Tonight at the Velvet Lounge. a rare opportunity to catch two artists active in the Beijing underground experimental music scene: P.K. 14 and Xiao He. Active since 1997, though with only one original member in the current lineup, P.K. 14 is one of the most influential bands in that scene and plays an energetic brand of post-punk. Xiao He is much more “out,” with recordings showcasing surrealist folk, free electronic improv, and dadaist vocal experiments. More information about these artists can be found at Maybe Mars, with free recordings available for download.

Tonight’s show is at 10pm, $10. Xiao He will also be performing a special show at Georgetown’s Govinda Gallery on Saturday at 8pm. Free admission.

On Sunday, a virtual all-star cast of free improv musicians hits Bossa in Adams Morgan for an event in which two silent films, Order From Chaos and Shades of Jazz in Noir, will be screened and accompanied by a live improvised score. The mighty lineup includes Herb Robertson, Oscar Noriega, Vattel Cherry, Hans Koch, Jack Wright, and locals Ed Ricart and Sam Lohman. Ricart—pictured above playing with Matta Gawa in Baltimore—helps curate the Bossa events and promises that this will be something special. Starts at 8pm, $8.

Thanks in part to Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street, it didn’t take long for the rock-star-toiling-away-in-seclusion narrative to go from the stuff of critical legend to obvious fodder for parody. Nevermind that two years later saw the release and instant canonization of Bob Dylan and the Band’s long-buried The Basement Tapes—the inspiration, in fact, for the DeLillo character Bucky Wunderlick’s “The Mountain Tapes.” And so for listeners, the brilliant, hermetic artist has persisted, both as a reductive, suspect concept and as an undeniably seductive one. Listed here, some examples of the latter.

The D.C./Baltimore psych-folk act Le Loup retreated to a cabin in North Carolina to record much of its latest album, Family (out now on Hardly Art) and the result is druggy, country-fried, and poppy. Take “Grow,” which sports what might be the best pairing of Beach Boys harmonies and the “Be My Baby” beat since, well, the Beach Boys. But the real innovation here is space: Where past Le Loup songs were concise and linear, Family’s breathe and frolic and expand. The band—which performs Saturday at the Black Cat with Pree—recently recorded a session for All Our Noise. Check it out:

More records made in wooded seclusion after the jump: Reluctant backwoods Svengalis, some latter-day Johnny Cash, and brassy mountain ditties!

Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow (2007): The members of this blissed-out post-rock band cloak their identities with costumes, pseudonyms, and video-heavy performances, hoping to emphasize their music by de-emphasizing the personalities making it. As the group has acknowledged, this strategy of willful obscurity hasn’t exactly worked out. No kidding: When you record your breakthrough record in a Western Pennsylvania cabin and sing trippy, hypnotic songs about witches, you’re more or less asking to be typecast as backwoods Svengalis.

American Recordings by Johnny Cash (2004): The cabin that the late Johnny and June Carter Cash built in Hendersonville, Tenn., in the late ’70s is definitely that, rustic patina and all. But in the early ’90s, when Johnny began collaborating with producer Rick Rubin for a tetralogy of morose, mostly acoustic albums, the space became a full-fledged studio, which is now run by Johnny and June’s son, John Carter Cash. You can’t find a knobsman more pro than Rubin, but in this case, he simply captured Johnny singing and strumming in his living room. How the Man in Black then wound up with this terrifying Anton Corbijn video, I can’t quite say:

Cabin in the Woods by Retsin (2001): The name says it all. Tara Jane O’Neil and Cynthia Nelson met in the early ’90s when their bands, Rodan and Ruby Falls, shared a tour, and they soon became romantic partners and musical collaborators. The final Retsin album, made more or less in isolation in upstate New York, is dusty and acoustic, drawing as deeply from the well of American folk music as the ’90s indie-folk milieu. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Retsin contributed to a Jandek tribute compilation around the same time.

Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project by Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (2003): This between-album project found the Olympia, Wash., singer Mirah retreating for a month to the Blue Ridge Mountains with an eight-track and some fellow musicians. There, she recorded some playful ditties—more washboard band than precise, lo-fi folk—and found sounds. And then she laid down this brassy jam, which recounts, doo-wop refrain in tow, the month-long experience:

Image courtesy of the Cash Cabin Studio MySpace page.

For Real Estate’s Martin Courtney, returning to his native New Jersey  last summer after graduating from college may have been a regressive move, but it also turned out to be a productive one.

“I almost exclusively hang out with people from high school these days,” the singer and guitarist says, echoing that common post-collegiate experience of hometown dive bars and procrastinated job searches.

But Courtney also spent last summer writing songs and jamming in his parents’ basement with guitarist Matt Mondanile, bassist Alex Bleeker, and drummer Etienne Duguay, laying the groundwork for what is, little more than a year later, one of 2009’s most promising new indie-pop acts in a year replete with lo-fi fast-burners. Six months after its first gig, Real Estate—which plays at the Rock & Roll Hotel tonight with Japandroids and Neon Indian—was generating buzz at the South by Southwest festival in Austin and tickling the blogosphere with woozy, summery singles. Now, the band is about to release its self-titled debut on Woodsist Records.

The pitfalls of blog-fueled, late-oughts meritocracy aren’t lost Courtney, who says he doesn’t expect Real Estate to break down, Wavves-style, anytime soon. “A couple months ago, that really worried me and freaked me out,” Courtney says. “But due to circumstances beyond our control”—intermittent access to a recording space and, later, a problem with the finished album’s test plate—”our record got pushed back. Now there’s been time for shit to cool off. I hope that now it’s less of a buzz thing and more that we’re just a band that exists.”

That music critics and bloggers have covered Real Estate almost as long as it has existed has been “a little nerve-wracking,” Courtney says. “It’s kind of annoying when people ask us if we spend a lot of time on the beach.”

He says songs like “Beach Comber” and “Atlantic City”—as well as the band’s tropical, laid-back vibe—can’t be chalked up to a strategy or ethos. They’re simply the result of a summer spent writing music by the ocean. Seeing his band boiled down to one-sentence narratives and minute-old labels “can be frustrating,” Courtney says. “You cringe a little bit. But I’m starting to realize that some people that write about music just need something to clutch on to as a reference and to make it clearer.”

Courtney says he’s somewhat vexed by Real Estate’s reputation as a lo-fi act—a distinction undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that several more of his high-school classmates, Julian Lynch and the guys behind the Underwater Peoples label, have also released nostalgic-sounding records that are heavy on tape hiss. “If we could record in the studio, I would do it in a second,” Courtney says. The Real Estate album, out on Nov. 17, “has definitely got a demo vibe. I think it sounds good for sure, but it’s not a choice we made to sound that way. It’s just the way it is.”

Real Estate performs tonight with Japandroids and Neon Indian at the Rock & Roll Hotel at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance, and $12 at the door. Photo courtesy of Real Estate’s MySpace page.

John Davis’ new project, Title Tracks, makes some mean power pop, and it covers some, too. Davis, who played in the defunct Georgie James and Q & Not U, recently posted some quick-and-dirty demos to his MySpace: ”I Can’t Hide,” one of the catchiest teenage anthems by the influential ’70s band The Flamin’ Groovies, and “I Stand Accused,” a similarly themed ditty by the mostly forgotten British Invasion group The Merseybeats.

Davis’ band, which plays tonight at the Black Cat, occasionally covers both songs live. Davis wrote in an e-mail that he recorded the covers in his Brookland practice space with Michael Cotterman and Andrew Black, who play bass and drums in the band’s live incarnation (Davis plays every instrument in the studio).

“I think they were just songs that fit in with what we were doing overall,” Davis wrote. “We were actually playing that Flamin’ Groovies song on the final Georgie James tour in Europe last year (Michael and Andrew also played with me in GJ), so it was something we knew and just thought we’d bring back and do again.”

These aren’t the only covers Title Tracks can play, but don’t expect to hear many more of them. “A lot of time at practice, we’ll just play covers for fun, most of which won’t see the light of day,” Davis wrote, “as people probably don’t need to hear Title Tracks’ instrumental version of Fugazi’s ‘Public Witness Program.’”

Title Tracks perform with Fulton Lights and The Andalusians tonight at 9 p.m. at the Black Cat. Tickets are $10.

Much of the BLK JKS’s press to date invokes afro-beat tinged comparisons to TV on the Radio, Bad Brains and Living Colour, though guitarist Mpumi Mcata brushes off the comparison game by encouraging “the reader to seek out and envision” rather than relying on, you know, critics.

The four-man group has erupted from South Africa as evangelists of any-influence-goes prog rock. Their latest, After Robots (Secretly Canadian), is a rousing yet challenging post-apartheid free-for-all. Such a frenetic melding of different styles, tempos, and instrumentations, though, can threaten to bury the central idea of a song.

“Funny you should say that,” Mcata said. “We used to have talks about a return to innocence… We hope people follow and see and feel this music as we do; music—and not its mathematical sum, which in any case is just guitars, vocals, bass, brass drums, and piano.”

D.C. residents will get their second chance to hear BLK JKS on Tuesday night at the Black Cat with openers Laughing Man. (After a coast-to-coast tour, BLK JKS will move on to Europe in support of After Robots.

“We are totally into D.C.,” Mcata said. “Really interesting and suprisingly mixed open communities even if it was kind of together but not together together, which is kind of the case in most places, it’s still beautiful to see people making an effort….re-imagining society in everyday mundanities; we’re looking forward to it.”

Prog-rock band Secret Machines frontman Brandon Curtis helped produced After Robots, and Mcata’s said of his contribution, “He was there to mediate—expedite the process so to speak. The brother really helped us get to the sounds we wanted…. He was a little bit of amazing.”

With so much going on, it must be difficult to reproduce After Robots onstage, no?

“The show is its own beast.”

The BLK JKS also project a positive image of post-apartheid South Africa, a role they believe artists have in interpreting the political and social events that transpired in their country.

“Oh it’s a major role…our part  is to be ourselves; no preaching or politiking—at least not yet. [Laughs.] You know, most of the world is unaware that such youths walk the streets of Africa.”

BLK JKS plays with Laughing Man at 9 p.m. on Tues., September 29 at the Black Cat Backstage. $10.

Almost 40 years after the fact, Faust remains a standard-bearer of Krautrock, the German experimental rock movement of the early 1970s.

Just don’t call Faust a Krautrock band.

For one thing, says Jean-Herve Péron, one of the group’s two remaining original members, Faust doesn’t have many fans in Germany, even though it’s still based there. For another, none of the musicians on the current tour, which stops at the Black Cat Sunday for the final night of the Sonic Circuits Festival, happens to be German. Péron is French, original drummer Zappi Diermaier is Austrian, James Johnston is British, and Geraldine Swayne is Irish.

And there’s also the matter that after four decades as a rock ‘n’ roll trope, the word “Krautrock” is basically meaningless. “In the beginning I liked it,” Péron says. ”It was first a joke, then it was a quite respected way of making music. But in the past decade, everything that comes from Germany is called Krautrock, even if it sounds like Anglo-American rock. That’s the opposite of what we meant it to be. But I don’t mind, really. The audience will decide if it’s good.”

But when Faust—and bands like Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Cluster—began making music around the late 1960s, they weren’t trying to concoct an explicitly Teutonic tonic to ascendant U.S. and U.K. rock music. Simply, their goal was to make experimental sounds outside the accepted boundaries of any popular genre—an aesthetic far more otherworldly than German.

Part of that aim had to do with social unrest on the continent. “There was a big upheaval in Europe poltically and socially, so it had repercussions in the arts,” Péron says. ”And there was a surge of a new identity, new values, and so we wanted very much to find something of our own, far from the normal American thing.” Faust’s early recordings—which hit an apex on the sprawing The Faust Tapes in 1973—are often chaotic and sometimes ambient, generally unbeholden to structure but occasionally playful, and utterly uncompromising.

To Péron, though, experimental music was actually an escape from the political zeitgeist. The multi-instrumentalist and singer left France in 1967 for the United States as an exchange student. There, he absorbed the music of Henry Mancini and Bob Dylan (”I’m not sure if I liked either,” he says). When he returned to France in July 1968, two months after a nationwide general strike, he found the political situation confusing, he says. He ended up following a girlfriend to Hamburg.

With Faust, which formed in 1971, Péron and his bandmates quickly earned a cult following, and soon after a great deal of media attention in the U.K. By 1975, however, the group was label-less. “We were more or less thrown out of Polydor, just as later we were thrown out of Virgin, because we didn’t want to make compromises,” Péron says. ”We didn’t want to make mainstream or popular music. That’s how you feel when you’re 20 and full of revolutionary ideals. You don’t mind being thrown out of a record company.”

After that, around 1975, Faust “went incognito,” Péron says. ”We were a bit fed up so we went underground. We kept on doing concerts for a couple years but without really shouting on top of the roofs.” Then the group stopped making music.

Faust reformed in the early 1990s, and in various lineups, and with increasing frequency, the group has toured, recorded, and collaborated with other experimental acts since. Péron even says he considers the group’s 1997 album, You Know FaUSt, to be as good as anything he recorded in the 1970s. Increasingly, Faust is a mainstay of international experimental music festivals, and Péron even runs his own, the Avantgarde Festival in Schiphorst, Germany. He says he’s generally impressed with the experimental music being played today, even if he’s taken slightly aback at the credit Faust sometimes receives as an influence.

“When you’re in the middle of a storm you don’t realize what the storm is doing all around you,” he says. “But for me it is very flattering.”

Faust performs Sunday night at the Black Cat with Rat Basterd, Chris Greir, and Ulrich Krieger; HEALTH; Pekka Airaksinen; and Alexei Borisov and Anton Nikkilä. Doors open at 8 p.m.; tickets are $15. Photo courtesy of Faust’s MySpace page.

Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. If you haven’t, well, there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. Most of it revolves around the Kia Soul Collective tour, which has set up shop in a warehouse at 3330 New York Ave. NE, with free parking as well as a free shuttle from Union Station. Wale performs in the space tonight at 7 p.m., with DJs Stereofaith, Reed Rothchild, and Chris Burns spinning from 4 p.m. Tomorrow night belongs to Dan Deacon, The Creepers, and Nouveau Riche DJs; the music starts at 8 p.m. And MGMT is headlining an 8 p.m. show Sunday night following DJ sets by DJ CA$$IDY and Dave Nada. To get tickets to this last concert, however, you have to test drive a Kia first, which you can do all weekend, if that’s your thing.

And Future, Army Of Me (in an acoustic iteration), Laughing Man, and The Mighty Heard are all performing outdoors at the H Street Festival on Saturday, all along H Street NE. Brightest Young Things is also hosting a free party that night in the Rock & Roll Hotel’s upstairs bar. Baller.

Dischord Records is now distributing releases by Windian Records, a new label started by The Points drummer Travis “Cobruhhh” Jackson. The band’s new Beat In Hell 7″, whose 6-minute B-side is about four times longer than every other Points song, is available now.

This is a few days old: Dischord and DeSoto Records are rereleasing Jawbox’s 1994 career highpoint For Your Own Special Sweetheart, and they’ve included a few bonus tracks from the very rare Savory+3 EP. The remastered album drops Nov. 23.

The Velodrome dance/not-dance party is back from summer vaycay this weekend.

Local way-beyond-left-field hip-hop band The Cornel West Theory has a release show at Liv next Friday for its new album, Second Rome, and apparently the eminent Princeton African American Studies professor and group namesake will be there.

Image courtesy of Dan Deacon’s MySpace page.

“When it comes to interviews , it’s whatever people ask, and I try my best not to answer it,” said Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo’s jocular guitarist and singer, at the end of our phone chat yesterday, dodging the most customary of questions: “Do you have anything else to add?”

It wasn’t his first demurral. I floated a few theories about the deceptively simple title of the Hoboken, N.J., trio’s excellent new album, Popular Songs—how the band has long been indie rock’s best synthesizer of cool aesthetic and good (read: rock-nerd) taste, and how now, more than ever, the group seems to be playing with ideas of nostalgia and shifting media. “Well I think that … ,” Kaplan said, trailing off. Strike one. “I’m not really going to tell you. We had the title for a while, and when we approached [cover artist] Dario Robleto about using his work, the way he used physical materials in his work seemed to really resonate with the title.”

Our conversation turned to the group’s current tour (Kaplan and his bandmates, drummer and singer Georgia Hubley and bassist James McNew, perform tomorrow night at the 9:30 Club) and then back to the new album—specifically, its dramatic string arrangements by the Chicago bass player Richard Evans. I told Kaplan that the ominous, swooping arrangement on “Here To Fall”—the album’s opener—reminded me of a Serge Gainsbourg song. Strike two. “I suspect Richard wasn’t thinking of Serge Gainsbourg. Richard made some incredible records in the ’50s and ’60s, so maybe it’s that Serge Gainsbourg heard what [Evans] was doing. Or maybe great minds just think alike.”

Things picked up as we discussed “If It’s True,” a concise love song whose effervescent bass line and amorous orchestrations wouldn’t feel out of place on a vintage Impressions record: “That was a song that structurally didn’t change that much. When we were rehearsing it I was primarily playing piano”—not Kaplan’s strongest instrument, he conceded—”so James carried some of the more melodic weight. He started playing this much more complicated bass line and the song was getting much more into the Motown bag, and it had kind of started there to begin with. At an earlier point in the band’s life, if we had a song that was really Motown, we’d come up with an element that would make it less so, but lately, we try to come up with an element that will make it more so.”

He said that sometimes a song will emerge fully formed, Athena-style, from the band’s head—like “Avalon Or Someone Very Similar,” the bounciest slice of AM pop on Popular Songs. Most of the time, though, “our writing tends to be pretty loose,” Kaplan said. “Almost every song has some sort of genesis as one of these long sprawling things.”

Given that methodology—in which songs are molded more than written—Yo La Tengo’s prolificness can be surprising: In 2009 alone, the group has released a proper album, a film score (Adventureland), and a disc of covers under a pseudonym (Condo Fucks’ Fuckbook). “In some ways it becomes a decision to not do [nonalbum projects],” Kaplan said, “because somebody asks you do something and it seems like such a cool opportunity. And at a certain point we realized we hadn’t done a record in a long time. ‘Maybe we should say no.’

“Basically we went to Matador [Records, the band's longtime label] and said, ‘If we were to put out a record, what day would be good for you? What day would you shoot for?’ And they looked at their record schedule and said Sept. 8. And we used that as a finish line.”

Kaplan said Yo La Tengo will tour through the rest of 2009—a year that, not coincidentally, marks the band’s 25th anniversary. And so I posed the obvious question. “Is it weird? It is a little weird,” Kaplan said. “It’s like being on a long line, and you feel the line’s not moving, and then you look behind you and see how many people have got on the line, and you say, ‘I guess I am moving.’”

Yo La Tengo plays with Endless Boogie tomorrow night at the 9:30 Club. Tickets are $20, and doors open at 7 p.m. Photo courtesy of Yo La Tengo’s MySpace page.

Imperial China’s mathy post-punk probably won’t be the next dispensable soundtrack to an iPod commerical, and the D.C. band knows it. The trio is playing a free set in the Apple Store at the Tysons Corner mall tonight at 6 p.m., and the performance apparently merits this disclaimer: “Yes, really.”

OK, so Imperial China’s jagged, discursive aesthetic doesn’t quite fit with Apple’s peppy minimalism in the same way that Steve Jobs seems to have taken to his new liver. That’s cool: You were probably putting off a trip to the Genius Bar, anyway. This way, you get to hear some tunes from the band’s forthcoming full-length (out this fall) while no doubt finding amusement in your fellow mallgoers’ confusion—over Imperial China’s aggro experimentalism, of course, not to mention the vagaries of Apple’s new operating system. Can you get any more win-win?

Check out the show deets after the jump.

Imperial China

Apple Retail Store, Tysons Corner

1961 Chain Bridge Rd.

McLean, Va., 22102

6 p.m.

Free

Photo illustration by Maciej Makalowski; source image courtesy of Imperial China’s MySpace page.

That’s three pretty kick-ass doom metal bands, all in one place. We’ve spilled a fair amount of digital ink about NoVA’s Salome (pictured above); today they start their first-ever proper tour, a few weeks after releasing the big news that they have been signed to the excellent experimental metal label Profound Lore (also home to bands like Alcest, Nadja, Krallice etc). When I spoke to the band a month or so ago, they said they were planning to take a break from live shows after this tour and begin recording their next album.

Salome are fantastic but Hull and Batillus are nothing to sneeze at either. You can download the latter’s EP for free and see for yourself, or just catch all three bands live – they’ll be in Baltimore tomorrow night at Talking Head, and then at College Park’s Marblehaus (3738 Marlbrough Way, College Park, MD) on Saturday night.

Full tour dates after the jump.

Sept. 10 – Kung Fu Necktie – Philadelphia, PA
Sept. 11 – Talking Head Club – Baltimore, MD
Sept. 12 – Marblehaus – College Park, MD
Sept. 14 – Bar None – Virginia Beach, VA
Sept. 15 – Volume 11 Tavern – Raleigh, NC
Sept. 16 – Live Wire Music Hall – Savannah, GA
Sept. 17 – 529 – Atlanta, GA
Sept. 18 – Little Hamilton Collective – Nashville, TN
Sept. 19 – Planet Caravan Festival – Asheville, NC (feat. Clutch, Pentagram, Wino, Yob, and more)
Sept. 20 – Bunk Space – Cincinnati, OH
Sept. 21 – Fubar – St. Louis, MO
Sept. 22 – Riot Room – Kansas City, MO
Sept. 23 – White Star Bar – Chicago, IL
Sept. 24 – Melody Inn – Indianapolis, IN
Sept. 25 – Cafe Bourbon Street – Columbus, OH
Sept. 26 – Krugs Place – Frederick, MD (Hull, Batillus only)
Sept. 27 – Union Pool – Brooklyn, NY (Hull, Batillus only)