The highlight of this exhaustively curated set are the performances which allow us to listen in to a full concert or series of tunes. It is here that we experience Bert’s crowning achievement—the temporal transcendence of music consciousness. From one song to the next Jansch could transport his audience to 1930’s Mississippi, the court of King James, or a 1974 folk club in Soho without missing a beat.

Essential retrospective collection of lo-fi pioneer Linda Smith. A baker’s dozen, spanning nearly a decade, the set highlights the artist’s home recording as aesthetic approach, culminating in something that feels both in and out of time. Fans of the Sky Girl compilation take note …

Angolese joint, circa 1976. Smash that “read more” button below to stream it.

Uganda is four enveloping tracks, clocking in just under 40 minutes, of deep-fried blues-rock sludge, ecstatic free-jazz abstractions, dizzying African percussion, and psychedelic maelstrom.

Jeff Parker has had quite a year, but he may have saved the best for last. Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, released by Eremite Records last month, offers up four sidelong pieces recorded live in Los Angeles over the past few years. Here, we get to eavesdrop on Parker, bassist Anna Buttterss, drummer Jay Bellerose and saxophonist Josh Johnson in full freedom flight. It’s an uncommonly intimate live recording — the players seem to be extremely at ease in this small club setting.

In 2016, Australian label Efficient Space released Sky Girl, a near immaculate collection of gems lifted from small pressings dating from the sixties to the nineties compiled by Julien Dechery and DJ Sundae. Although highly varied, pasting together new wave tones, borderline outsider rock, and haunting folk, Sky Girl is a seamless listen. Six years on, Efficient Space offer their second compilation, Ghost Riders, put together by record collector Ivan Liechti, culled between 1965-1974.

Recorded in the ’70s and early ’80s like his exceptional album Neighborhoods and presented again by the Freedom to Spend label, Back to the Woodlands by experimental composer and public radio explorer Ernest Hood layers field recordings from his neighborhood in Western Oregon with washes of zither and synthesizer.

The turns this music takes, random as they seem, are never cheap jump-scares. They are developed organically throughout, and Johansen’s crack squad of Norwegian musicians fully commits to them. Somehow they manage to weld spiritual jazz and icy ECM and martial prog and no-wave noise into an improbable, and emotionally stirring, unity. It is one of the most inventive and consistently surprising records out this year, and it might be one of the finest.