Laurie Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, visual artist and musician. Regardless of the medium, a common characteristic of all her work seems to be the act of storytelling.

Laura Phillips Anderson was born June 5, 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, United States. She attended Mills College in California, and eventually graduated from Barnard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University.

She performed in New York through the 1970s. Two early pieces, "New York Social Life" and "Time To Go," were included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others.

She became more widely known in 1982 with the single "O Superman," originally released in a limited quantity by One Ten Records; a sudden influx of orders from the U.K. (prompted by British DJ John Peel playing the record) led to Anderson signing with the Warner Brothers label, which re-released the single. "O Superman" reached number two on the national pop charts in Britain.

"O Superman" was part of a larger stage work entitled United States and was included on her following album, Big Science. Her more recent stage work includes a multimedia presentation inspired by Moby Dick. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave, and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. All of Anderson's albums from the 1980s sold very well despite being labeled "avant garde". Her varied career has even included voice-acting in the animated film The Rugrats Movie. In 1994 she created a CD-ROM entitled Puppet Motel.

She wrote a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica and in the late 1980s hosted the PBS series, Alive from Off Center, for which she produced the short film, What You Mean We?.

One of the central themes in Anderson's work is exploring the effects of technology on human interrelationships and communication.

Anderson has collaborated with William Burroughs, Mitchell Froom, Arto Lindsay, Peter Gabriel, Perry Hoberman, David Sylvian, Jean Michel Jarre, Hector Zazou, Nona Hendryx, David Van Tieghem, and husband Lou Reed. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s (with a romantic involvement hinted at in some of her spoken word performances about him).

Anderson, who rarely revisits older work (though themes and lyrics occasionally reappear) went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001. One of these performances was recorded in New York City only a week after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and included a performance of "O Superman". This concert was released in early 2002 as the double CD, Live In New York, which remains her most recent album release.

In 2003, Anderson became NASA's first and so far only artist-in-residence, which inspired her most recent performance piece, The End of the Moon.

Rumors emerged of a possible new album release in the fall of 2004, but this turned out to be false as Anderson seems too busy mounting a succession of themed shows, as well as composing a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan.

In February 2010, Laurie Anderson premiered a new theatrical work, entitled Delusion, at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. This piece was commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and the Barbican Centre, London.

In May/June 2010, Anderson curated the Vivid Sydney festival in Sydney, Australia together with Lou Reed

In late June 2010, with the production assistance of husband Lou Reed, as well as Roma Baran. Laurie Anderson released her first full length studio album in near a decade with that of: "Homeland" on Nonesuch Records. Receiving much critical acclaim, "Homeland" has been lauded by many as Anderson's crowning auditory achievement. A conglomerated assimilation of her many persona's, characters and decades work exploring and experimenting in a multitude of artistic mediums.

Also featured on the "Homeland" album are a number of famed collaborators, including John Zorn (saxophone on tracks 8 & 11), Kieran Hebden of "Four Tet" fame (keyboards on track 5), Antony Hegarty (vocals on track 4), Husband Lou Reed himself on some guitar, and Tuvan throat singers. At 66 minutes, it is also Anderson's longest studio album.

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Antony Hegarty is an acclaimed mercury prize winning singer, best known for his work with Antony and the Johnsons and Hercules and Love Affair. Born in 1971, Hegarty is of Irish and English Decent. Hegarty has made three albums with Antony and the Johnsons: Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now,The Crying Light. As well as these, he has released four Eps, Another World being the most recent of theese.

Hegarty is known for his unique and moving voice, which has promted much pariase from the media. In an interview with the culture show, he describes Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins as a major influence upon his singing, especially with the Crying Light.

As well as his work with Antony and the Johnsons, Hegarty has worked with a variety of artists. Hegarty provided the vocals for the Hercules & Love Affair single Blind, described by NME as "the best kind of dance record: physical and emotional, euphorically happy and deeply, irredeemably sad. It clips along weightlessly; all disco bass, trumpets and rippling synthesiser, as Antony, his voice like tears rolling down the cheeks of a beautiful 40-year-old woman, muses intoxicatingly on lost innocence and ageing." On Joan as Police woman's 2006 album, Real Life, Hegarty cowrite and sang on the song 'I Defy'. Hegarty also provided Backing vocals for Lou Reed.



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James Blake (born October 1988) is an electronic musician and singer-songwriter from London, England, United Kingdom. Blake is primarily considered a dubstep producer and is frequently heralded as a leading figure in the "post-dubstep" community, but he is also noted for his prominent soul influences. Blake was nominated the Critic's Choice award by the 2011 BRIT Awards and the Sound of 2011 award by the BBC, and won second place in the latter. In addition, his self-titled debut LP, James Blake, was nominated for the 2011 Mercury Prize. Blake has also released material under the alias Harmonimix.

James Blake began his final year at Goldsmiths in September 2009 studying popular music while recording songs in his bedroom. In July 2009, he attended the Latymer School and released his debut single "Air and Lack Thereof" on Hemlock Audio. It was a firm favorite with Gilles Peterson from BBC Radio 1, and Blake was invited to do a special mix on Peterson's worldwide show, which included an exclusive Mount Kimbie track.

Blake released his debut EP The Bells Sketch on 8 March 2010 on Hessle Audio, followed soon after by CMYK on 31 May 2010 and Klavierwerke on 10 October 2010, both on R&S Records. All three EPs were met with significant critical acclaim: BBC's Nick Grimshaw chose CMYK as his Record of the Week, the title track of CMYK was ranked 24th on Frontier Psychiatrist's top 40 songs of the year, and all three of Blake's 2010 EPs were collectively ranked 8th on Pitchfork's top 50 albums of 2010.

On 4 February 2011, Blake released his self-titled debut LP, James Blake, via ATLAS and A&M. Three singles were released for the album: "Limit to Your Love," "The Wilhelm Scream," and "Lindisfarne"/"Unluck". The album was very well-received by critics: on 29 September 2010, BBC's Zane Lowe made "Limit To Your Love" his "Hottest Record in the World," Pitchfork awarded the album Best New Music and ranked it the 12th best album of 2011 on their year-end list, and it was nominated for the 2011 Mercury Prize.

On 7 October 2011, Blake released his fourth EP, Enough Thunder, via ATLAS and A&M. Two singles were released for the EP: "Fall Creek Boys Choir," a collaboration between Blake and Bon Iver, and "A Case Of You," a cover of Joni Mitchell. On 12 December 2011, Blake released another EP through R&S, Love What Happened Here.

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Das Racist is a hip hop group, formed in 2008 and based in Brooklyn, New York, comprised of Queens-born Himanshu Suri and San Francisco-born Victor Vazquez. Suri and Vazquez met in 2003 at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut where Victor was Himanshu's resident advisor in a "Students of Color for Social Justice" theme dormitory. Suri was a member of the Eclectic Society and is also an alumnus of School of Oriental and African Studies. Vazquez is also a member of Boy Crisis. The duo was later joined by hype man Ashok Kondabolu, known as Dap, for live performances and in music videos. Kondabolu and Suri are both alumni of Stuyvesant High School.

Known for their use of humor, obscure references, and unconventional style, Das Racist has been both dismissed as joke rap and hailed as an urgent new voice in rap. Spin magazine picked Das Racist as one of 50 acts to watch at the 2010 SXSW festival, and in April 2010, MTV Iggy selected Das Racist as one of the "25 Best New Bands in the World". Rolling Stone declared the song "hahahaha jk?" from Sit Down, Man one of the fifty best singles of 2010.

Das Racist's unique style has a strong polarizing tendency; their set at the Pop Montreal festival was described as "the most divisive show seen at the festival". They describe their approach to music as "'deconstructionalist': sawing the legs out from under hip-hop as they celebrate it".The New York Times wrote "Das Racist's lack of piety has become an aesthetic of its own, with songs that are as much commentary on hip-hop as rigorous practice of it". The Root said Das Racist could speak for both "the 'hood or the nearest gated community." Playboy called the duo "equal parts hip-hop and Cheech & Chong".

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Early life and education
A native of Santa Monica, California, violinist Tim Fain is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Victor Danchenko, and The Juilliard School, where he worked with Robert Mann. Before Curtis, Fain studied with Eduard Schmieder in Los Angeles. The "charismatic young violinist with a matinee idol profile, strong musical instincts, and first rate chops" (Boston Globe) was featured as the sound of Richard Gere 's violin in Bee Season. As The Washington Post recently raved, "Fain has everything he needs for a first-rate career."

Career
He made his New York concerto debut at Alice Tully Hall with Gerard Schwarz and the New York Chamber Symphony, and at Lincoln Center 's Mostly Mozart Festival with the Orchestra of St. Luke's. Performing works from Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to Richard Danielpour and Philip Glass, he has been soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and Oxford Symphony Orchestra, and with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He appeared as soloist with the Philip Glass Ensemble at Carnegie Hall in a concert version of Einstein on the Beach, and gave a special performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra. Other recent and upcoming performances include appearances with the Champaign Urbana Symphony Orchestra, the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra, Illinois Symphony Orchestra and the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, as well as recitals for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and in Utah, Maryland, Syracuse and elsewhere throughout the United States.

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Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is a composer from the United States. His music is frequently described as minimalist, though he prefers to describe himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures". Although his early, mature music is minimalist, he has evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, and is described by his biographer, Tim Page, as "the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music -- simultaneously."

Glass is a prolific composer: He has written works for his own musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (for which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theater works, eight symphonies, eight concertos, solo works, string quartets, and film scores. His film scores include the "Qatsi" trilogy by director Godfrey Reggio ("Koyaanisqatsi", "Powaqqatsi" and "Naqoyqatsi"), Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Martin Scorsese's "Kundun", Peter Weir's "The Truman Show" and Stephen Daldry's "The Hours," in addition to a number of operas ("Einstein on the Beach" and "Satyagraha") and the quintessention of the minimalist tradition with "Music in Twelve Parts." Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.


Glass counts many artists, writers, musicians and directors among his friends, such as Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Doris Lessing, the late Allen Ginsberg, Robert Wilson, Godfrey Reggio, Ravi Shankar, David Bowie, and the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who have all collaborated with him. He is (primarily) Buddhist and a strong supporter of the Tibetan cause. In 1987, he co-founded the Tibet House with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere. Radio personality Ira Glass is a first cousin of Glass.

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Stephin Merritt (born 1966 in New York City, United States) is a singer-songwriter. He has created and played principal roles in the following bands: The Magnetic Fields, The 6ths, The Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes.

He briefly used the name The Baudelaire Memorial Orchestra as an attribution for a song written for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, entitled "Scream and Run Away". Further music was recorded for the audiobook versions of the series and is attributed to The Gothic Archies.

Under his own name, he recorded and released the soundtracks to the films Eban and Charley and Pieces of April. The soundtrack to the late Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete featured many of his songs.

He and director Chen Shi-Zheng have collaborated on three pieces of musical theatre; Orphan of Zhao (2003), Peach Blossom Fan (2004), and My Life as a Fairy Tale (2005). Select tracks from these works have been released on Nonesuch Records under the title Showtunes.

Merritt is openly gay. His lyrics are known for bending and blurring the gender line; examples include the song When My Boy Walks Down the Street, sung by a male vocalist, which contains the lyric "and he's going to be my wife". He is fascinated with the undead, often making veiled or explicit references to vampires. Other frequent motifs in his lyrics include trains and railroads, the moon, dancing, eyes, and, of course, love.

Merritt has a Chihuahua named Irving, after Irving Berlin. He was raised buddhist by his counter-culture mother. He attended the progressive Massachusetts high school, The Cambridge School of Weston and briefly attended NYU before moving back to Boston. He is a smoker, and is known to light a cigarette while performing on stage. He has worked as a copy editor for Spin Magazine and Time Out New York.

One of Merritt's most notable quirks is that, when interrupting his speech for thought, he does not use linguistic placeholders such as "uh" or "er" to indicate that he is not done speaking, but instead simply stops speaking. This leads many interviewers unfamiliar with this behavior to cut him off before he has finished answering a question.

In a September 2005 interview conducted by The Onion's AV Club, alternative rock musician Bob Mould was reminded of an interviewer who once referred to Mould as "the most depressed man in rock." Mould's response was, "He's never met Stephin Merritt, obviously."

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Rahzel, born Rahzel M. Brown, is an American musician. He is a hip hop MC who specializes in beatboxing (he calls himself a 'vocal percussionist'). He is probably best known as a member of The Roots. He is also called "the Godfather of Noyze".

Growing up in the Bronx, Rahzel went to Grandmaster Flash's shows regularly and later became a roadie of the Ultramagnetic MCs. He was also influenced by artists like Doug E. Fresh, Biz Markie, Bobby McFerrin, Buffy of the Fat Boys, and Al Jarreau.

Rahzel has expanded the art of beatboxing in a unique way, creating vocal beats while singing lyrics simultaneously, as is best displayed by his famous a cappella performance of "If Your Mother Only Knew" (an interpretation of Aaliyah's song "If Your Girl Only Knew") of which an MP3 is in wide circulation.

Rahzel has been performing live with musician and vocalist Mike Patton (Faith No More, Fantômas, etc.) as "Patton & Rahzel".

Rahzel released his album Make The Music 2000 in 1999 on the MCA record label, followed by the 2004 release of the album Rahzel's Greatest Knockouts for Sureshot Recordings on which he collaborates with many other artists.

In 2004, Rahzel collaborated with Björk and other beatboxers for her album Medúlla. His beatboxing skills are also featured on The Crystal Method's album Legion of Boom, in which he provides the vocals for the song "The American Way" and others on the album.

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Lou Reed (born March 2, 1942) is an American rock artist originally from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Especially while a member of the The Velvet Underground in the 1960s, Reed broke new ground for the rock genre in several important dimensions, introducing more mature and intellectual themes to what was then considered a largely simplistic genre of music.

In 1964 Reed moved to New York City and began working as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records. In 1964 he scored a minor hit with the single "The Ostrich", a parody of popular dance songs of the time, which included lines such as "put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it."

Reed first found prominence as the guitarist and principal singer-songwriter of The Velvet Underground. The band, which lasted from 1965 until 1973 (with Reed departing in late 1970 after the Loaded sessions), gained relatively little notice during its life but is often considered the seed from which most alternative and underground traditions of rock music sprang. As the Velvet's songwriter, Reed wrote about such taboo subjects as S&M (Venus In Furs), transvestites and transsexuals (Sister Ray, and Lady Godiva's Operation), prostitution (There She Goes Again), and drug addiction (I'm Waiting For The Man, White Light/White Heat, Heroin).

As a guitarist, he made innovative use of abrasive distortion, volume-driven feedback, and nonstandard tunings. Reed's flat, New York voice, stripped of superficial emotions and, like Bob Dylan's, flaunting its lack of conventional training, was no less important to the music's radical effect. One of rock's most volatile personalities, Reed made inconsistent albums that frustrated critics. The reputation he established more than forty years ago with The Velvet Underground has both haunted and elevated him to near-mythic stature.

Reed began a long and varied solo career in 1972. He scored a hit that year with Walk On The Wild Side off the Bowie-produced Transformer. For more than a decade he then seemed purposely to evade mainstream commercial success. Transformer was followed by the dark and challenging Berlin, an album that shed his fan base just as he'd cultivated it.

Albums such as the one-take low-ball wonder Sally Can't Dance and Metal Machine Music continued his nose-thumbing at mainstream success and his label. Metal Machine Music, upon which Reed later commented, "no one is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive.", although considered a contract-fulfilling joke upon its release, has been widely recognized as the invention of "noise music," and many artists, such as Japan's Merzbow have regarded it as a pioneering classic.

Despite his best efforts, the 70's were not without artistically and commercially successful albums. He had a major success with the live Rock 'n Roll AnimalLP, recorded following the release of Transformer, which received vast FM airplay in the mid-to late '70s due in no small part to the superb guitar solos of Steve Hunter. Coney Island Baby contained some of the best written and performed songs in Reed's oeuvre and Street Hassle saw Reed brave new-wave stylings.

Rock and Rule, an animated film centered around rock music in a post - apocalyptic future, featured music by Reed and other similar artists. His contribution vividly helped define the evil character Mok, and reflected his ongoing exploration of dark subjects. Although released within a couple of years of another animation cult classic, Heavy Metal, the 1983 release of R&R was a commercial failure. Despite the advanced animation, lack of marketing support by the parent company doomed it. The movie was relegated to late - night cable TV, where it built a small but persistent fan base.

Despite erratic turns, Reed's work won him wide recognition by the late 1980s as an essential elder statesman of rock. For decades he has written about intense subjects including heroin, transexuals, and S&M - not to mention the horror stories on Berlin - which had never been presented in rock and roll before. The industry had matured, to the extent that his commercial position as an "art rocker" was secure.

Reed has lived in New York City for most of his life and much of his music evokes the city, earning the singer comparisons (which he has encouraged) to William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers of regional interest. He also cites the poet Delmore Schwartz as a great influence. Reed studied creative writing under Schwartz at Syracuse University in the early 60s. The song My House tells the story of a Ouija board which spells out Delmore, and how this event inspired Reed.

Lou Reed teamed up with The Killers on the track Tranquilize for their new compilation album Sawdust, which was released on November 13, 2007.

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Dechen Shak-Dagsay is a contemporary singer of traditional Tibetan Buddhist mantras. She is the Tibetan-born daughter of the Venerable Dagsay Tulku. Born in India in 1961, in first year of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Dechen fled with her family to Switzerland in 1965, where she has resided ever since.
Strongly committed to "preserving Tibetan culture in the West," Dechen studied and performed traditional Tibetan music and dance throughout her childhood and adolescence. However, she considers herself to be truly a product of Eastern and Western culture. As an adult, she pursued a successful career as a marketing executive in Zurich.
In 2005, Dechen left her job to pursue her career in music full-time.

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