Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor

Danny Brown, Old I loved 2011’s XXX, but Danny Brown‘s new album is even better than I could have imagined. The first half is “old Danny Brown shit,” or in other words backpacker-throwback stuff that bests any backpacker album of the past five years. The second half is a psychedelic crunkstep masterpiece, like Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers with none of the irony or art-house pretension and all of its jokes up front. And it’s all delivered by an MC as thoughtful and animated as the half-dozen best rappers in the Wu-Tang Clan.

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Bob Dylan, Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 A bunch of outtakes, live cuts, unreleased material, and demos from the quirkiest years of every boomer’s favorite false idol. My friend Mark says that this is Dylan’s strongest work as a vocalist, and I hear what he means: there’s none of the bleating of his early period or the hoarse muttering of anything he’s done over the past 20 years. So many of these songs are simple, warm, and friendly that it’s hard to believe they came from the same regressive asshole who complains about iPods.

Nathan Butler,

sound artist, part-time faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Listening to music with my students Every semester I spend hours doing this. I play the music from recordings, though the works themselves may not have been created as such. I’ll just name a few artists and composers from the past couple weeks: Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luc Ferrari, Carl Stone, the Congos, Francois Bayle, Pierre Schaeffer, Pauline Oliveros, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Christian Marclay. No surprises here, just music whose structure is determined by sound itself, by chance, or by the environment from which it emerges.

NPR My place has been broken into a few times, but instead of buying some ADT system, I leave a light on and turn on NPR before I go out so it seems like someone is home. It’s my cheap home-security system. I like to think that if a burglar were at my front door, he or she would think there were people inside having serious conversations about politics and the arts. And when I’m not using NPR as an alarm system but rather actually listening to it, I like to stream the TED Radio Hour podcast.