Kropp says there are plenty of recordings that get sucked into a black hole only to pop up at some point later, including some reel-to-reel promos for the station by The Beatles. In fact, he says he found a copy of that Elliott Smith session back in 2004. So, he did what any curious crate-digger would do: He ripped a copy of it. But Kropp "never thought to share it with any of my friends," and he didn't know that the recordings he found contained an unreleased song. He was just pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the session after hearing whispers about its existence.

The same goes for former WMUC live music director Chris Henry when he found a CD copy of the performance back in 2009. As live music director, Henry was responsible for running Third Rail Radio, the program Smith appeared on in 1996, but he discovered the CD before he ran that show. Henry wasn't even trying to find a recording of Smith's set when he decided to go digging through the archives, though he'd heard about it—he was actually hunting for a rumored WMUC performance by Will Oldham. But when he found it in a binder, he opted to do the same thing Kropp did some five years prior. "I had an engineer make a copy for me and I brought the copy back to my apartment and ripped it to my computer," Henry says.

Henry placed that CD back in its original file, where it probably still remains. ("It sort of surprised me that nobody touched the CD after that, which I think is kind of odd," he says.) He named the 10 tracks he ripped onto his computer as best he could, and gave the lead-off tune the title "Division Day, Take 1." That's because on the recording Smith began playing "Division Day" for about 20 seconds before stopping, mumbling, and eventually performing that impromptu version of "Misery Let Me Down." Like Kropp, Henry wasn't aware that the tune that followed his aborted take of "Division Day" was an unreleased gem. He learned that last Friday, long after he passed the digital files along to WMUC co-music director Vaman Muppala.

"It's always been a legend at the station," Muppala says of the Smith session. It landed in his lap in the form of a curious package from Weisholtz. As Malitz wrote, Muppala found a MiniDisc marked "Elliott Smith/Braid" in the package. But he couldn't do anything with it: Muppala hadn't seen anyone use a MiniDisc player at the station. Ripping the session from the disc got added to a future "to do" list, but nothing could be done then. That's where Henry came in.

When Muppala realized Henry had a digital version of the tracks—albeit a rip of a rip of the original MiniDisc—he asked him for a copy. Henry passed it along and uploaded the session to WMUC's digital music archive. In the wee hours of Oct. 17, Muppala sent an e-mail about the session's availability to the station's listserv with a subject that captured his rapt excitement: "Live at WMUC! on the music Archive and ELLIOTT EFFING SMITH." DJ Leila Mays played one of those songs almost two weeks later, and her public playlist helped lead to the realization that the session contained an unreleased tune.

Since the news of the session went viral, Muppala has been swift to try and set the record straight and give proper credit to Henry. That's because the session he uploaded to the digital archive didn't come directly from the MiniDisc Weisholtz sent him, but the copy of a CD copy Henry made in 2009. After Malitz's piece went live, Muppala wrote a humorous, scatterbrained post on WMUC's Tumblr explaining how the tracks got online and included a link to an edited version of the session. And the story keeps evolving: Muppala says that WMUC record librarian David Taylor is working on ripping the original session from the MiniDisc in order to obtain a higher quality version of the recording, and Muppala adds that Braid singer-guitarist Bob Nanna called the station to clarify that his band did not perform with Smith as Muppala's post indicates.

Discovery stories aside, Smith fans got their wish: a digital file of his WMUC show. Yet, it appears that new, slightly edited versions of that session dilute his set into listenable clips. (The above YouTube clip only contains the "Misery Let Me Down" cut, while the Click Track piece contains a slightly longer version with Smith introducing the tune saying "can I like warm up and play a song before we tape?") The reality of the performance is quite different.

"It's kind of a sad thing to listen to," Kropp says. Some on-air sets can be rough around the edges, but Smith's stripped-down show is messy to the core. He stumbled through the rest of the session after playing "Misery Let Me Down": He made two more attempts of "Division Day," a couple takes of "Say Yes," and also performed "Thirteen," "2:45 AM," and "Alameda." Along the way, you can hear him break-off mid-song, pause to fix his headphones, mumble, profusely apologize, and anxiously pick at his guitar. On Click Track, Third Rail Radio creator Eric Speck relates his impression of Smith, saying "He was SHOCKINGLY shy and it became clear he had on air jitters. He pretty much locked himself in the promotion office—alone—to tune and practice. He was super nice, but very sullen and soft spoken."

"I think he was wasted on cough syrup, this is how the story is told," Kropp says. In fact, between his first try at "Division Day" and "Misery Let Me Down," Smith mutters, "I just need to wake up. I took some Nyquil." That could also partly explain his erratic behavior during the session, and why "Misery Let Me Down" abruptly ends seemingly mid-song. Looking back on it, it's hard not to re-contextualize the event in regards to the painful personal issues Smith grappled with and his early death in 2003.

Needless to say, it's an interesting document, and perhaps one of many waiting to be dug up at WMUC. Muppala says there are plenty of recordings from now-legendary bands like Q And Not U sitting in the station, and he's heard rumors of a Fugazi MiniDisc floating around. "There's definitely more shocking MiniDiscs to be found," he says. And finds like the Elliott Smith session remind old WMUC members the joys of their own musical treasure hunts. "It's fun to see that happen, because everyone gets to relive that discovery," Kropp says. For Kropp, it's stories like these that help build a special mythos around the station. "It's like Hogwarts with music," he says.

Afternoon, y'all! I keep forgetting how self-righteous music critics can be when it comes to the term "indie," which was coined as shorthand for "independent music," or music that is made and released independently of the Big 4.

But as with other words–"gay" no longer means thrilled to be alive, and "damn" will no longer send one straight to hell–the meaning of indie has changed to connote, as often as not, an aesthetic.

No one really agrees with me on this, besides Carles, who agrees ironically. But I firmly believe that this word, if it still exists in five years, will no longer mean what the tofu-eating, burlap-wearing, coke-snorting Amero-Zapatistas  had in mind when they coined it in 1812 1968 the late 1970s.

Remember when CNN had that special report called "Inside the Indie Scene"? Yeah. That actually happened. In a 2006 article, CNN wrote, "According to critics, indie is now nothing more than a branding tool: a highly commercial and money-driven movement, more concerned with marketing a particular image instead of culture with a truly independent nature and passion for its art."

When was indie *not* concerned with paying the bills? When has indie never been about selling shit? Did all these people play every show for free? Give out all their merch for free? Give away their music for free? If they did, and if that was how we defined indie–an extreme allergy to sustaining yourself financially–isn't it a good thing that's come to connote a profitable aesthetic?

I was hoping that some of the people who responded to the  Monitor Mix survey question, "What does 'indie' mean to you?" would agree with me on this. Or, at least agree somewhat that cultural evolution is OK.

But no. The dinosaurs all share a hatred for Kidz Theze Dayz and their insistence on using "indie" to describe the way music sounds or the way people dress or anything other than Fighting the Power.

My own survey question would be: Isn't it a good thing that a bunch of stodgy critterpoos have absolutely no control over how Kidz Theze Dayz uze wordz?

In the 21st Century, everything has changed: Information is ubiquitous; newsmen are no longer godheads. The role of the national news anchor in American culture must be redefined. The question is: as what?

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams seems to be molding a new archetype. Newscaster 2.0, as Williams has shaped it, is not so much an avuncular sentinel as a cultural tycoon–one who regularly parries with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, gushes about pop culture on MSNBC, and appears in Saturday Night Live sketches making fun of–and effectively disavowing–the role of self-serious journalistic demigod that he inherited from the likes of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Ted Copple, and Cronkite.

Meet the latest extension of Williams’s tycoonery: A Web-exclusive music interview series called “BriTunes." The site, hosted by MSNBC.com, will feature band interviews alongside a blog and a constantly-updated playlist of Williams’s fave songs. “The thinking that went into this," he explained last week, "is that Al Roeker does about nine shows on the air, I think, about barbeque and food, Matt Lauer does men’s clothing beautifully, and so why not talk about our hobby here?”

For a series that sounds like a brand of dental cosmetics, BriTunes is shockingly hip. Williams's current playlist features Great Lake Swimmers, Interpol, Doves, and other bands that would elicit ripples of approving head-bobs from a Red Derby crowd. His latest blog touts the European daydream-pop group Camera Obscura. In an interview with Rolling Stone Williams recalls his freewheeling days as a blue-collar kid in Jersey who spent his free time stalking Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band—you know, before it was cool. (He also reveals the breadth of his taste, saying that he pumps himself up for the Nightly News by listening to “My First Song,” by Jay-Z. “I was tempted to go on and say ‘Ch'boy!’ but I didn't,” he says. “It was close.”)

In that Rolling Stone interview—which is priceless, by the way—Williams acknowledges the awkward dissonance between his bourgeois, eminently mainstream persona and an indie-music ethos that is based on the willful rejection of that paradigm. “I have a wife and two children and a house and a two-car garage and a dog,” he says”…I'm not going to bars in Brooklyn and drinking PBRs.” Really, the disconnect is even more dramatic: Brian Williams is not just some shlub with a mortgage and a white picket fence; he’s a $10-million-a-year TV star with a rub-on tan and a closet full of immaculately tailored suits. It’s not that it is necessarily impossible for him to “get” music made by angsty twentysomethings who prefer ’zines to the Nightly News; it merely guarantees that any direct interaction between the two will be awkward.

Take BriTunes’s inaugural interview with Deer Tick, a neo-folk quartet out of Providence. (Perfectly, Williams heard about the band while on a family vacation in Rhode Island.) "Bri" looked at home, dressed in newscaster-casual—a gray cashmere v-neck over a subtly striped dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes—and nestled in a dark-leather chair on a set that resembled a sleekly furnished living room. Not so the members of Deer Tick, slouched on an adjacent sofa in rumpled plaid shirts and sneakers and looking like a group of teenagers trying to get through a conversation with someone’s dad while high. Williams intones an introduction over clips of frontman John McCauley, hirsute and shirtless, crooning nasally into a stage mic. He then lobs blandishment-laced questions to McCauley, who returns Williams’s noble baritone with laconic, mumbled answers, avoiding eye contact and pawing absently at his clammy cheeks. “Dirty Dishes,” the artist explains—a song Williams cited as a profoundly moving song about heartbreak and loss—is actually about McCauley and his roomies being too “miserable and lethargic” to do the dishes.

Ever the pro, Williams delves into his geniality reserves to keep the interview afloat through this revelation and a subsequent awkward joke from McCauley about unintended pregnancy. The use of a hand-held second camera—and its operator’s occasional toggling of the zoom lens—fails to dramatize the conversation beyond a threshold of excruciating discomfort. The segment mercifully ends with an eloquent thank-you from Williams and a collective grunt from Deer Tick.

It is doubtful NBC would have so undermined Williams's gravitas without a strategic motive. So what is the network hoping to achieve with this foray into underculture? The obvious guess is that with network news audiences skewing old, NBC is trying to use Williams—who has already made inroads with younger media consumers through his appearances on The Daily Show—to rebalance its demographics. In this, NBC certainly has a competitive advantage over CBS—whose Katie Couric is far more popular among middle-aged women than co-eds—and ABC, whose Charlie Gibson is unrecognizable to anyone under age 45.

But the reality is that just because the indie crowd may be aware of—and even amused by—Williams doesn’t mean they’re going to start going to him for musical insight, and it certainly won’t persuade them to start watching the 6:30 news. Assuming it will misunderstands the consumption habits of young people generally, and especially those of indie-music mavens, who will be far more apt to regard Williams as an interloper than an authority. More likely, BriTunes will attract middle-aged Nightly News viewers desperate for a way to communicate with their kids across the generational gap, resulting in awkward living-room conversations about underground music between well-meaning parents and their kids, who may or may not be high at the time.

This Saturday, hipsters nationwide will saddle up their fixie riders and head down to their local vinyl outlet for Record Store Day. The holiday, created two years ago by a coalition of well-connected romantics (presumably while smoking a peach hookah and watching Empire Records), celebrates the culture of indie record emporia in the face of encroachment from "corporate behemoths." In order to participate, a store must be a "physical retailer whose product line consists of at least 50 percent music retail, whose company is not publicly traded and whose ownership is at least 70 percent located in the state of operation."

The event is a fine idea. It promotes community and a healthy disdain for corporate homogenization, which is what a lot of good music is about. But big-box music retailers aren't exactly going gangbusters these days. Trans-World Entertainment Corporation, the exquisitely evil-sounding conglomerate that owns Sam Goody, F.Y.E., and Strawberries, has seen its stock price fall by 92 percent in the last five years. Really, these stores and your local Championship Vinyl analog are similar inasmuch as they share a common foe: the iTunes Music Store.

Record Store Day implicitly condemns iTunes, and official event ambassador Jesse Hughes (from The Eagles of Death Metal) even goes so far as to liken buying music online to playing Guitar Hero instead of guitar. But as New York Times blogger Verlyn Klinkenborg notes in a 2008 post, iTunes, with its vast catalog of far-flung artists and user-generated reviews, is far from an indifferent, imperial merchant. Local bands can get their self-recorded album on iTunes just as easily as they can get it on the shelves of their local indie shop. Even artists are grateful for iTunes's astounding ability to lure customers away from free-download sites, which seemed destined to cripple not only indie music stores, but musicians as well. Sure, a lot of them are using Record Store Day as an excuse to put out a bunch of b-sides; but how much you wanna bet those go right to iTunes, with the bands' blessing?

Those who bemoan the decline of the indie music stores shouldn't villify iTunes. If anything, they should be thankful, on an aesthetic level, that it has driven many of the big chain stores out of business. Indie shops, meanwhile, will always be around, just like vintage clothing stores and antiques dealers. They serve a niche market, and that market is entirely justified in gathering to celebrate them. But celebrants should not be too hard on iTunes: It may be a huge corporation that wants your money; but it may let you hang on to your soul.

Be sure to check out Jason Cherkis' upcoming roundup of local Record Store Day events.

Journalists–even music journalists–are supposed to write somewhat objectively about their interview subjects; I suck at this. I don't pitch softballs, but I almost always come across as curious rather than skeptical, and by the end of the interview, I'm practically rooting for my subject's success. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. I'd like to think that when I interviewed Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, it worked really well, because we managed to talk about what informs her ideas about her art, and because I didn't feel dirty afterwards.

Worden is a fixture in the experimental scene. She's played with Sufjan Stevens, released two albums with her former band Awry, and just released her second solo album, A Thousand Shark's Teeth, under the moniker My Brightest Diamond. I really enjoyed Shark's Teeth, and this is coming from a guy who–unless he's stoned–would rather eat cat litter than listen to most experimental music. Worden plays tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel with Clare & the Reasons. Our interview is below.

You mix a lot of genres on A Thousand Shark's Teeth: there are strains of cabaret and musical theater, and some indie rock. Tell me about that process.

The objective through this record (I wrote this album at the same time as my previous album) was to test out how much from the classical world I could bring to my songwriting. I was listening to a lot of [Claude] Debussy, [Maurice] Ravel, [Pierre] Boulez, and Samuel Barber, and I was trying to let the songs go somewhere a little bit differently. It is really eclectic–the songs represent six years of writing, so they're kind of all over the place.

But there's a common thread that runs through all the songs, which is the classical nuances. How did you pull everything together when it came time to produce the album?

It took me about 3 years from the time we started recording until it was finished, and I had to re-record almost everything in a short period of time at the very end to give a sense of continuity.

What changes did you make to the tracks that you had recorded previously?

I introduced drums, which the album didn't have before. I'd been working with a beat-boxer to deal with the dynamics, because the dynamic range of classical music is so much wider. You listen to a classical song, and at some points the instruments are so quiet that you wonder if the song is over. You're constantly adjusting the volume to hear all the parts.

You have formal music training, and I'm curious as to when you started incorporating rock music. Who do you model in that genre? And I hope Robert Plant is on the list, because the vocals at the end of "Inside a Boy" sound exactly like Plant (on "Immigrant Song").

Sweet! (Laughs) We did a Led Zeppelin cover last year, and I love their music.

I grew up in Michigan, so I was listening to a lot of soul and funk. I studied opera while I was at the University of North Texas, and sang funk on the side. I didn't get into rock until the mid-90s, when I started listening to Jeff Buckley, Portishead, and Nina Simone.

I don't want to sound like a philistine with this question, but you've got this distinct visual persona, and it comes through especially in your photographs for your albums. I know with some artists, like Frank Zappa and Bjork, that strange persona is them, and they are it. How deep do the strange pictures go for you and what's their significance?

The visual world helps so much, and I find that I'm very, very in love with the visual world. When I'm depressed, I go to a museum. Art makes me feel alive, and beauty is a great source of hope and strength. But then, also, the visual world gives so much information, and it lets people like Peter Gabriel, Tom Waits, and even Bjork sort of develop this world to play in and be creative.

What's the connection between the mood in those photographs and your music?

In general, I like mixing romance with punk. There's something very beautiful, and even sweet, but there's also something rebellious, and dirty, and messed up.

Which artists do you pull from?

I love Jean-Pierre Pinet (a flutist), and the German installation artist Anselm Kiefer–we based our photos on his work. I took a lot of writing away from his pictures. With regards to clothes, I haven't come close to approximating Alexander McQueen, but I love his style.

The combination of the visual and musical elements seems almost theatrical, it reminds me some of Moulin Rouge. What does it look like to you?

I kind of imagine a cross between Commedia dell'arte and Alice in Wonderland.

Below, "Inside a Boy" off of A Thousand Shark's Teeth.