Beastie Boys Adam Yauch and Mike D busy with side projects

Adam Yauch and Mike D from the Beastie Boys have been keeping busy in their time between albums.

Yauch, who recently battled cancer, has acquired the rights for the LCD Soundsystem film Shut Up and Play the Hits for his company Oscilloscope Laboratories. He expects to release the film to theaters in North America this summer and in the rest of the world shortly thereafter.

The film documents the group's final show at Madison Square Garden in 2011. Yauch said of the film "Perhaps having grown up in a band for most of my life ... a band that formed when I was 16 years old ... and having released our first record when I was still in high school, this film addresses so many questions. For instance, it can be pretty clear when a band starts, but perhaps less so when it ends, or how it should end. In that sense, it's brilliant of James [Murphy] to end it in such a definitive way."

Mike Diamond (aka Mike D) is curating a visual arts show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art running from April 20 to May 6.

Diamond told Rolling Stone "As somebody who's been making music most of their life, I've always been interested and I've had the good fortune of meeting a fair number of visual artists and if you look at what my band has done, visuals have always been almost an equally important presentation for us as music was.

"I'm a big fan of visual art, but I'm not always a fan of the museums or even art gallery experience 'cause I feel sometimes it's stiff or static. One of my goals with this was just to try to really change it and infuse this event with a lot of music. There's gonna be DJs on certain nights and food. The goal is to have it be a full sensory overload, if you will. It's almost more like an art festival in the sense that we're trying to get together some live music nights as well."