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Nine years in the making and help from All American Rejects and Third Eye Blind, this two brother duo launches a compeling tale about life and love in their much anticipated CD release of, An American Stranger. Hear a special 5-track preview with special guest and lead singer, Ari Ingber on http://greatunknownspresent.com

An executive from social-music site Imeem told CNET News just days ago that the company would not be going through a round of layoffs. Well, not quite. Imeem's vice president of marketing, Matt Graves, said the question was actually "whether we had done layoffs, not whether we were going to," and that he answered accordingly. Sneaky! He proceeded to confirm a report from PaidContent that a quarter of the company has been laid off. "There's not as much money floating around the market, and we had to cut our costs to accommodate," Graves said. He added that the layoffs are companywide--"finance, marketing, communications, product, technical operations"--clarifying the PaidContent assertion that the layoffs had been primarily "on the technical back-end side." He would not comment on the other half of PaidContent's report--that Imeem is planning to shop itself to prospective buyers. PaidContent's Rafat Ali added that Imeem's projected valuation is more than $200 million, a figure that many media and technology companies might not be willing to fork over at this point. Imeem has taken venture funding from Sequoia Capital, a firm that has advocated extreme caution and frugality amid financial panic. Another Sequoia-backed company, Jive Software, cut a third of its employees within days of the now-famous letter from the venture firm to its portfolio CEOs.

Hailing from the very heart of hip-hop culture (Ann Arbor, Michigan) Tadd Mullinix aka Dabrye is back on the shelves at your local record store (if you are lucky enough to still have one) with his third full-length release Two/Three. The enigmatic and fractional title is the follow up to his 2001 debut One/Three and 2002 sophomore release Instrmntl. Mullinix, who is quite the busy beaver, also makes house, techno, and industrial music under other monikers. So it's not surprising that his brand of hip-hop is a little bit left of center. A Dabrye album is as likely to feature white noise, sawbuzz analog synths, and found sounds, as its title is to include numbers or consonants, it seems.