies” negates its gloomy title while closer “A Ritual in Time and Death” struggles between being skittish and solemn. When he decides on the latter, it makes for an elegant landing to his Fall.

Contemplative and pensive, without a trace of regret

When Rick Rubin trekked down to record Johnny Cash in his living room back in 1993, he unwittingly set off a trend: Performers from America’s pop past, ranging from Solomon Burke to Bettye LaVette, from Mose Allison to Charlie Louvin, were exhumed, paired with reverent youngsters, and offered a fresh turn in the spotlight. Along with brethren like Willie Nelson (see Teatro) and Glen Campbell (Ghost on the Canvas), Kris Kristofferson received a similar treatment with 2009′s rustic and stripped-back Closer to the Bone. Recorded again by Don Was, Feeling Mortal continues along the same track — contemplative and pensive, yet without a trace of regret as he looks across over his 76 years.

“Wide awake and feeling mortal/ at this moment in the dream,” Kristofferson sings the album’s first line, in a creaking voice as stoic and weathered as a butte. He goes on to sing of an empty blue horizon and an imminent descent “like the sun into the sea,” contemplating both the cosmic and the earthbound. Rendered with a six-piece backing band, what stands out is Kristofferson’s eye for detail, which remains whetted after all these years. He considers his blind “Mama Stewart,” how she can still see that “everything is new and full of wonder and surprise,” and keeps such a lesson close to heart over the course of Mortal‘s ten songs. So while the music is somber on “You Don’t Tell Me What to Do,” Kristofferson still has some kick left: “Losing myself in the soul of a song/ And the fight for the right to be righteously wrong.” In such tough, stubborn lines, the man comes around, remaining defiant to the end.

Their most immersive to date

Despite nearly a decade spent in the industrial confines of their North Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, the sound that Mountains — a duo comprised of Koen Holtkamp and Brendan Anderegg — evoke is positively bucolic. And while the name itself suggests something dominant and looming, across five albums, Mountains favor the smaller sensations of nature walks: gurgling brooks, cricket crescendos. At times, it approaches the aural equivalent of magic hour light on wheat.

Centralia balances the finger-picking and field-recording roots of their debut with the analog components that throbbed on their last album, Air Museum, adding a few new timbres to their palette. The acoustic and electric mingle on the horizon-wide opener “Sand,” the duo’s delicate drones and washes cresting before carefully removing every layer so as to reveal a gorgeous core of bowed cello. The ruminative steel-string figures of “Identical Ship” are swarmed by sputtering alien pulses and then an elegant piano line arises, all of it arising and passing away in three luminous minutes.

Mountains are at their finest when they have ample space to move about in. So it all builds toward the album’s shimmering 20-minute centerpiece, “Propeller.” Starting from a Dream Machine-like flicker of organ, Holtkamp and Anderegg allow the track to accrue innumerable drones until this masterstroke attains lift-off, their white noise turning golden. Low-key closers “Liana” and “Living Lens” let you down gently, a fitting end to a cinematic double album, and Mountains’ most immersive to date.

Remaking and remodeling old kosmische sounds into something new

Last year’s breakout album Replicas elevated laptop noisemaker Dan Lopatin’s bracing Oneohtrix Point Never project to new heights, but it also revealed a new wrinkle in his sound. Built primarily on layers of finely-minced commercial samples from the ’90s, Replicas‘s bright-yet-perplexing sound was a clear break from OPN’s previous output. Rifts, a three-CD or five-LP set, finally culls three of Lopatin’s early albums, along with two extra discs of material, corralling an oeuvre once scattered across innumerable handmade CDRs, noise cassette splits, and ridiculously-limited LPs.

Evocative from his very first effort, 2007′s Betrayed in the Octagon, “Woe is the Transgression” finds Lopatin conjuring a bleak, forlorn, lead-heavy atmosphere of analog synthscapes. While his sonic forebearers – be they Klaus Schulze or Cluster – often emphasized the utopian and bucolic with their array of synthesizers, Lopatin’s vision is dystopian, paranoid, ashen. Two years on, tracks like the arpeggio-heavy “Computer Vision,” soaring nine-minute “Format & Journey North” and epic 16-minute cosmic journey of “When I Get Back From New York” allow in a bit more light.

With titles like “Transmat Memories” “Laser to Laser” and “Zones Without People” and analog tones, Rifts most readily brings to mind pulpy sci-fi paperbacks of the 1970s, the strange new worlds that OPN details like something arising from a Martian landscape. Lasers and hovercraft drones abound, but there’s always something solemn at work as well. Take the relatively concise three minutes of “Emil Cioran.” Named for the bleak 20th-century Romanian existential philosopher (who once quipped: “Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart”), the hyperdrive effects at the start quickly dissolve into a melancholic melody lying just beneath its jittery haze. Throughout Rifts, a suspension of time can be felt, but that sound of Cioran’s tearing is also audible, as Lopatin remakes and remodels these old kosmische sounds into something new in the 21st century.

Somewhere between the past and futuristic

Over the last few decades, wheezing analog synthesizers, tranquil New Age textures and the bracing noise-cassette tape-trading underground have all enjoyed minor renaissances. In Emeralds, these three distinct trends congeal into a unified vision. The Cleveland trio of John Elliott, Mark McGuire and Steve Hauschildt converted these old, oscillating sounds into new throbbing noise to great effect across innumerable cassettes and CDRs before their 2010 breakout album, Does It Look Like I’m Here? brought them greater attention.

In the intervening two years, Emeralds have nurtured industrious solo careers (as well as a label), and on the aerodynamic Just to Feel Anything, they reconvene with a similar focus and sense of studiousness. Opener “Before Your Eyes” mingles soft synth textures with a melody that approaches the glide of “Trans Europe Express” before a martial drum machine and soaring McGuire solo elevate the track. Similarly, the moody melodicism and Italo beat of “Adrenochrome” suggests an ’80s cop show chase set against a German Expressionist backdrop. The final two tracks nod to the late-’70s work of German guitar master Manuel Göttsching and Ashra. Onetime krautrock pioneers, they were also New Age and synthesizer innovators. So while the title track shows Emeralds at their most cosmic and streamlined, effortlessly reaching into the stratosphere, closer “Search for Me in the Wasteland” is pure sonic drift, somewhere between the past and futuristic.

Allowing nuance, rather than more shadows

When Los Angeles singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe released her second album, Apokalypsis, last year, her read of black metal forefather Burzum’s “Black Spell of Destruction” found her voice undergoing a transmogrification into Nordic wind: a lightless, flesh-chilling howl to go with the industrial gloom. So when Wolfe sings “I want Flatlands/ I don’t want precious stones” on the opening song on her latest album, Unknown Rooms, her throat now feels sun-warmed and vulnerable. Which is the perfect change for the gentler instrumentation now about her. And when the cellos come in to mingle with her voice midway through the song, it’s a stunning amalgam.

Subtitled A Collection of Acoustic Songs, her latest album suits Wolfe’s strengths, allowing nuance, rather than more shadows. Lyrically, Wolfe remains bleak (see the a cappella “I Died With You”) – which makes her liner notes’ nod to Townes Van Zandt all the more telling – but now the songs come first. Stripped back to acoustic guitar, church organ, a tom drum and upheavals of strings, Wolfe moves towards the austerity of folk in a way that feels natural. There’s a bit of PJ Harvey on the country-tinged “Appalachia,” but more often, traces of singers like Josephine Foster and Sibylle Baier can be gleaned. But on the haunting, elegiac harmonies of “Spinning Centers,” Wolfe’s voice now feels gentle as a breeze, even as it still sends a shiver.

At his most mortal, physically and lyrically

Eight minutes to detail love’s dissolution on “Ballad in Plain D”; 11 minutes to itemize a parade of inconsolable icons on “Desolation Row”; 11 on a Song of Solomon ode to his wife on “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”; another 11 on the murder of New York mobster Joey Gallo. Yet it’s on Bob Dylan’s 35th studio album that he lays out the biggest epic of his career, “Titanic,” a 14-minute, 45-verse, chorus-free Celtic waltz about the day that great ship went down. In Dylan’s expert hands, he floats between the tragedy as rendered by the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie and William & Versey Smith as well as James Cameron, meditating on death, fate, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the realization that “there is no understanding on the judgment of God’s hand.”

Tempest finds Dylan at his most mortal, both physically – his phlegmatic voice is gritty enough to abrade paint and out-carnie Tom Waits – and lyrically. Hundreds of dead bodies float in the ocean, the gunned-down John Lennon gets remembered on the maudlin “Roll On John,” while the noir of “Tin Angel” ends in a grisly murder-suicide.

Fittingly, his backing band kills. Powered by Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo’s accordion and guitarist Charlie Sexton, they navigate turn-of-the-century blues, folk, country-swing, and jazz. See how the “Mannish Boy” riff lurches to meet the conjunto accordion for a song about “Early Roman Kings.” It leaves Dylan free to prowl and growl, sinister and gallows-humored. When on the Stones-y “Pay in Blood,” he snarls out “the more I die the more I live,” he sounds like he’s got nothing but time.

Fully steeped in the nuanced, vigilant and incisive songcraft of totemic American tunesmiths

Richmond, Virginia-reared singer/songwriter/arranger Matthew E. White recently confessed to music blog Aquarium Drunkard that he had made a pilgrimage of sorts to Randy Newman’s home in L.A. a few years back. Rather than stalk the venerable songwriter/Oscar-winning soundtrack composer at a distance, though, White worked up the nerve to ring the man’s doorbell and hand off his own music. If it was a copy of his poised debut, Big Inner, there’s a good chance Newman might soon be ringing White up.

The biggest man to ever utter a line like “I am a barracuda/ I am a hurricane” and make it into the gentlest of admissions, White emerges on Big Inner fully steeped in the nuanced, vigilant and incisive songcraft of the likes of totemic American tunesmiths like Newman, Allen Toussaint and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner. And while such debuts are usually tinged by youthful exuberance and metabolism, there’s such patience in White’s delivery and his backing band’s pacing that belie their years.

Opener “One of These Days” simmers and sees through the temporality of the world, White assuring his betrothed that even though “we all pass away/ everyone finds a way,” he still wants to be there “when the glory fades…and never turn away.” His whispers mingle with Dixieland horns and a crisp backbeat on “Will You Love Me,” and he sounds positively sage when he sings at that song’s climax: “Darkness can’t drive out darkness/ only love can do that.” The dilapidated yet regal strings of “Hot Toddies” sound as drunken and quietly mirthful as vintage Newman, while the nine stirring minutes of closer “Brazos” cloaks itself in cresting strings, a driving bassline and gospel choir that evokes Spiritualized’s sense of redemption through sound. Underneath almost every song there pulses New Orleans’s second line strut. You can hear it buoy the uptempo “Steady Pace” as White ensures his love with the same sense of calm that he and his band deploy throughout this magnificent debut: “We can take our time.”

Their most workmanlike set to date

In 1998, when baritone saxophonist Martin Perna assembled a clutch of musicians to play at a poetry night staged in a Harlem pub under the name of “Conjunto Antibalas,” expectations were fairly low. The group drew on then-obscure musical touchstones: Latin composer Eddie Palmieri and Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti, the latter of whom had passed away from AIDS the year before with little notice by the western media. It was an unlikely foundation for 11-piece New York band to try and parlay into any sort of success. Yet just over a decade on, the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra found themselves 100 blocks south, playing on Broadway as the live band for the smash hit musical Fela!

For all the international accolades, their fifth studio album (and first in five years) avoids any trace of hubris for what might be their most workmanlike set to date. Tough polyrhythms, always the group’s stock in trade, remain steely on “Ari Degbe” and “Ibeji.” Lyrically, the band eschews the trappings of capitalism (and their newfound fame): See the drowning man having money thrown at him on “Dirty Money.” And on “The Ratcatcher,” there’s a parable of a man stuck in a Sisyphean whorl of work, always needing to catch more and more rats, lest he have “no security.” Needless to say, he winds up in his own cage.

An oasis in oddness and clamor

Thirty-five years after it first flummoxed undergrads, weirdoes, film scholars and midnight-movie buffs alike, David Lynch’s debut film Eraserhead continues to defy explanation or elucidation. No matter how often one regards the Man in the Planet, the befuddled high-haired Henry, the Lady in the Radiator, or that monstrous, screaming, foaming “baby,” the film places its viewers wholly within the realm of nightmare. Though Variety originally panned the film as “sickening,” they did praise Lynch’s sound design, which returns in this reissue from the similarly crepuscular Sacred Bones label. Across the two epic suites, industrial throb turns to rust-belt ambience, which turns to cryptic dialogue and banal family-meal chatter and then back to alien drone and radiator shriek. An oasis in such oddness and clamor, the eerie incant by the Lady in the Radiator that “in heaven, everything is fine” (actually sung by cult figure Peter Ivers) still beguiles; everyone from Devo to the Pixies to Bauhaus and Modest Mouse have referenced it.

Mapping out a parallel universe

“Country Funk” — a genre named specifically for this choice compilation — seems on first glance as the musical equivalent of a black and white cookie. Or suggests that until the late 1960s, African-American thump had yet to intermix with Southern Baptist twang. Not true of course (see Stax, Booker T. and the MGs, Allman Brothers, etc.) but this compilation maps out a parallel universe, one where Levon Helms’ Big Pink beat is on equal footing with Clyde Stubblefield’s good foot. Or where the wood-chipping break on Tony Joe White’s “Stud Spider” can also get chopped up by Kanye West and Common in the next century.

Country Funk suggests second acts for these American singers, be they black or white. So gritty gospel singer Johnny Adams can get low with pedal steel on “Georgia Morning Dew”; ’50s crooner Bobby Darin can drop out and back in with the slinky protest stomp of “Light Blue”; former Naw’leans R&B bullfrogger Bobby Charles can grow his beard and hair long and jam with the Band on “Street People.” Best of all is when garage rocker Link Wray holes up in a chicken shack on his Kentucky property to howl about “Fire & Brimstone.” They weren’t fiscally successful reinventions perhaps, but in hindsight these country boys — regardless of color — sure were funky.

Fresh & Onlys guitarist indulges in his inner goth

When he wasn’t conjuring dust storms of noir-ish, twanging guitar with San Francisco garage-rockers Fresh & Onlys, Wymond Miles was quietly stockpiling his own songs. Not that we’re sure where he finds the time: aside from the building buzz of F&Os, Miles earned a degree in the humanities and also became a father. Earlier, he released Earth Has Doors, which evinced a deep appreciation for the lyricism of Scott Walker. His full-length debut is darker and more somber than the Fresh & Only’s; Miles indulges his inner goth, singing of torn desires and fragile flesh on opener “Strange Desire” and sounding at times like Robert Smith fronting the Bad Seeds. Though his words tend towards the lugubrious, it’s Miles’s hooks, expert six-string playing and tactful placement of sounds that make the album a luminous whole. See how the theremin sweeps in during “The Thirst” or how the guitar feedback upticks on “Lazarus Rising” before receding to its original jangle. Perhaps his strategy is laid out best on “Singing the Ending,” where he croons about “go(ing) gentle into that goodnight.”

eMusic’s Andy Beta chatted with Julian Gross while the band was on tour in Holland to ask about art school days, gamelan and electroclash, and if it’s cool to just cop Daft Punk’s snare sound as your own.

So you and Angus met while both students at Cal Arts. I wonder how that discipline continues to inform the band.

The great thing about that school is they let you do anything. I did graphic design and Balinese gamelan. And there were times when we would be recording where I would remember these certain patterns that I wanted to translate over to the band, as gamelan is so percussive. In every sense — from the music classes I took like Balinese gamelan and African percussion, to studying different types of media — that discipline is totally there. When you’re in a band, there’s album covers and posters and videos and websites and all the different parts to being a band that you’re able to create and make work in, which is so exciting.

So WIXIW, your sixth album, is being billed as your “electronic” record, but how did you guys not make an electronic record when you were living in Berlin, the epicenter of minimal techno in the early ’00s?

I think our Drum’s Not Dead album was more of a response to the music of Berlin, where — when we lived there — it was electroclash music everywhere. Everybody had a drum machine and most of it sucked. We then made something much more organic in that sense. Where you live influences your life and what you’re thinking about in some way. Liars and Sisterworld had a very Los Angeles sheen to them, but WIXIW, which was also recorded there, had little to do with the city. AllL.A. had to do with it was that we were all living there and we all had studios in one place.

So what made you move toward electronic production for the new album?

The last two albums were rock-heavy and it was an experiment for us: Can we write a regular song with a verse, chorus and melody? We did. And after that, we were tired of it. We wanted to try something new and explore sound again and go back to experimentation. We wanted to get rid of the studio part, the placing of mics for sound. We wanted to get rid of the space between the microphone and the amp. Let’s just go direct and get rid of all of that: studio, engineer, demos, mics.

Is the process like reinventing the wheel?

In a way, but you don’t want to get too comfortable with something. We wanted to make ourselves a little bit scared again and start all over. Mistakes and doubts are all good things for us. If we keep it interesting for ourselves, hopefully it’ll be like that for everyone listening.

How much electronic music were you listening to leading up to making WIXIW?

We like hip-hop, house, jungle, techno…we’ve all been going to clubs since the ’90s. Backstage, Angus would play electronic music to get tight and amped up before playing a show.

Anything specific?

The funny thing about electronic music is that it’s not very specific, so to speak. It’s always a pseudonym remixed by someone else. I almost never know who the artist is sometimes. There’s an anonymous part to electronic music that I also think is cool. We like that part of electronic music, its non-specificity. It was never certain artists and the closest that got for us was having Daniel Miller (Mute president and former member of The Normal) be with us during the process. We just had no idea what we were doing.

“Is that the signature Daft Punk snare sound?” If we do that, are people going to know? You don’t know these things, so you’re a little naïve. Can we just use an 808 unadulterated? Does that sound like Trent Reznor? And so Daniel helped with what we’ll call “the electronic music protocol.”

A lot of the songs have this sense of purgatory, of pressure intensifying, but without release.

That’s how it was feeling. WIXIW wasn’t aboutL.A. or witches or drums and mountains; it was about looking inward. This record was about doubts, insecurity, and was more introspective for us. And it was a conscious decision to make it that way. There’s no screaming or yelling and that was intentional as well.

Not only is the title a palindrome, but it seems to be structured like one as well, with the title track precisely in the middle of the album. And it feels like that song itself has two sections.

People talk about ending somewhere different than where you started but with this record, we started and then came back around to where we were. It was more a 360 than a 180. We came back to where we started.

That half of his career was spent as a moderately successful songwriter along Nashville’s Music Row throughout the 1960s and a non-charting non-entity as a singer on his own does not necessarily lend itself to the stuff of legend. In fact, Willie hit his midlife crisis with little to show for it. Ostracized from the conservative braintrust of Nashville, with his home and compound in Ridgetop, Tennessee, burned to the ground, when the 1970s rang in, Willie had retired from the music industry and was holed up deep in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. Born in hard-scrabble farming community Abbott, Texas, Nelson was the son of two guitar-picking parents and raised by grandparents who taught shape-note singing in mass. Nelson himself began writing poetry and songs at the age of four. So a return to Texas was a return to his roots. And in Willie, there was a mingling of country music’s honky-tonk, hillbilly, hokum, polka and western swing roots with rock’s counterculture mindfulness for Kahlil Gibran, the Tao te Ching, and the mind-opening effects of marijuana. Even as he embraced his role as an outlaw straight out of the Old West, Willie also began to transcend the confines of country music. His catalog covers the many strands of 20th century American music: pop, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, rock, country, soul, etc. all get braided together into one in Willie. Both sacred and profane, Willie continues to stand as music’s most sage of icons.

What could Paul do but become more lightweight and capricious and, yes, pretentious?

The case against Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram (the couple's lone album made together under their names) is formidable indeed. Robert Christgau's Village Voice review of the 1972 album is a vicious body blow: "The songs are so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices. If you're going to be eccentric, for goodness sake don't be pretentious about it." Over at Rolling Stone, Jon Landau aimed far below the belt: "Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of '60s rock thus far." Well…with such critical savaging, one might mistake Linda McCartney for being more despised for ruining a Beatle than even Yoko.

Landau also noted in his dismantling of Ram that "the Beatles were obviously a true group and history is now proving that it was greater than the sum of their parts." So like an ionic bond, wherein opposites attracted and each individual element contributed their strengths and offset weaknesses. And nowhere was that bond stronger — and more volatile — than between Lennon's emotional intensity and McCartney's whimsical melodicism. So as Lennon's songs grew heavier, McCartney could only offset that with more lightheartedness. Splitting off into solo entities, those trajectories continued. So with Lennon's cathartic and scabrous Plastic Ono Band album, bed-ins, and the weighty "Imagine" (not to mention George Harrison's massive All Things Must Pass somewhere in the middle), what could Paul do but become more lightweight and capricious and, yes, pretentious?

As a manifestation of that tendency, Ram is a resounding success, a blueprint visited by everyone from the Flaming Lips to Elephant Six Collective in the decades since. McCartney indulges both R&B rocker roots ("Smile Away," "Eat At Home") and aw-shucks folkiness ("Legs" and "Ram On") with a cast-off theatricality. The multi-part "Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey" should be an aural trainwreck: solemn introduction, maudlin orchestration, insufferably jaunty delivery, radio play FX, awkward tempo gear-shift, and kindergarten-friendly transcendent chorus. And yet it succeeded wildly, becoming McCartney's first No. 1 single in the U.S. since the Beatles. Ram and its delights is summed up best by "Monkberry Moon Delight." A tambourine-shaking, bass-sproinging, driving piano ditty featuring Paul at his caterwauling and doot-dooting finest; the lyrics still puzzle. Is it about snorting some hallucinatory substance? Or is it actually a dressing down of his former partner John? Or is it just jabberwocky nonsense? Precisely.

What could Paul do but become more lightweight and capricious and, yes, pretentious?

The case against Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram (the couple's lone album made together under their names) is formidable indeed. Robert Christgau's Village Voice review of the 1972 album is a vicious body blow: "The songs are so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices. If you're going to be eccentric, for goodness sake don't be pretentious about it." Over at Rolling Stone, Jon Landau aimed far below the belt: "Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of '60s rock thus far." Well…with such critical savaging, one might mistake Linda McCartney for being more despised for ruining a Beatle than even Yoko.

Landau also noted in his dismantling of Ram that "the Beatles were obviously a true group and history is now proving that it was greater than the sum of their parts." So like an ionic bond, wherein opposites attracted and each individual element contributed their strengths and offset weaknesses. And nowhere was that bond stronger — and more volatile — than between Lennon's emotional intensity and McCartney's whimsical melodicism. So as Lennon's songs grew heavier, McCartney could only offset that with more lightheartedness. Splitting off into solo entities, those trajectories continued. So with Lennon's cathartic and scabrous Plastic Ono Band album, bed-ins, and the weighty "Imagine" (not to mention George Harrison's massive All Things Must Pass somewhere in the middle), what could Paul do but become more lightweight and capricious and, yes, pretentious?

As a manifestation of that tendency, Ram is a resounding success, a blueprint visited by everyone from the Flaming Lips to Elephant Six Collective in the decades since. McCartney indulges both R&B rocker roots ("Smile Away," "Eat At Home") and aw-shucks folkiness ("Legs" and "Ram On") with a cast-off theatricality. The multi-part "Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey" should be an aural trainwreck: solemn introduction, maudlin orchestration, insufferably jaunty delivery, radio play FX, awkward tempo gear-shift, and kindergarten-friendly transcendent chorus. And yet it succeeded wildly, becoming McCartney's first No. 1 single in the U.S. since the Beatles. Ram and its delights is summed up best by "Monkberry Moon Delight." A tambourine-shaking, bass-sproinging, driving piano ditty featuring Paul at his caterwauling and doot-dooting finest; the lyrics still puzzle. Is it about snorting some hallucinatory substance? Or is it actually a dressing down of his former partner John? Or is it just jabberwocky nonsense? Precisely.

His book The Tao of Willie might not quite be a spiritual tome, but it’s not quite a put-on, either. And even as he nears octogenarian status, he’s as liable to record with young bucks like Kid Rock, Norah Jones, Snoop Dogg and Ryan Adams as he is to pay a half-century’s worth of respect to his forebearers: Ray Price, Faron Young, Hank Snow. Add his political stances, arguing for clean bio-fuel, marijuana reform, and founding Farm Aid and his activism, generosity of spirit and unabated songwriting prolificness stand out at an age when many of his peers might turn reclusive.

With that in mind — and a new album now available (Heroes) — we’ve rounded up Nelson’s most essential records…