IT ISN’T UNCOMMON to be let down by something that comes along calling itself “opera,” only to find out that it either has nothing at all to do with opera, or that it’s basically a musical. (For the layman, musical theater would generally fall under the “theater” industry, while opera is classical music’s territory; there are some exceptions, but generally, that’s how i...

AMONG THE MANY talented artists from around the globe that make up the sixth edition of GlobalFest—New York’s largest world music showcase, which takes place at Webster Hall every January— is Brooklyn’s own Chicha Libre, a band put together by Olivier Conan (one of the coowners of Barbès in Park Slope) as a way to spread chicha, a psychedelic musical genre he discovered almost by chance while ...

JEREMY BARNES HAS no greater passion, at least from a musical standpoint, than Eastern European folk. During our conversation, Barnes uses the word “love” more than half a dozen times to describe the intensity of his feeling for the region’s fervent, dizzyingly passionate sounds. But Barnes (who made his name originally as the drummer for one of indie folk’s most lauded bands, Neutral Milk Ho...

First, let’s say so me thing good so this article can say something at all: The Passing Strange soundtrack, the Repo! The Genetic Opera soundtrack, Joe Jackson’s Rain, Electric Six’s Flash, that self-titled one from Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, Black Mountain’s In The Future, Murder By Death’s Red of Tooth and Claw, Alice Cooper’s Along Came A Spider, and…well, there was th...

WHAT DO YOU get when you combine punk rock,Vaudeville cabaret, modern technology and a greatly misunderstood character actor from America’s golden age of film? Everyone agrees:You get a bad idea. Specifically you get Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century. Conceived as “a hybrid punk rock multi-media theater event,” the piece presents Lorre’s dramatic life story through music...