October 1, 2012 – The most telling moment during David Byrne and St. Vincent's brass-abetted Lacoste L!ve concert series performance at Brooklyn's Williamsburg Park Saturday came about halfway through, in the middle of "This Must Be The Place," the first of three Talking Heads songs scattered conservatively throughout the night. With an eight-piece horn section handling the song's elegiac synth melody, Byrne reached the line "love me 'til my heart stops," and all 12 musicians onstage paused for a beat in a musical realization of the lyric. Performing mostly songs from their new collaborative album Love This Giant, for nearly two hours, Byrne, Annie Clark (in the role of St.

September 5, 2012 – In the pre-Internet underground, few hyper-prolific collectives came more self-obscured than Phoenix's Sun City Girls. Their 15th proper full-length since their early '80s inception, 1995's Jacks Creek had drummer Charles Gocher and brothers Alan and Richard Bishop deconstructing Appalachian twang into shards. Often threading characters (like Alan Bishop's belatedly unhinged Uncle Jim) with raw ethno-psych, Jacks Creek quickly crosses from patois novelty shtick to primitive folk terror. Like Oddsac, it grows scarier when one tries to figure out why it's funny. Avey Tare: It was actually the first Sun City Girls record I bought. Pavement had mentioned the Sun City Girls as this great band. I was on a trip to New York… Geologist: Actually, we were going to see Pavement! Avey Tare: …And I was like all right, I wanna check this out.

September 5, 2012 – A practitioner of "cinema of the ear," second generation Montreal electroacoustic composer Robert Normandeau is fond of the sonic narrative. Repurposing field recordings — including animal sounds, water droplets, and human voices — Normandeau creates shapes from sounds, and music from shapes. Finding common textures that connect his sources into coherent pieces, Normandeau's paths from chaos to beats cover important pages in Animal Collective's acousmatic atlas, which lead (among other places) to the hushed Jungle Book grotto of Strawberry Jam's "Derek." Avey Tare: Liquidy sounds? Definitely Robert Normandeau on the Emprientes DIGITALes label. Brian brought that CD over to my place once and played it for me and it was the kind of thing where it was weird, liquidy swampy sounds that formed together to make rhythms.

September 5, 2012 – The Grateful Dead were a cornerstone of the Collective's teenage brahdom, and thus an essential part of the Collectivist myth that followed — not to mention the inspiration for the band's ever-changing setlists filled with improvised segues. For the budding young psychonauts acquiring bootlegs from the lunch dude at their junior high, the Dead provided numerous portals, from "Dark Star" jams to musique concrète adventures to the radical notion that a rock band could jettison song form entirely for a transitive nightfall of diamonds. Geologist: When you're a middle schooler, if you were into music, you sort of looked at what older people were doing. I think that's why I started wearing Grateful Dead T-shirts. Like, I have to be honest, you did it because you saw older kids doing it and the imagery was just…you know, with the bears or whatever. It was just fun.

September 5, 2012 – Established in 1958 by Desmond Briscoe, Daphne Oram, and others to create a palette of sounds for various BBC programs, the Radiophonic Workshop quickly became as much research center as music production facility. A home for experimenters including Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, who would co-found White Noise, the Workshop grew renowned for its music for Dr. Who, but its ground-up homebrewed synthesis would resonate in every pop epoch, from Jimi Hendrix producer Eddie Kramer, to bands like Broadcast and Portishead, all the way up to Geologist. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: The Beatles — Revolver

September 5, 2012 – A pioneering acoustic ecologist, the German-born Hildegard Westerkamp followed in the wake of R. Murray Schafer's 1977 book, The Tuning of the World (The Soundscape). Creating music from field recordings with a particular consciousness towards their original sources, Westerkamp made music of the world at hand. On "Cricket Voice," she time-stretched desert crickets amid the rustling of cactus spines and dried palm leaves, a deep environmental awareness without which AnCo's Campfire Songs might not have discovered the rhythm of the Maryland rain. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: White Noise

September 5, 2012 – A key member the Group de Recherches Musicales, the electroacoustic crew established in post-WWII Paris, the classically trained Pierre Henry was an early titan of musique concrète. The GRM's radical notion of music built around source materials rather than linear performance was a ticking conceptual time-bomb when psych rock was finally invented. Henry was right there with his 1967 single with Michel Colombier, "Psyché Rock," from which Christopher Tyng appropriately borrowed for the Futurama theme 30 years later. Geologist: One of those dudes I discovered from records thorough WKCR. Since I was a DJ there, they encourage you to take anything out. I didn’t have many friends early in college. I'd sign out like three at a time. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: The Hour-Glass Sanatorium

September 5, 2012 – Practice space-mates with Animal Collective in the heady early aughts and comrades ever since, Gang Gang Dance's art-groove moves grew from the same lysergic Brooklyn soil. The rare contemporary act that Animal Collective has repeatedly claimed allegiance with, the Gang Gang gang's own beat obfuscation has evolved in parallel towards bigger and more drippingly dense targets. With 2011's Eye Contact being the glistening New Wave yin to Centipede Hz's day-glo yang, both continue to follow their psychedelic marching orders into new paths. Geologist: We sort of try to fight nostalgia a lot, at least aesthetically. We're not interested in nostalgia because it's in opposition to the spirit of what psychedelic music is to try and sound exactly like it. At their time their music was really forward thinking and trying to push boundaries.

September 5, 2012 – The Moog-pop supergroup spawn of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, White Noise's sole LP —1969's An Electric Storm — is handmade electronic music of the first order. David Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire, and Brian Hodgson built their resonant blips and proto-hauntological swirl from scratch without a single keyboard-based synth. Though parts of "Firebird" sound like Smile, the trio embraced the power of working without presets, either generic or technological. The drama of the group's dream-splice edits wasn't lost on Animal Collective. Deakin: We used to spend time outside on this porch [of the house] Dave's family lived in. I remember that record coming on. I might have been having a [psychedelic] experience of some sort. It was just incredible. It was something I think I already understood.

August 1, 2012 – Olivia Trevor Control member and co-founder of the Elephant 6 collective Bill Doss passed away suddenly on Monday at the age of 43. He had a long and storied career as a indie-rock songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, audio engineer, scene lynchpin, and sound artist. But before all that, growing up outside Ruston, Louisiana, his idea of music itself was literally synonymous with the Beatles. He once recalled to the San Francisco Weekly about hearing the Fab Four at age 10, thinking, "Wow, this is neat. This music thing is good." As Doss grew and evolved, the Beatles remained his lingua franca as he and his high school pals discovered punk rock, screamed into boomboxes and four-tracks, got jobs at the college radio station, invented the Elephant 6 Recording Company, and eventually formed real bands.