First Listen : NPR

First Listen: Danielle De Niese's 'Mozart Album'

August 31, 2009 • Rising young soprano Danielle de Niese is about to release a new album dedicated to lesser-known Mozart arias. Hear the entire CD before it's released, and download an NPR exclusive bonus track: "Pupille Amate," from an opera Mozart wrote when he was 16.

Hear Danielle de Niese on 'All Things Considered'

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Exclusive First Listen: Circulatory System

Kelly Ruberto

Review

Exclusive First Listen: Circulatory System

August 25, 2009 • It took nearly eight years to make, but Circulatory System's breathtaking new album, Signal Morning, justifies the wait. The 17 new tracks, culled from hours of recorded material and meticulously pieced together in more than half a dozen different studios, are sonic wonders. Signal Morning assembles a mysterious and mesmerizing world of orchestrated chaos that offers new discoveries with each listen.

Exclusive First Listen: Circulatory System

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courtesy of Tompkins Square Records

Exclusive First Listen: Tim Buckley

August 18, 2009 • Buckley was just 20 years old in 1967, when Izzy Young asked him to play above his store on Sixth Avenue in New York City. In front of a small crowd of 35, Young set up a field recording kit amidst stacks of books and records and flipped the reels every now and again, as Buckley played completely unadorned.

Exclusive First Listen: Tim Buckley

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Robert Frank

Exclusive First Listen: New Lost City Ramblers

August 17, 2009 • What differentiated the Ramblers from the commercial folk groups was their interest in the music's origins. They were tireless chroniclers and ambassadors of vernacular music, the blues, bluegrass and Cajun music of rural America. Hear the entire first disc of the band's new 50th anniversary, three-CD compilation.

Exclusive First Listen: New Lost City Ramblers

Listen · 6:03 6:03

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Lauren Dukoff

Exclusive First Listen: Joe Henry, 'Blood From Stars'

August 11, 2009 • On his 11th studio album, Henry sounds raw and stark, both as a singer and as a guitarist. The songs are often blues-based, and Blood From Stars sounds genuinely inspired, which makes it a record with a long shelf life.

Exclusive First Listen: Joe Henry, 'Blood From Stars'

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Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Exclusive First Listen: Terence Blanchard

WBGO

August 11, 2009 • Choices is the newest recording from the New Orleans trumpeter. Upon first listen, it's another document of the evolution of the musician and his current band of futurists. Hear the new album in its entirety.

Exclusive First Listen: Terence Blanchard

Exclusive First Listen: Choir Of Young Believers

Choir of Young Believers. Will Calcutt hide caption

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Will Calcutt

Exclusive First Listen: Choir Of Young Believers

August 7, 2009 • Choir of Young Believers is led by 26-year-old Danish singer Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, who works with a rotating cast of supporting players. His band fluctuates anywhere from a duo to an octet. Listen to the Beach Boys- and Radiohead-inspired This Is for the White in Your Eyes in its entirety.

Exclusive First Listen: Choir Of Young Believers

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Autumn de Wilde

Exclusive First Listen: Brendan Benson

August 4, 2009 • A lot of people had never heard of Brendan Benson before he formed The Raconteurs in 2005 with guitarist Jack White of The White Stripes. But Benson already had a solid solo career, and anyone familiar with his music will confirm that he's responsible for much of that band's hyper-infectious power-pop sound. You can hear as much on Benson's latest solo album, My Old, Familiar Friend, available here in its entirety two weeks before its official release.

Exclusive First Listen: Brendan Benson

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Exclusive First Listen: Mount Eerie, 'Wind's Poem'

Mount Eerie's Phil Elverum. Wheat Wurtzburger hide caption

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Wheat Wurtzburger

Exclusive First Listen: Mount Eerie, 'Wind's Poem'

August 4, 2009 • Mount Eerie's Phil Elverum is drawn to forces larger than himself. Past efforts featured grand themes involving mortality, but on Wind's Poem, he's found a way for the sound to swallow the world whole. Drawing influence from Twin Peaks and black metal, Elverum has come to call this style "black wooden." Hear the new album in its entirety.

Exclusive First Listen: Mount Eerie, 'Wind's Poem'

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Exclusive First Listen: Lightning Dust

July 21, 2009 • In the two years since releasing its spare and mostly gloomy self-titled debut, Lightning Dust has somehow found happiness, or at least what passes for it in the strange netherworld it inhabits. The new Infinite Light, which you can hear here in its entirety two weeks before its release, illuminates the dark corridors of the duo's earlier work.

Exclusive First Listen: Lightning Dust

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