At a time when pop listeners seem especially responsive to genre-defying singers like Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards, Antony Heggarty and Björk, it should expose Mr. Bleckmann's mercurial, hard-to-label art to a much wider audience.
This is a bold approach, but also a savvy one — it arrives at a time when young listeners across demographics are primed for a meditation on black empowerment in the face of injustice.
The shows, in which the two men perform each other's songs both together and separately, are noteworthy at a time when attention-addled listeners are increasingly focused on specific songs, rather than albums, and find few artists worthy of their continued support.
Listening to music is great and everything but there comes a time when, as a listener, you find yourself getting itchy.
There was a time when punk-trained collegiate listeners would have disdained Sigur Ros's grand sonic expanses, but no more; the concert was part of the four-day CMJ Music Marathon of college-radio favorites and hopefuls.
Easy: reminding listeners of a time when musical theater orchestras produced rich, lustrous sounds, before a mixture of economics and technology led to the reduction in the ranks.
(Or is it curse?) At a time when money is tight and would-be listeners are often lost to other activities, the dangers are painfully obvious and, in some cases, already playing themselves out.
But the purchase is also regarded as a way for CBS to grab an audience online at a time when many traditional radio stations fear losing listeners to iPods, Internet radio and other competing media.
That these place-particular songs were appealing to Icelandic listeners at precisely a time when Sigur Ros was mesmerizing European rock sophisticates -- and major-label execs -- as an opening act for Radiohead on its big tour last summer is evidence, I think, of a globalization more complicated and more hopeful than the dark prophets of a looming imperial pop-monoculture would have us believe.
Well, not really, but most of today's music listeners will not remember a time when mobile music meant groaning under the weight of a ghettoblaster.
There was a time when pop was predicated on the notion of being disposable; listeners revised their tastes quickly.
