For Haggis—best known for writing and directing Crash—we’d have been shocked if these three sets of characters weren’t somehow all connected.

The pairing of Röyksopp and Robyn first happened with Röyksopp’s 2009 album, Junior and “The Girl and the Robot.” The following year, Röyksopp featured on Robyn’s, “None of Dem,” from her Body Talk trilogy. Now they come together for Do It Again, a five-song mini-album.

The tagline for this year’s edition of Sled Island is #NobodyRainsOnOurParade.

Hercules and Love Affair‘s self-titled 2008 debut was exciting, in large part, because of the way it exemplified, not to mention totally refreshed, modern disco-house music.

Ben Hatke’s cartooning is lovely, expressive, and whimsical, but it’s his world-building and character-building that bring the Zita books from very good to wonderful.

They say all the good band names have already been taken, which accounts for why so many post-millennial acts have resorted to daft monikers such as Freelance Whales, Com Truise, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., and We Were Promised Jetpacks.

Roman Polanski proves his dexterity once again with this dark, mystifying, and anything but simple two-character, single-location film.

Set against the exponentially growing AIDS epidemic in San Francisco in 1985, Chris Mason Johnson settles his eye on the intimacy of dance, the irony of the body and its treatment in dance versus sex, and the gradual paranoia of the era in his film Test.

That Andrew Bird has chosen to record an album entirely of Handsome Family covers will surprise very few. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist may not fit the profile of a natural iconoclast, but he’s hardly known for playing things by the book. For the most part, he does whatever he feels like, whenever he feels like it.