If you are an artist who objects to any music posted here, please please please get in touch with us directly. We are very happy to comply with your wishes - our intent is really not to piss you off. But it makes it much easier for us if you just let us know!

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Konono No. 1 - "Ditshe Tshiekutala". What's Konono numéro 1? I didn't really know. I saw it on a few year end best-ofs last year, and then it populated even more this time around. So I investigated. And good golly, would you listen to this.

Konono No. 1 is a Congolese band led by a man named Mingiendi. Mingiendi plays the likembé, aka the thumb piano. Recently, Toronto's indie scene has been mildly buzzing about the thumb piano - Laura Barrett's been plinking around town with her kalimba. Unlike Barrett, Mingiendi plugs his likembé through a distortion box, making his instrument sound more like a blurry staccatto electric guitar, a fast-flashing sound that dances around in the body of the listener. The rest of his band is made up of other likembé players, percussionists, megaphone-yellers and whistlers, and according to this page, three dancers and a "president".

While Congotronics is their most-talked-about CD, this recording is taken from Lubuaku, a live recording from a gig in Holland with unlikely tourmates The Ex. It's very important that it be listened to loud - the band usually play before a wall of speakers, plzzzonking into wooden microphones, the tumbling beats and darting likembé-notes rolling through the air like flurries of dust, sand, heat, spirit. To my ears it's not unlike the rhythmic racket of the DC go-go scene - its roots are after all similar, - but there's this brilliant hazy psych aspect, too; the ceaseless circling elicits an almost trance-like response, a falling into the music, solos driving up the elbows and feet, tossing heads back, scattering smiles, gasps and beads of sweat. It's the opposite of most "Christmas" music, and therefore all the more appealing as this writer goes diving toward Norway, spending a few days near the fjords.

[buy for $18.95 shipped]

Heron - "Yellow Roses". The mighty Goldkixx beat me to Heron earlier this month, but it's too worthy a thing to go unheard. Formed in Maidenhead in the late 60s, Heron were one of the country's hundreds of fresh-faced folk bands - peers of Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, Pentangle, etc. Their first, self-titled record was recorded "only in fields", in 1967. It's an appropriately pastoral record, warm as sun and sweet as lakewater, that feels as reminiscent of The Zombies as it does the Incredibles.

"Yellow Roses" is built on a flowerbed, piano and acoustic guitar, voices crisscrossing in a lazy dusk. Each part of the song - chorus, verse, bridge, - is a perfect little delight, and the band approaches each of these sections with a slow, sure pace. It takes its time: relishing the warm voice-on-voice, string-on-string, hand-on-hand, breeze-on-breeze. My favourite folk singer of this period is Nick Drake, I guess predictably, and so I hear "Yellow Roses" and I think of "Northern Sky" or one of Drake's happier songs - the evening's just opening right up, a life opening right up, a song sending you whirling through the million possibilities that lie ahead.

Heron - "Sally Goodin". A twenty second trifle, a clap-clap sing-song that I include because it makes me glad, because she must be quite the gal if you put aside strawberry pie and gooseberry pudding. She's there, in the window of that cottage over the ridge; squint and you'll see her, fair hair glinting.

Remarkably, Heron reformed in the Nineties and is releasing new music. There are lots of mp3 samples, new and old, here.

[buy Heron]

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You Ain't No Picasso has a great mp3 mix from another member of Bishop Allen, Justin Rice.

Kathryn Yu's favourite albums of 2005, and the descriptions thereof, are very worthy of your perusal.

And with that, I'm off to Oslo for four nights. See some of you there! I leave you in Dan and Jordan's steady hands.