It'd been four years since Jill Sobule's last disc, and more than three times as long since she had a hit with "I Kissed a Girl." Then Katy Perry owned the summer with her own love-it-or-hate-it single, and some were itching for a catfight between the two self-proclaimed girl kissers.

Perhaps no one embodies the continuum and contrasts between composition and improvisation quite as well as Anthony Braxton, so it's fitting that the saxophonist/composer be the first subject of Ars Nova Workshop's Composer Portrait series.

The Dead C has for 18 years made it their business to turn the structures and mores of rock music on their head — not so much in a brash, piss-off punk fashion, but by distilling and configuring the very elements into a bubbling, steaming pitch.

Hurling themselves from one end of the musical spectrum to the other, often within the space of a single song, they spiral vertiginously through space, which may explain their lyrical fondness for science fiction.