You know what's awesome? Drum fills. Can you identify a song when it's stripped down to a just few seconds of isolated drum pounding?
- Watch the bluesy Irish singer-songwriter Hozier play "Take Me to Church" in the KCRW studios. http://n.pr/OYzlCE
Photo: Rob LaFond/KCRW - NPR's Alt.Latino is in Mexico City for the massive Vive latino 2014 festival. Here are 14 bands they can't wait to see.
- Watch Kristian Bell strip down The Wytches' hair-flinging psych-rock to an acoustic guitar in the backyard of an Austin coffee shop. http://n.pr/1jRzO2U
- Watch The Silk Road Project percussion section get into a deep groove inspired by a traditional rhythm from Upper Egypt.
- 831 new works and 40 years later, the Kronos Quartet still nudges composers and audiences in new directions.
- For one night, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra experimented with a pop-up orchestra of professionals, students and amateurs of all ages. http://n.pr/1gYwVd7
- 20-year-old producer Young Chop's made beats for everyone from Pusha T to Cassie. In a backyard interview with NPR Hip-Hop, he says he looks to the '70s for inspiration.
- Watch the superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma and many of his close friends from all over the world in action at a theatrical props warehouse in Brooklyn.
- Dan Willson drifted away from the Jehovah's Witnesses as a teenager. His second album as Withered Hand finds him at loose ends with his religious faith — not lost so much as spiritually dislocated.
- Norwegian singer Monica Birkenes, a.k.a. Mr Little Jeans, makes epic pop with gnarled synths. Her latest video follows a trucker hopped up on drugs as he traverses his haunted past.
- Hear brand new cuts from The Black Keys and Swans, plus our latest musical discoveries, including singer Dylan Shearer, who channels Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.
- Got 5 minutes? Want to help NPR Music? Take our spring survey. https://www.surveymonkey.com/
s/CF9QCQK - Lil Jon may be best known as the king of crunk, but "Turn Down for What" isn't his first time working with a dance music producer.
- To mark the venturesome Kronos Quartet's 40 years of commissioning and performing and new music, composers Steve Reich, Terry Riley and others recall their favorite Kronos memories.
- Watch Angel Olsen perform the intense and incendiary "Sweet Dreams" in the KEXP studios. http://n.pr/1gtYjVO
Photo: Amber Zbitnoff/KEXP - On Feb. 5, 1953, Bud Powell was uncommunicative face to face at the New York jazz club Birdland. But when he sat at the keys, it was a whole other story.
- Swept away by a hurricane, crushed by baggage handlers, infested by cockroaches — nothing hurts quite like the destruction of a musical instrument.
- Watch the young operatic tenor Joseph Calleja with the old-school style sing NPR's Tiny Desk. http://n.pr/Q8filV
Photo: Abbey Oldham/NPR - The mastermind behind metal's most cartoonishly grotesque band, Gwar, brought levity to the genre.
- Morning Edition host David Greene talks to British singer-songwriter and former Culture Club frontman Boy George about his first album in 19 years, 'This Is What I Do.'
- "When you make music, you don't really think about how you're going to explain it at the end," Skrillex's Sonny Moore tells NPR's Arun Rath. http://n.pr/ONAwEG
Photo: Adam Kissick for NPR - Yasmine Hamdan makes electro-pop by way of Lebanon that's both intimately familiar and bracingly new. Stream 'Ya Nass' from NPR Music's First Listen. http://n.pr/1g9rOLG
- Fresh out of rehab and a rocky point in his marriage to June Carter, Johnny Cash recorded an album in the early 1980s that his fans never got to hear.
- Your Sunday long read: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on celebrity fandom and the #BeyHive.
- The Bad Plus plays the score to Igor Stravinsky’s gloriously noisy, 101-year-old fever dream of a ballet as literally as possible. Stream 'The Rite of Spring' from NPR Music's First Listen. http://n.pr/1kQpkCo
- "We are the spark that lights the inferno." Stream 'Heathen,' the crushing new album by Baton Rouge metal band Thou, from NPR Music's First Listen. http://n.pr/1jidlfg
- NPR's Alt.Latino took a break from seeing bands long enough to discuss their favorite SXSW music over heaping plates of Texas barbecue.
- David Letterman and GIFs made this long-running Baltimore band famous. Now it’s time to hear Future Islands new album. Stream 'Singles' from NPR Music's First Listen. http://n.pr/PYv2I7
- When your oeuvre is built on left turns, how better to throw your fan base for a loop than by going straight ahead? Stream Liars' 'Mess' from NPR Music's First Listen. http://n.pr/1dxWmly
- For some shops, ordering all of those special Record Store Day releases is "a roll of the dice." WAMU 88.5's Bandwidth reports.
- 50 years ago today, Andrew Hill recorded 'Point of Departure.' 50 years later, it still sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday. Hear the pianist in a Piano Jazz episode from 2005.
- Are you brainy when it comes to Bach, or bamboozled? Know your cantatas from your concertos? Match your wits against the granddaddy of composers in this 'Big Bach' puzzler.
- Download 10 songs from our favorite acts out of SXSW, including Future Islands, PHOX, Sergio Mendoza Y La Orkesta, Ages and Ages, and much more.