As the dust settles on another year of uninspired Mercury Music Prize nominations, The Liminal have decided upon a selection of 12 albums that far better represent the variety of extraordinary music being produced in Britain today. No entry fee, no token nominations, no cosy industry shindig, no reference to sales figures or the tedious critical consensus which dominates elsewhere: we call it the Uranus prize because it revolves on a different axis to the others. We will announce in due course who will follow in the footsteps of last year’s inaugural winner Richard Skelton.

Khyam Allami – Resonance/Dissonance
Born in Syria, of Iraqi descent, and with an album of solo oud which mixes his own compositions with versions of traditional middle eastern music, Allami’s presence on this list of British music may raise a few eyebrows. It will also raise a few questions, in particular: what does Britishness mean in our increasingly multi-cultural society? Allami has lived in Britain for most of his life, and that fact is very relevant to this record: there is something of the “outsider” to Resonance/Dissonance: in the dark spaces which fill this wonderful record, you can hear a man trying to come to terms with his roots, trying to understand where he stands in relation to his homeland in light of recent events.

Altar of Plagues – Mammal

For an album constructed on a mulch of Emily Dickinson and explicitly about the role of death in our lives (what Saul Bellow called the ‘dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything’) Mammal is a curiously enlivening experience. And let’s be clear it is an experience: 50 minutes of atmospheric, haunted post-black metal spread across four tracks that have a tidal rise and fall and a similarly oceanic sense of grace and power.

Michael Chapman – The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock
The guitarist Michael Chapman has released upwards of 35 albums since his debut in 1969, but The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock is, unbelievably, his first improv album, to which the legitimate response seems to be, “where has this come from?”. If it wasn’t already so explicitly linked to John Fahey via its title, you’d wonder if that most haunted and most haunting of figures had found some way of re-incarnating his damn(ed) self.

Demdike Stare – Triptych
Quite a year for Demdike Stare all told. With this unholy trinity of albums they managed to reference minimal techno, dub, noir-ish soundscapes and the Radiophonic Workshop; yet with their ties to the Lancashire landscape, they also managed to make their sound ancient and telluric – there is age in this wax, age that reeks of the films of Michael Reeves, and the musty camp of Aleister Crowley. These three records were as much a work of psychic dredging and incantation as they were about sculpted beat science.

Ekoplekz – Memowrekz
Nick Edwards’s gurgling, moody one-take improvisations in analogue electronics are executed with a level of dexterity that matches their immediacy. Even across Memowrekz‘s initially intimidating 33-track length there’s a sense of fluidity; this is more than a tossed-off sketchbook of experiments, it’s a stretching of the resources imbued with a willingness to meddle.

Mark Fell – Multistability

Multistability is the branch of Gestalt psychology in which things are perceived in more than one state. And this album from Mark Fell, of pioneering Sheffield minimalist glitchers SND, is his suitably scientific attempt to translate this phenomenon to music. Different rhythms and sounds compete for the same headspace, channels fade in and out in disorientating fashion – you lock onto something, it vanishes, and something else arrives in its place. This is a typically complex and thrillingly confusing record.

Gyratory System – New Harmony
There’s a real human touch behind all the synthesised sound. Warping the “here and now” through past sounds makes New Harmony remarkably contemporary. The sound of our shifting urban landscape and a soundtrack for our times.

Philip Jeck – An Ark for the Listener
Jeck’s rumination on a stanza from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Wreck of the Deutchsland” may have marked a return to familiar themes after his involvement in a version of The Sinking Of The Titanic, but the depth was greater. On An Ark For The Listener he was (w)ringing some crackly recordings of bells for all they were worth, summoning the all of water.

Okkyung Lee And Phil Minton – Anicca
Torquay’s Phil Minton has ploughed a most idiosyncratic of furrows for some forty years, and I do wonder whether his renown is destined to be limited by his choice of instrument. Or, rather non-choice. An improvising vocalist, Minton’s mastery of his own vocal chords is astonishing, and truly shocking to witness first hand. On Anicca, he and New York-based cellist Okkyung Lee trade a remarkable range of sounds: scraping, squealing, groaning, retching, screaming (typically for Minton, there is something of body horror about this) and it isn’t always easy to tell who is producing which sound. Whoever it is, there are more ideas and more skill in a few seconds of Anicca than in the Horrors’ entire career.

Petrels – Haeligewielle
Haeligewielle is Oliver Barrett’s (also of Bleeding Heart Narrative) first solo album as Petrels. It is a song of water, a song of stone. These two elements form the album’s thematic core, entwined in the story of the central figure of William Walker, the Winchester diver; but they also inform the album’s sonic makeup – onrushing, buoyant, coursing and at times dense and abrasive. It’s a record that excavates, and extrapolates outwards from, a particular and resonant historical undertaking and in its jubilant expansiveness grants it mythic, numinous life.

Alexander Tucker – Dorwytch
Many so-called “folk” artists these days think it is enough just to use the traditional instrumentation, without engaging with the experimental and uncanny spirit which underpins much of the canon. Rob Young’s Electric Eden book made a case for the Ghost Box label being a more recognisable carrier of this particular flame than the faux-folkies, and Alexander Tucker’s music too fits well in this lineage. On Dorwytch, his eldritch folk song emerges from amidst swirling loops of cello, guitar and electronics, to make something timeless and completely captivating.

TVO – Amid the Blaze of Noon
Amid the Blaze of Noon is a remarkable piece of music in its depth of descriptive ability and breadth of musical styles. Ruriah Law has made the perfect musical counterpart to the writings of Calvino, Ackroyd and Ballard, a sprawling urban masterpiece in which every listener will find some shared experience. A love letter to one of the greatest cities in the world; London.

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