June 15, 2012 – On their sixth album, WIXIW (pronounced "Wish You"), Liars have dispatched the dissonant guitars and jarring rhythms in favor of rich tapestries of burbling analog synths and hypnotic machine beats. Scorching with electronic influences, the result is multi-textured body music with songs ranging from lush ballads ("The Exact Color of Doubt") to tribal stomps ("A Ring On Every Finger") to glistening psychedelia ("WIXIW") and even a mutant dancefloor banger ("Brats"). WIXIW emphasizes not just different instrumentation than their previous records but a totally revamped songwriting process. Using software like Pro Tools and Reaktor, they collaborated on laptops instead of writing compositions separately. "[2010's] Sisterworld was largely a pretty much traditionally recorded album, says the band's Aaron Hemphill, "like guitars with amps and a studio engineer to place the mic.

March 14, 2012 – When filmmakers Alexandria Hammond and Ian Markiewicz, directors of the recent Better Than Something, first met its subject, Memphis punk rock musician Jay Reatard, they weren't sure what to expect, given his name and his notoriety for transgressive, even violent stage antics. Brought in by Matador Records to make a short promotional film for the impending release of Reatard's album Watch Me Fall, the pair of documentary veterans — Hammond had helmed a feature doc on homeless children in Haiti, while Markiewicz had worked with legendary filmmaker Albert Maysles, including editing The Beales of Grey Gardens — weren't very familiar with the pugnacious enfant terrible's prolific output with bands like the Reatards, the Lost Sounds, and Angry Angles.

July 1, 1997 – When Dave Grohl air-drums, you can still hear a sound. This isn't the answer to the old tree/forest riddle, nor confirmation of the more recent in-space-nobody-can-hear-you-scream hypothetical, just a fact: The Foo Fighters frontman goes at the task of keeping imaginary time just like he does everything else, with full-throttle energy, and so his forceful rhythmic chopping has the insistent, metronomic whirring of fan blades. That is, as long as he's not air-drumming along to something loud."I know what time it is," Grohl says excitedly, ejecting the Butthole Surfers from his Chevrolet minivan's car stereo and popping in a new selection. It's a balmy spring day at the end of March, and we're inching our way through a typical Los Angeles rush hour on the way to a Foo photo shoot.