An unscientific survey of River Cities' Reader employees revealed that many people have never heard of Richard Thompson.

The lack of recognition is not exactly a surprise, because Thompson has never been able to parlay intense respect into sales. But he is an important artist, and one who has no difficulty bridging the gap between folk music and hard-edged rock. He also has a fantastic sense of humor, a rarity among "serious" artists.

So allow me to introduce him.

When I put the album from the electronic duo EOTO in a CD player at work, my office mate Mike Schulz asked - after about five seconds of music - "You're not watching porn, are you?"

I'm guessing that question would please Jason Hann, a percussionist with jam-band/bluegrass favorites String Cheese Incident and half of EOTO. While he's more than happy to talk about the impressive technical elements of the live-looping project - which will be performing at the Redstone Room on Monday, May 28 - he'd rather you just dance.

Most everybody knows that Blur song as "Woo Hoo," even though its proper title is "Song 2." Neither is particularly meaningful.

But Kyle Ferguson, a senior philosophy major at Augustana College, called one of his songs "Notes from a Solipsist," and that title frames the song's lyrics. Solipsism is a belief that one can only know what one directly experiences - that there might not be a world outside of your own mind.

"You identify your experience with the world," Ferguson explained. "So there's no reality external to your experience."

The concept of record-label samplers is to introduce a listener to the sound and artists that a label offers. But too often, these compilations are nothing more than a hodge-podge of material tied together by a company name: Either everything sounds the same, making it difficult to tell one artist from the next, or the compilation is so disparate that it's impossible to settle in and sit through all of the songs.