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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

"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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]