The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jpjameshansen for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

As the prediction context winner (Justice for Opeth!!!), when I went about choosing an album for the bracket, I wanted to choose something unique that would open our ears and perhaps provide a sense of discovery. Something unique to the bracket. After creating my own mini-tournament to choose, Laurie Spiegel’s Unseen Worlds came away victorious, defeating Oxbow’s King of the Jews, Nusrat’s Muust Muust, and Suzy Bogguss’s Aces on its way to claiming the crown. It is a masterpiece of computer music (not an “ambient album”!) that was essentially unheard until its 2019 re-issue. For my bracket, I listened to the album five or six times in a very short time period. The writing below (lightly edited) was written on my final listen before making my decision. It got a terrible first round matchup here against a Superchunk album I like quite a lot and will surely lose. But I hope you’ll turn off the lights or sit with your eyes closed, turn it up loud, and let Spiegel’s Unseen Worlds wash over you. Then maybe vote for it afterward. 

Simplicity leads to magnitude. While Spiegel’s first masterpiece was called Expanding the Universe, you still very much get that sense in Unseen Worlds. Though what is different in this incredibly stark, often moody compositions are how smaller beats and tones, when set against one another, create vibrant transcendence. The opening triplet of “songs” are stunning, and incredibly important in setting up how to listen to this composition, how to hear Spiegel’s software. The way one stroke bounces, blends, and echoes off the previous. It allows you to imagine the process of creation, how these difference elements might speak to one another (and to you). 

If “Three Sonic Spaces I” suggests we might be in for pure ambient minimalism, “Three Sonic Spaces II” absolutely blows the lid off that. Stupendous. “Three Sonic Spaces III” continues from the previous track in creating a mysterious, dark, ominous mood, while continuing to open up the sense of what we are hearing, what this sound world can do, and where it can go. This is what I meant when I say this album creates depth and space, absolutely living in three dimensions. That this happens with an independent created software program on a Macintosh 512K is miraculous.

And those are just the three opening tracks! From there, Spiegel works in couplets or triplets, with two or three tracks creating unique forms of sonic dialogue. I won’t walk through every track here, but there just isn’t a weak point. It brings us up and down, continually. “Finding Voice” has less manic energy than what we find in the latter two "Sonic Spaces," but it also perfectly sets up the deeper whirlwind and higher pitches beaming within “The Hollows.” Each time it start to seem repetitive, or maybe like something we have heard before, something else emerges to completely reinvent our own conception of the worlds we are tuning into.

The listen is often intense, which makes the emergence of “Strand of Life (Vivroid)” and “From a Harmonic Algorithm” something like an invasion. (I’m typically not staring at the tracklist and each time Unseen Worlds gets to those tracks, I guffaw all over again. I burst into laughter on my most recent listen. Joyous). On what planet did these come from? At the same time, perhaps this is precisely the point and shows why there is such a sense of discovery within what Spiegel is doing. These sounds are from the unseen virtual world in our computers, but that world isn’t fixed and it most certainly isn’t deducible to one thing. “Passage” is a perfect closer, creating an all-encompassing “narrative” of sound contemplatively leading us through the cosmic world that Spiegel discovered.

– @jpjameshansen