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This is Said the Gramophone's 2011 Funding Drive, from June 13 to July 12.

It's where we invite the people who have enjoyed the site over the past year to help keep this loose gang ganging, swinging at windmills.

Once a year, Said the Gramophone asks its readers to please give. (And we offer rewards!)

We accept donations for just one month a year. (It's right now.)

Most of Said the Gramophone is written by two people: Dan is an actor, Sean is a freelance writer. This doesn't mean you should feel bad for us: we don't feel bad for us, we're doing things we love. Besides, you're probably broke too. But what we mean is this: we could use your help.

Since 2003, with Jordan Himelfarb, we have written 1,865 entries about almost 5,000 songs. This past year, another four or five hundred tunes, harpooned with scraps of prose. Some of the songs were new, some were very old. Each week, instead of trying to find another ten great bands, we do something much humbler: ten magnificent songs. Little marvels, three-, four- or five-minutes at a time.

We're proud of what we do at Said the Gramophone, but we know we will never be the biggest mp3blog in the world. We do not post videos, tour-dates, album art. We do not chase pageviews, post press releases, share the indie stars' new soundcloud leaks - unless they are killer songs, deserving to be here. If we post about something, it's because it's wonderful.

We try to do that one thing - writing with spirit about the songs we love, - and to do it well. As we've said before, our audience is you. That's it. There's no one else. You small, strange gang.

If you enjoy our work, please support us.

The Funding Drive is also your chance to get t-shirts, mixtape subscriptions, StG's first-ever chapbook, or even an exceptionally limited lathe-cut 7". Details of these pledge gifts are below.

These are some of the things we did in the past year: introduced or (more likely) reintroduced you to artists such as Ancient Kids, Austra, Avec pas d'casque, Bertrand Belin, Blue Hawaii, BOAT, Braids, the Burning Hell, Charlotte Dada, Colin Stetson, Connan Mockasin, Cousin Dud, Curren$y, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Dead Heart Bloom, Digital Leather, Digits, Efrim Manuel Menuck, Eternal Summers, Glass Ghost, Glasser, the Good Ones, Grimes, Group Doueh, Hello Shark, Hidden Words, Jai Paul, James Blake, James Irwin, James Leroy, Jamie Woon, Janelle Monae, Joe Goddard, Josephine Foster & The Victor Herrero Band, Katy B, Khaira Arby, Kris Ellestad, Kurt Vile, Land of Talk, Les Cox (Sportifs), Little Scream, Long Long Long, Lloyd Miller & The Heliocentrics, Makeup Monsters, Mavo, Mean Wind, Mozart's Sister, Norwegian Arms, Ô Paon, Otouto, Pacific!, Parasites of the Western World, Parlovr, Pat Jordache, Peter Nalitch, PS I Love You, Ryan Driver, S.E. Rogie, Sea Oleena, Shotgun Jimmie, Sleeping Bag, Sunglasses, Ted Hawkins, Tennis, This Is The Kit, Timothy Bloom, Tonetta, Troupe Majidi, Ty Segall, the Vaccines, Valley Maker, Venuses, Vijay Iyer, Vokal Ansembl Gordela, Warpaint, Wombs, Young Man and Zola Jesus; prepared guides to Pop Montreal and Suoni Per Il Popolo; wrote of swallow-jockeys, godfathers, 1996,heat and magnets, drum lessons, Arcade Fire's comeback, the city of Ület, Disney Park Memories, karaoke with co-workers, a Halloween after-party, the drowning city, Mickey's amulet, making love to the Earth Mother Achilles, Tiny's magic courtship, Catfish, The Weather War, #BRAGGADONTCHAKNOW, demos, grandpa's .zip file, flowers from the oven, James Blake's dad, Kirk Baxter, co-editor The Social Network, The Story of Emma, if the Beatles never broke up, "Ça Plane Pour Moi", Sappyfest and the Dawson City Music Festival, covers of Big Star's "Thirteen", unreleased Disney tunes, singing for a child, shaving your beard, Derek the "Judo master", pot from Muscles, the lovers' lying song, a fly in butter, Tune-Yards' succumbersome mid, beating blizzards and blizzards beat up; plus guestposts by Chandler Levack, Emma Healey and Little Scream. We also wrote about our 100 favourite songs of 2010.

Thank-you gifts

We have some presents for donors.

Give > $20

1. A one-year subscription to our new mixtape of the month club.
   • each month, a seamless full-length mix by Dan and Sean;
   • delivered by email, with download link.
2. Get entered into a draw for t-shirts by Nice Snacks-Cold Drinks.
   • win one of five shirts from our favourite t-shirt maker;
   • winners can choose from any of Nice Snacks' amazing hand-drawn t-shirt renderings, including Ben Kingsley with Patrick Stewart, Ice-T with Paul Newman and Arnold Palmer, ONE LESS CAR + yacht, and basketball players Yao Ming & Shaq holding baseball's biggest trophy.
   • (This is courtesy of our dear gramo-friend Dave Barclay.)

Give > $50

• The first ever Said the Gramophone book.
  • a hand-numbered, limited edition chapbook;
  • four new stories, by Sean and Dan, with original illustrations by Meags Fitzgerald and others;
  • plus a handful of Said the Gramophone classics;
  • small and perfect-bound, with colour cover and b&w interior.

Give > $100

• Said the Gramophone's first hand-cut 7" vinyl record.
  • extremely limited custom-made lathe-cut single;
  • we mean it: rarer than a Stradivarius;
  • with music by ??? and ??? (too secret to mention);
  • hand-numbered, in handmade packaging.

We don't have photographs of our book and 7", because we haven't made them yet. But if you have any doubts about the substance of our thank-yous, we thought we would share some details from last year's funding drive:

To thank Said the Gramophone's 2010 donors, we made two exclusive mixtapes for download. Here's one of them: Songs for Dancing [90mb].

We hid their initials around Montreal:

We documented games of giant chess:

We even made a short film, about betting on long odds. This is a tiny clip:

That was last year. This year's gifts are even better.

Finally...

We are terribly, marvelously indebted to you. Every year we say it, and every year it feels even more true: your beauty and smarts, your kindness and curiosity, your wit and wolf-whistles, your comments and clicks - these are the things that make this thing a thing. These are the treasures which sustain this sea bed. You give us your time, and we feel privileged to give you ours. Thank you for leaving comments, writing emails, offering help and hospitality and faraway friendship. Thanks for the spooky JPGs and the animated GIFs and the MP3 attachments, the pokes and retweets. You play our favourite songs to your lovers, send us your lovers' favourite songs. You put up with this stumbling, fumbling project - stories about midnight gardens and weather wars, eros and hate. We understand that not everyone can afford to donate to a silly website. Regardless of dollars or cents, rubles or yen, thank-you thank-you thank-you all yet again for continuing to make this one of the most rewarding things in our lives, truly.

Said the Gramophone's 2011 funding drive runs until July 12, when donations will close for the year.

Alina Simone - "Glitterati". It went on until she gave him his eyes. The insults, the slaps, plates full of ash. Then one day she knocked gently on his study door, pushed it open, and as he looked up over reading glasses she extended her open palm. Two eyes, like white and grey marbles. He assumed at first that they were her own. But he gazed at her face, remembered the brown of those irises. He looked again at the eyes in her palms. This time he recognized them. His own pupils, certain and fixed. There was admonishment in them, wrath, hatred. He understood that they would never blink. [Make Your Own Danger, as well as Alina Simone's first book, You Must Go And Win, are both out today. She will be reading tomorrow at Brooklyn's Word bookstore, as part of Largehearted Lit]

Car Seat Headrest - "Happy News for Sadness". This song is like the arrival of reinforcements. A legion of legionnaires, cresting the hill, flying your banner. They will stand with you, advise you, lean into their shields and take the arrow-fire. When the smoke comes, they will not buckle; they will not shift. They will flick their lighters and crank the electric lanterns, they will kick on their fizz-boxes and listen to that hopeful zzzzzz. Your reinforcements are safe bets. They are close to friends. [download at a price of your choosing]

(photo is of an embryonic penguin - source)

The 11th-ever Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, one of Montreal's best selections of loose, brave, wild, weird, wrecked and jubilant musical acts, began yesterday. It goes until June 25. It's wonderful and too many song-loving locals don't take advantage enough. For me, there is not a better chance in Montreal's four seasons to get your mind blown by something completely unknown. Free jazz, free folk, noise, contemporary classical, musique actuelle, weird punk and electronics - stuff that can be pushed to the fringes, brought out & up & together by Suoni's marvellous curators. Last year, I interviewed the festival founders. This year I just want to point out some highlights.

All tickets cost less in advance. Almost all shows at either Sala Rossa or Casa del Popolo, which are across the street from one-another. Browse the full Suoni schedule.

Top three:

1. OMAR SOULEYMAN and AroarA
My highlight of the festival. When Souleyman played here last year, it was one of the concerts of the year: everyone, across all lines, dancing like dumb animals to Souleyman's insane dance music, synth-lines twisting like fucked astral snakes, him cool as cuke and striding. That was a free, giant outdoor gig downtown. This is a concert in the small room of Sala Rossa. It is going to be ludicrous. Opening are AroarA, the new project by Broken Social Scene's Andrew Whiteman and his partner Ariel Engle, v hotly tipped. 13 June, and buy tickets in advance. [8:30/$20]

2. SATOKO FUJII MA-DO
Quartet led by Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii. Contemporary jazz from Tokyo that lifts from avant-rock, traditional Japanese folk and contemporary classical. (Or so the program tells me.) Sounds so great. 19 June. [8pm/$22]

3. COLIN STETSON and HANGEDUP
Saxophonist Colin Stetson may have recorded the best album of this year. Live, he is a technical wonder - but fuck that, listen close, and he'll leave you in devastation. Hangedup are an amazing post-rock duo that died and have been reborn. I saw them again this winter and was thrilled by the experience. Melodies that feel old, raucously rawked, by just viola and drumkit. 17 June. [8:30/$12]

Other wonderments:

GLENN JONES
A master of folk guitar, in the tradition of John Fahey and Jack Rose, performing at Sala on June 6 [8:30/$12] and doing a free workshop at 1pm that afternoon (not June 7, as in program).

VERTIGO
Music from the Hitchcock film, performed by "the Lost Orchestra", ft members of Godspeed, the Luyas, Silver Mt Zion, Land of Kush, Besnard Lakes, &c &c, on strings, woodwinds, brass, wurlitzer, guitar and drumset. Tomorrow, Tues June 7 [8:00/$15].

JERUSALEM IN MY HEART
New work from Radwan Moumneh with Malena Szlam. Radwan is a showman & provocateur; it's never clear what he will do with his roiling Arabic psych. (He promises 16mm film projections.) June 15, free.

MOLLY SWEENEY
Featured on StG in December, a ghostly folk-singer launching her debut album tonight, June 6 [8pm/$12].

CHARLES GAYLE
Tenor sax by a free jazz pioneer. Sensitive & damn prickly. The Wire says piercing cries, gut-centred bellows, and melody-shredding phraseology. On Wed 8 June [8:30/$12].

TONSTARTSBANDHT and GRIMES
Grimes' chillwave skirts Elizabeth Fraser and Vangelis, with a touch of Twin Peaks; Tonstartsbandht make some of the best loud music in this hemisphere. 9 June [8:30/$8]

KEIJI HAINO
When I lived in Scotland, Heino played Glasgow's Instal festival more than once. People talked about it with saucer-sized eyes. It was, they said, the loudest thing that they had ever heard. Haino plays guitar. This is on 10 June. [8:30/$20]

MECCA NORMAL
Canadian legends, weird and determined, reduced and clever. Seriously just listen to "Ice Flows Aweigh", sour and true, which Jordan wrote about six years ago. Afternoon gig on 11 June. [2pm / $8]

PARLOVR and MAVO and MOZART'S SISTER
Three of Montreal's best emerging indie kids; all have been hailed on StG. Parlovr play spiky rock music, on guitars. Mavo are a bit touger, but slouching and goofed. Mozart's Sister is a one-woman heatwave, with smoke in her eyes. This will be fun on 16 June. [8:30/$8]

LICHENS and SOFT CIRCLE
Drone and loop, like a doomed forest. Listen. Soft Circle is the solo project of a guy who used to be in the beautiful noise band Black Dice. June 19. [8:30/$12]

ERIC CHENAUX and O PAON
I love Eric Chenaux, a Ratdrifter who is kindred with Sandro Perri and Ryan Driver, whose music we have often written about. Uncanny, soft-voiced folk, part free-jazz and part easy listening. Just extraordinary & beautiful. Opening is Genevieve Castrée, aka O Paon, a Quebecoise singer and artist who has recorded with Phil Elverum, makes gnarled heartbroken music. 20 June. [8:30/$12]

WYRD FEST MTL
Wyrd Fest is the amazing all-night June 20 festival organised by Weird Canada, the country's best blog for home-grown loud-and-out music. I trust them. This will be amazing. But, apart from Dirty Beaches [cool!] and D'Eon, I know these ten (!) bands only from Weird Canada's own site. Explore. [7pm/$12, a crazy bargain]

FULL BLAST TRIO
Peter Brotzmann with a grindcore band? I think this will be a little like getting shot in the head. 22 June [7pm/$20]

STRANGE BOYS and SIC ALPS
Noisy rock music from two good bands. 22 June [8:30/$17]

CHAD VANGAALEN and NAT BALDWIN and ADAM & THE AMETHYSTS
Chad Vangaalen has been rightly celebrated for his gorgeous acid-dropped pop-folk nonsenses. Nat Baldwin, a Gramophone fave, Dirty Projector, makes unhinged post-pop with his double-bass. And Adam & the Amethysts are the city's best psychedelic folk band, making heartfelt, out-spinning songs. Amazing line-up. 23 June [8:30/$15].

Little Scream is Laurel Sprengelmeyer. She lives in Montreal. She played her first gigs in the summer of 2008; within two years, Dan was calling her the city's best live act. Last fall, we posted her gorgeous song "Heron and the Fox". It was one of my favourite songs of 2010. Describing her performances, I wrote: She would sing a thin, silver phrase, and the light in the room seemed to change. When she raged, with ring & thunder, you could smell the petrichor of somewhere else ... Sometimes instead of sounding pretty, Laurel sounds patient.

Little Scream's debut album, The Golden Record, has now finally been released by Secretly Canadian; but it's still a secret-seeming record, one of those LPs, like Cat Power's Moon Pix, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, Bon Iver's For Emma, that seems too small and private, too intimate, to be out in the whole wild world, distributed to a thousand record-shops. There are quiet songs, like "Heron and the Fox", and noisy songs, like "Cannons": all are luminous in different ways, with slow phosphorescence or dancing sparks. These days, my favourite is "People Is Place": gorgeous, with a sharpened edge, so slow that I can scarcely catch it move. It's music for ghosts that we will not allow to be ghosts; for phantoms which still breathe.

I asked Laurel to do as we do, to write about some songs she loves. This is what she sent us. Please leave a word or two in the comments, if you can. (And thank you, Laurel.)

The Velvet Underground - "Pale Blue Eyes".
Mary Margaret O'Hara - "To Cry About".
Mary Margaret O'Hara - "Dear Darling".

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a religious context severe enough to support the development of a world of teenage fantasy characterized by intensely romantic sexual repression. By most accounts, my experiences seemed more akin to the 1950s, if not Elizabethan England. You could not date until you were of marital age. And even then, it would have to be with a chaperone. I knew of one couple in that context who didn't have their first kiss until their wedding day. The best you could hope for in terms of contact with the opposite sex was the chance to slow dance at one of the closely monitored religious social engagements.

We young people desperately looked forward to these events, strategically countering our modest, ill fitting outfits with the over application of make-up in order to look attractive to our future marital prospects. Music at these events was also monitored, with all mix tapes needing to be pre-screened by an elder for approval. The Neville Brothers, Eric Clapton, and Bette Midler were all likely to be on heavy rotation. But somehow, perhaps literally by the grace of God, "Pale Blue Eyes" by the Velvet Underground made its way into approved party listening. I was nearly 15 years old. Apparently the slow lilt and the innocent chorus of the song had allowed the screener to not pay closer attention to the words... "It was good what we did yesterday, and I'd do it once again. The fact that you are married, only proves you're my best friend... but it's truly, truly a sin...". It was dancing to this song that I had the misfortune of falling in love for the first time.

He was a bit older, 17 at the time. Not clean cut like the other boys. He too had come from a broken home, and I felt I could relate to him. He had been the one who made the mix tape with the Velvet Underground on it. And I felt delirious when he asked me to dance when that song came on. As we held each other at a respectable distance, under the watchful eye of the elders, I melted into the sweet chorus "...linger on, your pale blue eyes...". And how prophetic the next words would one day prove to be "...I thought of you as my mountaintop, I thought of you as my peak. I thought of you as everything, I've had but couldn't keep... I've had but couldn't keep".

Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

Around that time, my father (who was not part of the religion) was dating a punk harp player who lived in Aurora, IL -- the "city of lights" and capital of Wayne's World. She made me a mix tape that would become the soundtrack to my teenage years. It had all the greats of youth cultures past; Roxy Music, David Bowie, the Sugarcubes... and 2 songs by a woman named Mary Margaret O'Hara: "To Cry About" and "Dear Darling". It was before the internet was the way people found music. And I spent the next few years in record stores on a fruitless search for more of her songs, to no avail. She became to me a mythical and unattainable voice from a distant land. It would only be years later that I would get to hear more of that voice, when after telling two Basque friends of my fruitless search for the woman behind the 2 haunting songs I played for them on a particularly wine filled evening, they sought out and successfully procured for me the reissue of Miss America in cd form. I have been grateful to them ever since.

Why would you go...and leave me to cry? A thing of such beauty, must never die...

[buy Little Scream's exquisite album, The Golden Record / watch Rachel Granofsky's stop-motion music video for "Red Hunting Jacket". / Little Scream is on a US tour with the Antlers through June.]

(Previous guest-blogs: Frog Eyes, White Hinterland, Bear in Heaven, artist Michael Krueger, artist Amber Albrecht, The Whiskers, Silver Jews, artist Ariel Kitch, artist Aaron Sewards, artist Corinne Chaufour, "Jean Baudrillard", artist Danny Zabbal, artist Irina Troitskaya, artist Eleanor Meredith, artist Keith Greiman, artist Matthew Feyld, The Weakerthans, Parenthetical Girls, artist Daria Tessler, Clem Snide, Marcello Carlin, artist Johnnie Cluney, Beirut, Jonathan Lethem, Arcade Fire, Al Kratina, Eugene Mirman, artist Dave Bailey, Agent Simple, artist Keith Andrew Shore, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, artist Kit Malo with Alden Penner (The Unicorns) 1 2, artist Rachell Sumpter, artist Katy Horan 1 2, David Barclay (The Diskettes), artist Drew Heffron, Carl Wilson, artist Tim Moore, Page France, Devin Davis, Okkervil River, Grizzly Bear, Hello Saferide, Damon & Naomi, Brian Michael Roff, producer Howard Bilerman. There are many more to come.)

Venuses - "Dump Rat (Goddess In Light)". He was slippery as a river. He knocked on a brick wall, ran away when it fell down. He snuck into strangers' photo-albums, baked black-pepper rolls, left fingerprints on churches' new stained glass. His prank-calls made you laugh so hard, so hard, that you became friends and asked him to call for real, for real, as often as he liked. And when he fell in love with Kim, none of that changed. He spoke to her solemnly, tenderly, saying You rule, Bird, like it was a benediction. He called her Bird. He imagined her flying circles around his head. And he kept on tricking spring into summer, kept tossing sugar with salt, kept scoring every improbable shot in the bar's endless game of pool. [Venuses are a new band from Montreal.]

Prinspóló - "Niðrá strönd". J grew up in Mexico City. He went to public school, got bullied in high school, scored a basketball scholarship to college. After earning his B.A., he studied law, passing the bar in five years. Then he glimpsed a need and an opportunity, a feebleness in Mexico's government. He ran for office - just 27 years old, a 6'4" former pipsqueak from Peralvillo. He won in a landslide. He addressed the country on state TV, rallying them to a bright new future, a realm of dream and possibility. He was unmarried and blind. He could speak no Spanish. But his gibberish resonated, it glittered, it told the people, meaninglessly, every single thing they needed to hear. [Prinspóló are from Iceland.]

---

As I mentioned on Twitter on Friday, I've released a music-mix for the late May sunshowers. Download here [110mb / 1h17]. Includes tracks by Tindersticks, Julian Lynch, Teedra Moses, Kurt Vile, Ryan Driver, Shlohmo, Colin Stetson, Woodkid, James Irwin, Nicolas Jaar, Wild Beasts and lots more.

(photo from Horses Think)

Beyoncé - "1+1". I did not expect it to be so easy to find happiness. I was twenty one years old when I met her. I still drank Bailey's Irish Cream and I still listened to Oasis. I feel funny even writing that down. Six years later, I don't do these things. I pour M red wine and we put on Ethiopiques. In the morning we kiss goodbye and in the evening we ride our bikes over overpasses, along canals. You cannot see the stars in the city but still we lie on our backs in the grass and we pretend we can, like when I was twenty one and she swept me off my feet. Six years. I did not expect it to be so easy to find happiness.

Last night she turned to me with colour in her cheeks and she said something that felt complicated and direct and unwavering, like she was taking my hand and putting it in a fire, and taking my eyes and making me see that our hands were in a fire. As she spoke, I listened without any confusion, because she is M. I watched each expression flicker across her face. Colour in her cheeks. In my heart I said, secretly, Okay, enough. Let's. Let's. All our lives, we shall lie in the grass and see certain stars that one-another has imagined.

[Beyoncé's 4 is out June 24]

The Brian Michael Roff Catastrophe - "Symbols". Toward the end of this song, there is a synthesiser - or a guitar? or a saw? or a small man happily tearing his arms off? i can't tell - and this is one of those rare moments when an instrumental solo says just as much as the entire rest of a song, not because that song is simple, but because the solo is bizarre and magnificient and very slightly wrong. It's the fitting end to a song about symbols, some of them clear and others opaque. Roff sings of symbols in the light, a phrase that can stand for film, or ink, or even our computer monitors' projections. Such symbols are at once art and distraction, thin reassurances. Roff cannot decide if wants or needs them. He sings the asking, with shambling drumbeat and a living electric guitar. These are his friends; with warmth and care, they refuse to answer each question.

[buy the Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly, Winter 2011 issue]

(photo source)

Grant Hart - "Evergreen Memorial Drive". Landed beautied & battered back in Montreal City. Heard chimes in the branches, saw streamers in the tulips, felt sure-footed with two soles on sidewalk slabs. You go a long way and then you come on back; you hear bad news and brace yourself for the good; you throw on "Evergreen Memorial Drive" and imagine driving for one whole viridian night. Grant Hart may have written this song about a road into Duluth, MN, but that scarcely matters; forget "the actual intent", "the original intent"^* - let this song be the small anthem for any voyage or return, for the moment that you refuse to be depleted, for hearing chimes and seeing streamers. Summer, brothers and sisters, through a cloud.

^* For years people have said there are covens of witches in Askov ... And farther up the road there's a town called Nickerson and everyone from Duquet was like, "Oh. Don't go to Nickerson. They'll just overcharge you if they know you're from Duquet." [So] I liked the way that Nickerson worked with "son-of-a-bitches." That's how it goes: "Askov has northern witches, Nickerson has son-of-a-bitches." That's the insider version of it, which is... meaningless. Whatever other people are putting into it is probably more valid to more people than the actual intent, or the original intent.

[Originally released by Nova Mob in 1991, "Evergreen Memorial Drive" is at last back in print. Buy it from Hazelwood Vinyl Plastics.]

Fairewell - "Others Of Us". She was rashly beautiful. He knew it, from the first day they went down to the canal and she seemed like she wanted to shove him over the edge. The water was dark, filled with steel points and ridges, cold muck. There were gardens on the banks but when she talked he could see the wish in her eyes, the yearning to lean back and throw him bodily down. Her eyes and hips and arms made her pretty, but it was this that made her beautiful; just standing beside her, he felt scraped up. He imagined a hundred years of awful gorgeous love-affair, empty cups, torn anniversary cards. He knew if he didn't take her, someone else would. He wanted to clutch her in his arms and hold her still in the azaleas until she stopped writhing and just lay beside him, inhaling slowly through her nose. [Fairewell are a new act from Britain]

---

Internal business:

Thank you so much to Jordan for filling in for me during my absence. He wrote such good things and chose such fine songs. I am not sure whether we have persuaded him to come back more regularly, but certainly we continue to expect him on the last Wednesday of every month.

Montreal business:

Three wonderful record launches in YUL this week, from three Said the Gramophone favourites: On Wednesday, Little Scream launches The Golden Record at Il Motore and James Irwin launches the handmade version of Blue Dust at Cagibi. On Sunday, Snailhouse debuts Sentimental Gentleman (discussed here last week) at La Sala Rossa. There's also a lovely folk benefit on Saturday night, starring the Mittenstrings and local legends the What 4.

Elsewhere: