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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

"Elvis Costello's first three LPs were triumphant," Kent Swafford writes. "After that, the music was different, but the first three had been so remarkable that I couldn't help but keep buying. I recently listened to The River in Reverse because of the Allen Toussaint contribution. It may be time to go back and listen to Costello."

"Led Zeppelin," David Sloan writes. "I own them all on CD, even got the remastered versions when they came out, but I never play them. I think I burned out from too many playings of 'Stairway to Heaven' on the radio. But I'm saving them for my next Zeppelin phase, which could come at any moment."

Other highlights:

Richard P.: "Will Oldham. But only because I never remember any alias that doesn't start with 'Bonnie.' "

Anna Fonte: "The complete studio recordings of Led Zeppelin are furred thick with dust on the shelf next to all my old Depeche Mode CDs."

Jordan Hirsch: "Probably Radiohead. I love them, love their music, love seeing them live — and am almost never in the mood to listen to them."

Matt Wilson: "Sonic Youth. They're an amazingly consistent band, but what that really means is that they've been remaking Sister for almost a quarter-century now."

Andrew Myers: "They Might Be Giants. But, hell, maybe I need to make another cycle through all those albums again, now that you mention it!"

Stephanie Koehler: "Superchunk. I have all their albums and buy the new ones. Never listen to any of them. I just bought a 7" I'll never listen to last week."

Marlene Bloom Rubin: "I haven't listened to any of my CDs in years! Really, since I had children 15 years ago and lost control of the car music, it's been downhill."

Jeffrey Carrier: "I would have to say Beck and, much more prominently, Tom Waits. I went through a brief period in high school where I was obsessed with Waits, and got just about everything I could buy — which was just about everything still in rotation, given that sophomores in high school don't have a lot of bills. Especially when they don't have a lot of friends, which I have a feeling ties into the whole 'obsessed with Tom Waits' thing."

Gary Miles: "Nobody takes up more space in my collection than Miles Davis. I went through a stage where Davis was all I needed, and I kept adding and adding. Now I rarely listen to anything other than Kind of Blue. I know I'll return to Miles someday. He makes me happy to be sad."

Marc Hirsh: "Guided by Voices. Though that seems like both a cop-out and a cheat, since the sheer volume of music that Robert Pollard upchucked at a steady clip for a decade and a half seems almost deliberately designed to be collected more than listened to. Not coincidentally, GbV is also the single act that takes up the most real estate in my collection, period."

Even in 140 characters or less, we got a few funny replies on Twitter, too: @simonsoup writes, "I have most Smashing Pumpkins records, all gathering dust since 2002 or so, because it turns out they're awful," while @koffeeguy names Bill Mallonee and his band Vigilantes of Love. "Lots of brilliance, lots of whining about brilliance not being financially rewarding," he writes.

I'll give the last words to Mike Rogers.

"Sadly, it's the artists I like the most that I rarely listen to," Mike writes. "Miles Davis, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Henry Kaiser, Grateful Dead. With the expanse of the catalogs — and with Braxton the daunting task of setting aside at least an hour per composition — I'm more glad to support the artists than spend all my time listening to them. But I wouldn't get rid of them for anything, because they need to be there when I have an itch that only they can scratch."

If I may tack on an unofficial follow-up question, which artist named here will you listen to the soonest?

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.

Bob and I have an ongoing disagreement over film scores.  Basically it's that he hates pretty much all music written for popular films in the past 30 or 40 years, while I really love quite a lot of it.  (John Williams scored my childhood).

My current favorite score is the music Has Zimmer wrote for Inception.  It's powerful, immediately recognizable, and conjures thrilling imagery.  It's so cool!  I played a snippet of it for Bob, and he immediately hated it.  I'll leave it to him to explain why some day.

Now a viral video is making its way around the web that reveals how Zimmer got the idea for the score.  It turns out he intentionally cribbed the two defining "da-da" notes from a slowed-down version of the Edith Piaf song "Non, je ne Regrette Rien." This is the song that the characters in Inception play to warn each other it's time to wake up.  Check out the video:

If you haven't seen Inception, one of its many ideas is that time slows dramatically when we sleep.  Five minutes in the "real" world can feel more like an hour with our eyes shut.  Zimmer and director Christopher Nolan get bonus points for playing off the idea by simply slowing down the film's most important musical cue.  (Bob would likely say that listening to five minutes of this score is like hearing an hour of it).

"I was surprised how long it took (someone) to figure it out," Zimmer says in an interview with The New York Times.   "Just for the game of it, all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track. So I could slip into half-time; I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time."

What do you think?  Do you like the score?  Is this a brilliant musical interpretation of one of the film's many ideas, or just a shameless gimmick?

Were you able to attend this year's Newport Folk Festival?  If so, did you have a "Newport" moment?  My memories of this past weekend are many, but here are a few of the standouts:

John Prine and Jim James, nearly cheek-to-cheek singing "All The Best."  I was trying to imagine what it must mean to John Prine to survive his cancer and have his songs still touch the hearts of a new generation.

There was also a brilliant moment when Glen Hansard was joined by The low Anthem on a Clancy Brothers tune.

I loved joining Levon Helm in the crowd singalong on Bob Dylan's "I Shall be Released;"  the sunset and the words turned the song into a spiritual tear-jerker.

There were a few backstage moments, such as the security folks trying to get Edward Sharpe on stage and finding the whole band deeply involved in a spiritual huddle.

There was also the gathering on the fort roof at end of the night Sunday, with the band David Wax Museum fiercely rocking out on accordion, guitar and donkey's jaw bone.

And, of course, I especially enjoyed the ongoing love fest from fans sharing stories at the NPR Music tent.

If you went to Newport or listened to the coverage, what was your favorite Newport moment?