September 5, 2012 – This adventurous, late '90s music venue located in Manhattan's decrepit and industrial Meatpacking District hosted Suicide, Thurston Moore improv nights, Electro-Putas, Oneida, and other collected weirdoes. The Cooler was actually a converted meat locker that retained its dungeon-like feel with stainless steel walls, shitty sound, piss-poor lighting, an unavoidable dank musty smell, and an artsy-if-foreboding clientele. When the cow's blood was finally hosed off of the cobblestones, the neighborhood became fashionista-friendly overnight, and the venue was hassled by police until it finally closed its doors in summer of 2001 to make way for real estate. Avey Tare: Brian and I went to the Cooler and saw Christian Marclay play. I think just in terms of seeing something that like done live? This is crazy.

September 5, 2012 – In Calcutta, Prince Rama would refer to the avatar of Lord Vishnu, but in Brooklyn, Prince Rama is Taraka & Nimai Larson, two sisters reared in a Floridian Hare Krishna sect. Their band has a bit of New Age synth sheen, but the "Hare Hare" chants of this ecstatic music is undercut by heavy dose of decidedly unholy Amon Düül II drug drums. Their 2010 album Shadow Temple was produced by Avey Tare and Deakin and released on their Paw Tracks label. Avey Tare: They just kind of floored me the first time I saw them live at SXSW. I think it was like 2010, maybe. I went down there to DJ and just went down early to check out some stuff. I didn't know any of the bands and they just started playing. A lot of the best musical experiences I've had just happened suddenly and out of the blue like that.

September 5, 2012 – This French electronic composer's magnetic tape wizardry took a distinct path between melody and noise in the 1960s, creating ethereal yet evocative compositions that eschewed the trappings of academia so as to sound like child's play — like the time he mashed up Stravinsky and Beethoven. He could also be a dirty old man, as his licentious 1973 piece "Danses Organiques" proved, putting the sounds of Sapphic lovers against a prepared tape piece. Abstract AnCo moments like "Loch Raven" and "Wastered" which melt acoustic sounds into electronics hearken back to his work. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Fifty Foot Hose

August 9, 2012 – On 2010's Odd Blood, Brooklyn-via-Baltimore crew Yeasayer was frolicking in a Merriweather Post Playground, mixing in a hefty amount of Justin Timberlake to their heady mix of bass noise, proggy time signatures, snatches of African music, and lyrics about dystopian futures. The dystopia remains firmly in place on third album Fragrant World, with its first single name-checking the Tuck-everlasting cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks. Elsewhere, the band gets funky with former POTUS Ronald Reagan's skeleton (take that, Killer Mike) — ultimately Yeasayer emerge after two years darker, twitchier, and more minimal. We found songwriters Chris Keating and Anand Wilder lounging on a bed in the Wythe Hotel, a plate of fries between them, and asked what their third album might smell like.

July 26, 2012 – Electronic polymath Flying Lotus is taking a meeting with an underground L.A. rapper in his Mt. Washington, California, home. Did he bring any of his music for FlyLo to hear? Well, no, but he does go into a particularly Californian spiel about how he wants to have him on as executive producer for a project bigger than music, that could have crossover with fashion and video, embracing everything happening in L.A. at the moment, perhaps even including icons like Grace Jones and David Bowie. "What about that one CD you played me two years ago?" Flying Lotus asks, slightly exasperated yet clearly interested. "What's up with that?" The rapper digresses once again, instead envisioning something with "lots of emotion in the lyrics and some hard hip-hop beats." Instead of something vague and abstract, Flying Lotus clearly wants something tactile and concrete.