D.C. fans of African sounds have a tough choice to make tonight. Tuareg guitarist Omara Bombino Moctar and his band bring their desert psychedelia to the Black Cat with local pan-African openers Sahel, while Nettle, an international band including two Moroccans plus Jace Clayton (aka DJ Rupture), Andy Moor from The Ex, and others, will be at the “Africa is Not a Country” party at the Marrakech Lounge along with several DJs spinning sounds from across the motherland.  Nettle is celebrating the release of its new album, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai. Bombino and Clayton discussed their projects via email.

Thirty-one-year-old Bombino was born near Agadez, Niger, and with his family, he fled at age 12 to Algeria from the violence of the Tuareg uprising against Niger. In Algeria, he acquired a guitar for the first time. When peace temporarily returned to Niger in 1997, Bombino and his family moved back, and he continued playing, inspired in part by Tuareg band Tinariwen.  Early in 2007 Bombino and his band were recorded for the 2009 Sublime Frequencies release, Group Bombino – Guitars from Agadez, Vol. 2. But later that year, in the midst of a second Tuareg rebellion, the Niger military would ban the guitar and kill two of Bombino’s bandmembers.  Again the guitarist fled, this time to Burkina Faso, before returning to now-calmer Niger in 2010.

Bombino now lives in Niamey, Niger, with his wife and daughter, but travels often to Agadez. Bombino says he currently performs at weddings and other Tuareg functions “all the time when I am at home and in Agadez.” He's also working toward having the Tuareg language of Tamashek taught in schools. It’s “slow to be honest," he writes. "It takes a lot of effort, time and patience to get something like this moving in Niger. But I will continue to champion this issue and we'll make progress little by little.” On his new album, Agadez, his fingerwork melds his region’s droning axe sound with influences from Jimi Hendrix to John Lee Hooker. One benefit of international touring, Bombino writes, has been meeting other six-string players. “I love Vieux Farka Toure, and this was the first year I got to play with him and see him live in concert," Bombino writes. "I also got to see Dave Matthews with Tim Reynolds which was really cool. Finally, I really enjoyed seeing Pete Townshend play when we did Jools Holland last month in London.”

Nettle’s new album is the soundtrack for an imaginary remake of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining set in a luxury hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The band includes Clayton on synths and laptop, Moroccan Abdelhak Rahal on violin, the Scottish Jennifer Jones on cello, Moroccan Khalid Bennaji on guembri, American Brent Arnold on cello, the English Andy Moor on guitar, and Canada's Lindsay Cuff on vocals. Together, they blend electronic beats and avante-garde noise with traditional North African folksong and percussion playing.  Clayton says Nettle “grew out of my longstanding interest in Maghrebi music. In 2002 I moved to Barcelona, a city with a strong Moroccan musical community.  Slowly I became involved with it, and a few years later I was working regularly with a violinist, Abdelhak Rahal.   Nettle existed before I met Abdel, but it was primarily a solo project. With him I decided to turn it into a group, to make my involvement with Moroccan music more of a collaborative work.”

While Nettle’s mostly instrumental sound has its out-there aspects, Clayton says it can reach fans of more traditional sounds. “Nettle played a free concert in Tangiers recently and it was well received! We make an effort to connect. There are avant sounds, sure, but, for example in Tangiers, Lindsay learned to sing a Berber song.  When she opened her mouth and Berber words came out , the audience was floored, so happy. We approach everything with a lot of respect, and a lot of emphasis on translation.”  The album has also gotten some attention in Dubai.   Clayton excitedly notes that there have been “several interviews and some interest in bringing us over to perform it in 2012!! I hope it happens.”

“Africa is Not a Country”  features Nettle along with  DJ sets by Bent and Mothershiester showcasing anthems from Mozambique, South Africa, Kenya, Congo,Nigeria, Madagascar, Ghana, and North Africa—plus a glut of "pirated" Kenyan Pop mp3s that dj Bent found online. Free. Nettle plays at 9 p.m. at the Marrakech Lounge, 1817 Columbia Rd NW.

Bombino and band with opener Sahel perform at 9 at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St NW.  $20. (202) 667-4490.

Roxy Music frontman and solo artist Bryan Ferry has long been regarded as one of the best-dressed musicians around. With his debonair attitude and that silken voice, Ferry has epitomized a certain crooner cool since the early '70s, when Roxy Music first came on the art-rock scene. Supporting his newest release, Olympia, Ferry stopped by the Strathmore Music Center last night on his first U.S. tour since 2002. Ferry may now be 66, but it's clear that his voice and his style will forever be considered classic.

See more photos from Ferry's set here.

Sweden's Teddybears are slated to weird out patrons on Saturday

On a scale between "click on a link" and "volunteer for at-risk youth," this year's Virgin Mobile FreeFest lineup is worth, say, assembling toiletry kits at a drop-in center for the homeless. What the cornerstone back-to-school party lacks in area talent and a discernible, reliable musical identity, it compensates for with exhausting marketing.

While the gimmicky stylings of Cee Lo and Deadmau5 are easy to attack, today's festival also offers a seasoned, snarling big three: TV On The Radio (touring on a romantic, quietly stellar 2011 release despite bassist Gerard Smith's heartbreaking passing in April); Okkervil River (same boat but with no reported interdepartmental deaths); and Cut Copy (wildly competent Australian synthpop, see: February's Zonoscope).

James Murphy will DJ in a forest. Patti Smith signed up to chaperon. Kanye weed-carrier turned major-label commodity Big Sean will be charismatic and inoffensive. During the day, catch an overload of electronica (the beats on Ghostland Observatory's 2006 album Paparazzi Lightning are insane). At night, The Black Keys are slated to rock out for every prophetic, shaggy, aromatic smoke enthusiast that wouldn't shut up about Magic Potion in college.

All day today, follow your brave correspondents on Twitter for up-to-the minute stats, breaking news, and profane rants.

In an e-mail to Arts Desk, Byrum notes that the longtime roadhouse is open as a bar on nights where they do not feature music. Surf Club ran into trouble with the Prince George’s County Liquor Board when someone involved in a fight that occurred inside the club was later murdered nearby.

The event will be hosted by longtime local Holly fan and rockabilly singer J.P. McDermott and his band, Western Bop, who have hosted numerous tributes over the last ten years to the horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing star, who died in a plane crash at age 22. Also scheduled to appear are local roots rockers David Kitchen, Andy Rutherford, The Jelly Roll Mortals, The Spectacles, Hangover Royale, and more.  McDermott was just in Lubbock, Texas, on Wednesday, singing with Texas band the Prophets of Rockabilly at the Buddy Holly Center. Expect McDermott and others Saturday night to sing Holly classics like “Rave On,” “That’ll Be the Day,” and “Peggy Sue,” and obscurities alike.

J.P. McDermott and Western Bop perform Saturday, Sept. 10, at 9 p.m. with David Kitchen, Andy Rutherford, The Jelly Roll Mortals, The Spectacles, Hangover Royale, and others tba at the Surf Club, 4711 Kenilworth Ave., Hyattsville, Md. $15. (301) 927-6310.

Marginal Man, one of the early bands on Dischord Records, played a one-off reunion show to a packed Black Cat on Saturday night. "When [Government Issue] did their reunion show back in December, [Marginal Man drummer] Mike Manos and I sat in on a couple of Marginal Man songs with Set to Explode, who opened for GI that night," said Marginal Man guitarist Kenny Inouye recently. "It was a fun time, and it got even more folks hitting us up to do a reunion show."

There may have been a general age difference of 20 or 30 years between the crowd in the mosh pit for Marginal Man and the crowd for the opener Strike Anywhere, but the ferocity and power was intense across the board. Signs reading "No crowd surfing or stage diving allowed" were nothing more than decorations.

All proceeds from T-shirt sales went to the Shirts for a Cure, an arm of the Baltimore-based Syrentha J. Savio Endowment, which provides financial assistance to underprivileged woman who cannot afford the expense of fighting breast cancer. SSE's Mark Beemer said the Marginal Man shirts from Saturday will be available for mail order shortly; look for an announcement on the Marginal Man website and Facebook pages.

All photos from the Marginal Man show can be seen here.

Do social workers really make more money than musicians?

I don't think so. I don't know what information/misinformation I was working off of, this whole thing about going to school to achieve more financial stability. As it turns out, social workers don't make any more money than people who piece it together than music. But I guess social workers are more traditionally employable. Hopefully I can make a nice part-time job about it, and I can stick with the music thing. Social work is as noble and worthwhile a profession as you can think of, but being away from D.C. has been hard.

Isn't New York a great place to be an artist?

So they say. I am trying to keep an open mind and an open heart about it, and many of my music friends have defected to New York, so I definitely have an equally good music network as I had in D.C. But New York is hard—it's so loud and so dirty.  I am learning a lot being there; it felt like an accomplishment learning how to work the subway and having overcome those logistical challenges of living in the city. It really is a melting pot of humanity—but I feel like, when I come back to D.C.,  I take a deep breath and a deep sigh of relief. It's urban, it's cool, there's a lot of stuff to do, but I don't feel like I am choking.

How is the music scene different there?

In New York, I meet a lot more openly ambitiously people—musicians who want to make it big, or at least be able to say, "I really tried." There's a lot less shame in saying who you know, who you are going to work with, what your game plan is.  That doesn't really seem to exist in D.C. My musical experience in D.C. is very familial, very amicable, everyone is really laid back. It's un-Washingtonian, in a way.

Has going to school full time slowed down your songwriting?

I write a lot of songs in class. Really, nothing has changed since high school. I try to pay attention, but then I think of some lyrics, or a drum part—and then rush back to my dorm room and record it on garage band. I'm lucky because some of my oldest musical collaborators are in New York now. My guitarist, Ed Donahue, has been living there for the last five years, and I get together with him couple times a week to hang out and work on new stuff.

How do your new songs fit into the Olivia Mancini oeuvre?

I feel like most of the stuff we do is steeped in oldies. My new single, "For Rickey," is a song about someone who is out of reach because of their social status, and musically it has a '50s rock feel to it. I thought putting it out in vinyl would be the right kind of tangible representation of the kind of song it is. No one likes to talk about class; it's not a polite subject, but it exists and pop music keeps it in our minds with songs like Frankie Valli's "Rag Doll" or "Uptown Girl."

Do you think you'll move back to D.C.?

I think I will definitely come back to D.C. New York is, as they say, a great place to visit, and I am gaining a lot of living there, but it's not a place I want to spend the rest of my life. I feel a sense of obligation to come back. Most of my generation has deserted D.C. for different places, and I think D.C. has a lot of potential as a city for people to stay more than three years after college. I see D.C. getting better and better and cooler and cooler every month, and I want to be a part of that.

Olivia Mancini and the Mates perform with Tom McBride at 9 p.m. at Black Cat. $10.

Tonight's show at St. Stephen's Church is far from sweetness and light. Headlining the affair is Ilsa, a local metal-laced crust punk act (or, conversely, crust-punk infused metal band). The five-piece recently dropped a 12-inch EP on Contagion, a split with Finland doom-slayers Hooded Menace. Their lone song on the release is titled "Titan Arum," the name of a massive flower that emits a smell akin to a rotting animal. It's an apt choice for a band that delivers swaths of brutal, blood-curdling noise, and happens to be named after a '70s Nazi sexploitation film called Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

A couple Providence acts hit the stage before Ilsa: The Body is an epic doom duo and Assembly of Light Choir is a loose ensemble of female vocalists with a headcount in the 20s (but only 14 singers have been on tap for their current trek). The Body got some assistance from the choir on its critically acclaimed 2010 album, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, and the two musical, um, bodies are in the middle of a joint tour that's often collaborative.

Also on the bill is an introspective post-rock band from North Carolina called Braveyoung. There's been a flood of post-rock bands on the scene lately, making it hard to distinguish one band's fragile riffs from the next. But perhaps the best introduction to Braveyoung's music is a New York Times video about a young couple dealing with the painful reality of living with an terminal illness, "Love Endures Even Cancer." Braveyoung's classically imbued music soundtracks the heartbreaking story with moving grace.

Ilsa, The Body, Assembly of Light Choir, and Braveyoung perform at 7 p.m. at St. Stephen's Church, 1525 Newton St. NW. $10. All ages.

Wonderland performs tonight, where—who knows?—she may bring some trumpet and well-placed whistling to the stage. “It's worthwhile to sometimes write on something other than your main instrument in order to step out of the patterns and boxes they hold," she says. "A song like "Misunderstood" would have been a different song if I had a guitar in my hand at the time, and why not throw a trumpet part in a song now and then?”

Part of Austin's allure for the musically inclined is the ease of collaboration with a host of music pros, including Asleep at the Wheel founder Ray Benson. Benson produced Wonderland's last record, 2008’s Miss Understood. “Working with Ray and everyone at Bismeaux, we had the luxury of time. It allowed us enough time to include our heroes and friends in Austin—Guy Forsyth, Shelley King, Tosca String Quartet, and John Mills with those horn arrangements. They could pop in and lay down tracks with us," Wonderland says.

One of Miss Understood’s strongest offerings, "Feed Me to the Lions," exemplifies Wonderland’s songwriting approach. “One can only write about honest experiences and try to make them universal in theme," she says. "Songs are sometimes Post-it notes to the writer, other times they are universal billboards, often in the same piece."

Work is nearing completion on her next Album, titled Peace Meal and slated for release in September. This time Benson is sharing producing duties with Larry Campbell. Much of the recording was done in Austin while four songs were tracked at Levon Helm's Woodstock, N.Y., studio in January.

Wonderland also recently tied the knot with writer, comedian, and Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show alum A. Whitney Brown. She’s calling their travels together on the road “our perpetual honeymoon tour.” A tour that unfortunately also leaves little time for a band “mostly full of political junkies” to soak in D.C.'s political side.

Carolyn Wonderland performs tonight at 9:30 p.m. at Hill Country Barbecue Market, 410 7th St. NW. $10.

“Usually if it doesn’t leak through the press circuit it does once it hits the warehouses,” Slug says. “There’s boxes sitting in warehouses. You’re telling me a single kid hasn’t snagged a copy and uploaded it? It leads me to think that nobody cares...but I always look at the dark side of things.”

The same could be said about Atmosphere’s corpus. In peak form, the hip-hop duo—Ant is the moody, notoriously introverted producer—evolved from the purist, self-serious, real hip-hop of passionately beloved albums like 1997’s Overcast! to post-Twin Towers, post-idealism rhymes about the self. On the heavy intro to 2002’s God Loves Ugly, Slug played populist everyman ("I’m sleeping on the floors of temporary friends/I’m keeping the store front as clean as I can") and swept in perfectly written context clues without the fact-spitting preaching of less interesting contemporaries ("September was the first time I had to breathe").

Slug was the poster boy of a movement that turned out to be a moment—raps about daily banalities, about feelings and girls, disseminated as punk revivals via nonstop touring. It was no coincidence Atmosphere would share Warped Tour stages with emoticon bands like Taking Back Sunday. The millennial generation was sad and lonely in a cavernous suburban castle their parents were always too busy paying for, and Atmosphere combined the familiar stylings of big radio jams, with food for the heart. Seven years later, Slug is shaking off the emo angle.

“At a certain point I have to be like ‘Overcast is not my best work,’” Slug says. “I try to consider the listener. You paid $20 to get into this, but at the same time I don’t want to just spoon feed. I want to challenge you as a listener. I want to push my audience, but I’m not stupid, there’s certain songs you want to hear.”

The irony is that one of Atmosphere’s best tracks is about the daily pains of programming set lists while also being one of the group’s most requested numbers. “’Trying to Find a Balance’ is at least cake that I can use to lure people into listening to [newer material],” Slug says.

Even through 2008’s narrative-driven When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, Slug habitually used women both as centerpieces for his melodrama (“Fuck You Lucy,” “A Girl Named Hope”), while likewise rapping from the female perspective (“Reflections,” “You”). Slug struggles recreating the pathos of the former, and flatly regrets the latter.

“I spent all of these songs writing about relationships and theorizing the psychology of me the antagonist and you the protagonist and vice-versa and it’s like, ‘Who the fuck do I think I am that I can climb into a woman’s head and speak for her?’” Slug says. “There’s a song on Lemon that hit home, about a working class mother of two, and after it came out I felt like an arrogant piece of shit.”

Nowadays, Slug’s happy place nets worthy, albeit mushy songs like “She’s Enough” (“It’s my ode to monogamy”), and “Just For Show,” the new single that sounds like a 2003 retread to bitter romance until Slug clarifies that it’s about his conflicted, tiring relationship with Atmosphere’s die-hard, message board fans.

It's fair to draw a parallel to James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. Both are long-time hustlers, patriarchs of their scenes by way of running respected labels, just on opposite ends of 40.

“I relate to Murphy as a fan, because we both run a label, and because we both seem to be driven by fear. Fear is an inspirational thing, you have to be nervous about what you’re stepping into next,” Slug says.

Difference is, Murphy cashed in earlier this month and retired as a performer, and Slug rages on in a genre built by teenagers. And how does one even itemize those hundreds of shows?

“I assume that I’ll have time to remember those times in the future.”

Atmosphere performs Wednesday night at 9:30 Club with Blueprint, Grives, Budo, Sab The Artist, and DJ Abilities. The show is sold out.

Sweet Tea Pumpkin Pie is planning concerts at another D.C. restaurant. (Rich Bernett)

Dave Mann has got a triple-pronged approach to world domination. No. 1: Launch awesome music blog. No. 2: Launch awesome concert series at local Eritrean restaurant. No. 3: Book really awesome two-day festival at said restaurant.

The Brookland resident, a 32-year old federal employee, officially launched his music blog Sweet Tea Pumpkin Pie— which he describes as "like Pitchfork, with a different kind of slant"—on Tuesday. (Mann also used to be in a band called Sweet Tea Pumpkin Pie.) Two months from now, if all goes as planned, he'll have released a music compilation, and he'll be one month into his concert and art series at Bella Cafe and Restaurant on Florida Ave. NW. On June 4—5, Mann will host a two-day music festival (with vegan food) at the Eritrean establishment across from the 9:30 club. Many acts have already been announced on Facebook. Last week, the event boasted 35-plus bands; this week, it's 45. Local bands Hiding Places, The Jet Age, Loose Lips, and Last Tide are among the sprawling, heavily local lineup.

The planned festival is not his first foray into concert booking, and not his first stint at an Eritrean restaurant, either. In 2008, Mann, who sings and writes songs in Mittenfields, booked bands at Dahlak near 18th and U streets NW. Relations soured with the restaurant management, and he was out of the booking game for a couple years. But he's optimistic about his new gig.

"Promoting these events is gonna be like, so easy," he says. Given the restaurant's proximity to the 9:30 Club, Mann guesses that club patrons "are gonna see a lot of awesome stuff happening across the street and wonder why they're not there."

As for what that awesome stuff is, though, details are still kinda unclear. Through his connections to various record labels, Mann plans on doing residencies and at least a couple weekly events: Thursday concerts curated by Fuzzy Logic blogger Megan Petty, and Friday art events. And a monthly movie night, maybe. He knows people with projectors. "I'm gonna do a lot of stuff," he says.

Mann, a Texan, says booking a festival will not be a problem for him, partly because he's from Austin he went to South by Southwest this year. "I know how it goes," he says. "It's not a cakewalk, but it'll happen."