The header above isn’t a reference to my sniffy review of a famous string quartet in an even more famous concert hall, which ran in The New York Times today. That’ll be posted later tonight. Probably.

No, what I’m doing here is publicizing an irony: Your humble host, who can barely manage to update his very own personal blog just lately, is here to announce today’s launch of The Volume, a New York music blog brought to you by Time Out New York. Effectively we’ve taken the music-related content that would previously have gone up on the all-purpose TONY Blog, and given it a ravenously hungry little playpen all its own.

It seems safe to predict that the bulk of the new blog’s content will be pop-related, given that I’m only one-fifth of the magazine’s music staff. But content germane to the classical-music sphere will definitely appear as often as I can manage—stop snickering!—and I’ll be sure to share it here when it does.

Meanwhile, I’ve added The Volume to the small “Library” blogroll (over to the left) for convenient access. My first contribution is a post about “Scorpion,” a new song by the amazing New York indie rapper Charles Hamilton, which I covered to launch a running song-of-the-day feature called “Now Playing.” If you’d like to read the post, go here; if you’re interested in hearing the song, see below. (The NSFW language is pretty minimal, but be forewarned.) And if you’d like to snag a copy of the song for yourself, it’s here.