Anyway. Over-under on the number of cast members who show up at this years’ Ultra Festival? We’re gonna go with three. For starters, this thing is at the beach, and those folks sure do love the beach. It’s also packed with the sort of bubble gum electronic music that might get Pauly the DJ all stoked: Tiësto, Carl Cox, Oakenfold, etc.

(Also, this is kind of off-topic, but we’d like to point out that these Ultra Music people are kind of on par with hardcore and metal bands when it comes to logo obsession.)

Anyway, fist-pumping douchebags or no (but we’ll pretty much guarantee you that attendance at this thing will put you face-to-face with some fist-pumping douchebags), the Ultra Music Festival happens March 26 and 27. Two day and single passes are still available in both VIP and regular.

MusicNOW Festival 2010: After four years of super solid line-ups—featuring the likes of Bang on a Can, Bill Frisell, and the Books—Chamber Music Cincinnati’s MusicNOW festival is bringing in Joanna Newsom. We know that this makes sense. Chamber music. Harp. Yeah. We get it. And we know that some of you think that Newsom is this totally adventurous creative thing, and that her high-pitched whine doesn’t really bother you all that much. But whatever: We here at Festival Watch are going to call bullshit. We think Newsom is kind of terrible. And totally boring.

For those of you that don’t, the MusicNOW Festival is scheduled for March 30, March 31, and April 1. Tickets are still available.

Pitchfork Music Festival 2010: Back when we here at Festival Watch enjoyed the luxury of office space at City Paper HQ, we found ourselves faced with the challenge of word-processing with XyWrite. This was no pleasure. But we made do—even when we had to type in numeric codes every time we needed to put in an accent mark.

This brings us to Dam Funk. We wonder: Will our editor have to type in some </#345> shit to make the little hat appear above the ‘a’ in Dam? [I'll let it slide this time -ed.] Does he have to do this every time some jerkwad wants to write about that duder?  [Yes. Same with Tiësto. – ed.]

Point is, Dâm Funk’s been added to Pitchfork 2010. Like as of today. Other late additions include Broken Social Scene, Panda Bear, El-P, John Spencer Blues Explosion, Freddie Gibbs, and CAVE.

Festival-length passes are sold out, but you can still get single-day tickets. It happens July 16, 17, and 18 in Chicago’s Union Park.

While the highlight of Sunday's Bang on a Can Marathon at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center came early, the rest of the program offered plenty to enjoy as well, even if the culminating performance was somewhat dubious. Just after the Bang on a Can All-Stars completed their innovative arrangement of Brian Eno's Music For Airports, a rather more scattershot program called kicked off in CSPAC's Gildenhorn Recital Hall, in which members of the Bay Players Experimental Music Collective and the University of Maryland Percussion Ensemble played a series of short pieces for small ensembles. Finally, a 6pm event featuring Glenn Kotche and Terry Riley closed things out.

My impressions of the day, after the jump.

Of the Gildenhorn performances, my favorites were two solo pieces. Robert Black performed a solo upright bass piece in which he managed to play beautiful, fractured melodies while simultaneously bowing a hypnotic drone. Halfway through, some moments of straightforward drama crept in, but I frankly enjoyed a few bars of what could glibly de described as Apocalyptica-style bombast underpinned by that ever-present drone. The other highlight was a solo clarinet performance by Bang on a Can member Evan Ziporyn (pictured above) that he introduced by saying, "I had this crazy idea to play chords on a bass clarinet..." which he appeared to do by singing into his instrument while overblowing. Far from a crass demonstration of extended technique, Ziporyn made his unusual sound into something strange and alluring.

Most of the small-ensemble Gildenhorn pieces deconstructed the relationship between composition and improvisation, the role of the performance space, the role of the performers' physical presences, and so on. Some of these were more interesting in theory than in practice, of course, but Michael Boyd's "Hand Leg Suit" was an entertaining highlight in which the three performers (including Boyd himself) played a kind of musical Twister. The score for this piece had the performers following "simple graphic images and charts that list actions, parts of body and parts of the instrument," the result of which was a fragmented clattering of sounds interspersed with what came off as physical comedy: Boyd hiding underneath the piano saying "this is really weird"; the percussionist taking his drum apart and obsessive-compulsively arranging the pieces along the front of the stage; Boyd meandering out into the crowd and greeting bemused audience members; lots of performing on hands and knees or wandering aimlessly across the stage.

The main event, which was ticketed and kicked off at 6pm in the CSPAC's 1,100-seat Dekelboum Theatre, began with Glenn Kotche performing solo. He started with a piece familiar to anyone who saw him and Nels Cline at the Black Cat in 2006 (when they played solo sets, then together as a duo, opening for Lambchop – a weird bill if there ever was one), "Monkey Chant" off of his 2006 album Mobile. This piece mixes rock-and-roll drum solo bombast with judiciously applied extended techniques, backgrounded by the amplified chirping of live crickets. As at the Black Cat, Kotche actually had an array of small boxes on stage with crickets inside them, which he opened at the beginning of the piece and then closed, one by one, at the end, their sound fading out gracefully.

A pair of duet interpretations of Steve Reich pieces, with Bang on a Can All-Stars percussionist David Cossin, followed, and then the full All-Stars lineup came out and performed what were the most enjoyable pieces of the evening for me: a relatively new commissioned piece called "Snap," and a rearrangement of the titular composition from Mobile for the full ensemble. These were energetic, engaging pieces, very well-received by the crowd, and Kotche once again showed himself to be much more than just "the drummer from Wilco."

After a brief intermission, Terry Riley's "Autodreamographical Tales/Science Fiction" capped off the marathon. A radio station commissioned Riley to write down his dreams and set them to music, and as one might expect, the results are trippy, psychedelic, a pleasant journey through a surreal landscape. Riley recited frank descriptions of his dreams as the Bang on a Can All-Stars flitted easily between styles (here a psych-rock guitar riff, there a a bit of raga; here a few moments of electronic haze, there an energetic, boppy jazz passage). The pastiche of musical styles was entertaining and evocative; unfortunately, I could have done with less of (or even none of) Riley's storytelling. While mostly narrating, he occasionally sang, and his earnest voice took all subtlety out of the performance, especially when singing lines like "Cannabis is a wonderful drug/Sometimes you're like a cat on a rug." Not exactly poetry at its finest.

"Autodreamographical Tales" received polite applause and a general feeling of bewilderment, which I suppose was probably the point. Still, I couldn't help but feel a little let down by Riley's piece. Thankfully, all the great stuff earlier in the day more than made up for any disappointment I felt at the conclusion.

See more photos of the afternoon's events here.

I'll have more thoughts on yesterday's Bang on a Can Marathon at the University of Maryland later, but the highlight of the day came early for me. Watching the Bang on a Can All-Stars perform a beautifully arranged version of Brian Eno's Music For Airports was a real treat. This is not how Eno envisioned the music would be heard: it was not meant for live instrumentation, and was not meant to be listened to in a concert setting, with an audience sitting and watching the performers intently.

But the space in which the performers played made all the difference. The airy, modernist lobby of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center was ideal for the music, and even passably close to an airport concourse on a quiet day, with its cavernously high ceilings and skylights. While a couple hundred people gathered to actually watch the performance, CSPAC is an active campus building and as such there was a constant hum of people coming and going, catching earfuls of music and then continuing on their way. The music functioned as soothing background music for these people, yet also stood up to close listening for those of us who chose to focus out attention. So even if the circumstances were quite different from what Eno might have imagined, the end result was exactly what he intended. (Except for the standing ovation at the end: that part might have taken him aback!)

For myself, I've always been partial to Eno's Ambient 4: On Land, but the piano melody of "1/1" from Music For Airports is so deeply ingrained in my head that it was all I could do not to grin foolishly when I walked into the CSPAC lobby a little late and heard the performance just starting up. Maybe the only way this could have been better is if it had been performed at sunset.

For the past few years, the annual Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City has had my mouth watering, juxtaposing performances of fascinating and often under-performed avant-garde classical music with shows by cutting-edge popular music performers (and generally blurring the line between these two categories). Last year's festival, for instance, featured compositions by Harrison Birtwistle and Terry Riley alongside performances by Marnie Stern and Dan Deacon.

This Sunday, the D.C. area is in for a treat as a scaled-down version of the festival occupies the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for an afternoon and evening (from 2pm until about 9pm). A free performance of Brian Eno's famed Music For Airports is among the attractions, along with performances of compositions by Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche (some of which D.C. concertgoers may have seen when Kotche performed a solo set at the Black Cat back in 2006). A lengthy Terry Riley piece, with Riley himself on vocals and piano, closes out the event.

The first part of the event, from 2pm-6pm, is free; the concert beginning at 6pm is $35. Check out the full schedule of performances here.

Also of note: on Saturday evening, the D.C. Society of Art Rockers hosts renowned electric bassist Michael Manring for a solo show at Jammin' Java. Manring was long the in-house bassist for new-age label Windham Hill, but don't let that fool you, as he's also recorded with jazz luminaries like Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith and even heavy/technical metal musicians like Alex Skolnick (Testament) and Ron Jarzombek (Watchtower). This show celebrates the release of Manring's latest solo album, Soliloquy, and starts at 7pm.