Hari Kondabolu is a Brooklyn-based, Queens-raised comic who has been described by Timeout NY as “smart, analytical and rising.” He has performed on CONAN, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham and John Oliver’s New York Standup Show. HisComedy Central Presents half-hour television special debuted on the network in February 2011. Hari is currently a writer and recurring on-camera contributor for FX’s Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. He made his UK television debut on BBC 3’s Russell Howard’s Good News in April 2011, which preceded a month-long run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He then had a regular segment on the first series of BBC3's “Live at the Electric” starring Russell Kane. He has also appeared on popular podcasts like WTF with Marc Maron and You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes.

When in New York City, he co-hosts the mostly improvised, monthly talk show The Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project with his younger brother Ashok (“Dap” from hip hop group Das Racist). He also wrote the cover story for Spin Magazine about Das Racist in 2011.

Hari is also a former video blogger for WORLD COMPASS, a joint initiative between WGBH Boston, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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Andrew Trim is a guitarist and composer living in Chicago, IL. His most recent project is a trio album with Denver saxophonist Danny Meyer and Chicago drummer Charles Rumback. He also co-leads the Hanami Quartet and plays as a side man with Rock Falls and Mark Lavengood's Steel Guitar Band among others.

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The Soil & The Sun is corn-fed, Michigan-made, New Mexican Space Music, or Experiential Spiritual Orchestral Rock. Originating in 2008 as a two-piece band, the group has grown and matured into a seven-piece community of friends and musicians. Oboe, violin, guitars, accordion, percussion, piano, keys and vocals, cooperate to create complex harmonies, layered melodies, and driving rhythms. The careful orchestration and intentional instrumentation will speak to your soul.

Little Hurricane is a dirty blues/rock outfit from San Diego, CA.

“Gritty, edgy and downright soul-shaking, Little Hurricane deliver on the album and at their live shows. Slacker listeners love Little Hurricane and want more. “Haunted Heart” has been playing on several Slacker Radio stations since late last year and listeners constantly favorite this song, making it a steady Top 10 performer on almost every Slacker Radio station it’s added to.” – Scott Riggs, Slacker

Listener is a spoken word rock band that started in 2002 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The current lineup consists of guitarist Christin Nelson, vocalist and bassist Dan Smith, and drummer Kris Rochelle. The band entered the studio in February 2013 to finish recording their fourth studio album Time Is A Machine due out June 18th. On May 28th they released a single confirmed from the new album "Eyes To The Ground For Change".

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For seven years now, Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s – led by singer and songwriter Richard Edwards – have been creating music that swirls with fear and doubt and tension and beauty. Their music was born out of Indianapolis with the lushly melancholic The Dust of Retreat (2005), came of age with the bittersweet duo Animal/Not Animal (2008), and most recently arrived with the primal Buzzard (2010).

Edwards saw Buzzard as the beginning of a “panic pop” trilogy: albums filled with a gnarled version of the pop music of his childhood, loosely tied together by the concepts of aging and starting over. For the second installment, he took his notebook full of song fragments and went to the place that held some of his most vivid memories of calm, a mere five months after Buzzard’s release. Subsisting only on aloe vera extract and clam chowder, Edwards spent 26 days burying himself in sand, sleeping outdoors, and finishing a batch of songs inspired by childhood, fatherhood, and bad stomach pain. Calm evenings bore panicked music.

Because when Margot ended the touring cycle for Buzzard, which included multiple headlining tours and a run supporting The Twilight Singers, Edwards was ill. Plagued with stomach pain, he boarded a bus and headed to Pismo Beach, CA. Over the years, Pismo had unintentionally become an oasis during Margot tours. The Nukes' battered black school bus, as if divinely inspired, always found its way there. They would spend a night or two by the fire, listening to music, eating clam chowder, drinking beer and recharging. With each tour, the band’s collective narrative grew and the town became more mythical, especially on bad days; “Pismo” was conjured up and whispered into the ears of a grumpy, hung-over drummer, the guitar player sighed it while replacing blown tubes, the keyboard player chanted it in his sleep, the bus’ engine grunted it. A place to rest. The end of the road.

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Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector is a new documentary that sheds light on the underground VHS culture and the people who still collect and cherish what many call a "dead format." Directed by the true believers at VHShitfest in association with Horror Boobs and Lunchmeat Magazine, Adjust Your Tracking captures and celebrates an eccentric and surprisingly large community of weirdos, cinephiles, and borderline hoarders united by their love of VHS.

See directors Dan Kinem and Levi Peretic in person! After the screening, bring your best VHS treasures to share with Dan, Levi and the rest of your fellow obsessives!

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Arising simultaneously from the hellscape of east Texas and the belching swamp-lands of the Mississippi delta, founding members of Big Dammit, Kris Scott and Phil Garrison, were assimilated into the price8records musical collective as teenagers and have been playing together ever since. “When I first met Kris,” says Garrison, “all I wanted him to do was shut up. I distinctly remember thinking ‘God, I hope we’re never in a band together’, but we grew on each other over time.” The pair left a trail of tears and bad jobs while floating in and out of several bands from Arkansas to Oklahoma and eventually settled in Chicago.

Belleisle plays a particularly ponderous pop repertoire the readily relies on catchily-crafted chord changes, mind-meltingly meticulous melodies and a handful of happy, haunting harmonies.

Xavier Rudd is back with his #2 ARIA debut album, Spirit Bird. With an identifiable array of guitars, yidakis (didgeridoos), stomp box and percussion, Rudd’s has reintroduced Australians to the sounds and stories of the land’s original owners, while introducing the rest of the world to an entirely new sound altogether. Over the course of a decade, he has taken this sound to every corner of the globe; producing seven studio albums, two live albums, multiple ARIA nominations and a global fan-base of likeminded souls.

From 2002’s To Let, his first studio album, through to 2007’s White Moth, Rudd gradually refined his globallyinfluenced collage of world music – a matchless mixture of reggae, funk, blues, folk, and nearly every other sort of song with the ability to stimulate people’s spirits.

With 2008’s Dark Shades of Blue, the world was welcomed into a darker, more somber side of Rudd’s music. The album was indeed musically rich, with an international influence still inherent; however, the overall aura carried a different tinge compared to that of his previous work.

“Dark Shades Of Blue was something that I didn’t realize at the time. It was like I could feel the shudder of an earthquake, but I didn’t know it was coming” explains Rudd. That metaphorical earthquake manifested in the form of the most tumultuous year in Rudd’s personal history, and one he was more than happy to put behind him when starting to pen 2010’s Koonyum Sun.

This album was a new awakening for Rudd, perhaps because it was his first with bassist Tio Moloantoa and percussionist Andile Nqubezelo under the unified banner of ‘Xavier Rudd & Inzintaba’. Thanks to the input of Inzintaba, Koonyum Sun presented a staggering amount of vigor to this release that Xavier Rudd fans hadn’t seen to date.

Which brings us to 2012’s Spirit Bird. Already producing Rudd’s highest-selling single and most played radio single to date with Follow The Sun, 2012’s Spirit Bird is Rudd’s deepest and most explorative album. The album saw the ever socially-conscience Rudd delve into his musical and spiritual ancestry and took him from the threatened landscape of Western Australia’s Kimberley region, to the hills and lakes of Canada.

Xavier Rudd is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, a surfer, environmental and cultural activist, and one of Australian’s most iconic voices.

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"When you make a record, it has to be the single most important thing in your world. This time around, I wanted to do something that encompassed all I love in rock 'n' roll music. It's got everything from Brtzmann and Berry right through to Dennis and Brian Wilson. I'm obsessed with music and the way you put it together and I don't believe there are any rules." So says, J. Spaceman, commenting on the recording of his new album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, which is due for release on Mississippi-based independent Fat Possum in March 2012. Recorded over the past two years in Wales, Los Angeles and Reykjavik, and mixed for a year in the confines of his own home, Sweet Heart Sweet Light will be Spiritualized's seventh studio album and the first release since last year's epic Radio City Music Hall rendering of their 1997 game changer Ladies In Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. Coming four years after release of the internationally acclaimed Songs In A&E, Sweet Heart Sweet Light promises to be one of the most eagerly anticipated releases of 2012. Taking musical risks is a hallmark of Spiritualized's outlook. Witness them playing the new album, unannounced, from start to finish live at London's historic Royal Albert Hall recently - something unheard of in today's clamour for instant hit gratification. As J.Spacemen says "I don't believe there are any rules" and this album will testify to that.

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Simpleton & Cityfolk appeal both to the heart and the tapping toes of the listener with a blend of roots rock, Americana and folk. The band's roots go back to Iowa when Geoff Glenn (guitar, vocals) and Chris Bennett (guitar, vocals) met as roommates at the University of Iowa. In 2010, college over, Bennett returned home to Chicago. Glenn soon followed intent on pursuing music with his friend. Bennett's high school buddies, Chris “Foo” Williams (upright bass, vocals) and John Conlon, (guitar) filled out the rest of the Cityfolk with Mike “Sku” Skowronski joining on drums after Conlon’s move to Utah.

In 2011, a Sunday afternoon residency at the Green Owl in the Wisconsin Dells allowed the band to hone their skills and learn to gel as a band. The weekly gig gave them the requisite chops and confidence to return to Chicago to perform their original material in front of receptive crowds. Compared to Mumford and Sons and Wilco, soon the band was headlining Metro, Double Door and House of Blues.

In 2012, the group recorded their debut 6-song EP, The Williams Account with Patrick De La Garza in his Chicago studio. The EP reveals the dichotomy of the country and the city with the aching “Porch Light” and the slow sway of “City Lights”. The follow-up full-length, No Man is an Island, recorded/produced with Mike Hagler (Wilco, Neko Case, The New Pornographers) at Kingsize Sound Labs. Scheduled for a July 2013 release, Simpleton & Cityfolk will have a busy summer promoting the new record, celebrating the record's release with a show at Lincoln Hall in Chicago and appearing at a number of other summer festivals including the Cedar Rapids Freedom Festival in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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Future Bible Heroes are comprised of celebrated songwriter Stephin Merritt (the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archics), longtime friend and collaborator Christopher Ewen (Figured on a Beach, the Hidden Variable and a popular Boston-area DJ) and Magnetic Fields pianist-singer-manager Claudia Gonson. The band released two albums, Memories of Love (1997) and Eternal Youth (2002), and three EPs, all of which they are repackaging as one large collection for simultaneous release via Merge on June 4, 2013, along with their new album, Partygoing.

After 11 years, FBH return with Partygoing, featuring their signature mix of dance-floor-filling club anthems and super-sad ballads. Why the long break between albums? Well, the trio has been busy. Merritt has made four stage musicals, four Magnetic Fields albums, a Gothic Archies album and done some film work. Ewen has been working on the Hidden Variable and DJing in Boston, and Gonson has discovered parenthood while navigating the Magnetic Fields' busy post-69 Love Songs schedule.

Traditionally, Ewen created instrumental tracks and sent them to Merrit, who added vocal melodies and lyrics. Ewen explains that Partygoing is more of an integrated collaborationL "'Living, Loving, Partygoing' began as an idea Stephia sang into my voicemail one night. 'Love Is a Luxury I Can No Longer Afford' began with the lyrics. This time around, we were able to write songs together using different approaches, and were able to arrange them along the way."

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Savages is not trying to give you something you didn’t have already, it is calling within yourself something you buried ages ago, it is an attempt to reveal and reconnect your physical and emotional self and give you the urge to experience your life differently, your girlfriends, your husbands, your jobs, your erotic life and the place music occupies in your life. Because we must teach ourselves new ways of positive manipulations, music and words are aiming to strike like lightning, like a punch in the face, a determination to understand the will and desires of the self.”

Sky Ferreira. Act like you don’t already follow her on Twitter – as if you haven’t Googled her, or checked her out on Wikipedia. Now check again. Before you can hit refresh, there might be another paragraph. She's co-written and recorded with half the Billboard chart, survived in Hollywood and on the Lower East Side, seen the world from thirty-five thousand feet, been shot by every photographer you can name off the top of your head.

Now get one thing straight: Sky was singing first. Just click on her piano-andvocal only cover of Miike Snow’s 'Animal' on YouTube for your evidence that her other skills might pay the bills, but music is her life and her voice is bona fide. Her 2011 debut EP As If! hinted at her soulful range and stylistic versatility. But if you think it prepared you for the step Sky’s about to take on her first long-player, think again. She’s hard at work with a hand-picked team of collaborators. And this time she’s in charge, making the record she wanted to make all along.

Anxiety is the full-length follow up to Autre Ne Veut’s 2010 self-titled debut, which was for many the definitive post-millennial Failure Pop statement outside of time and style. Autre Ne Veut rivaled other lovelorn “missteps” such as Marvin Gaye’s Here My Dear and Big Star’s Sister Lovers. If you didn’t hear the connection, you weren’t listening closely enough.

Be that as it may, ANV brazenly decided to make it easier for people with his post-canonical return. No longer playing the role of pauper or king, Anxiety is simply his high definition arrival. Born April 20th, 1982 Arthur Ashin is the first of two children and the only son of American ex-patriots living in rural Kenya. He’s struggled with minor bouts of depression throughout his life, but a year of intensive psychoanalysis helped Arthur to realize that anxiety was at the crux of his problems.

Anxiety is in some sense Ashin closing a chapter on his adolescence through song-form depictions of his own relationship struggles and ecstasies. There are club bangers on Anxiety, for sure; “Counting” a cybernetic sea shanty tips its hat to Timbaland, and opening track “Play By Play” rolls out like a slowly evolving Top 40 operetta with nods to Dr. Luke and Patti LaBelle in equal measure. But when experienced as a whole, there is an unfolding sense of confession to Anxiety.

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Bob Schneider is a fixture on the Austin scene, having kicked around for years in various bands before embarking on a solo career in 1999. Born in Michigan and partially raised in Germany, he dropped out of the University of Texas at El Paso to front his first band, the funk and rap outfit Joe Rockhead. The band released three independent albums before disbanding immediately prior to signing with a major label. A stint with a jammy, slightly Phishy outfit called the Ugly Americans followed, which experienced some success as an opening act for the Dave Matthews Band. In 1997, Schneider went on to co-found the Scabs, where he made a further name for himself as a crotch-grabbing frontman. He then became a solo act in 1999, although performing at first under the band name Lonelyland.

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Chicago singer-songwriter Xoe Wise has just released her sophomore album, Archive of Illusions, which reached #41 on the iTunes Singer/Songwriter chart, and was immediately placed in the music store’s “New and Noteworthy” section.

Originally from a small town on the ocean in North Carolina, Wise moved to Chicago to pursue a music career. She burst onto the scene in 2009, collaborating with Ethan Stoller on her debut album, Echo. Stoller has contributed music to the DVD extras and promotional materials of several major Hollywood films, including V for Vendetta, Ninja Assassin and Sherlock Holmes. Echo was released in October of 2010 to critical acclaim. Chicago Innerview recognized Wise as “easily the singer/songwriter and pop counterpart to Columbia native Chaz Bundick’s (a.k.a. Toro Y Moi) laconic chill-wave synth ballads.” The Chicago Tribune’s Redeye described her single “Dear Sendai” as “spiritual.”

Xoe Wise has performed at venues ranging from Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles to Hard Rock in Nashville. She has shared the stage with such artists as Lisa Loeb, Greg Laswell, Tyrone Wells, and more.

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Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and calling Colorado home, Gregory Alan Isakov has been traveling all his life. Songs that hone a masterful quality beyond his years tell a story of miles and landscapes, and the search for a sense of place.

Music has been a stabilizing and constant force. “I’ve always had this sense about music and writing that I sort of have to do it. Like I’ll implode without it. I probably wouldn’t do it if I felt any other way.”

His song-craft lends to the deepest lyrical masterpieces, with hints of his influences, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen. He has been described as “strong, subtle, a lyrical genius,” but the source of his writing often remains a mystery to him. “My songs have nothing to do with me; they have a life of their own. A lot of times I won’t know what a song is about when I’m writing it. It just has a certain feeling about it.”

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Reinvention can be a bitch. But for the men behind The Draft - three-fourths of whom recently crawled from the wreckage of the now-defunct, legendary post-punk outfit Hot Water Music - taking a powder was never, ever an option. Instead, frontman/guitarist Chris Wollard, bassist/spokesman Jason Black and drummer George Rebelo - the nucleus of what became this new band - stared down their collective doubts and insecurities, flipped off their detractors, recruited a new guitarist in longtime associate Todd Rockhill and took the next evolutionary step.

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In the four itinerant years since their self-titled debut, Smith Westerns have grown unphased by the rigors of touring. The melodic indie-rock group—whose latest album, Soft Will, drops June 25—has tested its mettle (and passed) with pivotal opening slots for MGMT and Wilco, not to mention high-profile stints in front of the itchy, overbaked masses at Coachella and Lollapalooza. Yet, come February 2012, after finishing up a whopping 140 dates to promote their second album (the critically hailed Dye It Blonde), Smith Westerns were apprehensive about returning home to headline a gig in their native Chicago.

When Smith Westerns finally arrived home, friends they looked forward to seeing had moved, and clubs they once frequented had disappeared. All the while, on the road, singer-guitarist Cullen Omori, bassist-brother Cameron Omori, and guitarist Max Kakacek had grown from—as they say in music parlance—boys to men. Everything, now, was ominously different.

This intersection between success and post-tour unrest culminates in the band’s third full-length, Soft Will, produced by Chris Coady (Beach House, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and the first to feature new drummer Julien Ehrlich, formerly of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. It starts with “3am Spiritual,” the album’s dreamy opener. “You’re creating your own future,” says Cullen, “and lot of the ideas on the record were reactive. For a long time, you’re playing music every night where you’re bringing the party. And you go from having something to do every day to…nothing.”

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