As Natalie Merchant and her band perform songs from Leave Your Sleep in California this week, new shows have just been added in the Northeast this fall featuring a full symphony orchestra. LA Weekly calls Leave Your Sleep "the most sonically adventurous project of her career." The Atlantic, reviewing the Seattle show, says it "worked—in wondrous ways," calling it "a tour de force ... an artist's creative and courageous venture into new territory altogether."

Punch Brothers' latest Nonesuch album, Antifogmatic, was just released on vinyl, while the band is out West performing songs from the album. Already on the road for a month now, Punch Brothers announce their fall tour, adding several new dates throughout the South. "Most shows are now on-sale," reports Noam Pikelny on the band's newly redesigned website. "People might be lining up outside of these venues already. There's just no way to tell for sure."

Sara Watkins has begun the month-long Summer Love Tour with Garrison Keillor and the cast of A Prairie Home Companion. She tells the Grand Rapids Press: "One of the things I'm looking forward to is getting to hear [Garrison] tell stories every night." Watkins will also perform on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on September 2 and has been nominated as Artist of the Year in the San Diego Music Awards.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the free outdoor music festival held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year with a stellar line-up of performers that includes a number of Nonesuch artists—Carolina Chocolate Drops, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, and T Bone Burnett—along with several artists familiar to fans of Nonesuch. The festival will be held October 1–3.

Punch Brothers' latest Nonesuch album, Antifogmatic, which was released earlier this summer on CD and described on NPR's Weekend Edition as "10 delectable tunes," is now available on vinyl. The vinyl edition includes the album pressed on 140-gram vinyl plus a CD of the complete album. Actor/comedian Ed Helms offers a "Slobbering Rave" of the band's music in Paste, calling "an impossibly perfect mixture of down-home charm and staggering sophistication."

AfroCubism—the great world music album that never was—has finally been realized and is due for release from World Circuit / Nonesuch Records this October. To coincide with the release of the album, AfroCubism the band, featuring some of Cuba and Mali's finest musicians, will embark on its first full tour this fall. In North America, where the album is due for release on Nonesuch October 19, the group will stop in Montreal, Boston, and New York.

Philip Selway's solo debut album, Familial, is due out at the end of the month. Selway spoke with Billboard magazine for an interview that was also published via Reuters. Billboard refers to "the album's pared-down, acoustic sound," about which Selway says: "It's a world apart from what I do in Radiohead."

Laurie Anderson recently spoke with The Quietus about her new album, Homeland. The Quietus reviewer says: "Anderson had, has, foresight, and if she would consent to the idea of timeless, I'd use that adjective here." The Seattle Times describes it as "brilliant vocals, thought-provoking narratives, hypnotic violins and the most finely attuned poetic sensibility in rock."

Björk is the latest artist to be chosen for NPR's 50 Great Voices, the weekly series featuring "awe-inspiring voices from around the world and across time." In the segment, titled "Björk: A Celestial Voice," host Guy Raz says of that voice: "There is something celestial about it, as if it comes from another world, a fantastic and colorful and utopian world." The New Yorker's Alex Ross tells NPR: "I cannot think of another voice like it in pop music, in classical music."

Punch Brothers recently visited the MTV studios in New York to take part in the network's new online series, "Live at MTV." The band played songs from their latest album, Antifogmatic, as well as a cover of the White Stripes song "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground." MTV's Buzzworthy Blog features four videos from the performance, including "You Are," "Alex," "Rye Whiskey," and the White Stripes tune.

Natalie Merchant, Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Rokia Traoré performed recently at the 45th annual Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England. BBC Radio 2's festival highlights program features interviews and live performances by all three both artists. Press coverage of the festival included praise for the performances.