Natalie Merchant heads to London this week for the first of several performances in the UK and Continental Europe in the coming weeks. To mark these events and Natalie's forthcoming Nonesuch debut, due out in early 2010, Nonesuch.com is taking a look back at the singer-songwriter's career in a special video piece, available now at nonesuch.com/media.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops were in California last week for a number of shows, including a small session at Santa Monica's Village Studios, where a select few got a taste of what's to come on the band's forthcoming Nonesuch debut, out early next year. "Boing Boing will be all over it like gravy on grits," says the site. "They were amazing." Boing Boing Video also shot some post-concert jamming with band member Dom and special guests.

Wilco and The Low Anthem have made the shortlist of nominees for the Uncut Music Award and are now two of just eight artists up for what Uncut has dubbed the year's "most inspiring and rewarding musical experience." The music video for The Low Anthem's "Charlie Darwin" can now be seen here at Nonesuch.com. Stereogum described it as an "affecting visual counterpart to Ben Knox Miller's fragile falsetto."

Earlier this year, "Charlie Darwin," the opening track to The Low Anthem's Nonesuch debut, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, was named one of the best songs of the year by NPR. Now, the band's moving music and lyrics have been set to beautiful images in a new video by Glenn Taunton and Simon Taffe, which premieres today on Stereogum. "The solemn, solitary pathos in Glenn Taunton's animated video for Low Anthem's 'Charlie Darwin' adds another layer of melancholia to the track," says Stereogum, "offering an affecting visual counterpart to Ben Knox Miller's fragile falsetto."

Christina Courtin is set to hit the road again this weekend with shows in Boston and Brooklyn before heading off on a three-week tour with Elizabeth & the Catapult next week. Just in time comes a music video for "Bundah," a song the Knoxville News-Sentinel notes for "Courtin's dulcet voice" and the "florid acoustic guitar swaying through" the track.

As The Low Anthem's tour transitions from Europe back to the States next week, Lake Fever Sessions has published three performance videos the group recorded during a stop in Nashville earlier this year: "Ticket Taker," "Charlie Darwin," and "This God Damn House." The band's rich and varied influences, says Lake Fever, "create a stark, though strangely lush at times, canvas for their melodic folk tunes."

Sara Watkins recently stopped by the Rolling Stone offices to perform three songs off her self-titled Nonesuch debut for the "Smoking Section," which praises her "gorgeous voice and killer fiddle." She is joined for the performances by her brother Sean and keyboardist Benmont Tench (of the Heartbreakers), both of whom are featured on the album as well.

Wilco was joined by Feist to sing "You and I" at Monday night's concert at KeySpan Park in Brooklyn and on Tuesday night's performance for the Late Show with David Letterman. Stereogum posts video of the latter and reports: "Jeff [Tweedy] and Feist enjoy a laid back but engaged rapport onstage that matches the dulcet mesh of their voices, one of those rare collaborative dynamics that enhances the song's meaning as much as it raises the song's profile." Billboard says of Monday's concert: "The sight was American rock 'n' roll at its finest, with one of the genre's most powerful live acts at the helm." WFUV's Rita Houston says: "Great show in a great setting on a beautiful night in Coney Island. Magic was all there."

Christina Courtin's self-titled Nonesuch debut is out now. The Huffington Post calls its mix of a multitude of sounds and styles "a wonderful concoction, with intoxicating moody numbers" and "gorgeous lines" of lyrics. The review notes "Courtin's toasty-warm, reassuring vocal," her "lilting, breathy voice" as what "steers her adventures through layers of hypnotic music and production." Time Out New York calls the record "superb" and "beautifully textured," crediting "Courtin’s commanding voice." She talks to New York magazine about discovering that voice as the subject of the magazine's "Breaking" feature.

The Nonesuch Journal brought you a brief glimpse of Björk's forthcoming multimedia release, Voltaic, in a video preview of the project earlier this week. Now you can watch the first full-length song performance, "Declare Independence," recorded live in concert in Paris, at nonesuch.com/media. The performance is part of the concert film available in the CD+DVD and deluxe versions of Voltaic, to be released on Nonesuch on June 30, and will be screened in cities across the US in the coming weeks.

Voltaic, the multimedia extravaganza in music and video celebrating Björk's two-year world tour following the 2007 release of Volta, is due for release from Nonesuch at the end of the month. Screenings of Voltaic's concert film component are set for cities across the US the week leading up to and around the June 30 release. And now you can catch a sneak peek at the whole project in a video preview at nonesuch.com/media.