Strange and interesting people/music

From the Bang on a Can marathon’s program book (see yesterday’s post about this year’s marathon):

What is it about the world we live in? It’s full of strange and interesting people. And all the strange people of the world make strange and interesting sounds, some of them beautiful, some of them dark, some of them welcoming, some of them very rude.

In this world we also have a lot of filters to separate the sounds into categories — we say disco or classical or ez jazz or mainstream or experimental and we immediately know what kinds of sounds get through the filter and which kinds don’t. These filters can be useful but they are also often artificial attempts to elevate the commercial appeal of some sounds by separating them from other sounds. So where can you go to find music from across the many many adventurous, sub-mainstream, less commercial genres? Innovative musics that could easily be filtered and heard only separate from each other but actually have more in common than you could ever imagine once the categories are removed?

Puts the mission statements of our leading orchestras to shame, doesn’t it?