Welcome to Six Degrees, a new Uncensored Interview feature inspired by none other than Mr. Kevin Bacon. You know the game–it’s a small world and we’re all somehow related. This theory applies to the music scene as well, no matter what you listen to, where you hang or who you know. We’re just showing you the connections.

While the rest of us are out bar-hopping, scarfing down questionably greasy food in the middle of the night and generally cavorting with friends, we tend to forget about the people serving us said methods of mayhem.

Because of the flexible schedule the service industry allows, many of the friendly faces you see are musicians. They probably come across some good material, too, considering all the things that go down behind the scenes. Here are a few of our favorite stories, including Clara Lofaro’s Sopranos-like run-in.

When she’s not hanging with her Mafia connections, Clara works with charity Action Against Hunger. She donates 20 percent of her Perfekt World album sales to the organization. Also involved in charity is Ed Harcourt, who appeared on a track for Crisis, a charity fighting homelessness. He also knows what chaos a restaurant can be.

Ed’s also a composer whose works have been played in film and on TV shows like Smallville. Joining him in the small-screen music world is Meiko whose songs have been played on Grey’s Anatomy, among others.

Fresh off the heels of our Northside Festival showcase last week, Uncensored Interview is hitting the streets again. This time we’re speaking at the Open Video Conference, held today and tomorrow in New York City.

What’s the Open Video Conference, you ask? Why, it’s a gathering of all the talented foks out there tinkering and pushing the boundaries of online video technology. The world of online video is pretty proprietary, but there are plenty of cool companies working toward widening the playing field and offering viewers more variety, flexibility and interactivity.

That’s where we come in! We’ll be there talking about the scalable, versatile content we offer; how we partnered with Creative Commons earlier this year to let others use our clips for bigger projects and using the royalty-free Ogg-Theora as our open source codec for fans to download.

If you’re attending the conference and need a little comic relief while in the Big Apple, The Notorious MSG have you covered.

Let’s get retro wth Flashion Backward, a feature that’s the spiritual cousin of Flashion Forward. Here, we rifle through our treasure trove of interviews to fish out a vintage gem–the better to explore the strange vortex in which fashion and musicians meet. Today we’re checking out The Age of Rockets to see what revelatory nuggets of wisdom we can extract from this UI clip.

Orchestral/electro indie rockers The Age of Rockets seem to have to the whole hipster nerd boys and girls thing going for them–they’re all Converse, fluttery layers of vintage clothing with odd button arrangements, pasty skin and dark hair. These are the peeps with whom one enjoys imbibing the champagne of beers, right? Wrong!

Don’t be fooled by their awesomely blended organic electro musical creations that surely reveal wise and kind souls, because really? The Age of Rockets crew up so hard there’s gotta be at least once where they talk smack about you and your friends. (We still can’t help but like their plaid, though).

Let’s dive into the Flashion Forward vortex, UI’s slap-happy spin through the contents of our favorite musicians’ houses of style. Each week we pluck a recently added interview from our warehouse of current clips and try to read between the artist’s sartorial lines. Today, we’re abandoning our bearings with Vetiver and joining them as they lead us off the beaten path.

Folksters Vetiver (named after grass…interpret that as you will!) always seem to be floating a few feet above the rest of us, enchanting us with their magical dust, fancy hats and Haute ‘n hot Farmer Joe aesthetic.

The music’s good too. So good it’s been called “dizzyingly euphoric,” and listening to their music has been compared to “pedaling through the French countryside on a three-seat bicycle: precarious, exuberant, and inexcusably weird.”

Clearly at home with the odd, Vetiver takes us on a little (non-psychedelic) trip through his hood in northern San Francisco, a strange and enchanting place, home of coffee shops called Trouble that sell nothing but java and coconuts, restaurants made of driftwood and surf shops that also serve as art galleries. Ah, California. It’s nice to know the O.C. hasn’t completely taken over.

Pixies are back with the mammoth Minotaur, a box set of all the band’s albums plus “a live DVD, new artwork, and a book,” according to Pitchfork. The band also took the stage last night at the Isle of Wight festival in the U.K. It was their first performance since hitting the festival circuit in 2007, and the band is reportedly playing more dates this year.

Available for pre-sale today, fans can cop the collector’s set for $175 (deluxe edition) and $495 (limited edition) via Artist in Residence. If that sounds like a lot, click here and here to find out what went into making the packages.

It seems like what the fans really want is some new material, so here’s to hoping the band finds some inspiration in the coming months. Here The Soft Pack share admiration for the visuals of the Pixies.

As if you needed an excuse to support the spirits industry, vodka brand 42 Below has sponsored “OneDreamRush,” a series of 42 films lasting 42 seconds directed by 42 directors. The topic? Dreams they’ve had.

Directors include the omnipresent David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Sean Lennon and Chan Marshall (that’s Ms. Cat Power to you). There are also plenty of additional respected directors and actors who will deliver their (really short) shorts in the coming months as the project develops. In the meantime, check out the trailer here.

It will be interesting to see what the musically-inclined among the bunch come up with since music and film are always borrowing inspiration from each other. Here  Electric Touch explains their approach, as influenced by a certain Scorsese.

Smooth out your pink cashmere twin-set! We’re going to hop into our trusty DeLorean with Flashion Backward, a feature that’s the spiritual cousin of Flashion Forward. Here, we rifle through our treasure trove of interviews to fish out a vintage gem–the better to explore the strange vortex in which fashion and musicians meet. And speaking of smoooth, let’s take a gander at Rudresh Mahanthappa.

When ya think of a dapper and cosmopolitan (and perhaps just slightly wicked) man about town, Rudresh’s image should instantly, magically and effortlessly pop into your head, just as the Octomom’s does when the phrase “hot psychological mess” is summoned, quite unbidden, from the depths of your superficial celebrity psyche.

Rudresh is based in New York, was born in Trieste, Italy, and reared in Colorado. Of Indian descent (his parents are first gen), Rudresh is inspired by ragas and uses tal-like rhythmic forms in his work, often collaborating with Carnatic sax great Kadri Gopalnath.

Rudresh is perpetually on the cusp of hitting the big time in the jazz world: he’s been named a rising star by Down Beat four times and his grant writer must be his BFF, considering the bumper crop he’s received (a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Music, three Rockefeller MAPs and two New York State Council on the Arts grants–huzzah!). Like many a cool cat, he has his fingers firmly rooted in many juicy pies when he’s not actually twiddling with the alto saxophone–a teaching gig at New School University here, a co-leader of seven musical projects there.

And if you’re impressed with Rudresh and his tall, dark and handsome bespoke besuited, almost hypnotic charisma, then that goes double for him.

When Rudresh meets a celebrity, his first instinct is to talk about himself. While he acknowledges this might be a “problem” I think it just indicates that he possesses an admirable level of panache and self confidence. Which is definitely necessary when attempting to pull off a non-ironic version of the short-sleeved brightly hued button-down look without looking like my dweeby Uncle from Cleveland–which Rudresh always does without missing a smooth, head-swaying, hip-shaking, finger-snapping Daddy-o beat.