Three years after Paul Simon's Graceland, the most identifiable member (by far) of the Talking Heads ventured way beyond his band's terrain with his solo debut. With Rei Momo, David Byrne inaugurated his plunge into Latin American music, doing so with a variety of styles, from son to salsa to merengue to samba, each lit with horn charts and piles of rhythm. The album, like Graceland, inspired some critiques (many of them vehement) of Byrne's cherry picking of styles, which smacked a bit of postmodern exotica. The album certainly genre hops, mixing national styles with lyrics that gnash about Latin American political and human rights concerns. Released a decade prior to the late-1990s fascination with native Cuban popular music, Rei Momo sheds light on the background for the explosion of interest in Buena Vista Social Club as well as the meteoric rise of Latin pop, which shares Byrne's border-agnostic mesh of all available styles. More than anything, though, Rei Momo stands as one of Byrne's most inspired outings, perhaps even as an early pinnacle of his now-lengthy solo career. —Andrew Bartlett

Sounding more like a missing Talking Heads session than anything remotely like David Byrne's 1990s-era work, The Catherine Wheel is at root a display of funky, off-time rhythms and vamps with Byrne involved at every level. The music was composed and produced to accompany a Twyla Tharp-choreographed dance event, and for program music it's brilliant enough to stand alone. The 73 minutes are almost seamless, weaving ambient soundscapes with loopy percussion-backed bass runs with guitar strumming across the top. Byrne shows his command of dramatic scoring here, spreading his wings across a huge range of styles and doing so in a way that sounds both like his old band and entirely different from them. You can hear in The Catherine Wheel where Byrne was heading (i.e., heavily rhythmic music) years before the Heads were disbanded and he ventured into life as a Brazilian- and Latin-music impresario. It's the sound of a young genius having free reign, and as such it's exceptional. —Andrew Bartlett

Engineer = David Baker; 10 tracks; trio with Sunny Murray and Byard Lancaster; recorded 1980-1981

Tracks: Acholi bwala dance, Call to prayer, Egyptian wedding, Islamic prayer school, Reed pipe & grass cutting, Courtship dances, Four men on the prayer mat, Zebaidir song with Rebabah, Hadandua cattle boys song, Hadandua love song & bells, Zande song of flight & frogs, Tamboura song, Edongo dance, Busoga fishermen, Bowed harp, Teso fishermen, Acholi Enanga, Dingy dingy dance, "Rain song" of Latigo, Bunyoro madinda, Bwala dance, Rowing chant of the Samia, Song of lamentation, Masai milking song, Karamajong childrens' slong, Turkana cattle song, Luo ritual burial dance, War drums, Call to prayer, Acholi warriors & Bwala dance, Aluar horns

Windhorse Riders by David Hykes & Djamchid Chemirani

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A single low note resonates. A second gradually becomes perceptible, then another, slowly swirling sounds that shift and pulsate from some unknown force, chords so ethereal they might be supernatural, or perhaps the vibrations of the universe. They are the voices of David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir. In Current Circulation, David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir expand beyond the scope of the traditional tantric Tibetan Buddhist chant, in which the singer holds one steady note and one unmoving harmonic. They also expand beyond the traditional Mongolian Hoomi singing, in which the singer projects soaring harmonic melodies from the overtone series of the steady fundamental. In Current Circulation, the singers create new melodies and chords by simultaneously moving both the harmonic and fundamental notes, sometimes in converging directions, or by holding the high harmonic while varying the fundamental. This kind of harmonic chanting is very demanding for the singers, and can be for the listener as well. The listener may choose to focus on the complicated tunings between harmonics and fundamentals, and the chords between the singers as they move among the notes of the inverted harmonic scale. Or, the listener may choose to let his mind soar through the architectural spaces created by the intangible energies emanating from the Harmonic Choir. The vibrations both define the space and inhabit it, shimmering through the air in a timeless dimension.