St. Patrick's Day may be one reason to celebrate this weekend, but it certainly isn't the only one. Fri., March 17 also happens to be the 25th anniversary of Milwaukee's Mecca of music known as the Milwaukee School of Engineering's 91.7 WMSE.

In honor of its silver birthday, WMSE is hosting a non-stop, 25-hour fund drive marathon srating at 9 a.m. on March 17. WMSE is inviting Milwaukee to visit the studio, 820 N. Milwaukee St., for an open house from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. where limited edition key chains will be given away for donations of $25 or more, as well as limited edition, locally-designed poster prints (see slide show above) for donations of $100 or more.

On Saturday, March 18, the studio doors will be opened to welcome former and current DJs, volunteers and alumni to view history from the station's vaults and reminisce on air about the station's beginnings in 1981 and earlier.

According to station manager Tom Crawford, WMSE was founded on the premise that there was so much good music out there that people didn't know about. For the last quarter of a century WMSE has been dedicated to educating Milwaukee about new music and in this spirit, WMSE's Promotions Director Brent Gohde shares his picks for this week's OMC mix tape.

Mix tape: Brent Gohde

The Chicago trio Hot Machines consists of members from three of my favorite bands which fall under the "garage rock" label (Baseball Furies, Miss Alex White and the Red Orchestra, and The Ponys), and boasts some of the best parts of those other projects. Its "Microphone" 7-inch on Milwaukee's Dusty Medical Records has two very different, very rocking songs with The Ponys' Jared Gummere taking vocals on the "A" side, and Miss Alex White singing on the flip side's "Can't Feel." Best bang for your buck in the whole record store.

I've never personally been excited by records on the Anticon label, but have always appreciated their genre-bending, and obvious love of all things old school hip-hop. Jel's (the label's founder and a member of 13 & God) "Soft Money" is the first Anticon release to really catch my ear. His first "solo" recording has all of the layers, heavy beats, and urgency of great hip-hop -- there's just no rhyming. Which isn't to say there's no great rhyming, because there is; there's just literally not much rhyming. The stand-out (and centerpiece) track is certainly "WMD" featuring a brilliant turn by Poor Righteous Teachers' Wise Intelligent, but the compositions hold their own without a need for constant vocal assistance, and are diverse enough to hold my attention for the duration of the album.

Similarly, I'm hardly a fan of remix albums, but Death From Above 1979's "Romance Bloody Romance" (Vice Records) is one of those instances when a few tweaks from like-minded musicians (ranging from Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme to Swedish DJ Jesper Dahlback) can breathe new life into songs which had previously (to say nothing of brilliantly) been performed by a band consisting of one bassist/synth player and one drummer. I love DFA1979 a lot, and was thrilled to hear -- more often than not -- how well the riffs and beats translated to the dance floor, sometimes by the band's own hands.

Speaking of dancing, the new single, "Over and Over," by London's Hot Chip bodes very well for the band's forthcoming album on Astralwerks Records. Released in America on the same November 2005 day as their previously import-only LP, "Coming On Strong," "Over and Over" has a stronger sound than that more playful, lighter-side-of-Prince, Chromeo-esque full-length, which had been out in England since early 2004. Pick up the new single, dance a lot, put it on that mix tape for your friend, watch your friend dance, and cross your fingers that Hot Chip's next record is as good as its live show would suggest it will be.

A recent bill was unanimously passed by congress requiring all music journalists to mention "T. Rex" or "Marc Bolan" three times or more when writing about The M's' new "Future Woman" album on Polyvinyl Records (Decibully's label), and with good reason. The comparisons are obvious, but not painfully so. The band has been around since 2001, circling a sound that it has now mastered, and it's landed them smack dab in the middle of "The Slider." Luckily for me, I like T. Rex a whole bunch, and have pretty much absorbed their catalog. For their part, The M's don't sound stale or derivative. I think this is a great record, and its most fully-realized to date.

Also falling into the "not stale or derivative" category (and unfortunately lumped into the "Art Brut/Bloc Party/Kaiser Chiefs/The Bravery/The Futureheads' Gang-of-Four-rip-off" category) is Maximo Park, five guys from Newcastle who probably actually listened to Wire growing up rather than five guys who saw a Franz Ferdinand video in 2004 and decided they could do that, too. They have just one album, which came out on Warp in early 2005, so it's odd that a year later we'd get "Missing Songs," a collection of B-Sides and demos. But it's definitely worthwhile if you're a fan of last year's "A Certain Trigger," which was an overlooked album (it's brand new to me). Pick up that first CD if you're a fan of the new new-wave wave of bands, and I very much hope you'll see why Arctic Monkeys really isn't so special after all.

And finally, that last myspace.com ad I saw for The Sounds' "Dying to Say This to You" (New Line) has convinced me to like them. I give. They win. You win. Sweden wins.

I'll only qualify this list by saying that there are dozens of amazing bands living in your neighborhood right now, and that I left Milwaukee artists off of my list in the interest of space, so as not to be exclusionary. These Milwaukee groups have made some of my favorite music in the world. On a daily basis, I work to spotlight them all on mseproject.org.