I remember first learning about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in junior year English class. I hadn’t thought much about it since, until a friend introduced me to the music video for Yael Naim’s song, New Soul.  (The song was a rednoW favorite in 2008 and was made especially popular after being featured in the Apple MacBook Air commercial.)

Naim sings about coming into a strange world, hoping to learn about what is true and fake.  This is where the video begins.  A woman enters an empty, white room and begins to unpack her life.  She creates a world, a reality in which she lives - and it seems pretty great.  She hangs pictures of her best friends on the wall and plays with what’s real as she paints new scenes and objects into them.

In today's over-digitized-auto-tuned-world, the expansive sound of analog is not only becoming a lost practice, but a forgotten commodity.  In short, analog (recorded) music is captured at a higher density - with an infinite amount of sound resolution.  Digital music on the other hand, is (often) capped at a particular resolution - rendering it captured with limited density.

It is safe to say that the "true" analog sound died with the vinyl record.  This is a sad reality for Paul Maywhinney - owner of the world's largest (personal) vinyl collection.  In The Archive, director Sean Dunne reveals not only what such a collection looks like, but what a collection of this magnitude represents - both to the music industry and to Maywhinny himself.

For musician and first-time director, Justin Dillon, what began as a way to personally process his shocking realization of the scope of modern-day slavery quickly turned into a sort of open-mic concert venue for other musicians to join him in responding and bringing awareness to this horrific issue. This led Dillon into a documentary study on music, which finally became the first feature rockumentary film, Call + Response: Exposing the world's 27 million most terrifying secrets.

There are more slaves today than ever before in human history.  There are 1 million people trafficked in the United States every year.  Trafficking humans is the third most profitable business in the world.

Anytime someone tells me that “the next U2” is here, I know that I no longer need to pay attention to what they are about to say. There will not be, nor should there be, another U2. But when I heard Steve Stockman, author of Walk On—arguably the definitive book on U2—tell a group at Calvin College that Bono and The Edge can soon step aside because a new band that is rising in the UK is here, I felt I had to pay attention.

Mumford and Sons, with their debut album Sigh No More, are a far cry from being the biggest band on the planet, but they certainly are positioned as one of the best new ones. Paste describes their music as “A delicate fusion of vintage Americana and English folk.” If you have not heard it already from Fleet Foxes, welcome to the sound of neo-acoustica. In a time where banjo is the new black in indie music, Mumford and Sons sounds familiar but strikingly more significant.