If you haven't yet, start thinking about your best-of-2013 lists. That'll be what we talk about next week.
This week: just drop your regular random 10.

Numbered list day:
1. Just not getting into Christmas music this year. And I'm OK with that.
2. Vampy Weeks is #1 in P4k, but only #3 in Spin. Ye is #1 in Spin and #2 in P4k. I would have guessed the other way around.
3. This isn't an invite to discuss the best of the year's music yet. For those wanting to make lists and whatnot, I've get my eyes set on Jan 3, to make sure that Beyoncé doesn't drop another new album on New Year's Eve at 5pm.
4. But mostly because I need to get my thoughts in order on it.
5. I spent a lot of the year listening to old records that I hadn't tried out in a long time or was trying for the first time, and exploring a certain prolific noise artist's catalogue, but didn't really sit with a lot of new stuff.
6. Is that what middle age is like?
7. Whoa that got contemplative. Save it for the Year-End list write-up, dude.
8. Regarding #5: I remembered yet another album that should have been on my Desert Island 20 40: Barry Adamson's As Above So Below. Hard to accurately describe, but it's a concepty album about sin and death, in a I've listened to Adamson's prior albums and sampled his works since and they just don't work this well. Even listening to one or two songs from it doesn't do the overall jazz-club/noir/cinematic score/vibes/rock type thing the same as listening to the whole album. Does it help anyone if I mention that Adamson was at one time a Bad Seed (Nick Cave band)? I highly recommend everyone this side of Cheaptoy give it a spin.
9. Also regarding that DI20 business: turns out I actually own Cash's AR V on CD. I must have purchased that right before our move 3 years ago because of the box I found it in. I would definitely pick AR over V for my desert island. The highlight on V seems to be "God's Gonna Cut You Down". which would work as a title on that Adamson album is the same traditional song as that which Moby used for his "Run On" off Play, which was ruined for me by Moby's 18. So one more thing that the awful I felt from 18 spread to and infected.
T. Should I have ten things in this list? I don't think I need to.

I picked up the CD of Roxette's Look Sharp! last weekend at a church rummage sale. Turns out I don't like it.

Earlier this week, Algonad asked for some help figuring out what turntable he should purchase to play twenty albums – the twenty albums he would choose to have on a deserted island. In the discussion that followed, ubelmann mentioned that he was working on sifting and winnowing his digital music library to under 64 GB. I was really intrigued by the idea of voluntary artificial constrains on a music collection. I’m a digital hoarder, and have accumulated nearly 100 GB of music. I have two small bookcases jam-packed with CDs and a small vinyl collection. So what would I do if I could only take twenty records with me to a desert island? Would I take the music most important to me, or the best stuff in my collection, or the longest albums, or what?

I’ve thought about it for a couple days, and I’m still not sure I have an answer that satisfies. Not all of the albums below contain music I have strong emotional attachment to based upon significance to specific events or periods of my life, though some of it certainly does resonate. I suppose if I were headed to that island I’d try to bargain, and ask for one supplemental CD mix of songs that I have a deep personal attachment to, just to preserve my sense of identity and emotional connection to my loved ones. But otherwise, I think I’d want to have music that was provocative and beautiful, so that’s what I have below.

CH's Desert Island Twenty

• Modern Jazz Quartet - The Complete Last Concert
• Frank Sinatra - September of My Years
• Bill Evans - Conversations with Myself
• Antônio Carlos Jobim - Wave
• Oscar Peterson - Olympia, 1963 – The Champs Élysées, 1964
• Tomasz Stańko - Leosia
• Louis Armstrong - The Hot Fives, Vol. 1
• Mary Lou Williams - Black Christ of the Andes
• Cesária Évora - São Vicente
• Anouar Brahem - Le Pas du Chat Noir
• Tower of Power - Urban Renewal
• Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
• Creedence Clearwater Revival - Willy and the Poor Boys
• Rodriguez - Cold Fact
• Bruce Springsteen - Live in Dublin
• Glenn Gould - Bach: The Goldberg Variations
• Daniel Barenboim - Chopin: Nocturnes
• Albert King - Born Under a Bad Sign
• Johnny Cash - American V: A Hundred Highways
• Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music

What's your desert island twenty?