ALBUMS (descending points)
1. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
2. Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
3. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
4. Akron/Family - Love is Simple
5. Ween - La Cucaracha
6. Radiohead - In Rainbows
7. Battles - Mirrored
8. Vampire Weekend - Blue CD-R
9. Diplo - Pitchfork mix
10. v/a - Music of Nat Pwe: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar Vol. 3

TRACKS
1. Modest Mouse - Dashboard
2. Of Montreal - Suffer For Fashion
3. Wilco - You Are My Face
4. Stephen Malkmus and Lee Ranaldo - Can't Leave Her Behind
5. Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip - Thou Shalt Not Kill
6. Dan Deacon - Crystal Cat
7. M.I.A. - Bird Flu
8. Bonde Do Role - Office Boy
9. Rihanna - Umbrella
10. Justice - D.A.N.C.E.

REISSUES
1. Gilberto Gil - Gilberto Gil (Nega)
2. Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
3. Woody Guthrie - The Live Wire
4. v/a - Brazil 70
5. v/a - Latinamericarpet: Exploring the Vinyl Warp of Latin American Psychedelia Vol 1

ARTISTS
1. Oink
2. The Grateful Dead
3. Sublime Frequencies
4. William Gibson
5. Radiohead

COMMENTS
You know it's a bland year when Ween counts for diversity on the first draft of your top 10. And by "you," of course, I mean "me." And by "bland," I mean "awesome."

Much has been made of music's new singles age, but 2007 is the year it transcended into glittering ephemera. The mechanisms and sources are infinite: YouTube, IMed Sendspace links, stray ringtones, MySpace Flash players, aggregators, aggregators of aggregators, hep record store recommendos, blogz, podcasts/playlists, f'in Oink. Killer jams flood in at an accelerated rate from the past and the present, from the next neighborhood over and from across the world. It is not the diversity that's new, but the speed with which it arrives. After a certain point, the idea of discovering something great often feels tantamount to chance. It is as if music has gone beyond, returned to some pre-technological norm where everything is of equal value.

Besides new stuff, a partial list of recordings/artists that've blown my mind, totally and completely, in the past six months: Soul Jazz's post-tropicalia compilation, a crispy Bob Dylan soundboard from '99, some older Boredoms EPs, Sun Ra, The Rutles, a huge mix of Ween outtakes, three new Sublime Frequencies anthologies, Jeffrey Lewis (who put out an amazing album in 2006 I can't really include on my list), countless obscurities on the mix CDs at Yo La Tengo's Hanukkah shows, at least one or two of the several dozen psych/prog/folk albums spat out on the Mutant Sounds blog every week, John Coltrane's Interstellar Space, and others.

A common strawman in criticism is overconsumption, perhaps because it is a common worry. It can be a real knuckle-biter, actually, especially when tied to the quality of mp3s and/or laptop speakers. "Poor-fidelity music stimulates the brain in different ways," Joel Selvin quoted Dr. Robert Sweetow, of the UCSF audiology department, in the San Francisco Gate. "With different neurons, perhaps lesser neurons, stimulated, there are fewer cortical neurons connected back to the limbic system, where the emotions are stored."

In other words: listening to lots and lots of mp3s will make hair grow on your palms, or you'll turn into a mental n00b or something! Fuck!

But the wormhole is open, and it's hard to close it, especially at this time of year. I just saw the top 10 list for Japanese bitmaster Cornelius (whose own Sensuous was ultimately kinda disappointing), which featured some band called Yura Yura Teikoku (which also shows up on James McNew's list), and another page over here cross-references them with a pair of tantalizing sounding Japanese psych bands... and so Soulseeking I will go, with nary a flicker of guilt.

One result of the Singularity is the plethora of semi-nebulous think pieces about it. Bill Wasik published a particularly great one in the Oxford American, identifying the existence of "the hipster archipelago." That is a particularly wonderful way to get at three sensations I have felt this year.

The first is the impulse to steal global and buy local. "Local" is a vague idea these days. It's whatever I want it to be. Sometimes, it means literally local: paying to download the new EP by the awesome band that used to live down the hall (Super Monster!) or $20 to see two sets of Steve Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra at the Stone. But, it can also mean local in thought only — somewhere on the archipelago — which is why I was happy to pay $10 for In Rainbows. But, really, I'd rather pay to see my friends' band than to buy a Ray Charles album or whatever, so I'll download it. The value of bits is one of the dominant moral issues of our times. Virtual reality still hasn't quite happened, but even trippier than deciding what our avatars might look like is deciding what money is really worth.

The second sensation grew from a sudden perception of various sub-populi scattered about the archipelago, and how they might just be part of one karass: the Brazilian tropicalismo circa 1968, Cornelius and the Shibuya-kei crew, the Elephant 6 collective in Athens, Georgia, even the Grateful Dead, in their original post-Beat utopianism. And, of course, plenty of music that doesn't quite exist there.

The third sensation I had is that, despite listening to all kinds of shit from all kinds of places and times, the albums that resonated most strongly were those which I somehow identified as local, and which felt completely familiar and wonderful. That is, people who (in my eyes) more or less come at the contemporary world with what I perceive to be similar assumptions about what is sensible/not totally fucking insane. It's music I listen to when, in the words of David Byrne (a civic leader of the hipster archipelago), I feel like talking to someone who knows the difference between right and wrong.

There is no way I could really argue that Bishop Allen's The Broken String was one of the most important albums recorded and released in 2007. But, it also sounds totally natural to me. Maybe because they're friends of friends (or maybe Friendsters of friends). Maybe because they're so Beatlesy. It's a common theme when I go back over the list of albums from 2007 for which I can remember most of the words: pasty white dudes. Sometimes, beards. Vampire Weekend, likewise, is a guilty pleasure, sounding too nearby on the archipelago for comfort, especially as they emulate groovy African pop, even if it's their songwriting that makes them winners.

It is a very conservative way of enjoying music, which scares me a fair bit, especially when I consider that this overwhelming feeling might just be a product of my age, as opposed to the age. But just because the new music I take most to heart is music made by people most similar to me doesn't make me some kind of imperialist hipster swine. At least, I don't think so. After all, I bloody love Ween.