Progressive rock has been a niche genre since it largely receded from public consciousness in the late 1970s. Like any niche, it has a small base of insanely dedicated fans, and Romantic Warriors, a documentary airing in the D.C. area several times over the next few days, is a paean to those devotees.

It's easy for prog fans—even casual ones with little exposure to the scene's surprisingly prolific underground—to enjoy Romantic Warriors. There are interviews with key figures in the current scene, including locals like Silver Spring's Steve Feigenbaum (owner of Cuneiform Records, which ironically prides itself on publishing outre music well outside prog's traditional genre confines) and Baltimore's Mike Potter (owner of Orion Sound Studios, which regularly hosts live performances by obscure prog and avant-rock bands). There's a fair amount of recent concert footage from a diverse range of obscure bands, as well as some excellent archival footage of British '70s stalwarts Gentle Giant. Those already into the music will eat it all up.

But Romantic Warriors lacks a cohesive narrative. Even for someone intimately familiar with the modern prog scene, the film feels like a pastiche of interviews and live footage rather than a truly well-crafted examination of the genre, its history, and its future. The documentary kicks off with a brief but surprisingly well-done timeline of prog as a genre; new fans and neophytes will find it quite useful, while old fans will doubtless delight in having more fodder for interminable debates about genre boundaries and whether or not such-and-such band "is really prog." But after that intro, the filmmakers jump to interviews and footage from the major U.S. prog festivals, and there is no obvious rhyme or reason to how the coverage is ordered.

Non-prog fans may also be confused by the documentary's unusually diverse set of performance footage. There are "traditional" symphonic prog bands such as Maryland's Deluge Grander, whose music evokes the grandiosity attempted by the classic '70s bands; there are jazz-rock fusion bands like Italy's DFA; there are bands that draw from a vast array of folk musics, like Mexico's Cabezas de Cera and Japan's Qui; there is the wonderfully understated solo instrumental music of Virginia's Rob Martino; there is even a bit of the uncategorizable avant-garde in Chicago's Cheer-Accident. The filmmakers' dedication to the truly underground part of the prog scene, and their decision to emphasize the current scene rather than focus on classic bands, is commendable. For existing fans, who understand why all these different bands fit into the same genre, it's wonderful to see a spotlight on the dark corners of the prog world. The uninitiated may just find it disjointed.

With all that in mind, Romantic Warriors is far from entirely incoherent. There are several themes that will be familiar to a fan of virtually any niche genre: prog as an outcast genre, prog as a labor of love on the part of both musicians and fans, prog as an international and vastly diverse scene, and, predictably if somewhat problematically, prog as a superior art form compared to more mainstream music. It's fascinating to hear various Important People weigh in on these issues, usually unprompted. We get some insight into what Feigenbaum considers strong sales figures (hint: the numbers are not huge), some interesting tidbits about how promoters at such festivals as NEARfest and ProgDay choose their lineups, and some quotable (for better or worse) gems like Gentle Giant's Gary Green saying, "We have to understand that [Top 40 music] is not music, should not be considered music, because that is fashion."

What we hear over and over again in these interviews is the sense that prog, ideally, is separated, but not completely isolated, from other forms of music, including the mainstream. Prog plays by different rules, but at the same time draws influences from everywhere it can, creating a rich and delightfully internationalized scene that—at its best—revels in the mixing of the old and the new. While I do wish the filmmakers had given a bit more attention to the bleeding edge of experimental music—they were present and filming at the first Avant Fairfax, for instance, yet that festival receives no coverage in film's the final cut—I respect that they needed to draw the line somewhere.

The end result isn't perfect, but Romantic Warriors, as a labor-of-love film about a genre that truly is a labor of love for everyone involved, is an illuminating peek at an eccentric underground scene. For anyone who has been involved in the scene to any extent in recent years, that's certainly good enough.

The film airs tonight on WHUT-TV at 10pm, and four more times between through Tuesday, May 24. Check the film website for the additional air times.

Doom metal—that slow, sludgy, Black Sabbath-influenced brand of extreme metal—is nothing new to the D.C. area. Two of the originators of the genre—Saint Vitus and Pentagram —hail from Maryland and Virginia, respectively. Scott “Wino” Weinrich, who joined Saint Vitus in 1986 and is responsible for other major stoner and doom metal icons like The Obsessed and The Hidden Hand, is still active in the local scene.

So why are Northern Virgina upstart doom metallers Salome—drummer Aaron Deal, vocalist Kat Katz, and guitarist Rob Moore—getting so much ink in the metal world, not to mention fawning write-ups in The New York Times and on NPR Music? A cynic might argue it’s the novelty factor: Salome has no bassist and an unusual membership. Deal is the bearded, tattooed metalhead; Moore is clean-cut and bespectacled (although he performs live sans glasses, presumably because he's rather not donate them to the audience in a fit of head-banging); Katz is a petite blond, and a yoga instructor.

But it’s just as easy to argue that Salome is noteworthy for the trail it's blazing for the doom-metal genre. Deal and Katz started the band in 2006, and it has informal ties to many in the D.C. doom scene. But Deal doesn’t consider those folks to be a direct influence on Salome’s music. The band draws inspiration from outside the style: Deal cites D.C.-area metal bands like Darkest Hour and Clutch, but says Jawbox and Fugazi are favorites, as well. While these diverse influences may not have been entirely obvious on Salome’s crushingly heavy and very straightforward debut album (according to Deal, that one was mostly just the results of “us jamming and doing minor tweaks when we started playing together”), they're becoming clearer with the release of the trio’s new record, Terminal. It comes out tomorrow.

In contrast to the debut, intentional songwriting played a bigger role with Terminal, which still boasts the visceral strengths of that first album but contains an innovative spark that transcends the doom subgenre. Amid the style's signifiers—thick riffs and howling vocals anchored by methodical drumming—are all kinds of new things. The opening cut veers off in unexpected directions several times: short blasts of noise and fast-paced, almost grindcore-like passages are interspersed with the usual plodding riffs. Similarly, the title track starts off with an uptempo and very un-doomy guitar riff before kicking into the band’s more usual slower gear. And the 17-minute “The Accident of History” which feels much closer to the long-form noise of Merzbow than the assault riffs of Sabbath. The nexus between doom and noise isn’t new, of course—see Sunn O)))— but here it still feels different and exciting.

“The whole focus is to keep things interesting with minimal instrumentation,” Deal says. “I wanted to try to make Terminal simple with more under the surface as the songs and album unfold, simple but clever. Hopefully it worked.”

It works pretty well on the record, and given Salome’s increasing reputation for one of the most intense live shows in metal, it will probably work even better on stage.

Tomorrow night, arguably the biggest, bestest Sonic Circuits festival yet ends with a bang at La Maison Française. This year's festival has seen a huge variety of local and (inter)national acts playing all around the D.C. area, drawing people from all over the country and even the world. Saturday's final show is a real treat, featuring a band that will probably never play in the United States, much less the D.C. area, ever again: Univers Zero from Belgium.

If the name isn't ringing any bells, you're not alone. As we've said in previous coverage of this band, Univers Zero toils in a nearly invisible netherworld between the spheres of popular and "serious" music. Despite its obscurity, Univers Zero is among the key figures behind a uniquely Francophone style of chamber rock music and, much like Magma, who headlined Sonic Circuits' first weekend, the group essentially created its own genre. Univers Zero's style defies glib description, if only because any such attempt makes it sound like the worst kind of cheesy prog-rock imaginable. A reasonable point of comparison might be with the so-called "post-rock" bands that tend more toward the abstract, like a more complex, ensemble-oriented version of Rachel's.

Univers Zero in 1979

This month, Cuneiform Records issued an expanded, remixed and remastered version of the band's sophomore album from 1979, Heresie. Widely known as Univers Zero's darkest album, Heresie is a record that prog nerds like to blast from their stereos on Halloween just to freak out unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. That it gained this kind of reputation while relying almost entirely on acoustic instrumentation (harmonium, oboe, bassoon, violin, and viola figuring most prominently) is particularly impressive, although it's likely that this stems solely from the first seven minutes of the opening 25-minute beast "La Faulx." The track starts as formless noise, which slowly coalesces into a dark wall of sound punctuated by a series of vocal roars reminiscent of death-metal howls years before that style of vocal came into fashion.

After that, the band's strategy changes abruptly from horror soundtrack music to intricate chamber music. What keeps it firmly in rock territory is the drumming of Daniel Denis—a true artist behind the kit whose doesn't keep time so much as he drives the music onward and upward, his insistent rolls somehow striking a balance between classical percussion and rock 'n' roll propulsiveness. Over the course of three long tracks ("Jack the Ripper" and "Vous Le Suarez en Temps Voulu" clock in at 13 minutes apiece), the ensemble works its way through chamber music that is sometimes melodic, sometimes noisy, usually dark, and always compelling.

This reissue features gorgeous, clear sound with remarkable definition of the instruments, a new sound that is particularly revealing when it comes to Denis' drumming. It also contains a 12-minute bonus track, "Chaos Hermetique," penned by guitarist and original group member Roger Trigaux (who soon after Heresie's release left the band to found the equally fantastic, more overtly rock-oriented chamber ensemble Present). This track is a fascinating archaeological find, and actually sounds more like proto-Present than a true Univers Zero track, featuring much more straightforward rhythms and a largely linear compositional form. In fact, hardcore Present fans will likely recognize a few passages here and there that have appeared in Present compositions recorded as recently as 1999. Even without the excellent new remix and remaster, this reissue would be worth a look just for this bonus track.

But Heresie came out over 30 years ago. The version of Univers Zero that plays tomorrow at La Maison Française will look and sound quite different; modern-day UZ makes liberal use of electronics and electric instruments, in sharp contrast to the early band's reliance on acoustic instrumentation. Like many bands of the era, Univers Zero went on extended hiatus starting in the late '80s, before reforming in the late '90s with a more rock-oriented sound. The instrumentation became more electric, and more importantly, compositions became more concise, even with some traditional song forms popping up here and there. That said, Univers Zero's music has remained complex and challenging and Daniel Denis' drumming is as fascinating as ever.

What's more, in a musical landscape where there's nothing new under the sun, Univers Zero and the few bands that have explored similar territory (present and other chamber-rock groups like Art Zoyd, Shub Niggurath, Aranis and so on) are pioneers in developing an intelligent hybrid of Western contemporary classical music and modern rock. These bands all seem to be concentrated in France and Belgium for some reason, and it's a rare treat to have one of them in North America.

Photos of Univers Zero courtesy Cuneiform Records

Back in 2007, French ambient guitarist Richard Pinhas, accompanied by longtime collaborator Jerome Schmidt on electronics, played to a packed house at the Velvet Lounge. Tomorrow, Pinhas returns, this time at La Maison Française with another collaborator twiddling knobs (or staring at a laptop screen): Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow. This kicks off the final weekend of this year's remarkable incarnation of Sonic Circuits.

The average vaguely curious music listener has probably heard of Merzbow, but who's this Pinhas guy?

He's has been active for over 30 years; fans of obscure prog-rock know him as the leader of Heldon, an electronic rock band whose prolific 1970s output started in Fripp/Eno territory and ended up somewhere much closer to King Crimson. Even before Heldon's eventual demise (their final album, Stand By, was released in 1979), Pinhas embarked on an equally fruitful solo career, one that has only picked up in recent years. In 2008, Pinhas and Merzbow released their first collaborative album, the remarkable Keio Line, which we gave very high marks. Now comes the sophomore effort from this duo, Metal/Crystal, out this month on Silver Spring's Cuneiform Records.

Oddly, the record is credited solely to Pinhas, although it contains contributions by Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, and a host of musicians formerly from Heldon and Magma, including bassist Didier Batard and drummer Antoine Paganotti. The presence of a rhythm section on Metal/Crystal immediately lends this album a very different feel from its predecessor. Much of the first disc of this two-disc set feels more like late-period Heldon than Keio Line; accessible bass lines and clear rhythms give the three long tracks on disc 1 a fairly straightforward electronic rock sound. For those hoping for more of the same subtle yet nuanced sonic wallpaper of Keio Line, this might be disappointing; however, those folks might get more mileage out of disc 2, in which 40 minutes pass before there is any sign of a rhythm section.

In fact, "Hysteria (Palladium)," the 28-minute first track of the second disc and perhaps my favorite on the whole album, swings all the way to the inaccessible side of the spectrum, featuring lengthy high-pitched squalls with Merzbow's trademark throbbing noise percolating underneath. It's a far cry from the thumping rhythm of parts of the first disc, but it's a welcome change of pace and a sign that even with literally hundreds of records under their collective belts, Pinhas and Merzbow still have interesting things to say.

It should definitely be worth the time and money to listen to them speak in their particular languages of noise tomorrow night at 8 p.m. With the help of a firmly placed set of earplugs, of course.

Photo of Richard Pinhas courtesy Cuneiform Records

The Muffins in Rockville in 1979

It’s a somewhat ludicrous thing to say about an event that spotlights so many alienating artists, but in its 10th year, the Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music feels, well, kind of big.

This year there are veteran prog and avant-rock draws, like Magma and Univers Zero, and the noise and improv fans that the festival has traditionally drawn can look forward to two of the most notable, critically adored names in those spheres: Fennesz and Merzbow. And so it’s a marquee year for the area’s umbrella of experimental music, whose homegrown acts can now regularly be seen at venues like Bossa in Adams Morgan, Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, and Orion Sound Studios in Baltimore.

But more than 30 years ago, D.C. also housed a constellation of progressive and experimental acts—a small scene that emerged but never quite flourished in the 1970s.

And then, says Steve Feigenbaum of the well-known, Silver Spring-based experimental label Cuneiform Records, D.C. punk rock killed it.

So it might be appropriate that The Muffins—an obscure, D.C.-based prog group that’s made music in the area since the mid-’70s—is headlining the first event of Sonic Circuits this Saturday. It’s a well-deserved spot. Despite its relatively under-the-radar status, The Muffins have made six challenging full-length albums; performed at numerous experimental music festivals, including at the prestigious Rock in Opposition festival in France; and collaborated with high-profile names like experimental guitarist Fred Frith.

While jazz-rock is the easiest label to apply to The Muffins’ music, no one descriptor suffices. Heavily influenced by the British “Canterbury” scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s (think early Soft Machine, Henry Cow, and more obscure practitioners like Hatfield and the North and National Health), The Muffins take this aesthetic and throw in collective improvisation, noise, and a touch of psychedelia. It’s a sound that at first impression can seem aimless and unfocused but, if you have the patience, eventually rewards.

This kind of demanding music is well in character with the progressive rock scene of the 1970s, and although D.C. was hardly a hotbed of prog, The Muffins weren’t alone. Grits (another jazz-rock band with a pair of out-of-print releases on Cuneiform) were an influence, and Muffins drummer Paul Sears lists a host of other D.C.-area groups of varying obscurity that formed at the time a loose local scene: Happy the Man, Crank, Love Cry Want, Sageworth, and Drums.

While the scene was small, it was active: Feigenbaum, 52, says he saw a number of “decent to pretty good” progressive rock bands at bars and outdoor shows. “Every bar used to have live bands back in the ’70s. That was a standard currency of the time… [but] The Muffins didn’t go over well in bars, because their music wasn’t good drinking music,” he says. “So for bands like The Muffins or Happy the Man or whoever, it was generally DIY spaces or ‘time to rent the Washington Ethical Society and do another show.’”

“Gigs were hard to come by,” says Sears, 57. “We did some university gigs, gigs in churches, coffeehouses, and a few nightclubs like the Psyche Delly in Bethesda, and Childe Harold in Dupont Circle.”

The Muffins’ DIY spirit didn’t end with gigs. The band—which also includes Tom Scott, Dave Newhouse, and Billy Swann, multi-instrumentalists all—created a label, Random Radar Records, which in the last few years of the 1970s released The Muffins’ first two official full-lengths, Manna/Mirage and <185>, and a handful of other recordings, including a U.S. pressing of the debut album by Art Bears, one of the earliest Henry Cow spinoff groups. Perhaps most importantly, Random Radar was a collaborative effort between The Muffins, Feigenbaum (who actually contributed some guitar parts to Manna/Mirage), and others. Feigenbaum helped keep the band’s music in print even after its initial demise.

That demise came in 1981, as The Muffins suffered the same fate as countless prog bands: changing musical trends and transient young members.

Feigenbaum blames punk. “It killed [the local progressive scene] dead,” he says. “You have to remember what punk did. For good or bad, punk was the great cleansing fire. It changed everything that came after. It’s very open now, but at the time, lines were drawn in the sand: Anything that existed before it was ‘bad.’ Anything that smelled of what came before was ‘bad.’”

In a punk-rock town like D.C., that seismic shift was pronounced, Feigenbaum says: “The audiences were getting smaller, the chance to be reviewed was getting smaller, and this for a band that had certainly paid some dues and had done some higher-level projects. What we were all doing was always marginalized, but by 1980 or ’81, it was marginalized and also mocked.”

Although Sears found the then-new D.C. punk scene “severely insular,” his judgment is a bit less harsh. “I thought we had more in common with some of them, and today I regret that we, or specifically I, did not try to initiate some collaboration,” he says. “We knew some of them. Tom Lyle from Government Issue was a friend of ours before he was in that band. He even set up at least two shows for The Muffins at American University that I can recall…When Fugazi hit the scene I thought I recognized a name—Canty. I knew Brendan Canty’s family back in the ’60s when he was, I’ll say, quite young!”

Regardless of the causes—and putting aside whatever a Muffins/Fugazi collaboration would’ve sounded like—after The Muffins’ split in 1981, Random Radar dissolved and Feigenbaum went on to found Cuneiform Records, which continued releasing challenging music in what Feigenbaum calls the “dark ages” of the 1980s. The Muffins found a posthumous home on Cuneiform, which reissued Manna/Mirage and <185> and has printed each of the band’s subsequent full-length recordings. This includes recent reunion albums Bandwidth (2002) and Double Negative (2004), recorded after the band reformed in the late 1990s for a gig at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room in Adams Morgan. That show happened after the band realized it still had an audience: Web reviews and retrospectives on The Muffins—an active and highly explorative Internet prog community developed in the 1990s—were almost universally positive.

Ironically Feigenbaum, perhaps the band’s biggest supporter (“They are pretty much single-handedly responsible for why I do what I do,” he says), was opposed to the reunion. “I’m a little ashamed to admit that I thought it was a bad idea, that they couldn’t do it again, that it just wouldn’t work,” he says. “They proved me quite wrong. And I’m glad. I think their work since their reformation is quite splendid and they still sound like themselves without repeating themselves.”

Since the release of their last Cuneiform full-length in 2004, The Muffins have played sporadic shows and festivals, made a short recording with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and are working on a new album, Palindrome. Of course, the band’s music is as unfashionable as ever, and its gigs remain few and far between, but now there’s now a thriving, open D.C. experimental music scene that exists beyond Sonic Circuits’ week of shows. In other words: The Muffins, cool or not, have young, like-minded peers.

That just leaves one problem: Sears is moving to Arizona immediately after Sonic Circuits, which means The Muffins’ D.C. shows will become even more rare. But that might be OK for a group that found a far-flung audience but few fans in its hometown. Says Sears: “We will work remotely and still play festivals.”

Photo courtesy Cuneiform Records

"Jazz Ruins Everything," read the sticker on bassist Devin Hoff's electric instrument, but if anything the Nels Cline Singers have gotten more jazzy, or at least less noisy, over the past couple of years. That didn't make last night's packed-house show (there may well have been more folks crammed into the Black Cat backstage than there were at the Singers' previous area performance at the cavernous 1,000-seat Paramount Theater in Charlottesville) any less engrossing, as the trio, augmented for a few songs by Yuka Honda on keys, made their happily uncategorizable music come alive. Jazz ruins everything? Not Nels Cline's music.

More photos after the jump.

"Thanks again. We're gone."

Those are the last sounds that atmospheric metal band Isis left in their fans' ears as they exited the stage at the 9:30 Club last night. Having announced the end of the band in May, Isis are currently on a "farewell tour" with the Melvins, and while listening to Isis live is a lot like just listening to one of their records at insanely high volumes, that's not really a bad thing at all. It didn't hurt that they played a number of cuts off of Oceanic and Panopticon, widely considered their best efforts.

More photos after the jump.

The Melvins, though a bigger draw than Isis, actually insisted on opening for them after Isis' announcement that this would be their final tour:

Full gallery here.

Last weekend, literally thousands of metalheads from around the world descended on Baltimore for the annual Maryland Deathfest, which just seems to keep getting bigger each year. For the 2010 version, there were two outdoor stages in addition to the main inside stage. While I was only able to make Friday of this year's three-day festival, that meant that I had the privilege of seeing the newest incarnation of Gorguts, the legendary Canadian death metal group whose music makes a lot of modern technical metal look like child's play.

Many more photos from last Friday after the jump and at the full gallery.

Tombs (Brooklyn):

Jesus Crost (The Netherlands):

Malignancy (New York):

Birds of Prey (Richmond):

Nazxul (Australia):

Watain (Sweden):

Gorguts (Quebec):

Gride (Czech Republic):

Coffins (Japan):

D.R.I. (San Francisco):

Full gallery here.

Six months had passed since Jucifer's last performance in the D.C. area, so it was time for another: last night's show at the Black Cat was the duo's second in the states since it wrapped up a lengthy European tour (the first being a brief set last Saturday at Maryland Deathfest). Drummer Edgar Livengood was less than enthralled by his performance, which is perhaps why the band played only 25 minutes—a short set even by its standards—but to those of us in the audience they sounded as lively, powerful, and just plain loud as ever.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

The Gloominous Doom opened with a hilarious set of thrash metal mixed with the occasional ska guitar part, which worked much better than one might expect:

Full gallery here.

Yesterday was the first night of Taylor Swift's sold-out two-night stand at the Verizon Center. Swift played all of her hits with some crowd-pleasing gimmicks thrown in—namely, playing a few songs in the middle of one of the lower-level concourses, surrounded by fans, then making her way down to the floor and playing to the folks in the back of the stadium, and finally walking up the floor to the stage, hugging and kissing and slapping hands all along the way. This was all well and good, except that combined with several overly lengthy interludes, the flow of the set was all too frequently interrupted.

Many more photos after the jump.

Kellie Pickler opened: