There has likely been less commercial music discussed on Disquiet.com in 2011 than in any previous year since the site’s launch, almost exactly 15 years ago, in December 1996. This relative absence wasn’t intentional. It doesn’t even particularly reflect my daily listening habits. But it does, in retrospect, reflect my imagination. I listen to enormous amounts of commercially released music, much that is sent to me for promotional purposes, much that I hear online, and much that I myself purchase. My email inbox is overrun with inbound, unsolicited, but often welcome, invitations to listen to the commercial music for free (un-commercially, as it were, though in the end, the whole act of promotion is itself a commercial enterprise).

Yet still, there is something about a commercial record that felt inherently stolid in 2011 — not all commercial records, and not the music specifically. The music can be dynamic, adventurous, but the enterprise can still feel rote or calculated or misguided, or some combination thereof.

I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, and interacting with, the music than emanates from generative sound apps (those based in Internet browsers, and those that come in the form of mobile-device apps). I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, the music that emerges from various outposts of the “free music” movement/phenomenon (from netlabels in particular, and also general Creative Commons work, as well as work that is released for free with no apparent tie to or, perhaps, even knowledge of either of those philosophically informed communities). I spent a lot of time listening to commercially released music, but rarely this year did I think about it with the energy that I did my other listening.

All of which is in no way intended to diminish the 10 (or 12) commercial recordings listed below. Nor is it my sense that following list could easily be swapped out with two or even four more lists of fascinating sets of 10 albums from the past year. These were selected because any other such lists would still have some sense of absence. The music here touches on a variety of approaches, which is part of what makes it feel whole. There is voice-infused music, and sound art, and something not too distantly related to dance music, and noise, and elegant ambience, and contemporary classical, and remixes — and more. There are small-scale recordings, and recordings for which institutional financial support was necessary. In two cases two albums are listed, because they are by the same artists and were released this year and feel of a piece with each other. (And it at least one of the two cases, they were subsequently packaged together by the releasing record label.)

All of which is to say, in a year when I didn’t write about much commercial music, when it came time to list my 10 favorites, the list expanded to 12. They are listed here in alphabetical order by musician. Yes, “musician,” singular. One thing that struck me when I completed this list is that all these albums are, with the exception of the ECM remix collection, solo records.

Julianna Barwick‘s The Magic Place (Asthmatic Kitty): Julianna Barwick is a choir of one. She makes music in which layer upon layer of her singing, vaguely druid in its tonal quality, form slow cascades of seemingly wordless invention. The effect is both meditative and cathartic. Other elements make themselves heard, including a minimalist piano that sounds like Harold Budd at work on one of Tom Waits’ detuned barroom favorites. This is music that could all to easily lapse into treacle, but it shows restraint, not in its ambition, but in its affect. … More on Barwick at juliannabarwick.com. Listen to the album in full at juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com. More on the record at asthmatickitty.com. There’s also a collection of remixes, Matrimony Remixes, which I cannot recommend; the beats just make all the songs sound like the closing music to a Disney animated film.
 
Jefferson Friedman‘s Quartets (New Amsterdam): The collection contains two complete string quartets and a pair of remixes. The quartets (which date from 1999 and 2005) are alternately fierce and pastoral, and they distinguish themselves with the extent to which the instrumentalists are treated as equal partners, and the extent to which the arrangement is the music: theme and melody rarely stand out above the musical interplay. They are performed here by the Chiara String Quartet, for whom they were composed. The Matmos remixes are some of the duo’s strongest recent work, especially the closing track, “Floor Plan Mix,” which achieves a spectral quality in its distillation of the source material. … More on the musicians at jeffersonfriedman.com, chiaraquartet.net, and brainwashed.com/matmos. Listen to the album in full at chiarastringquartet.bandcamp.com. More on the album at newamsterdamrecords.com.
 
Grouper‘s A I A : Dream Loss and A I A : Alien Observer (Yellow Electric): Between their titles and approach, these are at least companion collections and more like parts of a whole (think how with the final two thirds of the Star Wars or the Lisbeth Salander trilogies, neither half is particularly satisfying without the other). Grouper is Liz Harris, and her two 2011 full-length releases, though available separately, deserve consideration as a whole, not simply because their titles and covers suggest them as halves of a pair, or entries in a series, but because they similarly eke songs, or song-like formations, from quiet accumulations of vocals and supporting sounds. There is a lot of freak folk, or “drone folk,” out there in drone world. These recordings are closer to “drone singer-songwriter.” … Both albums are sample-able at the boomkat.com music retailer, among other places: Alien, Dream.

Tim Hecker‘s Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky): Hecker took source recordings he made of a pipe organ in Iceland and then went to work on them. Each glitch is a synapse-firing crisis of faith. Each echo maps the architecture of the place. Each mass of synthesized material fills the empty church in your mind. The cover shows a piano being pushed off the edge of the building, which makes for a colorful (or, in this case, black-and-white) polemic. There is tension in this music for certain, but it’s more likely to instill in experimental musicians the desire to explore pipe organs than to dispose of them. … More on Hecker at sunblind.net. The music is sample-able at boomkat.com, among other retailers.
 
Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly): In traditional terms, this is the prettiest album on this list. It is built from harpsichords and string sections and other classical instruments, which in combination lend it a storybook quality. It’s less fragile than it is dainty, but the daintiness is undergirded with filmic tension, like something out of the Quay Brothers at their most romantic yet mischievous. And the “traditional” instrumentation is just part of the sound design, mixed in with all manner of knocking and general acoustic haze. … More on the album at ghostly.com, where it is also available for streaming. More on the composer at the somewhat out of date
jacaszek.com.

Eli Keszler‘s Cold Pin (Pan): Based on a massive sound-art installation by Keszler, the album comes in two parts: a recording of his invention (“14 strings ranging in length from 25 to 3 feet are strung across a 15 x 40 curved wall, with motors attacking the strings, connected by micro-controllers, pick-ups and rca cables”) and a recording of Keszler performing freely improvised jazz alongside the sculpture with Geoff Mullen, Ashley Paul, Greg Kelley, Reuben Son, and Benjamin Nelson. The artwork is impressive, and the album is a model for documenting site-specific installations. … More on the album (including sound and video) at pan-act.com. More on Keszler at elikeszler.com.
 
Israel Martinez‘s El Hombre Que Se Sofoca (Sub Rosa): Six tracks of resplendent noise. The pieces range from deep washes of grey haze to jittery and anxious scattered samples. Melodic and cinematic washes give way to harsh deadspace. The impact is true to the title’s depiction of suffocation. A major album by the Mexican sound artist and musician, who is also a co-founder of the adventurous record label Abolipop. … More on the album, including two sound samples, at the record label’s website. More on Martinez at israelm.com and abolipop.com.
 
Andy Stott‘s We Stay Together and Passed Me By (Modern Love). Two albums of closely related yet disparate takes on club music. At its essence, this is the most minimal of minimal techno, but it seems more interested in exploring aridity than dankness, a rare and particularly welcome variation in this arena. … Listen to Together and Passed at their respective Soundcloud set pages.
 
Amon Tobin‘s ISAM (Ninja Tune). It was almost as tempting to list this album under “best scores of 2011″ as it was to list Kid Koala’s own recent Ninja Tune release (a soundtrack for a graphic novel he wrote and drew) simply as a commercial album. ISAM, in essence, is a recording of the music to Tobin’s audio-visual concert performance of the same name. It is brash and moving and, more than anything he has done previously, free of riffs intended and required to signal affiliation with a particular techno genre. … More on Tobin and the release, including streaming music and video and a free download, at amontobinisam.com.
 
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer‘s Re: ECM (ECM): The repeated use of the “re” prefix on this album — every one of the 17 tracks on its two halves — suggests that someone at the company still thinks of remixing as a purely post-production undertaking, rather than part of the artistic process. But still, it is a good thing that the estimable ECM label let DJs Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer wander through its back catalog, unearth samples, and render from them sonic tapestries. The music, with its constant presence of dust formations, has the texture of affectionate archival research. (It’s very close in spirit to Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa stroll through Miles Davis’ work.) … Discussion and music at youtube.com. More on the record at ecmrecords.com

Two days ago, after spending many hours with nothing playing but an MP3 that consisted in large part of the mechanical sound of an old turntable making its rotation, I had the sense that I was still hearing the track, even though I was miles from the house, pushing a bright orange three-wheeled stroller in which dozed my eight-month-old. This was along Golden Gate Park, where people regularly park their cars with the apparent interest in having their passenger-side windows broken. The sidewalk there is littered daily with glass, which collects in these dry glistening pools. I had navigated just such a pool of reflective shards, and one of those shards had, it turned out, embedded itself in the rear left wheel of the stroller. With each rotation, there was a scratchy sound, which in time took on the metronomic significance of a beat. The beat sound, in turn, so to speak, brought the ear to bear on what happened the other 350 or so degrees of rotation, when the wheel regained its grip on the pockmarked sidewalk. The sound of that portion of the rotation was weathered down, in a sandpapery way. I reached for my phone, continued to push the stroller, and used the bright red Record button in the Soundcloud.com app to tape 20 seconds of this beat. (It’s an Android phone, but there’s also an iOS version of the app.) The result is as follows:

Some comments began to accumulate on the page where the track is posted for streaming and download, and then 24 hours later an email arrived from Thomas Park, who records prolifically under the name Mystified. He had commented the day prior on my track, which I had titled “Broken Glass in a Stroller Wheel,” and in the intervening hours he had taken my track and produced something new from it, which he titled “Stroller Groove”:

Just looking at the waveforms of the two recordings, it’s clear that only one of these has the inaccuracies inherent in natural-world sound (even if part of that so-called natural world is a mass-produced, human-powered vehicle). The Mystified remix starts with a brief loop selected from the original track, and slowly accrues a veneer of minimal techno. As such, it provides an echo of my walk, in some manner resembling the way that my walk had provided an echo of the turntable MP3 to which I had been listening earlier in the day.

Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet and at soundcloud.com/mystifiedthomas

(Above photo from flickr.com/photos/wheatfields via Creative Commons license.)

As with the Stonesthrow Beat Battles that get an occasional mention here, the pleasure in hearing the variations spun from the original is precisely in the variety. As of this morning, when Four Tet tweeted the existence of an Icarus remix of “Bowls,” there are at least three distinct iterations since the original. One by Holden opens and closes with a sharp snap of that prayer bowl, a come-to-trance gong that introduces and occasionally bisects a mix of heavy acoustic beats and backwards-masked warbles. Nearly twice the length of the Caribou original, the Holden version grabs hold of little details and plays with them at length:

Gavin Russom‘s version is more self-evidently dance-able, its two main sections separated by a bit of ecstatic stasis. The opening is all gamelany, low-key counterpoint; the second half dives into My Life in the Bush of Ghosts territory, with a pulsing bass and ritual whirlygig sounds:

Which brings us to the Icarus edit, the sole one of the four tracks mentioned in this post that is available for free download. It’s the most dessicated of the batch, and willfully so, a defiantly remote take on the original. It moves, spookily, from a looped snatch of overheard conversation to dense Michael Mann cinematics: rumbling subaural texture and automated percussion. It shares with the Holden version a taste for extreme specificity (neither track sounds merely like loops set on hold), but is much more abstract in its plotting:

More on Icarus at icarus.nu.

Dream Machine: Four screen shots from the iOS app for the film Inception

A cursory search of this site finds almost two dozen mentions of RjDj since September 2009, most of them Twitter observations typed somewhere out in the world, where the software has taken a busker’s trumpet and turned it into a cellophane ribbon of ambient sound, or has echoed a pneumatic drill until it’s a dank minimal-techno beat. Often as not, these moments have felt filmic, bringing to mind sequences in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, when the light technological mediation of experience was enough to make one feel just ever so slightly in the future.

The adoption of RjDj as a part of the massively popular Inception franchise is a great opportunity for reactive sound to reach a broader audience.

It’s also a useful reminder of how context is essential in adapting to new ways of thinking about, and participating in, sound (and, yes, a marketing budget and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s blue eyes do help). As of this writing, the Inception app has a four-star average rating: 36 five-star, 11 one-star, 12 in between — and at least two of those negative reviews are purely technical (Bluetooth and iPhone functionality issues). The latest version of RjDj has, by coincidence, exactly the same number of five- and one-star reviews, but far more (38) in between — and out of the 8,631 reviews that RjDj has received thus far (Apple lets you see the ratings for the latest version of an app, and for the app over the history of its iterative upgrades), it has a three-star average rating, but there are more one-star reviews (2,187) than there are any of the other stars (five-star comes in a close second, at 2,160).

Sound, it’s worth noting, was an essential part of the structure of Inception. The film signaled a shift between dream levels by using an orchestration of a maudlin Édith Piaf pop song heard elsewhere in the film, slowed down almost beyond recognition (see: “On the Sudden Popularity of Glacial Sound”).

Anyhow, the full BoingBoing.net piece: “Music Apps Killed the MP3 Star.”

PS: I also realize that somehow I’ve managed to write two times in as many days about things that resolve back to the prog rock band Yes. In the Boing Boing piece on Inception, I reference Zimmer’s association with the band the Buggles, which was founded by two people who worked with Yes (Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes), and the day prior I interviewed the Bad Plus, who covered Yes’ “Long Distance Runaround” on its 2008 album, For All I Care.

Participants in the contest, in the true spirit of online collaboration and open-source music-making, were provided (for free — no pay-to-play here) the raw materials, the stems as they’re called, of the piece “2×5,” a kind of post-rock bit of chamber music newly composed by Reich. They then set to work, beat-battle style, to see who could make something interesting enough out of original to impress the composer himself. (The other judge was Christian Carey, a member of the composition faculty at the Westminster Choir College.)

This is Steve Reich we’re discussing, the minimalist most comfortable with, most at home amid, uniformity and repetition, as well as with the subtle shifts that evidence themselves therein. So, since the audio player of the service that hosted the contest, indabamusic.com, includes waveforms, the question that suggest itself is: How do the waveforms of winners compare and contrast with those of the losers? Or, in this case, not the losers, but the honorable mentions.

These first three waveforms are of the top three placing entries:

And these are the ten honorable mentions:

It seems fair to say that the three that won show considerably less internal variety than do the ones that they bested, at least in the manner this waveform algorithm indicates. Of course, these are just 10 out the numerous ones that were actually submitted, so this is not exactly a scientific investigation. There may be, for all I know, one among them that looks like a solid block.

If you want to give those remixes singled out by Reich himself a listen, here they are, starting with the winner, credited to Dominique Leone:

More on the contest at nonesuch.com.

My interview with Reich, and some of the contributing musicians, on the occasion of his 1999 Reich Remixed album here: “The Public Record.”

Short notice: I’ll be on Soundcheck, the great John Schaefer radio show, today, December 3, at 2:20pm (EST). We’ll be discussing the Tabletmat.com-hosted “Hanukkah, remixed” compilation that I put together, Anander Mol, Anander Veig.

More on the show at wnyc.org. The radio broadcast also streams live online, and will be available later as a free podcast at that same URL.

Yeah, this is in about 15 minutes from when this post is being published. I’d put an alert up at twitter.com/disquiet, but figured I should also mention here.

PS: Here’s the audio of the interview, streaming. Also available for download as an MP3, if you’re an Anander Mol completist.

It was a good conversation. Several tracks were played during the segment, including Paula Daunt‘s Alicia Jo Rabins remix, xntrxx‘s Dave Tarras remix, and the original “Ose Shalom” by the 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra as well as Diego Bernal‘s remix. Speaking of the 4th Ward, that track provided a good transition from the first part of the Soundcheck episode, because the show opened with photographer Michael Schmelling and New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh discussing their recent book about the Atlanta hip-hop scene, Atlanta being the city that the 4th Ward group calls home.

Nonesuch, Reich’s longtime label, was still coming up to speed on the concept of remixes. At the time, Howie B (then perhaps still best known as part of the quartet Skylab), told me of his experience being invited to participate: “They turned around and said, ‘Can’t you sample off the CD?’ and I went, ‘No, that’s not why I’m doing it. I want to touch on the sounds that were there.’ It’s not like doing a normal remix.” In other words, the label’s idea of a remix was working from the completed track, not from the multitracks, which while certainly common, undermined the creative potential of the contributing musicians.

Times have changed, and the understanding of remixing along with it. As of this morning, the pristine, entirely separate, eight constituent parts of the third movement of Reich’s composition “2×5″ have been made available for downloading and remixing, as part of one of the remix contests at indabamusic.com. The basic stems set breaks it into eight parts: two bass, two drums, two guitar, two piano. That’s something of a reduction of the original, because “2×5,” as the name suggests, features not eight but ten musicians (two equally matched five-piece rock bands); the stem set combines the two drummers into one track.

Don’t despair; there’s also a 20-track advanced set that, true to Reich’s emphasis on percussion, breaks the drum set down even further. The judges for the contest are Reich himself and Christian Carey, who’s a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. The due date for participants is November 2. Get the full set at indabamusic.com.

“2×5″ had its recording debut earlier this year when paired with “Double Sextet,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music last year, in a performance by Bang on a Can (eighth blackbird performs the other work).

My interview with Reich, and some of the contributing musicians, on the occasion of Reich Remixed here: “The Public Record.”

The majority of the most popular posts this past month were drawn from the site’s week-daily free (and legal) download recommendations, the Downstream department: (3) a Grassy Knoll demo circa 1998, (4) one minute of instrumental hip-hop bliss, (5) a sample track off the Oval album O (due out later this year, to follow up the album Oh), (6) a slice of Bruce Kaphan pedal-steel atmospherics, (7) a sample of the collaboration by experimental electronic duo Matmos and percussion quartet So Percussion (plus guests), (8) electronica lullabies from Athens-based Naono (that’s Greece, not Georgia), and (9) news (and free WAV files) of a Peter Gabriel / “Games without Frontiers” remix contest.

And, finally, (10) a brief bit on the return of the patch cord, which is cementing its role as a visual metaphor in software-based instruments — such as this screenshot from the iPhone/Touch app Circuit Synth by Michael Daines:

The most popular post of both the last 60 and 90 days was the Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album link noted above. The second most popular post of the last 60 and 90 days was the initial response I wrote to the McArdle article, “What, After All, Is the ‘Music Industry’?”

The top 9 search terms on this site for the month of May were: “rss,” “performances,” “oval” (as in Oval, see above), “drone,” “oversteps” (as in the album by Autechre), “autechre” (as in the duo that just released Oversteps), “loops,” “topic,” and “mcardle” (as in Atlantic writer and editor Megan McArdle, as noted above). Tenth place had so many words tied, it’s just silly to list them all.

In the meanwhile, one watches the open-source, community-produced list grow in length, and one searches for recent updates — new versions of old sounds.

Among the more recent is a series of renditions of a guitar sound, the initial (the fount, the source) rustic in its resonance (by Freesound member Benboncan), the subsequent two experiments in audio manipulation (by Freesound member Timbre) slowing then speeding, in various manners, to its creator’s imagination:

More on the files as follows: original (freesound.org), take one (freesound.org), take two (freesound.org).

This is a new category for Disquiet.com, and likely a short-lived one. Not because the iPod (or, for that matter, the iPhone or iPod Touch, the latter of which is currently my primary MP3 player) is going away any time soon, but because the landscape is likely to get rangier in the very near future — as the Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and various Nokia operating systems come into their own, or at least struggle to. In the meanwhile, the iPhone/Touch has by far the best marketplace for music/sound-based applications, and to play with the best such apps on the iPod is to only get a sense of, a glimpse of, what these tools will evolve into in the years to come — especially if all these rumors of an Apple tablet result in something real. (I’ve spent a lot of time playing with music software such as Ableton Live on my small Fujitsu tablet PC running Microsoft Windows 7, and let me tell you it’s a great experience — you entirely forget you have a laptop in your hands, and the screen interface simply “becomes” the device.)

As for this list below, with one exception I left out apps that don’t make innovative or extensive use of the touch interface (or other aspects of the iPod as a gadget), and (again, with the same exception) I left out apps that are, in truth, just ports of software that’s existed on other platforms previously (hence the paucity of beatmakers and synths below).

In the case of all of the entries below that work on pre-existing audio source material (most notably Touch DJ), they would all be significantly improved if Apple’s iPod family of devices allowed for (1) easier drag-and-drop adding of music to the gadgets and (2) easy access by third-party software developers to the music held in the iTunes library.

Here they are in roughly alphabetical order:

Though some of these were first released in 2008, all saw at least one update in 2009:

1. RjDj (version 0.9.4: apple.com, appspot.com): You’ll note that RjDj is out of alphabetic order with the rest of the entries here. That’s because RjDj is far and away the most extraordinary sound application made for the iPod. It’s also a little hard to describe, because it is so new (sort of how RSS feeds and Tivo were once difficult to describe, and yet eventually became new norms of how we process information). RjDj isn’t software so much as an engine for software — numerous “scenes” have been programmed that are then played within RjDj. Those scenes allow the listener to then listen to generative and reactive music, the best of which actually process the sounds around you in real time. For all the dozens of RjDj scenes with which I’ve experimented (some free, some at a minor expense), my favorite remains one of the free ones that comes with RjDj, called Echolon. In Echolon, every sound that your mic picks up is then echoed around you — left, right, top of head, over and over, as it slowly fades in volume. The experience is exhilarating. There are weeks when almost all of my iPod use is simply playing RjDj, and much of that time is spent in Echolon. William Gibson once wrote, “The Walkman changed the way we understand cities”; well, RjDj has literally changed the way that I walk through the city — I walk toward potential sound sources, such as street musicians and construction sites, on a regular basis (and in a manner that is increasingly subconscious).

2. Bebot (version 1.5: apple.com, appspot.com): Bebot is a cute little multi-touch synth that has found use in live performance by numerous laptop-wielding musicians. In its simplicity, it bears a certain resemblance to near-phenomena, such as Leaf Trombone and Ocarina, both of which have introduced casual (casual perhaps to the point of rote) music-making to a broad audience, and is a strong suggestion that super-simple individualized instruments have a future in a music-tool marketplace increasingly defined by feature-packed apps.

3. Bloom (version 2.01: apple.com, appspot.com) and (jumping ahead alphabetically for the moment) 4. Trope (version 1.0.1: apple.com, appspot.com): Bloom and Trope are two apps developed by ambient godfather Brian Eno and his development partner Peter Chilvers. They’re generative apps that emit ambient tones based on some touch input and scene-setting decision-making on the part of the listener. They’re best thought of less as music applications unto themselves than as Brian Eno music albums released in a manner that allows for some user participation.

5. DopplerPad (version 1.6: apple.com, appspot.com): This is a somewhat complex but highly rewarding loop-based music maker that includes the ability to employ in your performances samples recorded with the iPod, and it involves excellent touch controls.

6. Gliss (version 1.0: apple.com, appspot.com): Gliss is a brand new, and very simple, gestural music-maker. It was released on December 23, and I was immediately taken by its use of drawing on the screen (in addition to the tilt function) to manipulate sound.

7. JR Hexatone (version 1.1: apple.com, appspot.com): A highly original implementation of a beat-oriented music-maker, with an interface so packed with iconographic tools and settings that it’s just dying to be ported to tablet form. (This app makes an interesting study in contrast with the two Brian Eno apps listed above. All three were developed by musicians associated with prog rock — JR Hexatone with Jordan Rudess of the band Dream Theater, whose music I have never enjoyed, but this app is engrossing.)

8. SoundGrid (version 2.0: apple.com, appspot.com): There are a lot of grid-based casual music-making tools on iTunes. It’s quite likely that I haven’t tried them all, but of the ones that I have, SoundGrid is the best — the best internal sounds, the best mix of effects, the best use of touch gestures, and the best approach to multiphonic voicing.

9. SunVox (version 1.4.5: apple.com, appspot.com): On the face of it, SunVox shouldn’t really be on this list. It’s a very complex synthesizer that doesn’t make much of the iPod’s touch interface. However, that complexity comes with purpose — SunVox is fully functional (and while I try not to take price into consideration, it’s also a quarter the price of vaguely similar offerings in the iPhone store, and that’s hard to ignore). And the utilitarian interface also has a purpose: the software’s creator is making SunVox available on numerous OSs, including Windows, Linux, Windows Mobile, and PalmOS — and thus it also deserves extra points for not treating the iTunes Music Store as a walled kingdom.

10. Touch DJ (version 1.0: apple.com, appspot.com): Touch DJ is one of many tools for the iPod that emulate the experience of working two sounds together, whether those sounds were sourced on vinyl or on CD or as digital files. What distinguishes it from the iTunes Music Store competition isn’t just that it’s fully functional (a lot of scratch apps on the iPod are little more than vinyl-emulating sound-effects generators, and a lot of the DJ apps are bare-bones implementations with little sign of intended improvement). What distinguishes it is how it uses visual cues as part of the DJing process — spikes in the sound waves of samples signal that a beat is occurring. (A close second in this DJ caterory is Sonorasaurus, which I’m looking forward to watching develop.)

The Disquiet.com “Best of 2009″ was published as three separate lists. The other two parts are:

Part 2: Best of 2009: Free “Netreleases”