{Shabazz Palaces photo from the Three Imaginary Girls Flickr Pool by Jason Tang}

Through sheer quirk of fate and possibly my own fatally quirky tastes, the top spots for my four favorite records of the year were given to two separate EPs by two different bands. I'm going to start my Top 20 of 2011 list with a cheat; combining two albums for placement at #1 and #2. Just to obnoxiously make you utterly vigilant of it: the first two spots are taken up by two separate releases, but they're EPs that if combined with each other, tie with/become one release.

Oh, and I'm keeping all hype to 20 words to mirror the Top 20 list. And then I cheat again by having the first two releases described in 40 words, a combination of two 20 word reviews. (No, I haven't been studying Kabbalah with the Wu-Tang Clan.) Also: Mostly in order, but ask me again tomorrow. (The Damien Jurado could be anywhere on this list, for example.) And regional preference takes precedence (call that "fanzine love").

1. Shabazz Palaces, Shabazz Palaces & Of Light EPs
Cracked, uncanny hip-hop collages of unsettling mind-movies, Clockers meets Company Flow. "Juxtapositions of the digital and analog, hard drum-machine beats set against softer bongos or the resonant sweetness of an mbira." -- Jon Caramanica, The New York Times

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Glen Galloway, of noise-gospel avatars Soul Junk, said of Dan Zimmerman, "Think about when you found all those Scott Walker albums, all those R. Stevie Moore tapes. There's a personality preserved in its own space, an old friend you knew nothing about ..."

You probably haven't heard of Dan Zimmerman, whose full-length Cosmic Patriot is being released by Danielson's label Sounds Familyre. But if you have, bets are you're probably one of the obsessives that considers this huge influence on artists like Daniel Smith and his family, Sufjan Stevens, and Half-handed Cloud, among others, to be strong enough reason to check in and see how the well over 50 year old poet-painter/singer-songwriter is doing.

My wife and I enjoyed Zimmerman's independent cassette releases in the early 90s, even before I met his son Matt, who was the bass player in a Portland band I lived with back then. Matt took me home and I met this gentle, provocatively intelligent, Renaissance man who painted huge amazing murals merging biology with divinity, which reflected what we had been listening to in his voice: A prophetic baritone inherited from his Methodist preacher father he grew up listening to on Sunday mornings in the front of the pews. Zimmerman moved out to New Jersey with his wife in the mid-90s; you can chart his attachment with Danielson at least from there.

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At more than 2.5 hours long, that’s a lotta Dylan covers, even for a serious fan.

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So, obviously, I had to make an autumn mix. To me, autumn songs are a distinct class -- they aren't as low and pensive as a winter song, but they're still quiet, and maybe just a little more hopeful.

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Tales from a Brave Ulysses is a traveling epic through modern art, music, and culture. In this installment: Quiet Fights with Hemingway's Fame.

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