Sure, Tom Hanks's iconic FAO Schwartz piano scene in Big was pretty awesome. But two decades later Scottish electropopper Calvin Harris has one-upped Big with an even bigger project: the world's first-ever "Humanthesizer," aka human synthesizer.

While Calvin's sonic experiment may seem like a sly excuse to hang out with 15 swimsuit models (rather than the lab-coated "boffins" who originally came to him with the idea), the Humanthesizer stunt does have a legitimate, scientific purpose of sorts. This is how it works:

A special electric body ink, developed by students at the Royal College Of Art in London, allows a current to be passed through the body without causing the usual painful electric shock; then, when the bodypainted participants position themselves on a series of customized electronic synthesizer pads on the floor and touch each other's hands and limbs, the currents generate synthetic sounds.

For this sonic experiment, Calvin played the main keyboard line and effects by

I've written about the supergroup phenomenon before. About how the sum of all those parts rarely ends up as great in reality as it does in theory, but there are those rare occasions in which a supergroup is actually super. Monsters Of Folk may just be one of those super supergoups. I make this assumption based on the band's stellar lineup--Jim James, Conor Oberst, Mike Mogus, and M. Ward--and by what I've heard so far. Take a listen and/or download "Say Please," courtesy of RCRD LBL, and see if you agree.

Although Monsters Of Folk's self-titled effort isn't out until Sept. 22, the collective actually starting playing together five years ago on a tour billed as An Evening With: Bright Eyes, Jim James and M. Ward. For the uninitiated, Bright Eyes is the pseudonym/band name that indie folk-rock wunderkind Conor Oberst recorded under from the late '90s until 2007, when he began issuing titles under his own name. Mogus, the lowest profile of the foursome, was also a member of Bright Eyes.

Just the other day, on the golf course of all places, I was having a conversation with a gentlemen about how the entertainment business can do battle with illegal downloads. He told me that the story of someone in another country that wasn't only illegally downloading music, but he was burning the music on to discs and then selling them to street vendors, who in turn sold the bootlegged discs to the public. My solution for this problem is for the industry to price downloads low enough to make the legal purchase more convenient and appealing than going the illegal route or perhaps packaging the album with some sort of bonus material you simply can't get for free on the web.

At least one band is taking a proactive approach to such matters. Time To Die, the third and latest album by San Franciso-based indie folkies the Dodos, leaked onto the Internet earlier this month. Rather than sit and whine about it or launch a legal assault on its fans, the trio set up TimeToDie.net, a site where

There's a certain young lady in my life that I sometimes call "Sassy Cassie" because at times she can be a bit bratty, even if her name is not Cassie. That moniker might be better suited for Cassie Steele, who shows she can be more than a bit sassy on her recently released second album, Destructo Doll.

If you're a TV junkie, you may already be familiar with Steele. The 19-year-old Canadian singer/actress was featured in the 2007 MTV film Super Sweet 16: The Movie and plays Manny Santos in Degrassi: The Next Generation, the same teen drama that also counts up-and-coming hip-hop star Drake as a cast member. I have to admit, I've never seen an episode of Degrassi and "Manny Santos" sounds like the name of a baseball player to me, but I've been hearing plenty about Ms. Steele. Possibly because she's hails from Canada and her music packs plenty of 'tude, Steele has already earned comparisons to Alanis Morissette. Granted those are some pretty large shoes to fill, but Steele may just have