The Stranger's Sasquatch! Guide came out yesterday, and if you're heading out to the festival next weekend, you really ought to take a look at it. The guide includes exciting info about camping, parking, and what you can and can't bring into the festival, as well as a map, schedule, and previews of every single act performing that weekend, such as:

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

(Sat, 5:40 pm, Main Stage) If you had told me in 2004, back when the band was yelping nonsense and touring with noise-scapers Black Dice, that Animal Collective would go on to produce a pop album as summery and perfect and emotionally rich as Merriweather Post Pavilion, I would have just made derisive squawking noises at you through a chain of effects pedals. But here it is, already one of the best albums of the year, and by far the finest of the band's career. It's also about the most ideal music possible for a pastoral summer festival, a blissful batch of songs that hits you like a cool breeze on a warm day, lingering in your skin's memory long after it's passed. ERIC GRANDY

BON IVER

(Sat, 8:45 pm, Wookie Stage) Nothing amps a record's buzz like a good backstory, and Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago came with a great one that got greater with each retelling. Last I heard, after being acquitted of involuntary manslaughter, Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin cabin with dirt floors and no running water to record his magnum opus of heartbreak, inspired by his merciless dumping by Julia Roberts's actress-niece Emma Whatever and pieced together on a four-track between fits of sobbing as Vernon slowly became encrusted in his own filth. For true: God could not create a more gorgeous setting than the Gorge for the impassioned acoustic strum and spooky falsetto croon of the man they call Bon Iver. D. SCHMADER

(A note for concerned readers: according to legend, in addition to being an acquitted manslaughter, Bon Iver is also a giant lumberjack, responsible for creating the Grand Canyon with the help of his enormous blue ox, Babe.)

ERYKAH BADU

(Mon, 7:30 pm, Main Stage) Enough wonderful things cannot be said about Erykah Badu's last album, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War). All of the promises she made in Baduizm are fulfilled by this record, which owes a heavy debt to the genius of Jay Dee, one of the greatest hiphop producers to walk the earth and the eat the sun (converted into sugars by photosynthesis). What Badu achieves is a perfect synthesis of neo-soul with Jay Dee's two-step hiphop beat. Many years ago, Mary J. Blige was supposed to become the queen of this kind of hybrid (soul and hiphop), but she never went far enough. On New Amerykah Part One, Badu goes to the terminal point, obliterating the distinction between the forms. I have nothing but respect for the badness that is Badu. CM

GIRL TALK

(Mon, 7:15 pm, Wookie Stage) In case you're just joining us: Girl Talk is music made out of a bunch of other music, but unlike in hiphop, where a basically new song will be embroidered with a distantly recognizable riff from an old song, Girl Talk's songs are made entirely of that embroidery—a little Hall & Oates, a little Fleetwood Mac, a little Metallica, a Lil Wayne, a shit ton of other stuff you can't recognize because you're not a supercomputer, all of it baked together into a "song." His tracks aren't satisfying in the way songs are, because they don't really begin and end; they're satisfying in the way that, like, the internet is satisfying. They just go and go. Live, he makes his songs on the spot, out of all the shards he's collected on his Mac, but he doesn't just stand there behind his laptop like certain people I could mention. He works up a sweat, and takes off his clothes, and crowd-surfs. CF

(I should have caught this one, but in fact Girl Talk collects nothing on a Mac, as Gregg Gillis is a PC.)

THE MURDER CITY DEVILS

(Sun, 5:20 pm, Main Stage) Reunion tours can go a couple of ways. For every mind-blowing My Bloody Valentine, there's a badly bloated Sex Pistols. But of this festival's reformed rockers, the Murder City Devils are unquestionably on the righteous side of things. Their few shows over the past couple years have found the Seattle band as boozy and badass as ever, with singer Spencer Moody howling pure, 100-proof fire about broken bottles and empty hearts while the band dutifully rips it up behind him, upending classic punk rock and roll with great, gothic organ lines and sinking-ship sea chanteys. EG

PASSION PIT

(Sat, 2:35 pm, Wookie Stage) Passion Pit are one of the most underappreciated bands in America, mostly because there hasn't been much to appreciate yet, except for an EP called Chunk of Change that simply refuses to get old for me. Do you like Hot Chip? Do you like ecstasy? Do you like pretty love songs made out of cool sounds? Passion Pit are an electro act from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Chunk of Change was originally a Valentine's Day gift from lead singer Michael Angelakos to his girlfriend (awww), and then became a campus hit at Emerson College, where Angelakos was going to school, and then Frenchkiss Records released it and Pitchfork/CMJ/etc. went gaga. They are still in that not-as-big-as-they're-going-to-be state (first-album release date: May 19), so see them now and you'll get to say you saw them back when. (Seriously, bring ecstasy.) CF

TV ON THE RADIO

(Sun, 6:35 pm, Main Stage) Yes, they're internationally adored and seemingly incapable of making an album that lands anywhere but the top of year-end critics' lists, but somehow TV on the Radio still manage to seem underrated. Maybe it's just my friends, many of them die-hard music lovers who "just don't get" TVOTR. Is a preexisting love for the band's brilliantly synthesized reference points—Sign o' the Times, Remain in Light, Loveless (that weeping-whale noise on "I Was a Lover" is pure MBV)—mandatory or a hindrance? God only knows. But allegedly, the band's even more amazing live than on record, as hordes of lucky Gorge-dwellers will learn firsthand tonight. D. SCHMADER

...And so many more—seriously, ever single band, dj, and comedian you'll see at the festival. Check it out.