Music

Avant-garde performance company Degenerate Art Ensemble, a collective known to weave dance theatrics with punk rock and orchestral arrangements, is meant to be experienced live.

Seattle hip-hop duo Blue Scholars could definitely call 2007 their biggest year. The last twelve months have seen the band release their album Bayani through Rawkus Records, and play gigantic gigs on the main stage at the Sasquatch Festival and supporting Q-Tip at CMJ 2007.

In August, Marco Benevento released Live at Tonic, a three-disc set that showcased his jazz keyboarding minus the usual loops and synths characteristic of his regular band, the Benevento/Russo Duo. This February he’ll take things a step further with the arrival of his debut studio album, Invisible Baby.

By design, the kind of subtle ambience played by bands like Kiln lacks the sharp, obvious hooks that dig their way into the listener’s psyche. So it’s no surprise that Kiln (previously known as Fibreforms) have escaped detection over their ten-year existence.

To commemorate the December 21 release of Judd Apatow’s newest film, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, John C. Reilly will perform as Cox with Dewey Cox and the Hard Walkers on a seven-city tour. The tour begins Wednesday, December 5, and will give some live credence to Apatow’s story about a “mythic” rock ‘n’ roll icon.

In his near decade-long career, Baltimore laptop eccentric Cex (born Rjyan Kidwell) has crossed numerous styles, including the industrial grind of Maryland Mansions, the white-boy hip hop of Being Ridden, the glitch IDM of Oops I Did It Again and, most recently, the conceptual sex funk of Actual Fucking.

Starting tomorrow, December 2, Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra will spend a week performing in Poland and Slovakia. The hard-bop cornetist/composer also has a new album to be released on Thrill Jockey on February 5.

The Voyager touch phone by LG, exclusive to Verizon Wireless, was recently introduced as Verizon’s response to the Apple iPhone. The phone is built around the Verizon V Cast software, which, similar to the software used by the iPhone, lacks the power to support a business setting, but offers lots of time-killing fun features, and several casually practical ones. For Verizon customers who feel enslaved to their

Recognized as cultural icons in Japan, the Yoshida Brothers are bringing their igneous sound to the US for the 28th Japan Expo this weekend in Los Angeles.

Comic book faction Dark Horse Deluxe has announced its latest addition to the growing merchandise line for The Umbrella Academy, the popular series authored by My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way.

As the central songwriter of dream-pop heroes Medicine, Brad Laner was responsible for some of the most ethereal and trippy pop tunes of the ’90s.