YEAR-END LISTS typically hew to the comfy round number 10. And although Top 10 has a ring to it, Silicon Valley’s melting pot of musical talent fused genres, collaborated, innovated and turned out so many great LPs and EPs this year that it became a nearly impossible task to narrow it down to even the Top 15 releases, so we squeezed one more pick for a favorite 16. Here, in no particular order, are some of 2013’s best local releases.

The Bangerz: PRiSM
PriSM, the Bangerz’ second soundtrack LP for the Jabbawockeez Las Vegas stage show, showcases the crew going deeper into some amazing futuristic soundscapes. The crew has always straddled a line between throwback hip-hop and cutting edge electro-jams, but it’s all forward thinking with this release. In a sign of the times—as the line between EDM and hip-hop continues to blur—there’s a healthy dose of dubstep influence on this record, as well.

Rebelskamp: The Kill
Going into a recording studio without any written material doesn’t sound like a winning formula for an album, yet Rebelskamp produced a remarkable LP this year. They’ve gotten so good at improvisation that they don’t sound like they’re inventing the music on the spot. Yet, the spontaneity of such a freeform formula remains intact. These songs go any and everywhere, drifting through funk riffs, psychedelic space jams and crazy free-jazz. A highlight is “The Rebel,” with local rapper Dirtbag Dan freestyling a couple verses.

Philthy Dronez: Wepa Life
Up until recently, Matt Gonzales was known mostly as the go-to guitarist for local bands. (Anya and the Getdown, Raul y Mexia, Chris Reed—to name a few). Now the world gets a taste of his solo project: producing Latin-infused electro-beats under his alter-ego, Philthy Dronez. His debut EP, Wepa Life, was released on Global Bass Experience a few months back. It’s a short EP, about 15 minutes, but it’s bumpin’. It centers on the emerging new-cumbia sound, but also veers into electronic and hip-hop territory, and even some old-school cumbia.

Boboso: Grown Ass Man
There are three things Boboso raps about: food, cats and his love for the female derriere—often within the same song. Yet, he’s not exactly a comedy rapper. He can really rhyme. Plus, his production skills are top-notch: classic West Coast beats with surreal twists. The Beach Boys sample on “That Breathe In, Breathe Out Shit” is a particular highlight. Jeff Rosenstock from Brooklyn punk band Bomb the Music Industry also lays down an impressive verse on “Sartorial Panache.”

Careless Hearts: Alum Rock
Alum Rock isn’t just the latest album by Careless Hearts; it’s the culmination of five years of life-changing events. They started out a laidback Americana group, but since 2008’s Heart’s Delight, they’ve gone through some major lineup changes and played a life-changing show with punk legend, Stooges guitarist James Williamson. It shows in the roots-rock, power-pop songwriting on Alum Rock. The release rocks harder, louder and with more passion than their first two albums.

Antwon: In Dark Denim
In Dark Denim isn’t as accessible as Antwon’s prior work and takes the San Jose rapper in a new direction. His beats are grimier, the samples are darker and the lyrics are dirtier than ever. “Work 4 Me,” with its down-and-dirty hip-shaking beat and raunchy lyrics, sounds like he’s seducing the listener. All the while, Antwon’s fanbase continues to grow, with a successful run at SXSW, an appearance at Treasure Island Music Festival and two national tours during the last year.

The Albert Square: How’s Everybody’s Doings?
Last year, Sim Castro reformed his punk rock outfit the Albert Square. The songwriting is much in the same vein, subtly nuanced ’80s and ’90s post-punk-inspired, but the band’s performances are far more unhinged—a good thing. Their newfound spastic energy complements Castro’s reflective songwriting quite well. However, the strongest song, “(Proud) Parents,” is oddly the most reserved track on the EP.

The Limousines: Hush
It’s been a couple years since synth-pop duo the Limousines released their brilliant debut, Get Sharp. Despite all the views they were getting on YouTube and radio play they received, they had major problems to sort out with their label, but Hush was worth the wait: Its synth beats are dancier, the production is more refined and in place of their signature clever nihilism, Hush offers lyrics that are raw and honest. Hush was made with funds from a Kickstarter campaign that sought $30,000 but ended up raising $75,000.

Dinners: Black Rabbits
If such a thing as a San Jose “supergroup” exists, Dinners might be that band, featuring members from Worker Bee and Doctor Nurse. Dinners go into a different direction than either Worker Bee (moody indie rock) or Doctor Nurse (psychedelic folk) with lo-fi noise-pop and a heavy dose of Guided By Voices influence. At first listen, Black Rabbits sounds like the kind of four-track recording popular with ’90s indie bands, but it’s actually a quite meticulously, thoughtfully crafted album. The cover art is amazing, too.

Rey Resurreccion, M-10, Locsta Villan: First Street Sessions
Some of rapper Rey Resurreccion’s finest works are collaborations. Last year, he worked with the Bangerz to make some killer old school hip-hop tunes. This year, he got together with emcees M-10 and Locsta Villan and created the 1st Street Sessions. Together the trio has produced eight laid-back, dreamy hip-hop songs that should be on urban stations all across the country.

Raul y Mexia: Arriba y Lejos
Brothers Raul y Mexia released a fun, passionate Spanish-language album this year on Nacional Records, the current leaders of cutting-edge Latin music. Arriba y Lejos combines elements of cumbia and other traditional Latin sounds with hip-hop and electronica. The duo, who are sons of Hernán Hernández, bassist of famous Norteño band Los Tigres del Norte, has created something that both pays tribute to classic Latin music, like their father created, and all the newer American music they grew up with here in San Jose.

Sean Blak: #Basslife
Sean Blak books live hip-hop shows, puts on battle-rap events and holds a weekly Tuesday night residency, “the Trap Shop” at Johnny V’s. He’s also a prolific rapper, with a ton of lo-fi, surreal homemade hip-hop records online. His best this year is the LP #Basslife. On it, he takes some of the strangest, most intimate beats and makes them sound like outrageous club bangers.

Slime Girls: Vacation Wasteland
By the time Slime Girls came together, the chiptune scene was already well-established. Yet they’ve still been able to find their own sound within it, taking all the old Nintendo chip Gameboy sounds and mixing them with surf, punk and ska. Their latest EP, Vacation Wasteland, is a seriously fun collection of instrumental chip-rock tunes. It was originally pressed on cassette because they’re that into old technology.

David Brookings: The Maze
The Maze is David Brookings’ sixth full-length album since 2000, yet he’s still working on building his fanbase in the Bay Area. He moved to Northern California from the Memphis by way of Richmond, Virginia, in 2009, and produced his five albums before heading West. The Maze, like its five predecessors, brings together ’60s psychedelic-rock and ’80s New Wave.

Derek See: She Came This Way
The title track to Derek See’s She Came This Way is an amazing psychedelic-pop gem. At first, See, who normally plays guitar in soul group the Bang, recorded it, along with a couple other tunes, just for fun. It was good enough for an indie label to offer to release it, and they even ran out of the first pressing. It’s the kind of song that, had it been written in 1967, would have been a Summer of Love FM hit, no doubt.

Noothgrush: Split LP with Coffins
Back in the ’90s, sludge metal group Noothgrush were a pretty big deal. Along with Sleep and a few other bands, San Jose boasted a strong doom metal scene. Noothgrush just recently reformed, and they also just released a split record with Japanese metal band Coffins. The third track, “Thoth” is particularly special, as it contains spoken clips from the late, great, much beloved KFJC DJ, Cy Thoth, who died earlier this year.

Iggy And The Stooges could be playing oldies shows in Vegas or at the Mountain Winery like their contemporaries. Instead of reliving their glory days, the four-decade-old group is enjoying the peak of their success now. In 2013, the band released a searing LP, Ready To Die and played to slam-dancing audiences at outdoor festivals from Australia to Belgium. They take a victory lap with their last scheduled show of 2013 on Sept. 28 at C2SV Music Festival, but it wasn’t always this way.

For decades, the Stooges were more a legend than a band. In seven years of demented existence, from 1967 to 1974, their records sold so poorly that they were kicked to the curb by their label, despite the fact that Danny Fields—the wunderkind of the music industry at the time, who built the careers of Jim Morrison and Lou Reed, and discovered the MC5 and Ramones—was so convinced of Iggy Pop’s genius that he personally took over management of the band.

Pop himself didn’t seem to take offense, didn’t even seem to care. In Legs McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s punk history Please Kill Me, Pop admits he can see it from the record industry’s point of view. “I mean, they must have thought ‘These guys are maniacs, you know, the singer attacks the audience, they’re all loaded, they don’t communicate nicely with us, their songs won’t go on the radio … So I could see their point. But hey, I didn’t know we were that way. I saw it differently. I thought we were great. I thought we were the best band in the world. We knew what we were doing was better than anybody.”

And yet, by the time Raw Power came out—in 1973, a full year after it was recorded—the man who would eventually be hailed as the Godfather of Punk was literally lying in the gutter on Sunset Boulevard. At the same time that he was doing his most famous shows at Max’s Kansas City in New York—where his antics rolling around in broken glass and walking across tables and generally bleeding all over the place got him sent to the hospital for stitches one night by order of Alice Cooper, who was in the crowd—Pop was a music industry pariah. Kicked out of his house, hooked on heroin and couch-surfing between gigs, he was hurtling toward either certain death or rehab.

Luckily, it was the latter. It wouldn’t be until 1976 that Bowie would help Pop reinvent himself as a successful solo artist, with iconic songs like “Lust For Life” and “The Passenger” paving the way for his first and only mainstream Top 40 hit, 1990’s “Candy.”

Over the course of those years, the legend of the Stooges grew exponentially. Their three albums, 1969’s The Stooges, 1970’s Fun House, and Raw Power, lacerated the indie-rock generation with a jagged, heavy sound that was unlike anything else. Forensic evidence of those three records is all over almost every significant rock movement since, from punk to stoner metal. Stooges classics like “Search and Destroy” were enshrined in the holy canon of rock, and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” had become one of the most covered songs of all time.

The problem was not just that no one could see the Stooges, but that barely anyone had seen them, ever—by the turn of the century, almost everyone who had seemed to be in some book talking about it. The rest of us knew their indescribable live shows only via the stories handed down, and through famous bootlegs like Metallic KO, Jesus Loves the Stooges and tons more (a legit box set of Iggy bootleg material, Roadkill Rising, was released in 2011). The world wanted a Stooges reunion.

In 2003, it got it. The whole thing was actually set in motion by Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis and SoCal punk legend Mike Watt, who made original Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton a sort of ad hoc member of their band J Mascis and the Fog. Whenever they could, they’d get him to play with them when they toured in the early 2000s, and they’d always break out a handful of Stooges classics. Eventually, they roped in Scott Asheton, Ron’s brother and the original drummer for the Stooges.

By this time, Pop had taken notice, and he invited the Ashetons to play on his 2003 solo album Skull Ring. Of the three songs they collaborated on, only one—the title track—really recaptured the sludgy, almost psychedelic proto-punk of their original sound. Still, that was more than enough to give everyone a taste of how good a Stooges reunion could be. That same year, it came together, with the band showing their appreciation for Watt’s role by inviting him to replace original bassist Dave Alexander. Alexander had been fired from the Stooges for drinking too much—a seemingly impossible feat, to be sure—and died in 1975, a mere 27 years old, of complications related to exactly that. Watt joined the band for the first Stooges performance in three decades at Coachella in 2003, and played with the reunited band for five and a half years.

The reunion also brought Steve Mackay, the saxophonist who had crafted the Stooges’ unique horn sound, back into the fold. It produced a 2007 reunion album, The Weirdness, that was appropriately titled. It certainly couldn’t have been called The Greatness, although a couple of tracks got close to that classic Stooges mix of nihilism and shake appeal.

It all seemed to come crashing down though, with the death of Ron Asheton in 2009. Just as the band had begun adding classics from the Raw Power years back into their set, Asheton’s reported heart attack put a stop, once again, to the Stooges.

But it led to what was almost a whole new reunion of Iggy and the Stooges. That was the moniker the band used in the Raw Power era, when James Williamson played guitar. After his warm-up at the Blank Club with local favorites the Careless Hearts—a now-legendary show at which the Hearts’ Paul Kimball filled in for Iggy with eerie accuracy—Williamson rejoined the band in Brazil, and the new era of Iggy and the Stooges began.

The Stooges have played more than 100 dates, but stage diving seems to be taking its toll on the 66-year-old frontman. Pop had to be carried off stage after the Aug. 25 Riotfest show in Toronto, during which he leapt into the crowd and dropped his microphone.

The Sept. 28 San Jose show is The Stooges’ only West Coast performance and the last show of the year. The band will take a needed rest and no dates have been booked for 2014.
“We’re ready for a break,” Williamson says without saying when the legendary band will play again. With a touch of exaggeration, he adds, “We’re so old, you never know if there’s going to be another show or not.”

Guitarist James Williamson will deliver the keynote music address at the C2SV Technology Conference and Music Festival in Silicon Valley at noon on September 28 before he performs with Iggy and The Stooges at St. James Park later that evening.

Williamson’s story is one of the more remarkable ones in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. As member of Iggy and The Stooges in the 1970s, Williamson created punk rock’s signature guitar sound, then settled into a quiet career as a Silicon Valley engineering manager. After 30 years, he took an early retirement buyout offer as Sony’s Vice President of Technology Standards and rejoined the band.

Completing a world tour that’s taken The Stooges from Australia to Europe, the legendary band will play its final show of its triumphant sweep on Williamson’s home turf in Silicon Valley. Williamson is an ideal icon for a conference and festival celebrating “Creative Convergence,” the fusion of information technology and the creative arts. In February, he’ll be inducted into the  Engineering Hall of Fame at California Polytechnic University. “To my knowledge, I am the only holder of a Rock n Roll HOF and an Engineering HOF,” Williamson says.

At the keynote, Williamson will talk about his journey from juvenile delinquent and rock pioneer to mild mannered corporate executive, in which one of rock’s great guitarists was embedded, undetected, in a big consumer electronics company. The keynote will take place in the newly-opened wing of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on the last day of the C2SV tech conference.

Born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma and Detroit, Williamson first played music with Iggy Pop while in high school and joined The Stooges in 1970, but the band was a short-lived trainwreck of drug-fueled excess and commercial failure.

In 1972 David Bowie invited Pop to record in London. Williamson joined him there, co-wrote all of the songs with Iggy, and played all of the guitar parts for The Stooges’ classic 1973 album, “Raw Power.” Kurt Cobain called it his favorite album of all time, and Cee Lo Green ranks it among his favorites as well.

Williamson’s jagged, loud, raunchy Detroit guitar sound inspired the punk rock movement that transformed rock music and continues to influence guitarists to this day. “He has the technical ability of Jimmy Page without being as studious, and the swagger of Keith Richards without being sloppy,” says Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.

Photo courtesy of James Williamson.

“The first time I heard him play,” Iggy Pop told Britain’s The Guardian in an interview, “which was in a basement in Ann Arbor, he did something that later became known as punk or speed metal—a great number of chords, almost all at once—but which at that time came from no known musical vocabulary.”

As the band disintegrated in the mid- and late-1970s, Williamson left the music world and earned an electrical engineering degree from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

He worked for silicon chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) from 1982 to 1997, then spent more than a decade as Sony’s Vice President of Technical Standards. He raised a family in Saratoga and didn’t talk to his colleagues and neighbors about his platform shoe days.

Photo courtesy of James Williamson.

Unlike many Silicon Valley managers who get the early retirement letter when they reach their 60s, Williamson didn’t have to open a frozen yogurt franchise. He accepted Sony’s buyout in 2009 and rejoined the Stooges after a three-decade break.

Williamson warmed up for his return to the stage with the Careless Hearts, a San Jose band, at the Blank Club in 2009. He’s been touring the world with Iggy and The Stooges for four years now.

Williamson’s keynote will be open to badge holders of the C2SV Technology Conference and VIP ticket holders for the Iggy and the Stooges concert later that day in St. James Park.

The concert ticket is sold in combination with a wristband that enables concertgoers to experience three days of music at more than 12 venues in Downtown San Jose.

The Creative Convergence Silicon Valley technology conference will feature three days of speakers, including many notable Silicon Valley CEOs, entrepreneurs, technologists, authors and academics.

More info on tickets.

Dan Pulcrano is the founder and organizer of the Creative Convergence Silicon Valley (C2SV) Technology Conference and Music Festival. Follow him at @Pulcrano.

A lot has happened to Derek See in the last year. It’s been about that long that since The Bang, the girl-group band he started with his partner Angeline King, broke up.

“There was a lot of turmoil,” he says, in the line-up at the time, with different members pushing for different directions. He and King wanted to eventually re-start the band, but they didn’t want to rush it.

“We took a little bit of time off,” says See. “We thought a lot about how we were going to approach it when we regrouped.”

And indeed, The Bang 2.0, which headlines at the Blank Club Saturday, is quite a bit different than its predecessor. Now, instead of three girl singers up front, there are two—King and new addition Rachel Mae Havens—but the whole band sings, as well. Richard Gutierrez has joined on drums, with Jafar Green holding down the basslines.

Perhaps the biggest change musically, however, is the addition of a co-lead guitarist in Alison Green (of the all-girl Kinks tribute band the Minks). It’s a surprising change, since See’s guitar is synonymous with the sound of the Band, but he says he couldn’t be happier.

“It allows me to play more how I want to. Trying to play horn parts and keyboard parts, it was exhausting,” See admits.