Foday Musa Suso - "Apollo"

Use a bird's eye to listen to the kora playing of Foday Musa Suso and you will hear something simple, repetitive, stuttering and lovely. But press your ears against your speaker, I say, and you've done the aural equivalent of putting your eyeballs against an M.C. Escher drawing. A close examination of the song's component parts and their complex interrelationships initially makes for a more stressful listen than does a passive appreciation of the whole, but eventually gives way to something more hypnotically soothing. A wide, mind-boggling array of rhythmic and melodic paths slowly makes itself heard, and yet despite the extraordinary technical virtuosity displayed in the playing of this song, the dominant impression it leaves is of a sad kind of playfulness; a man wading out into musical infinity. [Buy]

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Bikeride - "Moonracing"

Bikeride's Tony Carbone is perhaps the greatest proponent of the Early Music/Baroque practice of "word painting" at work in pop music today. Throughout his music, when Carbone sings "high", he sings high, and when he sings "quick", he does so quickly. Here, he sings "harmonize" and layers his voice on top of itself, forming a rich chord. Carbone is such a skilled word painter that when he sings of a late summer night, amid hand-claps and xylophone, Iron and Wine guitar and airy organ, the sun actually sets and the spring shrinks away. [Buy]