This Weekend: Black Keys, Snoop Dogg, Girl Talk, & Many More at Catalpa NYC Festival

The inaugural Catalpa NYC festival takes place this weekend.

There's a new festival in town, and it takes place this weekend: the Catalpa NYC Music Festival, featuring The Black Keys, Snoop Dogg, TV on the Radio, Matisyahu, Umphrey's McGee, Matt & Kim, and many more. The event takes place on Randall's Island, site of many other multi-day music events. And as you'll see from the lineup, Catalpa NYC blends rock, hip-hop, reggae, blues, and electronic music into one festival.

There are four stages, including a reggae stage that offers live music throughout the day. See the Catalpa NYC event info page for FAQs, full lineup, directions, venue map, and much more. Here's the lineup for the three main stages of Catalpa NYC:

Saturday, July 28th:
The Black Keys - 9:30 to 11 p.m.
Felix Da Housecat - 9:30 to 11
Umphrey's McGee - 8:30 to 9:30
TV on the Radio - 7:45 to 8:45
JDH+Dave P - 7:30 to 8:30
Umphrey's McGee - 6:45 to 7:45
Hercules and Love Affair - 6 to 7
Paul Favretti - 6 to 6:45
The Sheepdogs - 5 to 6
DJ Paul C - 4:15 to 5
Zola Jesus - 4 to 5
The Demos - 3:30 to 4:15
The Aviation Orange - 3 to 3:30
My Pet Dragon - 2:15 to 3
Q1043 winner - 1:30 to 2:15
The Rebel Light - 1 to 1:30

Sunday, July 29th:
Snoop Dogg (performing "Doggystyle") - 9:45 to 11 p.m.
Hellfire Machina - 9:45 to 11
A$AP Rocky - 8:45 to 9:45
Polish Ambassador - 7:45 to 8:45
Girl Talk - 7:45 to 9
AraabMusik - 6:45 to 7:45
Matt & Kim - 6 to 7
Hook N'Sling - 6 to 7
Matisyahu - 5:15 to 6:15
Cold War Kids - 4:30 to 5:30
Alex English - 4:15 to 5:15
Dirty Heads - 3:45 to 4:45
Paul Raffaele - 3 to 4
City and Colour - 3 to 4
The Big Pink - 2:15 to 3
Aunt Martha - 2 to 2:30
The Airplane Boys - 1:30 to 2
Bury Me a Lion - 1 to 1:30

Tickets are $100 for each day, or $180 for both. There are additional fees for ferry and parking options, but you can also take an MTA bus there (the X80 special event bus, $5.50 roundtrip, or less if you transfer from subway or bus with a pay-per-ride MetroCard). You can also walk or ride your bike across the bridge to Randall's Island.

I'll be going at least one of the days, thanks to the folks at the Village Voice (I won a Twitter contest about the Voice-sponsored 4 Knots festival). There are no heat waves, hail storms, or tornadoes forecast for this weekend, so the weather should be good to go. (Might be a little rain, but that's nothing compared to the stuff we've had to deal with so far this summer in the NYC area.)

If you're going to Catalpa NYC, enjoy and leave your comments below on how you liked it.

New Year's Treats: Top 25 of 2010 Mashup; Girl Talk's "All Day" Annotated

Thought I'd start the new year off with a couple of fun mashup videos. The one above is the latest in DJ Earworm's medley of Billboard's top 25 songs of the year. I came across this one in an article on Mediaite.com by Rachel Sklar; you can find the list of all the songs at the article. Included are songs by Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Eminem.

Girl Talk's latest album, "All Day," features numerous song samples... but what are they and when does each sample appear? The website Mashup Breakdown allows you to listen to "All Day" while a graph underneath each song shows what songs are being sampled and when. It's more fun that just looking at a list of the samples, since you can see all the songs being sampled as you're hearing them.

Happy New Year!

Free Download: New Girl Talk Album, "All Day"

Gregg Gillis, the mashup DJ known as Girl Talk, has once again released a new album for free on the Internet. The full album "All Day" is available free from the website of his record label, Illegal Art.

Girl Talk announced the news on Twitter early Monday morning:

You can download the entire album as one file or as individual songs, although he says that the album is "intended to be listened to as a whole."

I saw Girl Talk live at the All Points West Festival a few years ago and it was quite a show. What kind of act a guy with a couple of laptop computers put on? Girl Talk's set featured a few dozen people on stage dancing (some recruited from the audience), helpers firing toilet paper into the crowd with bazooka-like guns, and many huge balloons bouncing on top of the crowd. It was the perfect compliment to Girl Talk's infectious, beat-heavy musical mashup.

Pay What You Want to Download the New Girl Talk Album

The recording artist Girl Talk is the ultimate mash-up king: his new album "Feed the Animals" is said to sample more than 200 different songs. In fact, the "songs" by Girl Talk (real name Greg Gillis) are totally composed of ingeniously spliced clips of songs from disparate genres. Following in the footsteps of Radiohead's "In Rainbows," Girl Talk is offering "Feed the Animals" in digital download format on a pay-what-you-want basis. You can get the name-your-price download at the Girl Talk MySpace page, among other places.

"Feed the Animals" got a write-up in today's New York Times Magazine, so he can expect a lot of downloads in the next few days.

Girl Talk's songs contain a dizzying array of samples in each selection (one of them combines Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl," Kelly Clarkson's "Since You Been Gone," and The Prodigy's "Firestarter," among a number of others), and he hasn't obtained permission for any of them. Apparently he hasn't been sued yet, maybe because the original artists are happy to get the added exposure or consider it a form of indie cred to get sampled in a Girl Talk tune.