Talk about your indie musical act: When John Darnielle took his The Mountain Goats imprimatur to the small 4AD label seven years ago, it was a technological leap forward from the beatbox accompaniment and cassette format releases that had comprised the bulk of his previous output.

It was the offhand specificity of his insights combined with the quantity of his material that made Darnielle’s DIY aesthetic such an effective, if obviously limited, marketing ploy. Whether it was a compilation tape, a 7-inch vinyl single or even a proper CD gathered from the cassettes, the effect was like stumbling over previously buried treasure, a cache accessible only by being hip to certain codes and whispered words-of-mouth — or by accident.

Suddenly you were hearing this thin, urgent voice, usually over churning acoustic guitar, unearthing what was resonant in the mundane. Or maybe it was that he was downsizing big-deal songwriter subjects like romance and religion into the mundane daily increments that deliver the insight.

While the six CDs The Mountain Goats have released on 4AD since 2002 have not surprisingly featured increasingly richer and more carefully recorded music, Darnielle’s songwriting remains literate yet utterly ingenuous, as if he were a guy stocking groceries a few courses short of his master’s in philosophy or English — and with a few skeletons effectively stashed in his closet. Which makes Saturday night’s ambitious, sold-out show at the Cedar Cultural Center (a co-production with the Walker Art Center) especially intriguing.

Along with the now-longtime bassist Peter Hughes and more recent fellow Goat Jon Wurster on drums, Darnielle will be joined at the Cedar by Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy, whose violin loops and string arrangements adorn the latest Mountain Goats record, “The Life of the World To Come.”

With its rapturous title and song titles correlated to biblical text, one might think this is an overtly religious record. And it is, excerpt that Darnielle is allergic to orthodoxy in any form, meaning that his blasphemous rebuttals, like his acknowledgement of the legitimacy of an afterlife, stem from scrutiny, skepticism and curiosity more than a desire to confirm, deny or otherwise pontificate.

As will once again be made obvious on Saturday, then, Darnielle’s choice of band moniker is wonderfully apt: This Mountain Goat prefers to keep his mind on the roam among rugged terrain.

Speaking of rebuttals, here is Darnielle contradicting the spirited intent of his originally spry, talking-blues tune “Dance Music” with a subdued version.

Here is the MySpace music page for The Mountain Goats, and the one for Final Fantasy is here.

The Mountain Goats with Final Fantasy at the Cedar Cultural Center, Saturday, Nov. 7, 8 p.m.; tickets $20, $18 for Walker Art Center members. Sold out.

The Walker Art Center offers an extremely rare opportunity Sunday to see the 1971 ballet version of “The Red Detachment of Women” (Hongse niangzi jun). Directed by Xie Jin, the film was one of eight “model works” permitted during the Cultural Revolution in China, and tells the story of a group of women who pursue the communist battle against the Nationalists — without regard to their own safety or welfare, of course.

Power and its loss, humiliation and obsession, revenge and execution all receive their due in this tale, which was made into a ballet in 1964. It was also performed for President Richard Nixon during his visit to China in 1972.

The film includes members of the China Ballet Troupe as it depicts the liberation of a peasant girl in Hainan Island, and her later ascension in the Chinese Communist Party. The ballet combines traditional ballet of Western culture with traditional Chinese dancing.
:
For a very brief snippet go here.

3 p.m. Sunday, $6-$8, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 612-375-7600.

A new sculpture celebrating free speech is being installed today in St. Paul's Western Sculpture Park.

It's a 17-foot-long, bright yellow megaphone, called "Democracy Speaks." It's made of fabricated and painted steel, and, appropriately, points right at the state Capitol, located just a few blocks to the east.

It was created by Minnesota artists John Hock and Andrew MacGuffie on a commission from Public Art St. Paul.

It's being installed this morning, and a ceremony will be held at 3:30 p.m., with lemonade.

More about the sculptors, from a press release:

John Hock is one of the nation's most admired sculptors and has dedicated his life to promotion and support of sculpture as the founder and Artistic Director of Franconia Sculpture Park. His work has been exhibited and collected nationwide, including at the International Sculpture Center in Hamilton, New Jersey and Chicago's renowned Pier Walk. Hock was instrumental in establishing Western Park's sculpture exhibition in 1998 and has been engaged by Public Art Saint Paul as its exhibition curator for the past 11 years.

Andrew MacGuffie's work has been exhibited and commissioned from Minneapolis and Franconia to Vilnus, Lithuania and Chalon-sur-Saone, France. He is the winner of numerous artist fellowships and awards. Like Hock, MacGuffie lends his talent and expertise to support the work of artists and arts organizations throughout the region and is considered a foremost rigger and sculpture installer.

The Western Sculpture Park is on the west side of Marion Street, across from the Rice Street Sear's store.

I welcome just about any excuse to browse through the many studios and small galleries of the Northrup King Building, but this weekend in particular, thanks to “Art Attack,” it's a prime time to stop by.

With more than 200 participating artists — working in fiber art, sculpture, photography, prints, painting and drawing, jewelry, ceramics and glass — this annual gallery and studio crawl offers a vast and eclectic assortment of artwork.

In addition to the individual studio and gallery spaces, you'll find a juried show of work by Minnesota women ceramic artists on the third floor; among the artists with work on view, I'm especially eager to see Mary Roettger's intricately spiraled, three-dimensional plays on natural patterns and forms.

And here's something else, strange enough to merit particular mention: Apparently, Minneapolis jewelry artist Heinz Brummel has taken up an intriguing sideline in recent years — yurts. After years of research into the traditional art and craft of building such things, the artist is showing the fruits of his newfound labors: two hand-built, traditional Mongolian yurts will be installed in the Northrup King Building's outdoor green-space.

“Art Attack” visitors will find refreshments by the quirky Magic Bus Cafe, occasional live music and demonstrations by various artists throughout the building, working at their crafts throughout the weekend.

I appreciate the manageability of “Art Attack”: It's a large enough art crawl to pleasantly fill an entire afternoon, but since the events, galleries and studios are nicely contained in one location, the art-seeing opportunities are ample without being overwhelming.

"Art Attack," the annual gallery and studio crawl in Northeast Minneapolis' Northrup King Building, takes place all weekend long: 5 to 10 p.m. today, noon to 8 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

The Walker's new perception-bending exhibition, "Dan Graham: Beyond," requires a certain childlike unself-consciousness of the viewer, a willingness to play.

The show, recently arrived in Minneapolis after presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, offers a dizzying mix of media and forms — from conceptual art and minimalism to experiments with video, writing, and performance, as well as architectural design and wry cultural commentary. This exhibition is the first U.S. retrospective of this influential artist's career, and it spans 40 years of work, from the 1960s to the present.

Evidence of Graham's active participation in the evolving rock scene abounds - the exhibition is peppered with lively commentary on and references to movers and shakers in pop music, from Dean Martin to the Kinks. Also on view is one of the artist's earliest and most famous projects, an astute chronicle of urban sprawl, "Homes for America" (1966-67).

A majority of Graham's pieces are only truly realized once the viewer walks into their sphere. Speaking about Graham's mirror-and-glass "pavilions," during a recent media tour of the show, Whitney curator Chrissie Iles said, "Until people approach these structures, they are quite static; their reflective surfaces blend in with their surroundings, and there's no real movement. It's as if they're waiting for people to enter the room."

Graham's perception-bending "pavilions" are elegant, curvaceous structures covered with a variety of reflective surfaces — some mirrored, some transparent — on which bounce reflections, some true-to-form and others distorted, of the viewers around and inside them. His video-based installations, using cleverly positioned cameras to capture and replay recorded images of passersby, necessitate audience engagement in much the same way as his architectural structures.

You need to take your time as you walk through Graham's show; more important, you must surrender to the roles of both willing voyeur and object of surveillance to feel their impact. As Walker visual arts curator Peter Eleey observed, "Dan asks you to be both the scientist and the rat."

And you may find that after years of accumulating a protective shield of polite grown-up inhibitions, such a thing may be easier said than done. In fact, that mild viewer discomfort with such scrutiny seems to be a key concern uniting much of Graham's work, across media.

As I meandered through each of the installations, I kept thinking how much my 3-year-old would enjoy their fort-like, public/private nooks and funhouse appeal. What's more, he wouldn't mind mugging for Graham's cameras and mirrors one bit. In fact, when I take him to see the show, my preschooler will be thrilled with the watching/being watched play of it all - and with his example to loosen me up, I think I will be, too.

"Dan Graham: Beyond" will be on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through Jan. 24.

The fourth annual International Society of Improvised Music Festival/Conference takes place in early December this year, and I’ve just made plans to go. By the end of the third day, or maybe the first, I expect that my head will be spinning like Linda Blair’s in “The Exorcist,” except in a good way.

Quoting The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, improvisation is “the spontaneous creation of music as it is performed. It may involve the immediate composition of an entire work by its performers, or the elaboration or other variation of an existing framework, or anything in between.” (The New Grove goes on for nine more pages; we’ll stop here.)

Improvisation keeps things interesting for the players and the listeners. On Wednesday night at the Dakota, during the final set of a three-day, five-show run, Dave Brubeck played “Take Five,” which he probably plays at every show and will continue to play for the rest of his life. It’s Brubeck’s greatest hit; people love it and expect it.

But what started out as the tune everyone knows quickly changed into something none of us had ever heard before because Brubeck and his quartet improvised. “Take Five” was in there somewhere — you could hear it in occasional flourishes from Brubeck’s piano, in the plucked notes from Michael Moore’s bass, in Bobby Militello’s saxophone, and all over Randy Jones’ lengthy drum solo — but it was fresh and new.

Improvisation within a familiar melody is one thing; “the immediate composition of an entire work by its performers” is another. It can seem like a lot of noise, random and unstructured and frustrating. I’ve heard many people say, “I don’t understand it!” Join the crowd. I don’t understand it either. But I like it. Improvised music can be intensely creative and full of surprises. You don’t have to know anything about what you’re hearing. Just bring your ears and an open mind.

One of the Twin Cities’ leading improvisers, multi-instrumentalist Milo Fine calls improvised music “deep listening.” The musicians aren’t making things up out of thin air and going their merry way. They’re listening — hard — to each other, responding to each other, leading each other, making musical suggestions, drawing from a shared vocabulary. Often, what musicians do depends on how the audience responds. So you may not realize it, but you’re part of the performance.

Fine leads this week’s picks.

Sunday: Trio Raro. Its name is a play on words, referencing both the music they make and the infrequency with which they perform (for geographical reasons). Milo Fine plays clarinet, piano, drums, and chimes; on Sunday he’ll play piano. Born in Argentina, Andrew Raffo Dewar is a composer, improviser and woodwind instrumentalist who teaches at the University of Alabama; he’ll play soprano saxophone and B-flat clarinet. Percussionist, cellist, violinist, soprano saxophonist and St. Paul resident Davu Seru will be on the drum set. All three have lengthy improvised music/free jazz resumes you can check out on their websites. 8 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 8, Studio Z, 275 E. Fourth St. (Northwestern Building), St. Paul ($5).

Tuesday and Wednesday: Herb Alpert and Lani Hall. The Tijuana Brass. “A Taste of Honey.” “Whipped Cream & Other Delights.” Co-founder of A&M Records (the Police, the Carpenters, Carole King, Janet Jackson). Co-producer of smash hit Broadway shows. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. Eight-time Grammy winner. 72 million records sold. Herb Alpert is A Very Big Deal. The trumpeter/bandleader and his wife, Lani Hall, are playing a series of club dates in support of their new CD, “Anything Goes.” They’ll spend two nights at the Dakota. Here’s a video from last year. 7 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, Nov. 10-11, Dakota, 1010 Nicollet Mall, ($79/$55).

Thursday: Turtle Island String Quartet. The Grammy-winning classical crossover group — violinists David Balakrishnan and Mads Tolling, violist Jeremy Kittel, cellist Mark Summer — has recently been exploring the music of John Coltrane. They played from their CD “A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane” in November 2007 at the Fitzgerald, where they shared a bill with Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker and author of the bestselling book “The Rest Is Noise.” I was there and enjoyed it very much. Improvisation is integral to their music. 7 and 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, Dakota, 1010 Nicollet Mall ($40/$25).

Pamela Espeland keeps a Twin Cities live jazz calendar and blogs about jazz at Bebopified. She tweets about jazz on Twitter.

A giant new film studio now under construction in an old Chicago steel factory probably won't have much impact on the Minnesota film and television industry, said Lucinda Winters, executive director of the Minnesota Film and TV Board.

The $80 million project will turn six buildings on 50 acres of the old the Ryerson Steel property on Chicago's Near Southwest Side into the biggest state-of-the-art film studio outside of Hollywood, planners say.

They're calling it Cinespace Chicago, and owner Nick Mirkopoulos is a Toronto studio owner. One 330,000-square-foot stage could be ready by January, and the rest is scheduled for completion in a year or so. They think it will create 6,000 jobs.

With the very complicated economics of movie-making — involving incentives to filmmakers varying greatly by state and country, plus exchange rates and local costs — Winters says the planned studio probably won't affect film and TV work here.

"If you're asking, will this benefit Minnesota? I'd have to say no," she said today from Los Angeles, where she's attending a film convention. "It won't have much influence on our business here. The only bump might be if this draws some large productions who might come as far as Minnesota to look for talent. We're known as having a good, diverse acting pool."

She said Illinois offers filmmakers a 30 percent incentive to work there, more than Minnesota's current 15 to 20 percent incentives, depending on the size of the project. The combination of the relatively high incentive, plus the new studio, should help Chicago snag some projects, she said.

Minnesota board efforts are further hampered by its relatively small $1.2 million budget for this fiscal year. "Until the last days of the Legislature, I thought we would be getting $5 million," Winter said.

"[The Chicago studio] should be good for the Midwest as a whole, because it provides more flexibility and the opportunity to choose another studio, but without the incentives, nobody goes anywhere," she said.

The Tennessee quintet Paramore has earned its MTV and” Twilight” soundtrack prominence with constant touring, taut hooks and the feisty sex appeal of powerhouse redhead Hayley Williams on vocals.

The music is on the blurred line between grunge and emo, and while the band is following a timeworn template that features precious few surprises, its punchy songs are pleasantly forceful and well-honed.

Check the group out here doing “Misery Business” and on MySpace here for tracks from their latest album.

Paramore at Roy Wilkins Auditorium (moved from the now-closed Myth), Friday, Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m., tickets $27.50.

On Tuesday, we talked about how local independent booksellers are dealing with the news that Target, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com are selling some best-selling hardcovers for $9 — far below their cost.

But such a thing couldn't happen in Europe, where they've got laws in most countries there — but not the U.K. — that require all bookstores, online retailers included, to sell books at prices set in stone by their publishers, says the Wall Street Journal.

And in Germany, the Journal says, it goes much further:

[Germany] outlaws the discounting of virtually all new books for 18 months. The system protects independent booksellers and smaller publishers from giant rivals that could discount their way to more market share. Along with some 7,000 bookshops, nearly 14,000 German publishers remain in business. Many are of modest size, like Munich-based Carl Hanser Verlag, which publishes the work of this year's Nobel laureate, German-Romanian writer Herta Mueller.

"The smaller publishers get to publish quality works they never could afford to do without the fixed book price," says Gerd Gerlach, owner of a small Berlin bookshop named after the 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine. "Everyone benefits, not least the reader."

Also, Michael Hyatt, a publishing CEO, blogs that the current U.S. book price war will ultimately hurt not only publishers, authors and book stores, but ultimately even the mass marketers who started the deep discounting:

When publishers are forced to further reduce titles, or new authors just don’t have the same incentive to succeed, the pipeline of new book titles will dry up. Where will the next crop of new authors come from? Who will be the bestsellers of tomorrow? The mass retailers have had the luxury of being able to skim the cream off the publishing milk pail without investing in the process that creates the milk in the first place. In my opinion, they are about to kill the cow.

Consumers, too, he said, should be wary:

Yes, lower prices are good for consumers — in the short run. But they are not good in the long run if authors and publishers are no longer willing to assume the risk of creating and producing the kind of quality and selection consumers currently enjoy.

The New York-based American Craft Council said today it plans to move its headquarters to Minneapolis next July.

"The Council is proud to have been headquartered in New York for 66 years, but the high cost of doing business in the city is not a sustainable financial model for our organization given the current economic climate," said ACC Board Chair Leilani Duke in a press release. "As part of a year-long strategic planning process, the Council Board determined that relocating to the Midwest — with its rich craft traditions and energetic artist communities - is an exciting and positive step."

For 23 years, the ACC has presented a popular annual juried craft show in St. Paul.

"Minneapolis, one of the country’s most vibrant centers for art and craft, provides tremendous opportunities for the Council to enhance its contributions to art and craft communities at a national and local level," Duke said.

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak says the move is a natural fit in the press release. "Nearly 9,000 people work in the arena of nonprofit arts and culture in Minneapolis. The arts are a driving force in the city’s economy. Already home to 275 arts and cultural organizations, we welcome the American Craft Council to our community."