Mary Halvorson.

This week, the Voice rounded up Weasel Walter's nationwide community of avant-gardist outsiders who both record for his boldly avant-garde label ugEXPLODE and collaborate with the iconoclast-about-town. The names are staggering and represent the most intrepid of musicians working in the experimental and jazz orb today: Brooklyn guitarist Mary Halvorson, Normal Love's Jessica Pavone, Oakland avant-blues guitarist Ava Mendoza and Houston improvisers Sandy Ewen and Damon Smith. Extended versions of the Voice's chats with them follow.

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Some DJs are quiet, let-the-music-do-the-talking types, but not Jonathan Toubin. Interviewed for this week's Voice profile, the 4Knots Music Festival Afterparty host was enthusiastic and opinionated, generating a novella's worth of transcript. More highlights from our conversation are below, as Toubin recalls his days freeloading from major labels, how to nicely kick drunks out of Arlene's Grocery, New York's Bohemian tradition, and just exactly which rare records he DJs with.

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Metallica circa the release of Metallica.

This weekend, Metallica will perform 1984's Ride the Lightning and 1991's Metallica during their Orion Music + More Festival in Atlantic City. In the spirit of reviving those albums, frontman James Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett talked about select tracks from each album. Today, they look back on their band's breakthrough from 20 years ago.

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This weekend, Metallica will perform 1984's Ride the Lightning and 1991's Metallica during their Orion Music + More Festival in Atlantic City. In the spirit of reviving those albums, frontman James Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett agreed to look back on a few tracks from both. Here's some dirt on several of the tunes from Ride the Lightning.

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via Audible Treats

Kool Keith used to love the Times Square of the early '80s; while interviewing him for this week's Voice, he waxed lyrical on the subject. Here's his full and lengthy rememberance of the days when 42nd Street was a seedier place, one lit by marquees advertising kung-fu flicks and boomboxes that looked like spaceships.

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Tonight at the Bowery Ballroom, the Afghan Whigs—the Cincinnati torchbearers for damaged soul music—return to the stage after 13 years on hiatus, and if their performances on last night's Late Night With Jimmy Fallon are any indication, tonight's sold-out show will be full of the band's trademark self-lacerating fury, with Whigs frontman Greg Dulli leading the charge as he spits out twisted tales of love gone spoiled. In advance of the band's return, which includes a Whigs-selected lineup at this fall's I'll Be Your Mirror festival in Asbury Park, I spoke with Dulli from his home in New Orleans shortly before he left to rehearse in Cincinnati with his bandmates; the parts of our chat that didn't make it into last week's Voice are below.

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A few drinks into my conversation with Mike and El-P about their new collaboration R.A.P. Music (Williams Street), the tone shifted, as it tends to under the influence of multiple makeshift White Russians. EL-P's drink-ordering became relentlessly efficient. Things became a little more candid. The conversation veered on-and off-record, and, by the time the night was over, they ended up "covering" almost everything. From the fate of HBO's Luck to the future of Earl to what El-P originally thought of Jay-Z, here are the (publishable) highlights of The Drunken Reel.

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This week the Voice sat down with New York jazz titan Charles Gayle, whose new album Streets portends a man on a quest to find peace within his craft and headspace. Gayle and Tom Surgal (of local avant-jazz stalwarts White Out) go way back to the revered '80s downtown era, and the percussionist, via email, reflected on their history together. "In many ways, I've always thought that Charles's life mirrors the life of Coltrane, in that he too was lost and then he was found," Surgal said.

"Charles was floundering in his earlier life, leading a dissolute existence, and then he experienced a spiritual awakening and he was saved. And like Trane, his playing began to reflect the new found intensity of a man on a righteous path. There has always been a sense of urgency to his playing, like he was making up for lost time. And also like Trane, he has always practiced relentlessly. I know people who used to live in his old squat who claimed he never stopped playing. A lesser-known facet to Charles's personality is that he possesses enormous curiosity about the human condition. He is always studying people and has keen insights in to the way peoples' minds work. I've always thought he has the intellectual predisposition more characteristic of an author than a musician. This stirring need in him to fathom those around him no doubt feeds in to the dimensionality of his playing, help making him the consummate musician that he is."

Here, Gayle delves even deeper into Streets and his inspiring trajectory.

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Monster Magnet frontman Dave Wyndorf is a talkative guy. What was supposed to be a 30-minute interview to preview his band's performance of the 1995 album Dopes To Infinity at Music Hall of Williamsburg this Friday stretched into 90, as he took off and ran with subjects like how his band has been pinned down as "stoner rock," his experience with the heyday of big-budget music video excess, and the time he took the stage with his old pal Marilyn Manson. It would be journalistically negligent to leave out any story involving "BB machine guns," so here's a compilation of some of the interview's best outtakes.

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Seze Devres / www.sdphotography.net

Bryan Kasenic (left); cake.

This week, the Voice profiled Bryan Kasenic, who throws the monthly Bunker party—the city's premiere techno event—which celebrates its ninth year tonight at Public Assembly with a bash featuring Chicago house legend Derrick Carter and Dutch techno great Legowelt. Below are some outtakes from our interview, in which Kasenic discusses his entrée to New York, the records that made him a techno fan, avoiding "amateur night," and not being the background to someone else's K-hole.

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