Isadora Moon Goes on a School Trip

With Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, the Bang on a Can All-Stars show off their blazing speed, polyrhythmic virtuosity and all-world versatility in a return to the core Bang on a Can sound - an uncategorizable supermix of classical and electric instruments that is part classical ensemble, part rock band, and part jazz sextet. The album is the first in a decade that features the All-Stars exclusively, rather than as part of a collaborative project. Each of the pieces on the double-CD calls upon a different kind of virtuosity, demonstrating the range of musical abilities and experiences arguably unique to this ensemble. Recorded in New York City, all of the music on Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (including the arrangements of the works by Conlon Nancarrow) were written for and premiered by the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars emerged from the scruffy environs of downtown New York playing a new kind of music, with a new kind of energy, for a new kind of audience.

Cantaloupe continues its recording series of the masterworks of the music of our time with this brilliant disc of two early classics by composer Philip Glass, performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Glass is arguably minimalism's most well-known and influential composer. Before film soundtracks, operas, and universal acclaim, there were these intense, rugged, and demanding early works for keyboard. In Music in Fifths and Two Pages, Philip Glass's ideas are at their most basic, using only addition and subtraction of notes in simple scales to create epic and hypnotic musical forms. The Bang on a Can All-Stars reconceive these works for their ground-breaking sound of clarinet, cello, bass, piano, marimba, and electric guitar. In the tradition of their award winning recording of Terry Riley's In C (#1 CD of 2001 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post), the musicality, passion, and focus of the All-Stars, plus the sparkling sound quality of the recording, catapult these classic works into the 21st century.

This book is a thorough introduction to climate science and global change. The author is a geologist who has spent much of his life investigating the climate of Earth from a time when it was warm and dinosaurs roamed the land, to today's changing climate. Bill Hay takes you on a journey to understand how the climate system works. He explores how humans are unintentionally conducting a grand uncontrolled experiment which is leading to unanticipated changes. We follow the twisting path of seemingly unrelated discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and even mathematics to learn how they led to our present knowledge of how our planet works. He explains why the weather is becoming increasingly chaotic as our planet warms at a rate far faster than at any time in its geologic past. He speculates on possible future outcomes, and suggests that nature itself may make some unexpected course corrections.