PowerPoint Roulette. The concert portion of the program didn't make much more sense.

​The Talent Show Presents: The Leap Year Show w/H. Jon Benjamin, Jon Glaser, Lady Aye, Ménage à Twang, Patrick Borelli, and others
Littlefield
Wednesday, February 29

Better than: Staying home to watch Family Guy. (But only slightly better than staying home to watch Archer.)

Since the brilliant FX spy cartoon Archer might be intended as a vicious Aqua Teening of intelligence agencies and our decade of national security hysteria, you have to wonder whether lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin may have been trying to do the same to overly serious electronic music when he took the stage last night as the musical guest for Elna Baker and Kevin Townley's popular variety show The Talent Show. Or maybe he'd giggle a bit at the idea of his goofy show spawning such a pretentious opening line—and wouldn't that be glorious, with his fantastic baritone—because he was just totally winging it as he pretended (I would assume) to be a stunningly incompetent bedroom beatmaker.

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The Playing For Change band.

​Ten years ago, audio engineer Mark Johnson boldly decided to part ways with a career that had him recording the likes of Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, and Los Lobos. He decided to chase after a new pipe dream that must have seemed at once both wildly ambitious and thoroughly hare-brained. Spurred into action by his discovery of a Los Angeles street performer who could do a particularly mean version of Ben E. King's soul classic "Stand By Me," Johnson launched Playing For Change, in which he traveled around the globe with a portable recording setup in order to document the buskers and other musicians he happened upon—sort of like a worldwide and far more competent version of my NYC field recording series Cast In Concrete, which has been running in this space sporadically since last year.

The biggest difference: Johnson kept overdubbing each new performer into the same song as the previous ones, resulting in patchwork collaborations between disjunct musicians who would never meet, each one carrying nominally different implicit messages about lofty themes like faith, war, and interpersonal connectivity. The tracks are both sprawling and scattered, with rapid "We Are The World"-style transitions between the participants, but the masterful production sensibility eventually helped turn the project into the sort of sensation that can make an Internet star out of Grandpa Elliott, the captivating blind sexagenarian busker who takes the reins for the second verse on Johnson's jigsaw puzzle version of "Stand By Me."

After a string of popular videos illustrating his process and a handful of successful record releases—including what is likely the first top-ten Billboard 200 debut by a group of largely unknown street performers—Johnson decided to take the project on the road, assembling a band with Elliott and a few other choice singers at the center. They're visiting New York for a show at the New York Society For Ethical Culture tonight.

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Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records the musical offerings of New York City's street musicians.

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Who: Zack Orion
When: 8/16, about 11:30pm
Where: Bedford Avenue L train platform

It's been a very long time since I've seen anybody pull off the one-man band thing quite like this guy—his ability sucks you in from all the way up by the turnstiles. Right foot stuck to a tambourine which is substituting quite effectively for the snare crack, left foot perched on a kick pedal that's aimed backwards at the suitcase/drum he's sitting on, harmonica around his neck ready to go for the times when he's not singing, and all this still leaves both hands free for the banjo. Imagine my surprise when I ambled up alongside him and saw the name on the CDs he was hocking—Zack Orion. I vaguely recognized it from the time I spent down in Virginia, where we sort of traveled in the same circles without ever actually meeting.

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​Once the towers had fallen, simultaneously facing both the body count and the scarred city skyline was enough to realign anybody's perspectives. I was supposedly on track as a college sophomore in Virginia, but it was tough for me to justify continuing on as a student; every day for months, I thought about dropping out to enlist, feeling like a draft dodger even though there was no draft. We waited for twelve hours in a line that stretched around the basketball arena to donate at the Red Cross blood drive, and when our turns finally came, it felt like we couldn't give enough. As a teenager, I was of course unprepared for the kind of trauma that can level a nation. It was a totally new kind of distress, like I was consumed by a grief that was just too big for my body to hold. This, I think, is patriotism.

But patriotism can be a funny thing, especially in the South, where it often threatens to devolve into something much more nefarious. Local goons started throwing sandwiches at my little brother as he walked to school; we're Indian, not Arab. Out in Arizona, a gas station owner named Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered for wearing a turban; he was Sikh, not Muslim. The ignorance was as alarming as the hysteria.

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​Could the defining record of the post-September 11 era have been the handiwork of an alt-rock band who wrote all of the album's songs before the attacks? Ten years later, it's pretty tough to sell the idea that Incubus' Morning View crystallized that heart-wrenching moment beautifully; even frontman Brandon Boyd had trouble digesting it. But sometimes these things happen by accident, so we talked him through it via email.

What was it like trying to tour and promote "Morning View" in the wake of September 11?

We had booked the tour, prepped the album and gone to New York to do promo stuff for it all. We were in New York and our first dates were New Hampshire on September 15th and NYC on the 16th and 17th, if memory serves. I can't believe it's been ten years. Everything went a bit haywire, to put it lightly.

Was anything about the album changed in response to the attacks?

The only thing that was thwarted as a result of the attacks was the half-million-dollar music video we had just completed and was set to come out days later. It ended up being banned in America due to "insensitivities" it had. The first single was called "Wish You Were Here" and the original video was an homage to the '60s film Head. Somehow the image of us running from a hoard of screaming girls, shedding clothing and jumping into a river, only to be rescued by superhot mermaids, was deemed inappropriate.

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Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records the musical offerings of New York City's street musicians.

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Who: Dan Bellen And The Hare Krishnas
When: 6/8/11, about 6:15pm
Where: Union Square

Scorcher of a day out at the Union Square Greenmarket, which is the best I can do by way of explanation for my complete and utter snark failure here. When I was about halfway through recording these white dudes singing an Indian devotional chant, a husky and apparently quite confused West African fella approached me to ask, "Hey, what you believe in?"

Now, granted, I am a full-blooded Indian guy, and there was even a phase of my life during which music like this was a constant background presence—house parties with other suburban Indian families where the adults would sing this stuff in the living room while the kids played NES in the basement, and then all the above parties would eat tandoori chicken and aloo parathas together. But here I was standing off to the side, wasn't singing, and was wearing a polo shirt, sneakers, and a considerably more conventional haircut.

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Bush
Bowery Ballroom
Thursday, July 28

Better than: Better Than Ezra.

Those of you who got here from the link I will be posting on Google+ may find this hard to believe, but for the first half of my life I was what you'd call a late adopter. The Discman I bought from a garage sale in 1995 was the first such device to be owned by any member of my immediate family, in fact, after which we were all mildly astonished that something living in my bedroom had an honest-to-god laser in it. Likewise, grunge had pretty much ended before I fully understood that it had started in the first place—Kurt was dead by the time I bought the CD player. And so it came to pass that Sixteen Stone was the first CD I ever bought, and thus knockoff post-grunge alternative rock had to serve as my earth-shattering teen coming-of-age soundtrack. Not my finest hour; apologies to Better Than Ezra.

But this was actually not so horrid a fate back in 1995 as it may seem now. Back in middle school we all had yet to discover Rolling Stone or Spin or in fact any sort of commentary on these things beyond the playlists of our town's lone rock radio station, so even if they had been critically attacked at the time our devotion was the real deal.

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Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records the musical offerings of New York City's street musicians.

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Who: Sistine Criminals
When: 6/4/11, about 5 p.m.
Where: Washington Square Park

Quite the debatably fortuitous beginning to this enterprise, getting run over by a mobile mariachi quartet's accordionista the moment I jumped on the subway out by Prospect Park. But they declined to participate because they didn't have their uniforms, which seemed to me a very good reason to refuse. So instead I was off to Washington Square.

If you're lucky, Greg "Torch" Sgrulloni's drums will pretty much rule the park when you arrive, jumping out over the fountain and right through the crowds milling about with their ice creams or homework or whatever it is the NYU kids do out there. What could otherwise probably pass for a straightforward jazz head with a slight Middle Eastern modal flavor gets warped into a nerve-wracking monument to paranoia by jittery mile-a-minute jungle breakbeats that you'd assume were programmed specifically to sound inhuman if you weren't right there watching it all unfold from a park bench.

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​We certainly try, but capturing the sound of the city is a tall order, even and especially for those of us who are usually most concerned with these things. To most regular New Yorkers—those more likely to spend their Friday evenings in a park than at a concert, for example, or those who take the 7 instead of the L—panhandling doo-wop singers and clarinets echoing across Bleecker are a much bigger part of the sonic texture of NYC, as important as the street vendors and traffic din. And yet these musicians have often been ignored, largely because many of them don't have publicists and fancy album release shows, nor web sites and YouTube accounts. In some cases, they don't even have safe homes to return to when they're done performing.

Either way, enough is enough. Welcome to "Cast In Concrete," a new series in which Sound of the City publishes recordings and commentary focused on a traditionally under-served population of musicians: the buskers playing their hearts out for your pocket change deep down in the subway stations, surrounded by trees in the park, and on dirty street corners all over New York. I'll come find you, musicians; just grab your instruments and get out there. Leads are welcome.

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​NYC's annual three-day Blip Festival, which starts tonight, is the world's most important celebration of "chiptune" music, wherein gamers-turned-composers write songs using their favorite ancient video game consoles. Wanna see how the sausage gets made? Let's take a look at the consoles that will serve as the backbones for the festival's music.

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