Casiotone for the Painfully Alone is the musical alias of 26 year old American film school drop-out Owen Ashworth. Ashworth began making music in 1997 after he realized that song-making was a far more cost-effective means of storytelling than film-making. Using only battery operated keyboards and electronics as instruments, Ashworth has created a hybrid strain of raw, emotional, and very homemade synth pop that is as influenced as much by film and literature as by its more obvious musical counterparts. CFTPA's claustrophobic two-minute character studies shudder with reverbed beats, blown-out chords, simple-but-infectous melodies, layered beneath the sometimes funny but always heartbreaking lyrics of Ashworth's sighing baritone.

The boundary between 'artist' and 'geek' is fine, yet frequently unacknowledged or concealed by overzealous intellectuals. MPC (i.e., Safety Scissors) does little to hide his social awkwardness in the quirky techno he produces and performs. If anything, he would rather admit to being a geek than to being an 'artist' or a 'musician'. 'Anonymity is much more interesting. It's silly when people say they are an artist or a musician. They're just trying to cover up for something else that they don't have a girlfriend or smell bad or suffer from alcoholism'.

Although he is the ultimate dork debonair, MPC does not over-obsess with the computing process. Singing on his latest works for Force Tracks and Plug Research, MPC experiments with camp techno. Upcoming releases on Carpark and his own label Proptronix similarly pervert techno formula with an electric ukelele and bubble gum.

MPC has an abstract and clumsy approach to making music and distinguishes himself from the intellectualism of abstract/minimal techno. The proud drop-out of the art school establishment pursues neither expressions of unmediated human feeling found in Abstract Expressionism or regimented lines of stucture in minimalism. Rather, with subtlety and smoothness, he references both in his unique sense of sarcasm.

The Ian Fays are an indie-rock quartet from Arcata, Ca. The band is fronted by twin sister singer-song writers and has a various back-up band, featuring everything from drums to xylophones. The Fays dress in costume every show (usually Catholic school-girls or prom night dresses) and enjoy audiences that drink and dance. They have two eps, “The Ryan Blackmore Project” and “Benny, the Apple Cider Drunk,” as well as a new full-length entitled “The Damon Lessons” that is for sale now.

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