North American

Avey Tare (born David Portner on April 24th, 1979) is a musician and founding member of Animal Collective. Avey Tare met Animal Collective's Deakin (Josh Dibb), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), and Geologist (Brian Weitz) in high school. For years, the four of them swapped homemade recordings, shared musical ideas and performed in different group configurations. Avey Tare recorded the Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished album with Panda Bear, and initially released the recording on the band's own Animal label in 2000.

Read more about Avey Tare on Last.fm.

Alarm Will Sound is a U.S. twenty-member contemporary-music chamber orchestra. Members of the ensemble began playing together while studying at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and have diverse experience in composition, improvisation, jazz, popular styles, early music, and various traditional musics from around the world. Alarm Will Sound's repertoire ranges from European to American works, from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced.

Billy Joel (born William Martin Joel on May 9, 1949 in Bronx, New York, USA) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become a multi-million-selling recording artist. Joel recorded many popular hit songs and albums from 1971 until he stopped recording pop/rock music in 1993. He is one of the very few rock (or even pop) artists to have Top 10 hits in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.

Read more about Billy Joel on Last.fm.

A self-taught pianist from the age of 7, Dustin O'Halloran's personal histories give us some clue to the thickly-woven tapestries of his music: he has lived in LA (where he studied art at Santa Monica College and formed the much-adored Devics with Sara Lov), Italy (in the depths of rural Emilia Romagna) and Berlin. His arresting, heartbreaking music is as much an elegant exercise in nuance and grace as it is a pure, intuitive, personal expression – and here is where we see some explanation into Dustin's quiet rise to notoriety and his continued ascension.