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The English electro-pop duo recorded three songs and posted two on their MySpace page. But by their fourth show they were playing host to the entire U.K. music press — quite literally from their own living room. The band just released its debut CD, We Started Nothing.

Supergroups have a long tradition in popular music. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson once joined forces as The Highwaymen. There were the Fania All-Stars, The Four Tenors and Audioslave. Now Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, Jim James and M. Ward, calling themselves Monsters of Folk, have released their debut album.

Once dubbed "The Prince of Pops," Kunzel, who died Tuesday, continued in a long line of famous pops conductors such as Arthur Fiedler. Hear the exuberant Kunzel lead his beloved Cincinnati Pops Orchestra in music by Strauss and Copland.

DJ Quik and rapper Kurupt, both veterans of Los Angeles gangsta rap, have put aside their gang affiliations — Quik was once a Blood and Kurupt was long identified with the Crips — to focus on their common musical bonds in Blaqkout. While Kurupt's rapping is straightforward, Quik's production shows him to be playfully unhinged, yet fresh and experimental as ever.

Sometimes, an idea is so perverse and bizarre that it needs to be carried out and followed to its logical end.

Mark O'Connor's new Americana Symphony follows the spirit of America's historic westward expansion and the music it engendered. The fiddler says he's trying to identify something long overlooked in classical music — our native language.

Emily Haines makes ethereal, piano-driven songs that are dark and gloomy, but utterly infectious. Haines visits Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club with her backing band The Soft Skeleton for a night of music originally webcast live on NPR.org Jan. 10.

Argentina probably isn't the first place you think of for groundbreaking electro-pop music, but for the past several years it's been turning out a number of stunning recordings from some of the genre's most inventive artists. The brother-sister duo Isol and Zypce (that's ee-SOLE and ZIP-see) is about to release one of the year's more curious CDs: a spectacular headphone album, with a richly layered world of blips and clicks, called Sima.

Pianist Ben Folds has crafted a series of alt-rock hits over the past 15 years. For his pseudo-"greatest-hits" package, he's commissioned new arrangements of those songs from university a cappella groups across the country. Folds and host Jacki Lyden compare and contrast the various versions of his songs.

Host Marian McPartland calls Dearie an "incandescent singer and pianist" whose "delicate, swinging style makes every song a musical gem." The vocalist and pianist died this past year of natural causes. Piano Jazz remembers her life and music in an archival interview and performance.