What a long, strange trip it’s been to this moment in music. The headlines are all too familiar – major labels are dying, download this, download that, blahblahblah… All the hubbub over technology and filthy lucre has obscured what is becoming increasingly clear: 2009 may be the best year for music in a decade – a veritable golden age, if you will, captured in a twelve-month period.

This is the year of the eccentric U.K. chanteuse: Bat For Lashes, La Roux, Little Boots, Florence and the Machine… There are more and more everyday it seems: a generation of Brit girls seemingly grew up discovering their mom’s Kate Bush eight-tracks, and their lives (and ours) were changed forever… Current case in point: Marina Diamandis, who goes by the nom de roq of Marina and the Diamonds.

It’s official – the ‘90s are the new ‘80s, and Charlotte Hatherley’s new solo single is the glorious proof. Okay, they are still some greed-decade echoes in “White,” the first download from the recently released album New Worlds from the former Ash guitarist and current touring instrumentalist for Bat For Lashes.

If you are follower of Kspace, then you know we’re fans of Bat For Lashes, having written incessantly about her music, her photography, and her connection to professional cricket! Well, the Bat love isn’t stopping yet, thanks to two amazing new remixes off the lovely Ms. Natasha Khan’s album Two Suns, one of the most acclaimed of 2009.

Now, we know Khan is a creative genius – in addition to her incredible, evocative songwriting, she also thinks up and art directs many of her innovative videos and album covers, bringing high visual-art élan to everything she does. But we had no idea she was such a great landscape photographer until National Geographic recently published a series of Khan’s Polaroids documenting her travels through the American West.

Notorious for nominating more pioneering (and often relatively fringe) artists than the long-standing Brit Awards, 2009 finds Mercury rounding up a panoramic cast to round out this year’s nominations.

Dirty Projectors have it all: the akimbo folk soul of Jeff Buckley, iconoclastic pop deconstruction a la Panda Bear, irresistibly ethereal, strange harmonies recalling School of Seven Bells, surprisingly effective ethnic cops evoking their Ivy League peers in Vampire Weekend – and contender for possibly album of 2009 in the band’s latest release, Bitte Orca.

We’re positively batty for L.A.-based analog synth fetishist/wonderfully eccentric performer Tara Busch’s (http://tarabusch.com/site/home.html) incredible new remix of Bat For Lashes’ “Daniel… What Busch has done has totally transformed “Daniel”: fragments of hazy Burial dubstep, Radiohead’s melodic…

This is the best kind of music video – executed with ingenuity, not budget, yet enough lite-brite kaleidoscopic spectacle to fulfill even an Etienne De Crecy fan. And while who knows what the hell Petrol are singing about, the band’s krautrock-shoegaze groove kicks some motorik arse.