Albums That Reward Listening on Headphones

Two quartets share one long performance on the stereo issue. Coleman and Don Cherry are on one side of the mix, Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard on the other. Listen past the soloist for both rhythm sections. A drummer or bassist can be pushing the music while the other group leaves room.

On “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be),” Hendrix’s guitar recedes into a stretch of shifting sounds before its tune comes back into focus. Listen from there into “Moon, Turn the Tides… Gently Gently Away.” The original stereo mix lets the sound effects drift even when the melody has stopped telling you where to look.

The little sounds around the voice in “Cocoon” make her breathing and the beat feel almost side by side. “Hidden Place” keeps that sort of detail audible as the voices become much fuller. Listen low enough that the choir and the tiny percussion seem to occupy different distances.

Pick out one of the guitars on “Discipline” and follow it until the other starts to seem like a separate tune. “Frame by Frame” brings that kind of interlocking detail into a song with a vocal center. The stereo separation gives you enough room to hear where two closely related patterns part ways.

In “Different Trains,” follow a recorded voice until the quartet copies how the words rise and fall. In “Electric Counterpoint,” pick out Pat Metheny’s guitar from earlier parts he recorded himself. Hearing both makes the album a compact lesson in how a recorded layer can become a playing partner.

Start with the bowed strings in “Bloodstone,” then move to “Big Furry Head” for a very different use of sound around your ears. The closer you follow the small noises, the harder it is to draw a line between percussion, instrument and something recorded outside a studio.

“Breaking Bread” builds its brittle rhythm from fragments of broken Bread records. On “Silicone Gel Implant,” listen for the contrast between the small clicks and the deeper pulses, then see what happens when the plastic flutes enter. Matmos make the source of a sound part of the fun without letting it get in the way of the beat.

The guitars on “Of the Girl” feel as if they sit well back from Eddie Vedder. Try the beginning of “Rival” next and see how quickly the growling sound changes the scale of the room. Those are good places to hear the album’s breadth even when the band isn’t at full volume.

The three movements of “Street Hassle” move from strings and sing-song delivery into something much more conversational. A quieter spoken voice can feel close enough to interrupt your attention while the music keeps going behind it. Try the original two-channel mix for the shifts in distance, especially across the title piece.

In “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” shifting fragments keep interrupting the space around Chuck D’s voice. “Welcome to the Terrordome” leaves even less air between the rhythmic hits and vocal. Try listening for one sound that keeps coming back while new material crowds in around it.

Bells and disjointed percussion keep catching the ear in “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” “Poor Places” gives way to noise and a repeating radio voice as the song ends. Headphones make it easier to follow the parts that seem like background until the arrangement starts to lean on them.

The soft opening of “Futile Devices” leaves each voice and plucked note exposed. Then “Too Much” keeps a pulse going through whole flurries of electronic sounds. Play them in album order and listen for what happens to the space around Stevens’s singing as the record fills in.

Follow the flute through the hazy swirl in “Feel Flows.” Then turn to “‘Til I Die,” where the voices gradually sound less like a lead and a backing part than a single broad chord. The album has room for both kinds of detail, a small sound cutting through and singers nearly disappearing into one another.

On “Take Time,” clipped speech fits into the beat closely enough that a phrase can sound like percussion. The voices in “Tokyo” have a different job, making the track feel as if it has opened onto another place. Try following a single piece of speech before listening to the whole collage.

Hear “The Great Curve” for the way a guitar break can come loose from a mass of repeated vocal and rhythmic parts. Then listen to the more spacious “Houses in Motion,” where the horn color has room to linger. It’s easier to catch both arrangements if you follow a single sound through the layers first.

Tony Williams’s cymbal pattern can be your guide through the shifting keyboards on “Shhh/Peaceful.” In the title suite, the quieter theme and the more mobile central stretch ask you to follow a different part. Listen for what keeps moving underneath the sounds that seem almost still.

Pick a small hit in “Carbon 7 (161)” and see how long you can hold it in mind as the accents move around it. On “Hatshepsut,” small percussion figures seem to make up a bigger shape one change at a time. Headphones make the off-center sounds easier to track when everything is moving fast.

Try the 2022 stereo mix of this album. The strings on “Eleanor Rigby” leave you room to hear their short strokes around the vocal. In “Tomorrow Never Knows,” follow a loop as it drops back and another comes forward. That alternation is one reason to hear the full mix beyond the opening guitar attack in “Taxman.”

“Hot Knife” builds from voices that keep adding rhythmic lines until it’s hard to choose just one. Go back to “Every Single Night” and notice how exposed the first voice was. The album can feel intimate in both cases, but “Hot Knife” gives you an entire arrangement of small disagreements to listen into.

“Ptah, the El Daoud” uses the distance between two saxophones to keep their different weights clear. On “Blue Nile,” flute and harp supply a lighter version of that spaciousness. Follow one sound across a few phrases and hear how much room the other players leave around it.