Your biggest discovery of the year!

I'll just come up with a short list or so:

Steve Reich
Can
Talking Heads
Charles Mingus
Faust
Portishead
Terry Riley
TV on the Radio
Youssou N'Dour

not much prog

Most of the older stuff I was already familiar with. This year I really got into:

Black Mountain- they only have a couple albums out, but they're amazing.
Ozric Tentacle
Porcupine Tree

I was thinking that a sociological understanding of mdern culture enables you to tweak you music to take advantage of scoial moires. I bet a lot of research is done by the record companies in order to determine what the "next big thing" is.

Making good pop is less of a musical exercise and more of an exercise in psychology/sociology. *rofl's imagining Freud's greatest hits* Maybe he could do a duet with Weber.

Edited by Deathrabbit - December 12 2008 at 00:03

Samla Mammas Manna, how to put them...outrageously outrageous yes that will do.
Robert Wyatt's solo stuff, incredibly human.
Kayo Dot, "Choirs" blew me away.
David Bowie , Nice.
The Alan Parsons Project, I really love Tales of Mystery and Imagination and I robot.

Nuke wrote: I discovered pop music! And I mean the terrible stuff that floods our radio, the antithesis of prog, the enemy of intellegence, the symptom of societal decay. I love it! Shakira, madonna, mary j blige, even britney spears (however, depends on who wrote the song for her). To be a bit less shallow, I also listened to french pop (alizee), latin american pop (aterciopelados, La Oreja de Van Gogh , shakira), and respected pop (kate bush, game theory, fiona apple). I love all of it, and I can't believe it took me so long to realize how much goes into pop music. I think that in some ways prog is easier than pop, because with prog music you don't have to make eveything so catchy. There is a fine art to pop music.

Quite right. Redundancy is a greater problem in pop than prog because it is harder to tell apart short songs with simple ideas, so it's also difficult for an artist to stand out. Unfortunately, this means luck also plays a part in the success or failure of an artist - guess it does anyway but more so in pop.  I'd say this is also true for run-of-the-mill verse-chorus rock.  But you shouldn't let Banks or Rutherford read this, they will then say that making those pop albums in the 80s was tougher than making Nursery Cryme.

This was my Prog re-entry year, so LOTS of stuff was new to me and lots of wonderful revisits to old faves.
New to me were:
Harmonium
Conventum
Pure Reason Revolution
Porcupine Tree
Willowglass
Camel' s Snow Goose
Mediaeval Baebes

Old Favorites Re-discovered:
RENAISSANCE Novella (!!!)
Anthony Phillips
Nektar A Tab in the Ocean
Uriah Heep Demons & Wizards

What a year!
Thanks ProgArchivists!

I discovered pop music! And I mean the terrible stuff that floods our radio, the antithesis of prog, the enemy of intellegence, the symptom of societal decay. I love it! Shakira, madonna, mary j blige, even britney spears (however, depends on who wrote the song for her). To be a bit less shallow, I also listened to french pop (alizee), latin american pop (aterciopelados, La Oreja de Van Gogh , shakira), and respected pop (kate bush, game theory, fiona apple). I love all of it, and I can't believe it took me so long to realize how much goes into pop music. I think that in some ways prog is easier than pop, because with prog music you don't have to make eveything so catchy. There is a fine art to pop music. Anyways, I also discovered the joys of female fronted metal like nightwish, After forever, or even within temptation. And, I discovered tons and tons of classical music. I took a class of western art music, and I am now officially a classic music affecionado. I particularly love fanny mendelssohn for some reason, the secret genius prodigy sister of felix mendelssohn. I've also become quite the fan of schoenberg's violin concerto, though that's such a taxing listen I haven't listened to anything else of his yet. As for prog, all I've really discovered is lots of prog metal bands (I mentioned 2 already). It's not so much prog metal as it is progressive in nature metal but not connected to the prog rock movement like lots of other prog metal.

Too many to mention - I'm a completely different progger than I was at the beginning of 2008.  

Rediscovering Guru Guru's Dance of the Flames after 30-odd years while enjoying PSY at the same time.