Three songs you need to hear: Sean Michaels’s playlist of the week

Time isn’t kind to hip-hop beatmakers. Trends move quickly and there’s an unending appetite for novelty. Looking back, it’s amazing that Timbaland reigned for as long as he did – from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s he was arguably the most influential producer in all of American music. But things change: Timbo’s latest mixtape, dropped just before Christmas, barely caused a blip. That’s a pity – a few of the tracks on King Stays King, including this one, live up to the record’s title. Timbaland had his first big breakthrough working with Aaliyah in 1996; two decades later, almost 15 years after her death, this (posthumous) collaboration bubbles with the same chemistry. As always with Timbo, it’s all about sound. Shakin’ has his signature synth-strings, snatches of glitch, the most scrumptious drums, but most of all it’s got Aaliyah’s ravishing voice. A voice that will stir your waters, raise the hairs on your arms, make the roses in your garden uncoil and bloom.

This solo piano piece seems as much about the spaces between the notes as the notes themselves. It opens with a shock – two swift strums of the steel piano-strings, like getting jolted awake. It’s a strange choice: This is quiet, pensive jazz, and you might think the Montreal-born pianist would want to induce a sense of dream. Instead, he rouses you from it. He asks for a more wakeful attention. The rest of Ojos de Gato, recorded in Oslo, based on a song by Bley’s ex-wife Carla Bley, oscillates between active performance and a meditative kind of drifting-off. There is none of Bill Evans’s gilded chiaroscuro. The notes all seem the same colour, a monochromatism that reminds me of canvases by Malevich or Rothko – white on white, grey on grey, blues on blues – which in turn bring me to consider the music’s spaces. Its silences. The way a scrap of melody, the smallest refrain, can be rewritten by the emptiness around it. Is this music sad, nostalgic, ambitious, desiring? The pauses seem to paint it.

Nap Eyes are one of my favourite bands in Canada. Four cats from Halifax recording lazy, rangey rock’n’roll – songs that recall the Velvet Underground or maybe actual vinyl Velvet Underground records, crackling wisdom spinning on a turntable. Roll It is a rocker’s stoned jam but it’s also epistemology – a marauding dissertation on what we know and how we know it. Nigel Chapman sings his lines with a certain distance, Father Superior and his riddles, but the band is affectless, profane, casual as a bowl of cereal. I figure this is usually the way with gurus: well-spoken long-hairs and their roving, loyal, merry men.

Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.