miss ellaneous

First: Run, don't walk (or just click, I guess) to New Amsterdam's website and download Corey Dargel's new EP, Every Day is the Same Day, for free. Dargel's fierce ruminations on death are accompanied by the ecstatic violin loops of Cornelius Dufallo, a truly wonderful eight minutes of music. It's Kafka Fragments for the SoHo crowd. I'm very excited for Dargel's upcoming double-album Someone Will Take Care of Me, out May 25th.

Second: Thank you all for your support and help--blogging, donating, watching--towards making Music Marathon a success. It was an incredible 26 hours (actually more like 25.5, but who's counting?), and I heard everything except for the 4AM to 8AM stuff. Excellent performances and more fun than a barrel of monkeys. So far we've raised over $12,000 and donations keep coming in--I'll have a final money tally by next week. At about 10pm on Friday night, I noticed a middle-aged Asian man sitting in the back of the hall. When the crowd thinned out at around 1am, he was still there. Two hours later, when he was one of four people in the hall, I decided to strike up a conversation. Roy Nakamura is the official Music Marathoner, the only person to stay for all 26 hours. Considering he didn't know any of the performers personally, and is just a classical music fan who happened to saw our Chicago Tribune article and decided to stop by, that's pretty astonishing.

Third: I saw Jónsi's spectacular live show last week at the Vic Theatre, and have yet to blog about it. But don't worry, I will! His new album is all I've been listening to the past few weeks, and I'm still waiting for my limited edition boxed set of goodies to arrive. When it does, I'll review everything in there and the live show as well. Stay tuned.