Courtesy of the artist

Sonic Youth will perform at All Tomorrow's Parties on Saturday.

Earlier this week, film director and overall cool guy Jim Jarmusch was a guest DJ on All Songs Considered. He curated a night at the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival going on this weekend and shared some of his picks, including Sunn O))) and Boris, Hope Sandoval and T-Model Ford. And right now, Bob Boilen and I are in Monticello, N.Y., to record a number of these concerts with WFMU. The performances will archived on the site this coming Wednesday, Sept. 8, but in the meantime, we'll be tweeting (@allsongs) and putting up photographs on our Flickr page all weekend.

Here are some of the concerts we plan to archive, with more to come:

Sonic Youth
BEAK>
The Books
GZA
Girls
Kurt Vile
Hope Sandoval
Explosions in the Sky

More soon...

Apple now has its own social network for music lovers. It's called Ping.  It's built into the latest version of iTunes.  I signed up last night and it seemed like I came to the party alone.

Screenshot of Ping

There are so many reasons why Ping failed me.  First off, I could choose to let Ping figure out my favorite music or I could pick it myself.  I actually let it choose because Apple's algorithms are always so cool and it said my favorites would be based on "music I like, rate, review, or purchase."  That seemed great to me. I'm one of those geeks who star-rates the songs on my iPod.

So when it said I liked Fleetwood Mac, Focus, Brent Dennen, The Eels and Lady Gaga, I knew something was just not right. These were all artists I'd purchased from the iTunes store for various show reasons, but not music I cared much about. I saw that someone on Twitter said they bought a Justin Beiber song for their 12 year-old sister and now it's showing up on the buyer's favorites list.

You can manually make your list of favorites, but try picking The Beatles or AC/DC.  In other words, it isn't what's in your library that matters, it's what can be bought on iTunes. Even Apple knows that only a small percentage of what's in someone's iTunes was actually bought on iTunes. They need to fix this.

Later, I went looking for artists to follow and only Jack Johnson, U2, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry were there.  That wasn't the party I was looking for.

I did find Rick Rubin, so now I have one friend or Pinger or whatever.

I'd heard you could find your Facebook friends with Ping and thought that would turn up a huge well of smart music fans to follow. But last night Facebook pulled the plug on Apple's interface between Ping and Facebook. Facebook says that Ping could cause "site instability" and "infrastructure" problems. Could Ping really take down Facebook? These could just be kinks to work out and Facebook states that they're working with Apple to resolve the issue, so we'll see.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg signed up, so I guess he's curious. I'm curious, too.  I'm curious to see what people are listening to, to see what bands are playing and to read comments about concerts and so on.

Sure there's Last FM and others that do similar things, but there are 160 million worldwide iTunes users and it would be amazing to see on a daily basis what people in Turkey or India or Australia are listening to and talking about.

Apple is jump starting a community with Ping and like all software it needs some real world testing. But it's the people who make the community.

So if you're curious, let's "Ping" for a few months and see what we think.

I signed up as Bob Boilen, how about you?

Despite being a wildly successful (and amazing) album, 1997's Buena Vista Social Club was never supposed to happen, at least not how its creators originally intended.  When producer Nick Gold first conceived of the project, he assembled a group of Mali's best musicians and planned to fly them to Cuba for a recording session.  But the group ran into visa problems and never made it.

Now, nearly 15 years later, Gold has finally brought together the original batch of musicians for a new recording session and project they're calling Afrocubism.  It includes Cuban guitarist and singer Eliades Ochoa (he's the one who sings on the Buena Vista opening cut "Chan Chan"), Ochoa's band Grupo Patria, ngoni lute player Bassekou Kouyate, guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, kora master Toumani Diabate, griot singer Kasse Mady Diabate and balafon player Lassana Diabate.

What I've heard of Afrocubism so far sounds pretty awesome.  It isn't out until Oct. 19.  But they've put out this little mini-documentary about the project that gives a good taste of what to expect.

2010: "Wetter," from the CD Un Ange Passe, by Julian Shah-Tayler, which I discovered today while opening the mail:

1983: "Major Tom (Coming Home)," from the album Error In The System, by Peter Schilling:

If you time it out just right, you can play both the audio file AND the video at the same time.  They sound like they were meant to go together.

A day after announcing his first album of new songs in five years, Sufjan Stevens is offering a taste of what the record will sound like, with a new track on his website.  The song, "I Walked," is available for a free download.

Courtesy Asthmatic Kitty

Asthmatic Kitty sent out a press release saying Stevens' new album would have more electronics and less banjo.  True to their word, "I Walked" has glitchy, hip-hop inspired beats with some very simple synths lines, all set against Stevens' gentle voice.  It's fleshed out with lots of reverb and delay.  Count me among the early fans of this new direction.

What do you think?

Sufjan Stevens will release his first full-length album in five years on Oct. 12.  It's called The Age Of Adz (pronounced "odds") and comes just a week after Stevens released the All Delighted People EP.  Both are available through the Asthmatic Kitty website.

Marzuki Stevens

The label announced the new record from Stevens this morning.  According to a press release from Asthmatic Kitty, The Age Of Adz doesn't rely on any specific concepts, such as Stevens' previous albums about states or urban expressways.  But it does share "similar themes of love, loss, and the apocalypse."  The label also says that the banjos and acoustic guitars heard on earlier records from Stevens have been replaced with more electronics and heavier orchestrations.

Stevens was a remarkably prolific artist when he decided to create an album based on each of the 50 states in the U.S., beginning with 2003's Michigan.  It was soon followed by a separate collection of songs called Seven Swans.  Then came Illinois and another collection of outtakes from Illinois called The Avalanche.  But Stevens then turned his attention to writing, directing and scoring the 2009 film The BQE and later announced he was abandoning the "states" project, which he called a promotional gimmick.

Asthmatic Kitty says The Age of Adz is based loosely on the paintings of outsider artist Royal Robertson.  One of his pieces is used for the album cover.

Courtesy Asthmatic Kitty

You can hear Stevens' entire discography, streaming for free online, at his Bandcamp site.

With few exceptions, Bob Boilen and I can usually guess what a CD is going to sound like just by looking at the cover art.  I guess when you look at several hundred discs a week, you start to see patterns.   But you can add Melissa Czarnik's new album, Raspberry Jesus, to the list of ones I got very, very wrong.  Here is is:

courtesy of the artist

What would you guess?  Angular post-punk?  Chamber pop? Speed metal (but ironically)?  I figured it was some sort of mopey, introspective, whisper-rock-folk, singer-songwriter fare (not that there's anything wrong with that).  It turns out Czarnik is indeed a poet, a gifted writer, with a fantastic voice.  But her medium isn't broody folk.  It's hip-hop.

Czarnik is a soulful, fluid rapper, backed by the five-piece Eric Mire Band.  Together, they've produced a surprising, potent and thoughtful mix of funk, jazz, soul and hip-hop.  Czarnik's flow reminds me a lot of Lauryn Hill's, so it wasn't surprising to learn that Czarnik cites Hill as an influence.  She's even included a few short skits interspersed throughout Raspberry Jesus, a bit like Hill did on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Raspberry Jesus is Czarnik's sophomore release, coming two years after her debut, Strawberry Cadillac.  I had a hard time picking just one cut to feature here, so you'll definitely want to check out the rest of Raspberry Jesus.  You can hear and learn more at Czarnik's website.

Download more music each weekday from great unknown artists in our Second Stage podcast.

Submit your music for possible inclusion on Second Stage or All Songs Considered.

Odd Juxtapositions

All Songs Considered producer Robin Hilton was thumbing through some of the CDs he keeps neatly alphabetized in a book.  He was trying to find one he could play just to annoy me.  But during his search, it was seeing the David Gilmour solo disc sitting uncomfortably next to the Andy Griffith CD that made me laugh out loud. Those weird and wonderful juxtapositions in our music collections say a lot about who we are.  (What does this say about Robin?)

So, go through your CD collection, album collection, iTunes playlist or whatever and tell us two records that sit oddly next to one another.  You can also tell us a bit about who you are and how this musical pairing might shed some light on your personality.

In just a swift glance I found this in my collection: Martha and the Vandellas next to The Mars Volta.

courtesy of the artist

By now — by which I mean, "in the last few hours, or the equivalent of six pre-Internet news cycles" — many of you have already heard a 35-minute composition titled, elegantly enough, "U Smile 800 Percent Slower." The concept of the piece couldn't be simpler: A DJ named Nick Pittsinger (a.k.a. Shamantis) took "U Smile," a hit by pint-size pop sensation Justin Bieber, and did nothing to it except make it eight times slower.

[UPDATE: We tested the track in the office, with the aid of electronic-music ace Sami Yenigun, and Pittsinger clearly used a phase vocoder to smooth it out — it's not merely slowed down. Also, for those who doubt its origins, it's most definitely Bieber.]

[UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Pittsinger himself wrote us to say, "I didn't use a phase vocoder; I used a program called paulStretch. I think it might have that technology built into it!"]

When I first heard about the idea, I immediately thought slowed-down Bieber might sound like, I don't know, some sort of downtrodden hobo bluesman. But the pitch doesn't change, giving him sort of celestial-choirboy quality, while the music becomes almost ludicrously majestic and beautiful. If I got this record in the mail with the tag ("Recommended If You Like: Sigur Ros, Stars Of The Lid"), I'd immediately rip it to the iTunes folder I've got titled "Music For Editing."

Click here to hear "U Smile 800 Percent Slower" on Soundcloud, and watch the video for the original on YouTube below. Heard side by side, the two versions of the song say a lot about how much artistry and craft go into producing pop music in 2010.

Enlarge courtesy of the artist

Not that we like Bon Iver or anything, but "Skinny Love" just happens to be the most commonly played song on a certain mope's iPod.

courtesy of the artist

Not that we like Bon Iver or anything, but "Skinny Love" just happens to be the most commonly played song on a certain mope's iPod.

A while back, I asked readers to consider the dustiest far reaches of their CD collections to name the artists they'd abandoned: musicians whose works were once purchased with painstaking loyalty, only to languish for years, owned but abandoned.

A few wisenheimers popped up to pose the question, "What's a CD?" — which is to say, "Who still bothers to maintain a music collection in any sort of physical form that doesn't involve a USB connection?" Leaving that issue aside (though I still collect CDs, as do most but not all of my NPR Music peers), I figured it'd make sense to throw the digiphiles a bone. So here goes: What song have you played on your computer more than any other?

If you're an iTunes user like me, the answer can't be fudged: There's a column marked "Plays" that'll tell you how many times a song has been played through. Naturally, it doesn't cover the times you might have streamed it online, or the times you played it on a CD in the car, or the songs you played and deleted and re-ripped. But I figured it might be a useful indication of what your obsessions have been since you started listening to music on your computer.

I've talked to plenty of folks who've seized on a given song and listened to it many hundreds of times, whether on iTunes or through a service such as Last.fm or Pandora. For me, it's trickier to build up that kind of repetition, just because of the amount of time I spend previewing new music for work (or "work," depending on your perspective).

Regardless, the result — the No. 1 song, measured by number of plays on iTunes — should come as no surprise to those who've endured our All Songs Considered roundtable shows: Bon Iver's "Skinny Love," to the tune of 98 plays since late 2007. (Throw a quarter in the Iver Jar! Sorry, folks!)

So what's your most played song — and how many times have you played it? Please leave your answers in the comments section below. I'll compile a bunch of answers in a follow-up post next week.

Enlarge Mito Habe-Evans

Mito Habe-Evans

Sometimes fandom for musicians comes with a badge of honor, or status in an unspoken aristocracy of taste. Then there are artists whose adoring followers are mocked and teased.

When I became the All Songs Considered intern, I was nervous about getting stigmatized if I revealed some of my musical tastes. How would this staff of articulate music aficionados react to my personal preferences?

Well, as the internship wraps up, it's time I come clean. While I love the weird and noisy, the soft and poetic, I also love Top 40 hits — the songs that get played to death on the radio, have simple verse-chorus-bridge formats and rely heavily on catchy hooks. I like pop and refuse to feel guilty about it.

For the NPR interns' Intern Edition project, I made this video, wherein I confess loudly and proudly about the music I can't go without. See what the other NPR interns turned out this summer and hear our playlists at IE3D.

Bryan Lee O'Malley/Oni Press

If you're at all like me, you're probably more than aware that the film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World opens Friday. Like many fans of the original graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, I've been eagerly anticipating this movie all summer. Expectations are high all around, in part because of the books' enjoyably stylized frenzy, a talented director in Edgar Wright and a winning cast. But for me, it's also largely because the music plays such a key supporting role in the story.

For the uninitiated, the movie centers on Scott Pilgrim, a 23-year old slacker hero from Toronto who's just met the girl of his dreams. The only catch is that he must battle her seven evil exes in order to win her heart. It's at times a charming love story, a buddy comedy, a coming-of-age tale and an action blockbuster. But, as longtime fans know, there's more to it than that. The movie, like the comics, is a freewheeling genre mash-up of manga-infused superheroics, video-game fight sequences and indie-rock name checks.

In the books (and, by extension, the film), Pilgrim and his friends play in a sloppy garage band called Sex Bob-Omb — a great band name that nods to both The Sex Pistols and Super Mario Bros. Nearly every page of O'Malley's books is loaded with this sort of musical reference: The names of characters, the band T-shirts they wear and occasional lines of dialogue all serve as knowing winks from the writer.

For that matter, even Scott Pilgrim's name originates from a song by Plumtree, a '90s all-girl band from Canada.

Shantel Mitchell/for NPR

Dave Matthews, seen here at Bonnaroo 2010, was a runaway winner of our Owned & Abandoned Sweepstakes. His prize: abandonment.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post — and sent out a tweet on the All Songs Considered account, and posted to NPR's restless army of Facebook-ites — asking readers to name which artists have put out the most music they own but never listen to. Whose CDs sit in the longest, dustiest rows on your shelves? (And, yes, the 1,000th person to reply "What's a CD?" will win a free tote bag.)

My plan was to read all the replies, pick a bunch of funny and interesting ones, and crank out a new question, all in the span of a few days — but then we got more than a thousand responses, many of which were funny and interesting. So, for those who remember all the way back to July 23 (the equivalent of eight months ago when translated to Internet time), here's a quick look at some of your many highlights.

Dave Matthews Band received so many votes, you'd think his fans had organized a particularly ill-advised letter-writing campaign, but close on his heels was poor Tori Amos.

"I own pretty much everything Tori Amos ever put out — live, B-sides, rarities and box sets included," Rebecca McClain writes. "I own, but have never listened to, her last two studio albums. I guess I'm just bored of her. Even the last live show I went to, I couldn't wait to leave; my butt hurt from sitting so long. I don't even have her on my MP3 player, and I'm starting to sell off my collection to try to recoup some of the thousand-plus dollars I spent on her stuff."

Naturally, virtually every super-famous musician popped up — The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead — with what seemed like special emphasis on artists who've dealt in volume in recent years: the aforementioned Dave Matthews Band, Ryan Adams, Elvis Costello, Radiohead, Beck, Ani DiFranco, Bright Eyes, R.E.M., Phish, Sting, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Rush and so on. Occasionally, readers offered theories while they were naming names.

"My friend has a great name for this. She calls it phase music," Kate Share writes. "All of those albums you buy because you love the band, and then you find someone else you love — i.e., Dave Matthews, R.E.M., Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Sarah McLachlan. Then you put them on your iPod (you have so many of these CDs, so you must like the songs), and when they come up in the shuffle, you skip them."

For some, the thought of all those abandoned CDs made them think of rediscovery.

Lindsay Sanchez

Intern Alex Spoto jams with Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros before the 9:30 Club performance.

Recently, my fellow NPR Music intern, Lindsay Sanchez of All Songs Considered, was kind enough to bring me along to see Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at the 9:30 Club as her guest. Lindsay interviewed the lead singers, and I came along as her “photographer,” but by the end of the night I somehow found myself onstage with the band, playing fiddle.

It all started after the interview, when I sheepishly confessed that I had hardly ever handled a camera.  The band was amused since I'd obviously taken the role of photographer just to get to meet them.  At some point during the pre-show chit-chat, singer Jade Castrinos asked me if I play music. I said that I actually play the violin (many, many years of lessons — thanks, Mom). Well Jade jumped up, hurried off to the bus, and returned moments later, thrusting her newly purchased violin into my hands. We ended in the alley between the band's tour bus and the 9:30 Club, working out a few tunes together with their guitarist Christian Letts. Below is a first stab at Jade's tune, "Fire Water."

Despite my fumbling in that video, nearby bandmembers perked up at the sound of a fiddle, and they asked me to join them onstage for a few songs in that night's set. At first I was surprised that a band would trust a stranger to contribute to their recognizable sound, especially during a sold-out tour. At that point, the reality set in that I was performing songs I barely knew how to play in front of thousands of people. But before taking the stage, we had five solid minutes of chanting "om" in a circle with the band, and this seemed to help me relax. The experience turned out to be utterly surreal.

I've heard the term "togetherness" endlessly bandied about to describe the band's larger-than-life mystique, but nothing could confirm the group's communal aesthetic so wholeheartedly as joining them in music-making. In performances, Alex (a.k.a. Edward Sharpe) Ebert frequently forays into the audience, graciously sharing the music with fans and transforming each Magenetic Zeros concert into a throng.  The focus is always on a collective whole.

Sharpe and crew are striking personalities, but they’re not overbearing performers.  As such, The Zeros’ overflowing musical spectacle achieves the near impossible: packaging an unabashedly hippie jam into perfectly executed pop-songs.

I ended up performing again with the band during this past weekend's Newport Folk Festival.  You can hear the whole show in the NPR Music archives.

A yet-to-be-released album by Shearwater's Jonathan Meiberg and Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart got me thinking of odd musical pairings.  Robert Plant and Alison Krauss was the first one that  popped to mind.  The two collaborated on the 2007 album Raising Sand. What I thought would be a disaster turned out to be a real treat.

The pairing of David Bowie and Bing Crosby is easily one of the top five strangest collaborations ever.  But somehow The Man Who Fell to Earth got on famously with Father O'Malley.

By far The least successful pairing I can think of can be seen in this Lou Reed and Luciano Pavarotti video. It wasn't such a "perfect day" after all.

Tell us some of the oddest pairings you can think of, one that was successful and one that was a disaster.  We'll put some of our favorites together for an upcoming edition of All Songs Considered.