Since early in his career, music historian and WFMU radio host Irwin Chusid has been defining and championing a peculiar genre of music that he has termed "outsider music". Outsider Music is loosely defined as music made by people who have little or no musical training or talent, and doubtful sanity, but continue to make and record music in spite of their severe limitations. Outsider music can result from mental derangement, drug burnout or total cluelessness, but the results are often worthwhile. People with little or no self-awareness are capable of producing some of the most beguiling and ambiguous sounds you'll ever hear. Outsider musicians are boundless experimenters and low-fi geniuses - but their total sincerity and passion make the results even more astounding. For jaded music aficionados who have grown tired of the endlessly self-referential intelligentsia of the modern avant-garde, outsider music offers a completely new universe of stunning musical insight, and all of it totally accidental!

So I'm playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City the other day, or, as I like to put it, my new "vice". Yes, I'm witty. [keep trying - ed.] Anyway, this game takes place in the eighties, and I noticed that they chose to get the rights to actual music this time instead of inventing their own, which probably put a lot of mediocre artists out of work. It's a better game for it (nothing like running over a street hustler while listening to "Broken Wings"), but after eight straight hours of gameplay, even that can get tiring, especially when you consider that each station only has about eight or ten songs.

The Welsh musical artist Dafydd Morgan has sought to musically document rugged, wind-swept landscapes over the course of his career as Stylus, and 'Archif:01,' a collection of various non-album tracks between 1997 and 2000, fits cleanly into that agenda.

The core of Sybarite's album 'Nonument' (yes, there are nine songs to accompany the pun) sounds like the dallying analog electronics of ISAN mixed with some guitar and live percussion. Horns and cellos also dot the landscape created by Sybarite's Xian Hawkins.

A stateside release is the crowning achievement for what has been a hard three years for Melbourne, Australia's Art of Fighting. 'Wires' was originally released last year on the excellent Trifekta label to much crtical acclaim and the Australian equivalent of a Grammy for Best Independent Release.

Five years ago, Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards seemed poised to take over the rock world as their band, Failure, was earning accolades for their recorded output as well as for their live presence. Shortly after "Stuck on You" from their 'Fantastic Planet' album became a minor hit on college radio, Edwards and Andrews parted company, and Failure was no more.

Will "creates human Tragedies, causes Chaos, and is the primary source of Creation" profess the liner notes to 'World As Will II,' referencing the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that everything was intrinsically "will," and inherently negative, naturally causing conflict and suffering.

After about the third listen through, I noticed that this album seemed devoid of something. There comes a particular repertoire with each Piano Magic release, one you are just conditioned to expect based on their past works. But this new album did not seem to feature this repertoire. Gone are the perplexingly intricate sound collages which feature indecipherable instruments, sounding like they could be either computer-created noises or just esoteric analog instruments rummaged from the dusty bin of a thrift store.

Steve Wilkes leads this ecletic group of percussionists who released their first record in 1997. Wilkes, former drummer for the Blue Man Group, wanted to create a sound that was based entirely in modern drumsets with different stylings. The members would create sound collages that would, in a way, force the drums to take on the different roles other instruments normally play in a band: one would be the voice, one the rhythm, one the interesting flourish, etc. It's certainly an interesting concept, that's for sure.