Tami "Making Friendz" Hart.

​For New York City, 2011 was the year local musicians proved that RSS feeds didn't kill old-school ideals like "scene" or "community." Every great band seemed to come tied to three or four like-minded bands you could love for the same reasons, often on the same bill. Maybe we read (and wrote) enough trend pieces to believe it ourselves. Maybe bands are just using Facebook connections to write the narrative before writers could. Maybe retromania has led us to think everything is back in a big way?

Don't get too excited. Bloggos still continued to rally deep and hard around the cleverest, firstiest mash-ups of hypester runoff micro-genres (good luck in 2012, A$AP Rocky, Light Asylum, CREEP and Caveman). But while so many jockeyed for positions and pixels, larger stories emerged that felt refreshingly like the street-level phonecall-and-flyer scenes of yore. As, I wrote in SPIN the new hip-hop fraternity of Das Racist, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Despot and a newly keyed up El-P represent the most energizing force in New York indie-rap since Def Jux's heyday. And as I wrote in the Voice, a beercan-ducking, sweat-gushing, feedback-obsessed swarm of new pigfuck bands have been laying waste to 285 Kent, including The Men, White Suns, Pygmy Shrews and Pop. 1280. Often pushing the boundaries of what modern metalheads can play and wear, there was a downright onslaught of forward-thinking, critically acclaimed extreme metal releases (Liturgy, Tombs, Krallice, Hull, Batillus), which helped turn New York into the most important metal scene in the country for maybe the first time ever. Hell, if record labels still had the money to fly people out here, they'd be swarming!

Below, the 2011 edition of our annual Yes In My Backyard mixtape—this year's encompasses 18 tracks, over nearly 80 minutes—which collects this year's greatest music from New York City.

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The cover of Driphouse's Root 91.

​Driphouse is a dizzying cumulus cloud of leapfrogging electronic squelch courtesy of Daren Ho, formerly of Iowa City psych-noise institution Raccoo-oo-oon. Ho made the trip to Brooklyn in 2008, and since then his sparkling, crystalline synth tones (released on tastemaking cassette labels like NNA and Gel) have established him as a cuddlier, kraut-kissed younger brother to local sound artists like Black Dice, Burning Star Core and Growing. His indispensable new tape, Root 91, appears on Root Strata in an edition of 100, swaddled in an absolutely gorgeous negative-space-on-white letterpressed J-card. For Root 91, Ho gently taps on pianos and harpsichords while quirky synths bubble about in brittle ecstasy. Check out "Chompers World," which basically sounds like Erik Satie adrift in Morton Subotnick's gurgling galaxies. And don't miss him in Mandelbrot & Skyy, his heavy-komische duo with Rene Hell, during New York's inaugural Neon Marshmallow festival next month.

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