Fortuitous Finds: The Best Music of 2007 Not Made in 2007

One night last summer, Takashi Ueno, the voice of Japanese noise-pop duo Tenniscoats, made a fortuitous find.

"It was hours after a show and I was wide awake," Takashi recalls. "My friend was already asleep so I searched through his iPod and came across Arthur Russell's First Thought Best Thought, a compilation of recordings made in the '80s but only released last year."

Happening upon a composer who stretched disco out of its recognizable shape in the late '70s in '07 was a little like being drawn through pitch-darkness to light. With electronic and indie music cultures on a descent into smaller and less substantial subgenres, the avant-garde purposefulness that Russell applied to his pop sound translated better than ever to anyone — from neo-raver to freak-folkie to dub-stepper — who kept an ear out.

At the turn of each year, it becomes the music media's job to persuade us that the state of the art has never been better. But examine, for a moment, your own listening in the past year — the stream of reissues and rediscovered artists, the unprecedented easy access to downloadable obscurities, the entries in your own collection you had simply overlooked before... At the risk of sounding crotchety, the standard, commercially-driven year-end best-of lists provided their least accurate read to date on which sounds actually impacted the contemporary pop scene.

So in our modest search for some of the most influential records of the last release cycle, we asked a handful of the artists who mattered most this past year to discuss the albums that mattered most to them, regardless of when they were made.

Some were only a year behind. Grizzly Bear, who toured one of the year's best live shows in support of their second album, Yellow House, cited Beach House's self-titled 2006 release. And according to Ghostly International's Sam Valenti IV, whose Ann Arbor label released Matthew Dear's Asa Breed in 2007 to much acclaim, "Peter and the Wolf's album Lightness Worker's Institute was the most exciting pre-2007 discovery."

Reaching further back, Baltimore's electro-absurdist one man show, Dan Deacon, dusted off copies of Neil Young's Harvest and After the Gold Rush, noting, "These albums fucking rule, and, in 2007, I remembered how much they rule." Deacon's year was also shaped by Gerty Farish's 2000 Load Records release, Bulks Up, and the Foo Fighters' 1996 self-titled debut.

Ghost Box's Jim Jupp was turned on to All Score Media's 2001 compendium of East German science fiction soundtrack music, Kosmos: "I'd not heard it until Ghost Box co-founder Julian House loaned me a copy earlier this year. The programs ran for years and the soundtrack seems to have been kept up to date, so it covers a huge range of styles: groovy psych, abstract electronics, disco and synth-lead power ballads. I love the fact that I've no idea what the shows were actually like."

Matthew Cooper, better known as Eluvium on the Temporary Residence label, spent time with Leon Fleisher's 2004 collection of Baroque and Romantic piano solos. "My favorite listen of this year that is not of this year is Fleisher's Two Hands, particularly his performance of Bach's 'Sheep May Safely Graze.' It's a very strange yet simple piece consisting of a simple passage that at first seems quite innocent enough, and could easily be understood as the title suggests, yet as the work progresses, changes temperature ever slightly and slightly again to explore darker areas."

Admiral Greyscale of the London duo Mordant Music reported revisiting the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs (Merge, 1999), along with one of Scott Walker's lesser-heard releases, the 1971 single, "I Still See You." "The former album I've had for a few years, the latter track I read about initially in the Walker biography A Deep Shade of Blue," he told us.

"It slays," said Charalambides' Tom Carter in reference to an overlooked album from 1969 by Love called Four Sail (Elektra). And then he set the record straight regarding Love's famously elusive frontman, Arthur Lee: "So much lame ink has been spilled about Love that it seems pretty criminal to have to point out that no, Arthur Lee did not stop writing killer songs after Forever Changes — he just exited the pop scene, or rather the pop scene backed away from him. And good riddance."

Christina Carter, Tom's closest collaborator in Charalambides and half of Scorces, talked about Le Rat Debile Et L'Homme Des Champs, an album from 1974 by the French actress Catherine Ribeiro's legendary progressive rock group, Alpes. "When Scorces toured the West Coast this album became our theme, mantra, energy source for most of our drives," she said. "Catherine Ribeiro and Patrice Moullet created a timeless album that made time go faster, cease to matter, radiate into limitless space for us and definitely became enveloped into our heads and performances."

Like Takashi's, Carter's recollection neatly summarizes the thrill of music. Certain discoveries, though fun to name and number, are indeed timeless. It's as if the soundtrack to our lives is best programmed on automatic shuffle, each track falling from the memory-tree — "one goddamned thing after another."