Music.

Christoph Cox

1. David Sylvian, Blemish (Samadhi Sound) The former pop icon reemerges as a convincing experimentalist, wrapping his sumptuous baritone around Derek Bailey's angular guitar and Christian Fennesz's electronic mulch.

2. Cul de Sac, Death of the Sun (Strange Attractors Audio House) Boston's psychedelic quintet slows it down, clears space for turntables and electronics, and offers a gorgeous meditation on loss and memory.

3. Yasunao Tone, Yasunao Tone (Asphodel) Fluxus veteran Tone brings turntablism into the digital realm, producing noisy bursts and spastic stutters that teeter between order and chaos.

4. Keith Rowe, Thomas Lehn, and Marcus Schmickler, Rabbit Run (Erstwhile) A thrilling battle of the machines (guitar, radio, computer) from Erstwhile, the world's finest purveyor of new improvised music.

5. William Basinski, The River (Raster-noton) The Marcel Proust of modern music, Basinski retrieves melodic fragments from layers of tape hiss, radio static, and mechanical darter, then lays them out in epic form.

6. So, So (Thrill Jockey) Markus Popp leaves Oval behind and hooks up with sweet-voiced Eriko Toyoda to produce a dazzlingly beautiful collision of lullabies and wanton digitalia.

7. Music from the Once Festival 1961-1966 (New World) Five COs and rich liner notes document this mid-western font of the post-Cagean experimental tradition.

8. Rechenzentrum, Director's Cut (Mille Plateaux) Prickly noise, spongy beats, and a collection of abstract videos constitute this CD/DVD set, the most satisfying release yet by Berlin's hippest electronic trio.

9. Rhythm & Sound, w/ the Artists (Asphodel) Silky voices drift over waterlogged riddims: sublime, minimalist reggae from this clandestine German duo.

10. Satoru Wono, Sonata for Sine Wave and White Noise (Sonore) A bit gimmicky in its take on classical form, but Wend manages to extract from his spare materials some wicked stripped-down funk.

Christian Marclay

1. Okkyung Lee and Martin Schutz (Tonic, New York, Mar. 23) An excellent improvisation, as two adventurous cellists in their first performance together dueled with swift bows in a cloud of rosin.

2. Butch Morris and Burnt Sugar, The Rites Conductions Inspired by Stravinsky's Le Sacre DU Printemps (Trugroid/Avantgroid) Greg Tate's band under Morris's baton. Seeing the maestro in a live "conduction" is like being in his brain--his thought process at once visible and audible.

3. Ryoji Ikeda, op. (Touch) Electronic minimalist Ikeda unplugs and composes for a string quartet. A sparse progression of movements, lyrical and cinematic.

4. DJ Olive, Bodega (The Agriculture) Sensuous beats take you for a walk through Brooklyn's corner stores; aromas abound. Little gems mixed by one of my favorite turntablists.

5. Alan Licht, A New York Minute (XI) Licht composes like the writer that he is. Ideas--simply stated and highly effective--emerge from a collage of everything from loops of raw guitar to radio weather reports.

6. tba, tba (max.E) A Thomas Brinkmann easy-listening release, more champagne pop and fizz than vinyl pop and dick.

7. Tim Barnes, Toshio Kajiwara, and Marina Rosenfeld, A Water's Wake (Locust) A crucial document by three respected young players from the New York improvisation scene.

8. Christof Migone, South Winds (Strange Attractors Audio House) An electronic homage to the legendary Petomane, "fart artist" of the Moulin Rouge.

9. Yoshimi and Yuka, Flower with No Color (Ipecac) Boredoms and Cibo Matte go fishing. A dreamlike psychedelic exotica trip through nature.

10. Tonic (New York) The best little club in New York for new and adventurous music.

Laura Cantrell

1. Linda Thompson (Joe's Pub, New York, May 20) Sharing the stage with son Teddy, Thompson faltered and blossomed with heart and nerve. The audience remained rapt until the inevitable "Dimming of the Day."

2. June Carter Cash, Wildwood Flower (Dualtone) The autobiography and family album of a true Appalachian-American princess, completed just before her death in May.

3. Kate Rusby, Underneath the Stars (Pure) British folk buoyed by Rusby's warm voice and sweetly steely presence.

4. Steve Earle, Just an American Boy, The Audio Documentary (Artemis) In this sound track to his Jerusalem tour documentary, Earle rocks, rants, and otherwise expresses his patriotic urge to disagree.

5. Paul Burch, Fool for Love (Bloodshot) Burch delivers lush and literate country songs for late-night listening. Big dumb twang this ain't.

6. 39th Charles Wells Cambridge Folk Festival (Cambridge, England, July 31-Aug. 3) An unexpected heat wave made for sweaty sets by Robert Randolph, Roseanne Cash, John McCusker and Phil Cunningham, and the Waifs. Several thousand capered and grooved, combating the dry weather with warm lager.

7. Ray Price, Touch My Heart/Burning Memories (Audium Entertainment) Two '60s albums reissued together show Price making the turn from master of the Texas shuffle to crooner extraordinaire.

8. Teenage Fanclub, Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds: A Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub (Jet Set) Sunnier than Glasgow in August, sweet guitar pop from these Scottish gentlemen rockers.

9. Shelby Lynne, Identity Crisis (Capitol/EMI) A grand tour of Lynne's frame of mind via unleashed voice and guitar.

10. Gillian Welch, Soul Journey (Acony) In which Welch finds poetry in the old songs and makes some high lonesome verse of her own.

Ben Ratliff

1. Sonic Youth (Irving Plaza, New York, Nov. 29, 2002) PS to last year's list: Succinct and complex, with all the iconic poses, sounds, and gestures in top form and gooniness at a minimum. A great rock band--then and forever.

2. Nancy Wilson (Alice Tully Hall, New York, Jan. 13) A real warrior of pop, or jazz, or whatever. One minute she's delivering middlebrow standards, the next she drowns you in radical subdivisions of a single vowel.

3. Johnny Paycheck tribute (Elbo Room, San Francisco, Mar. 19) You can go through life without noticing the cult of Paycheck, and then ...

4. Allman Brothers (Beacon Theater, New York, Mar. 22) Derek Trucks's clawlike picking was close to perfect.

5. White Stripes/Loretta Lynn (Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, Apr. 19) Loretta walked through a short set; the Stripes played piercing, high-concept miniatures brimming with a sense of occasion.

6. Bill McHenry Group (Village Vanguard, New York, June 26) The young jazz saxophonist whooped it up, valorizing and demolishing standards at once.

7. Neil Young (Bonnaroo Music Festival, Manchester, TN, June 13) When you're among 80,000 people on a farm under a full moon and Neil is beaming thirty years' worth of gnarled, dense, expensively amped craftsmanship in your face, you start thinking seriously about who might be at his level among American artists of any kind.

8. Cafe Tacuba (Bowery Ballroom, New York, Aug. 5) Mexico's best mix of satiric perversity and happy pop pleasure.

9. Pelican (Knitting Factory, New York, Aug. 22) The new college heavy metal: Swans plus Black Sabbath plus Glenn Branca plus Husker Du.

10. Pharoah Sanders and Kenny Garrett Quintet (Blue Note, New York, Sept. 9) Every once in a while, a famous older jazz musician reminds you why people made a fuss of him in the first place. So it was when Sanders played the very hollering, gutbucket, free jazz, Turner-sunset music that made Coltrane a believer.

Dennis Cooper

1. New Pornographers, Electric Version (Matador) If I were God, every song on tiffs furiously insinuating CD would go multiplatinum.

2. Iron & Wine, The Creek Drank the Cradle (Sub Pop) Samuel Beam's baroque, fastidious, heartbroken, secretive art-folk songs are indescribably beautiful.

3. Wire, Send (Pink Flag) This is probably ineligible for the 2004 Turner Prize, but it should win anyway. Easily the best British artwork of the year.

4. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, Pig Lib (Matador) Malkmus discards the last vestiges of Pavement's characteristic sound and reimagines early-'70s psychedelic proto-heavy racial as a kind of limber, poetry-laced, neoprogressive riff rock.

5. Super Furry Animals, Phantom Power (Beggars XL Recording) SFA's contention that wealthy melodies, immaculate sound, and shifty song structures help the politics go down has never been more lushly borne out.

6. Guided by Voices, Earthquake Glue (Matador) Ultragenius Robert Pollard is the most infinitely talented and productive contemporary American artist, period. Includes 2003's savviest pretty song, "The Best of Jill Hives."

7. Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (La Face) The massive popularity of these thrilling expert mental artists is a real mind-boggler. This two-CD set manages the rare feat of being both the most utterly self-indulgent and nonstop inspiring album of the year.

8. Ariel Pink, House Arrest (ballbearings pinatas) Super lo-fi, frenetic, pop music-based sonic installation art by LA's newest underground sensation.

9. Deerhoof, Apple O' (Kill Rock Stars) Fussy, angular guitar work, violent drumming, and precious, noodling vocals make for a weirdly magical combination.

10. The Postal Service, Give Up (Sub Pop) Subtly complex, high-IQ, quasi-radio friendly electropop froth from glitch maestro Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel) and Death Cab for Cutie's soupy-voiced Ben Gibbard.

MUSIC: BEST OF 2003 CHRISTOPH COX teaches philosophy and contemporary music at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and is coeditor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, forthcoming from Continuum next year, CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, a New York-based artist, has investigated the intersection between sound and visual culture for more than two decades. A traveling retrospective of his work is currently on view at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Musician LAURA CANTRELL released her second album, When the Roses Bloom Again (Diesel Only), last year and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville this past summer. She is also host of Radio Thrift Shop on radio station WFMU (91.1 FM) in Jersey City, NJ. BEN RATLIFF is a jazz and pop critic at the New York Times and author of The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2002). DENNIS COOPER is a contributing editor of Artforum. Last year, he published his sixth novel, My Loose Thread (Canongate), and coedited a volume of the selected writings of Kathy Acker.