Browsing the racks at a local record shop, I initially glanced past the display of Southside Soul, Vol. II. But something made me take a second look. At the top of the listing of songs to be heard on the compilation of Minnesota-made music was a familiar name: Lini.

Indeed, the Latvian-American foursome Lini kicks off the 17 tracks on the compact disc subtitled “The Sound of South Minneapolis.” The south side of Minneapolis is where the folk group got its start in 1994 as a spin-off from the long-running Teiksma ensemble. Members of Lini include sisters Zinta and Gunta Pone, their cousin Amanda Jātniece, and Ingrīda Erdmane.

The compilation was released in mid-2009 by the monthly community newspaper Southside Pride. The first track is Lini’s performance of “Kas tie tādi?” and the album ends with the group’s instrumental “Valsis.” For a review of the compilation, see Twin Cities Daily Planet.

To hear more of Lini, look up its debut CD, the self-titled Lini (1996), which includes both tracks heard on the Southside Soul disc.

Astro’n’out will present its third album, Ģeometrija, during a Dec. 11 concert in the Sapņu Fabrikā club in Rīga.

Led by singer Māre Holšteina Upmane, the band was formed in January 2003. After the success of its single, “Daļa Rīgas,” Astro’n’out released its first album, Kuš kuš, in 2006. Last year the band let loose an acoustic recording, Astro’ Acoustic.

Publicity material describes the new album as bolder than the band’s earlier work.

“Musically, Astro’n’out sounds like Astro’n’out,” Upmane said on the band’s Web site, “but compared to the acoustic album released last year, on this album and in the concert the group will not shy from playing thicker and louder.” The first single from the album, “Spoguļoties,” confirms that.

Upmane, who is married to singer Goran Gora (Jānis Holšteins), has one of the more distinctive female voices in Latvian popular music. Other band members include Juris Kalnišs (guitar), Mārtiņš Elerts (guitar) and Mārtins Miļevskis (drums).

Ģeometrija is released on the indie label Avantis.

For more information on the band, visit its official Web site, astronout.lv, or its MySpace or draugiem.lv pages.

A new catalogue covering nearly the entire history of Latvian symphonic music has been published by the Latvian Music Information Centre.

Titled Latvian Symphonic Music, the catalogue begins in 1880 with Andrejs Jurjāns’ “Symphonic Allegro,” which is considered the first Latvian symphonic work, and ends in 2008.

Compiled by composer Mārīte Dombrovska, and produced by the Latvian Music Information Centre in cooperation with the Latvian Academy of Music and the National Library of Latvia, the book lists more than 1,700 symphonic works of 144 Latvian composers, from Ādolfs Ābele to Arvīds Žilinskis.

The text of the catalogue is in Latvian and in English, with English translations for all of the works, as well as notes about instrumentation, time of the work, and, if applicable, the publisher of the score and if a recording is commercially available.

The catalogue also includes a reference list for all abbreviations used in the catalogue, and is divided into two sections—symphonic music and vocal symphonic music.

One can find all the symphonic works composed by well known Latvian composers such as Pēteris Vasks, Jānis Ivanovs and Artūrs Maskats, as well as diaspora Latvian composers such as Pēteris Aldiņš, Dace Aperāne and Andrejs Jansons.

For further information, visit the Web site of the Latvian Music Information Centre, www.lmic.lv.