17. M.I.M.E.O. & John Tilbury
The Hands of Caravaggio
Erstwhile, 2002

Mustering quite a bit of star power for an improv set (MIMEO includes Kevin Drumm, Thomas Lehn, Kaffe Matthews, Peter Rehberg, Keith Rowe, Marcus Schmickler, Rafael Toral, and others), this outing pits the members of MIMEO against pianist John Tilbury in a somewhat adversarial set. No musician ever attains dominance, and pianist Cor Fuhler spends much of his time disrupting Tilbury's phrasings by clamping down the latter's piano strings and anticipating his moves. Meanwhile, the electronics-wielding members of MIMEO must exercise some self-restraint to keep from overwhelming Tilbury's delicate phrasings. The process forces everyone outside his comfort zone, and generates a performance that is both sympathetic and adversarial. The result is as arresting as the Caravaggio painting that inspired the proceedings.

18. Bonnie "Prince" Billy & Matt Sweeney
Superwolf
Drag City, 2005

Many Superwolf reviews emphasize that, while nominally a collaboration, this project sounds remarkably Bonnie "Prince" Billy-ish. After all, we do see same melodic conventions, the same lyrical themes, as in much of Will Oldham's other work as Palace and Bonnie "Prince" Billy. But with the benefit of hindsight, Superwolf also sounds like a remarkable interruption in Oldham's career, a moment at which he traded his developing country-rock side for a spare, heavy, and metallic brand of folk music. We can most certainly attribute this sound, which brings out the desperate angst that always lurks in Oldham's songs, to Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Zwan), an accomplished guitarist who deserves far more credit for this record than he got at the time. Sweeney's skeletal structures and elegant melodies gave Oldham the last top-notch album of his career so far, and his best since 1999's I See a Darkness.

19. The Boredoms
Vision Creation Newsun
Birdman, 2001

"A whole beach vibrating with the sun was surging behind me. I took a few steps toward the source. ... The scorching sun attacked my cheeks and I felt drops of sweat forming in my eyebrows. It was the same sun as on the day I had buried Mother, and, as then, my forehead hurt and all my veins were pulsating underneath my skin. Because of this heat which I could no longer stand I took a step forward. ... The Arab took out his knife and pointed it at me in the sun. The light flashed on the steel and it was like a long blade attacking me on the forehead. At the same instant the sweat that had been forming on my eyebrows ran down all at once over my pupils, covering them with a warm thick veil. ... I felt nothing more than the cymbals of the sun on my forehead, and, indistinctly, the bursting blade of light from the sword continually in front of me. This burning sword was eating at my eyelids and digging into my aching eyes. It was then that everything reeled ... It seemed to me that the heavens had open to their full extent in order to let it rain fire. My entire being became tight and I closed my grip on the revolver. The trigger gave."

20. Geir Jenssen
Cho Oyo 8201m (Field Recordings from Tibet)
Ash, 2006

Complied from audio of a Tibetan mountain-climbing expedition, Cho Oyo bridges the gap between Jenssen's life as a mountain climber and his career as an ambient techno artist (Biosphere) with a flair for the naturalistic. In what seems almost like a day by day document of his climb of this 8,000-meter mountain, Jenssen blends recordings of supply trucks, birds, wind, rain, yak bells, voices, radios, horses, and hailstones into a subtly edited, wholly coherent, and adventurous listen. It would be hard to call this ambient music, as the raw flapping of birds' wings on "Nangpa La" are certain to snap the listener out of any kind of trance, but one can easily see the connections between Jenssen's love of nature and his musical day job. Cho Oyo is a striking listen, and the best compilation of field recordings in a decade that saw outstanding work from Francisco Lopez and Philip Samartzis, among others.

21. Nina Nastasia & Jim White
You Follow Me
Fat Cat, 2007

Singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia's dusty, intimate voice graces a streak of outstanding records on the Touch & Go and Fat Cat labels from 2002 to 2010 (The Blackened Air, Run to Ruin, On Leaving, The Outsider). But her stripped-down collaboration here with drummer Jim White (Dirty Three, Grinderman) brings out the best in her. Nastasia takes full advantage of the record's empty space, at times filling the room with denunciations or self-recriminations ("I always dreamt of the day I would bury you / I never thought on the day I'd stop hating you"), or letting the silence speak for itself.

White's skill as an accompanist is almost unmatched, as his hyperactive polyrhythms and deft brushwork unsettle even the quietest songs, and keep the record moving forward. His restless work on the album's outstanding centerpiece ("Our Discussion") captures perfectly the narrator's nervous sense of impending dread. Together, these two musicians absolutely embarrass the host of drab indie-folk singer-songwriters who litter the past decade.

22. Bill Dixon
17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur
AUM Fidelity, 2008

The second half of the aughts (2005-10) were an exciting time to be following avant-garde jazz, as the scene was teeming with rediscovered or reactivated veterans. Bassist Henry Grimes simply walked back onto the stage after decades of mysterious absence, and he began touring with Rashied Ali, formerly a drummer for both Alice and John Coltrane. At the same time, Bill Dixon, who had seemingly retreated from heavy performance and recording in favor of teaching in Bennington, began playing a host of startling performances, of which 17 Musicians is one.

Recorded at the Vision Festival in 2007, Dixon's large-ensemble record sounds at turns gruesome, ominous, energetic, and elegiac. The title track shivers with dread, and the epic-length "Sinopia" lapses into queasy, bent tones that simply won't let go. Dixon also has his solo moments on this recording, though he is spotlighted even more on his date with Exploding Star Orchestra that same year. Both records serve as a fitting tribute to an outstanding career. Dixon sadly died in Vermont in 2010.

23. Loren Connors
The Departing of a Dream
Family Vineyard, 2002

Bill Orcutt
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Palalila, 2009

All of Loren Connors' works, to some extent, emphasize silence, distance, solitude. But Departing of a Dream, recorded around the quaking fear of 9/11 and consisting of a brief tribute to that day and a longer suite inspired by Miles Davis's haunting "He Loved Him Madly," is positively devastating for what it does not say. Connors' guitar wails endlessly in the opening nine-minute epic, but the noise gives an expression of never finding the right note, the correct thing to say. The album's frustrated inarticulateness is its genius.

Bill Orcutt's first solo guitar record screams with an inarticulate genius of a different sort. In Orcutt's hands, ten decades of folk traditions---country blues, jazz, punk---spill out in jagged shards, rippling with the intensity and immediacy of the most bracing hardcore. I put these two records together mainly in order to cram in a record that has grown on me since I first generated this list in 2009. But Orcutt and Connors represent the range of solo guitar innovations over the past ten years.