Dr. No's Ethiopium, “Oh No” (Stones Throw)

He might have been born with the name Michael Jackson, but this eclectic hip hop producer is better known as Oh No. His latest concept album is a dizzying studio creation called Dr. No’s Ethiopium. It’s inspired by Ethiopian jazz of the 1960s and 1970s -- but it reimagines the entire genre. Ethiopian jazz has produced its fair share of epic songs. But using music loops, random samples, and weird studio tricks, "Oh No" boils down gems from his record collection to 36 tracks, all clocking in at two minutes or less. "Oh No" is the younger brother of another hip hop studio wizard, the producer Madlib. So that might explain why this album is a little strange, even disorienting. But maybe that’s why it’s called “Dr. No’s Ethiopium." – picked by Joel Meyer

Heiner Goebbels – Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten (ECM)

German composer Heiner Goebbels has spent the last two decades exploding the boundaries of music and theater. He joined us just a few weeks ago on SC when his no-man live show "Stifters Dinge" was mounted by Lincoln Center at the Park Avenue Armory. His "opera," Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten (Landscape with distant Relatives), does have men and women in it, but they rarely sing, and there is no story. Instead, you get a series of excerpts from Giordano Bruno, Henri Michaux, and especially, Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein’s wartime diaries provide the key to Heiner Goebbels’s piece, which might just be a meditation on war. In Italian, French, German, English, and Hindi, the texts suggest rather than describe, and Goebbels’ music is similarly eclectic. - picked by John Schaefer

Bach: "The Well-Tempered Clavier," Book 1. Maurizio Pollini, piano (DG, two CDs)

The veteran Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini is known as one of the most cerebral and erudite pianists on the scene. But a new recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier gives you the sense of a spontaneous outpouring of emotion rather than cold hard intellectualism. Pollini has never recorded Bach’s landmark work before and you often get the sense that he had some very specific things he wanted to say. The album is the result of two decades of study by Maurizio Pollini. - picked by Brian Wise