But L’essentiel finally provides US listeners with a (legitimate) way to hear 2 songs — “Dans la glace” and “Un toit étranger” — from Holden’s brilliant Fantomatisme, perhaps my favorite 2009 release. Fantomatisme walks a crazy tightrope between the fragility of largely acoustic arrangements and Armelle Pioline’s voice, and Uwe Schmidt (aka Señor Coconut)’s otherworldly electronics. It’s simultaneously hushed and noisy, arresting and compelling, and not quite like anything else I’ve ever heard. It’s also virtually impossible to (legally) hear it in the United States; Amazon says We don’t know when or if [the CD] will be back in stock; no digital service I could find is licensed to sell Fantomatisme in the US.

I think record companies that want to survive need to remove all barriers between music and the people actually willing to pay for it. Nationalistic protectionism isn’t doing anything but depriving Holden and their (former, I hope) label of resources to help create Holden’s next release (which I really want to hear). Anywhere in the world, you ought to be able to type “holden fantomatisme” into Google and get a link to buy it. You can’t. But you can get a link to hear it. (Although you may need to dip your web browser in lye afterwards.)

In the meantime, at least L’essential is readily available from Amazon’s MP3 store or iTunes.

There’ve been a lot of release-a-new-song-every-day/week/month/whatever projects on the internets in the past few years; this one is a new song written and recorded by Hayman every day in January. This sounds like a schedule that might encourage the artist to be slapdash about both the song-making and the recording part, but Hayman is really smart about he approaches it. He’s booked a lot of friends to help with the songs, including a co-write or two, and some lead vocals not delivered by his own distinctive-but-not-to-everyone’s-taste-and-admittedly-rather-nasal voice. Most importantly, he’s aware that it would be easy to let the writing quality slip, and he’s consequently conscious about avoiding his comfort zones, using tactics like recording in a park he avoids because his dog was hit by a car there* to jolt himself out of routine. Although he warns upfront that the songs “won’t all be good,” I’d say that remains to be seen.

I even watched a handful of the video diary entries, something I almost never do.

If you need more persuading, here’s a bloke who seems to have committed himself to review each individual track with a much less brief take.

* Beaulah was badly hurt, but happily recovered, and appears in the video diary.

Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.

Colleen (real name: Cécile Schott)’s story would be intriguing even if I didn’t love the music. She assembled her first release, 2005’s Everyone Alive Wants Answers by manipulating samples from old records — the sort of records that are usually filed in the “classical” section, whether or not the composers are strictly from the early 18th through early 19th centuries. That album’s extensive use of loops and the often prominent presence of vinyl surface noise gave it a superficial gloss of glitch-pop electronica, despite the unusual sound source choices.

It found considerable critical favor, and when in response Schott began touring, she felt that performing with a laptop would be too sterile and uninteresting, and opted to work live with acoustic instruments. The ensuing The Golden Morning Breaks was assembled from original source material, and much less reliant on looped sounds.

Les Ondes Silencieuses (The Silent Waves) is even sparer. My wonderful girlfriend observes that Erik Satie is perhaps the best touchpoint. I also hear some of Harry Partch’s fascination with the tonal qualities of unusual instruments, although Schott adds the dimension of manipulating the sound sources significantly after they are digitized. Since Schott’s compositions are assemblages, they don’t fetishize performance technique the way many “classical” recordings do. Her lack of “first chair” control over the clarinet (for example) imparts a certain unusual quality of fragility, (even, almost naivety) to her music.

Les Ondes Silencieuses has a very sculptural aspect. “Echoes and Coral” evokes images of moving slowly through some darkened, twisting gallery and seeing its bell notes revealed like hanging beacons as I turn corners. The concluding section of the baroque-influenced harpsichord piece “Le Labyrinthe,” despite its name, makes me think of circling a single, dense, complex, object and observing the play of light and shadow on its surface. (I noticed that when Schott talks about her creative process she sounds more than a little bit like my favorite sculptor, Sarah Sze)

Colleen’s music is often, but not always, pretty in a conventional, accessible, sense. There’s ample musical tension and discordance to keep it wll clear of new age/aural wallpaper territory. At its most intense, as on “Past the Long Black Land,” and “Le Bateau,” Schott’s viola de gamba even evokes a more stately version of John Cale’s mind-bending see-saws on “Black Angel’s Death Song.”

Throughout it’s a surprising, thoroughly rewarding musical experience and very highly recommended.