It's probably a pretty rare occurrence that New York City residents turn to D.C. for help, advice, or anything else when it comes to cutting-edge culture. But lo and behold, I just got word that Silver Spring's Cuneiform Records has been asked by John Zorn to curate two weeks of concerts at that nonprofit haven [...]

Sometime last year, I gave props to new releases by a bunch of D.C.-area record labels, one of which was Æthenor's Betimes Black Cloudmasses on VHF Records in Fairfax. VHF have just released something else that caught my ear – and no, not the new Æthenor, although that one is excellent as well.
No, this time [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote up Extra Life; now here comes another offshoot of NYC avant-garde rockers Zs: a quartet of dual sax, guitar and drums by the name of Little Women. Little Women's debut recording is a 19-minute thrash-jazz blowout released by SocketsCDR, a local label run by Sean Peoples (of FFFFs, [...]

In lots of music that attempts to fuse influences from disparate genres, the discerning listener can say, "oh, there's the rock beat," "and there's the jazzy solo," "and there's the traditional folk melody," deconstructing the music piece-by-piece into component genres. But then there's Univers Zero, a Belgian so-called "chamber rock" ensemble whose albums have all [...]

Fairfax's VHF Records has been around since the early '90s, releasing the kind of fringey experimental stuff in which Aethenor — a project of Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley — fits comfortably. Despite the lineage, doom or drone metal this is not; instead, Aethenor's style is an improvised ambient music that paints vivid imagery through amorphous [...]

Move your eyes to the right a little bit, maybe scroll up or down some, and you'll come across a tidy little list of D.C.-area record labels. Among this list are some incredibly obscure labels releasing incredibly esoteric music. Over the next little while I'll be briefly profiling a few 2008 releases from a few [...]