Hot Chip’s sold-out show tonight at the El Rey Theatre has been postponed due to illness. The British outfit played a show in New York on Saturday and apparently Felix Martin barely made it through that one, Brooklyn Vegan reported. A Goldenvoice spokesperson said tickets for tonight’s show will be honored on the new date.

So, this link to the neat (and massively unlikely to stay online for long) little toy called Songerize landed in our mailbox a few minutes ago. It professes to allow you to play any song, ever, by typing a title into whatever ungodly cauldron of Internet searching it’s made of. So far, it seems to work, which means that it has about six more minutes before the Recording Industry Assn. of America likely crushes its puny aggregator spine. In honor of its surely imminent funeral (and for Patriots fans), we’re playing Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” right now.

– August Brown

I think I found the cure for the common TV. Of course, it’s right here on your very own Internet.It’s My Damn Channel, a portal that is home to offerings from musician extraordinaire Don Was, along with the likes of Harry Shearer, David Wain and others.

Was, a bassist, music supervisor, documentary director, Grammy-winning producer and a driving force behind the cutting-edge funk outfit Was (Not Was), has seldom been more sublimely entertaining than as the cool-cat host of the “Wasmopolitan Dance Party” — a webisode filmed in the showroom of the Furniture Outlet, a budget joint in North Hollywood. [Pardon the ads, but the installment above is well worth their intrusion.]

There is singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, gamely playing her beautiful songs from behind a dining-room set as shoppers mill about looking at recliners.

“I can’t compete with the setup on Letterman” Was says with a laugh. “But doing something like this, we asked, ‘What could we offer that’s different?’ The answer is, the stripped-down and personal stuff.”

Was says the idea of an in-store was inspired by the AM radio stations of his boyhood in Detroit, where DJs often would do their shows from their sponsors’ businesses. “I love the interaction with the guy who owns the store,” he says. “It’s just the right combination of terribly wrong and ‘Yes! We should be doing this.’ ”

It works — and, yes, having sponsorship helps — where so much of today’s Internet video content doesn’t. “I’m worried that in a DIY culture, people can just throw anything up on the Internet,” Was says. “People should know that you shouldn’t put up crap just because you can.”

Was’ channel offers songs for download — Sobule (who is having an online telethon to finance her next project after having released six albums for four labels) has an especially nice new song, “San Francisco,” here.

And Was also rescued the L.A. girl group Rocket after the quintet was eliminated from the Fox television show “The Next Great American Band.” He brought the band into the studio to record (and do a video for) a new single, “I Wanna Love You.”“That show was really awful — Fox has already turned politics into sports, and now they’ve done it with music too,” he says. “Rocket will last longer than that show.”

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Was (Not Was), by the way, has a new album, “Boo!,” due on April 8. More on this later, but it’s funk-on-a-bender. The group has a Feb. 14 show at the Orpheum too, which will feature three-song appearances by both Brian Wilson and Kris Kristofferson.

Tina Dico’s insouciant alto sounds like no other voice. She’s not an aspirating waif, despite her Danish good looks. Instead, there’s the hint that she could eat you for breakfast, if she cared. She’s like an updated Tracy Chapman with her no-nonsense delivery, deft acoustic picking and songs of yearning. This peculiar $5 video of “On the Run,” a catchy, reflective number on the peripatetic life, is from Dico’s upcoming album, “Count to Ten.” The video looks as it might have been discovered in an isolated cache in Joshua Tree National Park — the last recorded images of Tina Dico before her disappearance.

Whenever some fool goes on about the death of jazz (as if such an improvisatory medium could stop mutating), play that misguided soul some of “Little Things Run the World,” the latest album from New York bassist Ben Allison and his band Man Size Safe. Allison has been getting a lot of ink from notable critics praising his merger with rock or folk. Rock? I’m not sure what they are hearing. This is assuredly jazz that deconstructs all influences, with harmonic chromaticism in an intriguing dialogue with hummable modal melodies. On the lead track, “Respiration” (streamable second track on the player for the above-linked website), guitarist Steve Cardenas bravely takes his solo to Ribot-like territory in which the guitar noticeably goes out of tune. One may be reminded of similar excursions by guitarists as varied as Thurston Moore and Ornette Coleman’s double whammy of Charles Ellerbee and Bern Nix on “Dancing in Your Head.” Becoming a musical device, you never forget it. And check out Allison’s mischievously skipping bass lines, punctuating all the permutations of the beat.

Minneapolis-based guitarist Steve Tibbetts rarely records or performs. ECM Records issues one of his haunting, musical gnosis, seemingly out of the ether, every once in a blue moon. Akin to Michael Brook and Eno’s more ambient work, the more uncharitable might label him New Age, but not many New Agers get that howling, desperate sound like the wind sweeping through the cerulean peaks of the Hindu Kush, close to where Tibbetts has spent so much of his time in the last 20 years. Listen to three tracks from “Selwa,” a collaboration recorded with Choyung Drolma, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, in 2004. A video of a concert in 2005 reveals Tibbetts playing an acoustic 12-string. Listen for the soul-shaking bottom end on the 12-string when Tibbetts kicks it in. Listener be wary: Time may suspend.

– Casey Dolan

[Photo: Ben Allison. Credit: Jimmy Katz / Palmetto Records]

The early buzz on the new venue Crash Mansion has been mixed. The downtown venue has been up and running for a while, playing host to some lively club nights and the occasional live show and, recently, trying to overcome the black eye it received when a patron was gunned down in a nearby parking lot in early January.

On Saturday night, the 1,200-capacity club — the kid sister of the hot NYC venue Crash Mansion — will put on its best face for its grand opening, featuring the Bravery and U.K. newcomers Switches. The headliner is a known commodity here, having played plenty of L.A. shows since “The Sun and the Moon” invaded the airwaves. Switches’ debut “Lay Down the Law” comes out March 18 (Interscope). If you’re looking for swagger and energy, it could be your party-starter; if you’re looking for originality, move on. Switches borrow heavily from the likes of Queen and ELO (is it just me, or is “Drama Queen” [on their MySpace] just a reworked “Don’t Bring Me Down”?) and seem to delight in it. Is there such a thing as background glam?

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what Crash Mansion (being booked by ex-Key Club talent buyer Roger LeBlanc) can bring to the table. Judging from the faux-historical murals inside and the doorman who seem to enjoy having a line (even when the music has started and the club is less than a quarter full, as I experienced in December), it could be a slice of Sunset Strip coming downtown. If you like that sort of thing.

Highlights for the weekend, Feb. 1-2-3

For those who remember “Reality Bites” fondly — and those who rightfully used “Stay (I Missed You)” as an entree to her music — Lisa Loeb is playing two in-store performances this weekend to support the release of “The Purple Tape,” her 1992 recording that is coming out on CD (with expanded packaging) for the first time. She’ll play acoustic at 7 tonight at the Barnes and Noble in the Grove and at 7 p.m. Saturday at Borders in Torrance (3700 Torrance Blvd.)

Also tonight: Autolux and Heath bring the noise at the El Rey, while Matt Costa (with the Delta Spirit in tow) plays the first of two sold-out nights at the Troubadour. … A-Trak and Kid Sister party among the artifacts at the Natural History Museum. … Bodies of Water and Castanets perform at Club Underground at the Echo.

Saturday: The Aquabats perform at the benefit for cancer-stricken Tony Carbone of Bikeride. It’s at the Glass House. … Sherwood and the Matches play a MySpace Records show at the Knitting Factory. … Mere Mortals and the Black Kites play Spaceland, while the Deadly Syndrome (explosive as usual on Thursday at Spaceland) plays the Scene in Glendale.

Sunday: Hungarian rockers the Moog play Safari Sam’s, and the Tartans achnor the bill at the Scene.

– Kevin Bronson