Narrow Road

Launched in 1980, NHK's renowned Silk Road series was the first foreign TV program allowed to film Silk Road inside communist China. The series sparked enormous interest. A quarter of a century later, NHK re-visits Silk Road with high-definition cameras. The first half of the journey is to Loolan, Tibet, Taklamakan Desert and Xian. The trip then continues from former Soviet Central Asia to the Middle East and Turkey.

As Darkside, electronic composer Nicolas Jaar and multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington unite their individual strengths, but also take their combined powers to new places neither could travel to on their own. The band's 2013 debut full-length Psychic was a sprawling exploration of contrasts, moving through winding paths of genre experiments and production twists that should have clashed but instead gelled into a massive, undulating entity somewhere between sci-fi soundtrack and a full-tilt experimental rock record. Second album Spiral was made after the duo took a lengthy break to pursue their solo outlets, much of it coming together during a week-long marathon writing session. It's every bit as shapeshifting and epic as Psychic was, but less reliant on moments of softer ambience or drawn-out atmospherics…