Music

On the next Galactic Travels, I'll begin a month-long focus on Modulator ESP.  The Featured CD at Midnight will be the self-released title "The Unknowing."

The Special Focus for October will be Modulator ESP, a.k.a. Jez Creek from Nottingham, England.  He performs improvised music that explores the boundaries of dark ambient, drone, Berlin School sequencing, and noise using modular synthesis, real-time sampling, sound manipulation, and live looping.

Brooklyn-based electronic-music producer Jonathan Dagan, a.k.a. J.Viewz, writes songs that whirl and clatter like tiny Rube Goldberg devices. So it's only reasonable that his videos might function the same way. Witness "About the Sea," in which small green squares reveal a series of patterns before giving way to gorgeous animated nature scenes.

Twenty-five years ago, no one — and I mean no one — would have predicted that a little budget label out of Hong Kong would totally upend the classical music industry. But after doing everything pretty much counter to received wisdom, the Naxos catalog includes more than 7,000 recordings, and they've sold more than 115 million CDs worldwide. A very popular streaming service, the Naxos Music Library, contains nearly a million tracks.

Catherine Russell is a lady born to music. Her father, Luis Russell (1902-63), was Louis Armstrong's orchestra leader beginning in the mid-1930s. Her mother, Carline Ray, is a bassist, singer, great all-around musician and a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the 1940s all-woman band that swung as hard as the men. "This Daughter of Jazz Is One Cool Cat," reads the headline of Nat Hentoff's profile for The Wall Street Journal.

All month, World Cafe invites listeners to discover the music of Havana, Cuba, with the series Sense of Place.

Marcus Mumford may not seem like the kind of guy who'd start a bar fight.

The newly reunited power-pop pioneers in The dB's make their first appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live in Charleston, W.V. Often described as the band that filled the gap between Big Star and R.E.M. in the early '80s, The dB's helped change the course of guitar-driven power-pop for years to come.