Here are some things I might do this weekend!

- That mind-fucking Ramin Bahrani short starring the disembodied voice of Werner Herzog as a morose plastic bag? It's showing this weekend as part of the Environmental Film Festival. RiYL: Easy jokes involving the words sad and sack!

- All Our Noise is having a festival! RiYL: Semisecret locations! Also: Keep an eye on the new Baltimore label Friends Records, which released the first song, by Weekends, on a new comp yesterday. RiYL: Finger-picking! Echo!

- Filmfest DC wraps up this weekend! The closing-night film is Soul Kitchen, by Fatih Akin. The Turkish-German director's last movie, The Edge of Heaven, breathed undeserved life into the tired hyperlink style; it was one of the best films I saw in 2008. This latest, as far as I can tell, is more like, um, My Big Fat Greek Culinary Comedy. RiYL: Incisive comedy about diasporic people! Food porn!

- The documentary I Need That Record!, about the decline of the record shop, is streaming for free all week at Pitchfork. It features Ian MacKaye and a bunch of other people, like Glenn Branca and Thurston Moore. RiYL: Records!

- I need to find a new place to live! RiYL: Kafkaesque frustrations second only to being stranded in airports!

Happy Friday!

Soul Kitchen still courtesy of Filmfest DC.

It's true: This year's South by Southwest feels like it ended 48 months ago. I already briefly pondered the South by Southwest postmortem, which is surely its own codified form by now. It's several weeks later, but the content bomb that All Our Noise just dropped—which includes over a dozen videos the site's Denman C. Anderson shot during the Austin festival—is well worth perusing, particularly for its footage of D.C. acts. Included therein: performances by the Northern Virgininia metal act Salome, dance duo Nadastrom, Nouveau Riche DJs Starks and Nacey, rapper Tabi Bonney, and more. My favorite? The clip I've embedded above, in which D.C.'s Kid Congo Powers, a veteran of the Gun Club and the Cramps, delivers deep, dirty rock 'n' roll with his new band, the Pink Monkey Birds.

Some Tabi after the jump. Read the full All Our Noise post here.

On Tuesday morning All Our Noise posted an interview with Sean Gray and Chris Berry, the owners of Fan Death Records. Chatting with reporter Denman C. Anderson, the pair discussed their favorite bands, the history of their label, and their plans to release a comedy record.

They also voiced a few rankling opinions about the D.C. music scene. A few of those low blows were re-published here.

The D.C. blogosphere went sort of batshit; the post garnered more than 90 comments and briefly veered this blog's usually modest traffic into Sexist territory. Some people concurred with Fan Death. Some were just artists sticking up for their work. Others cracked jokes about Gray's cerebral palsy.

Gray and Berry were unmoved.

When Baltimore's Bmore Musically Informed asked them for a comment, they supplied this statement:

"Go orioles and white sox. Oh and PS, Tejada... bad move. Baseball is more important than shitty bands. Especially shitty bands in DC."

Contacted by City Paper, they were happy to elaborate further. "We stand 100% behind what we said," Gray and Berry say via e-mail. "We are just 2 record nerds. And the fact that 2 nerds who run a no-name punk label that isn't even in D.C. can shit on 2 soft targets and make tons of people butt-hurt is telling of how lame the city actually is when it comes to crappy 'indie' music/culture or whatever it is those bands are into."

"But it's neither here nor there," writes Gray. "We put out records and that's our bottom line. This soap box, or whatever, is for fun it doesn't fucking matter. I just cant believe so many people cared. They had some funny zings, too."

This isn't the first time Fan Death has made its true feelings about D.C. music known. Gray was just as down on D.C. when he spoke with the Washington Post's Dave Malitz.

"I have no patience for bad music," he says matter-of-factly. And that means most of the bands currently playing in D.C. "To me, there's nothing going on. There are maybe three bands that you can solidly say are good."

They named names, too, but Malitz didn't publish that. "They said similar things about bands when i talked to them. They'd say the same thing to you if you were talking to them anywhere, even if they weren't being interviewed. That's how they roll," explains Malitz in an e-mail. "But mostly, I chose to play up the stuff they were really into. Because that's the thing about them—yes, they will hate all over tons of stuff, but the bands they are into, they love equally as much. It's not just hate for the sake of hating, there's a balance there. Those dudes seriously love Taco Leg more than most people love their favorite band, and to me that's more interesting than just rattling off the names of a bunch of predictable bands to hate on."

When they unloaded a similar wave of bile on Anderson at All Our Noise, he chose to leave it in the interview, but he played down the negativity. "I wanted to be able to put something like that up and couch it in a way that people would be more receptive to (Don't get me wrong, I knew what I was posting)," Anderson e-mails. "It just seemed like it got freight trained into, I suppose, more of a controversial piece than I had wanted. I thought what they said was humorous, and a rather sharp point of view that DC might need to hear, regardless of my personal feelings on the matter. So, I kept it all in."

Denman's strategy worked. The offending statements—which didn't arrive until 10-minutes into the first interview—were pretty much buried. Until the quotes were singled out and posted on Arts Desk, nobody raised much of a ruckus.

But in the larger scheme of D.C. music, what do the words of two angry nerds really mean? "If someone doesn’t like your music, or if someone disses your faaaaavorite band, just move on and keep doing your thing," wrote Food For Animals front man Andrew-Field Pickering in the post's comments section. "Dudes gave a run-down of how they feel about some shit, it ain’t like its some surprise in 2010 that some people don’t like the same music that other people do."

Gray and Berry say no one whose feelings were hurt have actually gotten in touch with them. To be fair, it could be that the actual members of US Royalty, The Dance Party, and Ra Ra Rasputin were simply not irked enough by Fan Death's statements to give the issue much thought. But somebody was. "We did get an anonymous email threat," says Gray. He passed along the e-mail:

If you want to talk shit about DC music and the people, be men and drive on down I-95 and let us know what you think. Are you even men enough to reply? Have fun working in the factory when your shitty label fails. By the way, I need some sugar in my coffee... go grab me some from Domino before you head down. Oh and one more thing... who's top and who's bottom?

That's a pretty good question. Who really is on bottom here?

When it comes to reinterpreting the music of the past, Stewart Lupton has a pretty expert touch. In Jonathan Fire*Eater, he got some real mileage out of Mick Jagger circa '69. Child Ballads' Cheekbone Hollows EP made clever connections between Bobby Charles' rootsy schtick and Royal Trux-style decadence. But Dean Martin? Seems like a bit of a stretch. In this footage, shot by All Our Noise, Lupton takes on "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me," which Dino performed in 1959's Rio Bravo. Lupton does a pretty good job, though—even though Ricky Nelson isn't there to back him up.

Find the original version of "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" after the jump. I challenge you to sync up the videos and create a Lupton-Dino duet.

Child Ballads performs tonight with Typefighter and Miss Shevaughn & Yuma Wray at the All Our Noise showcase.
Wed. 1/6 9 pm
$8
Velvet Lounge
915 U St. NW

Bite Sized Sets at Comet: Shortstack from All Our Noise on Vimeo.

All Our Noise recently shot this footage of him performing a couple of songs at Comet Ping Pong:

Bite Sized Sets At Comet: Vandaveer from All Our Noise on Vimeo.

Vandaveer
Kennedy Center Millennium Stage
2700 F St., NW, Washington, D.C.
6 p.m.
Free

AON Sessions: Jesse Elliott, "We Go Down To That Corner" from All Our Noise on Vimeo.

Edie Sedgwick will perform with Kid Congo Powers, and Exactly as part of the New York Night Train Happening @ Civilian Arts Project
Saturday, June 27th,
11pm / $10 / 21+

Interview: Edie Sedgwick from All Our Noise on Vimeo.

Also, you might check out this concert video from France.

Edie Sedgwick on Attic Addict from Attic Addict on Vimeo.

AON Sessions: Hume, "Grip" from All Our Noise on Vimeo.

This past year was busy. I can't think of much by way of disappointments, but the following stood out and really made 2008 for me:

• Dmerit is a DJ/production duo who are killing it right now. I just caught a DJ set of theirs and it included a bunch of their own remixes. I expect even more from these guys in 2009.
• All Our Noise blog – Some friends of mine started this blog, which highlights Washington, D.C.'s cultural rebirth. AON Sessions films local artists performing live and provides a good alternative (not to mention local flavor) to YouTube's video distractions.
• Sonic Circuits – Jeff Surak's Sonic Circuits festival is becoming the pride of a small community of folks who celebrate experimental music here in the District. Jeff's tireless efforts over the past several years seems to be paying off and this last year's festival was packed with great performances.
• I started DJing a funk, soul and R&B night we call Fatback with some friends this year. We've changed venues a couple of times, but found a home at Red Lounge on 14th Street NW. The audience is always ready to dance at 10 p.m. and it keeps going until they push us out at 2 a.m.
• Future Times – Andrew Field-Pickering's new boutique 7" label is already one of my favorites. He has great taste and who doesn't love a 7" these days? Compact discs are so 2002.
• The Lighthouse – House shows are always more interesting than club shows. There is possibility in the air. And there is usually a potluck/cheaper beer. The Lighthouse had some amazing shows this past year and I bet they continue providing an alternative venue for bands passing through D.C.

What were your bestselling discs?

The bestselling disc was definitely Little Women's Teeth. Little Women is this great freak-out-jazz quartet from NYC who combine blistering horns, shredding guitars, and pummeling drums. Imagine constant streams of spiraling horns meeting a punk rhythm section. The live show is intense. They share members of ZS and Extra Life, which also claim bestselling status on the label. The albums included Extra Life's "2 Song EP" and the ZS "4 Systems". All three of these bands are from the NYC area and have pushed the limits of experimental music in my mind.

Favorite discs?

A lot of my favorite local bands are still working on their full albums, but some of the records that really stood out this year included the following:

• Belly by Food For Animals – This is hip-hop from the future that has come to save us all from the present.
• Methods EP by Imperial China – I have waited a long time to hear a record like this. For it to come out of DC makes it worth the wait. It harkens back to some great post-punk sounds of DC past, but it doesn't feel overly nostalgic.
• Ghost Games by Apes – Ghost Games sounds like it came from a swamp. Apes are one of the most consistently awesome live shows in DC right now.

As for music in general, it would be a long list. But here are a few that you might not have heard:

• Los Angeles and the corresponding EP's by Flying Lotus really impressed me. It was a swirling, cosmic down-tempo affair from this kid in California.
• Fallin' Off The Reel, Vol. 2 released by the Truth & Soul label. This is soul music that you've never heard before, but somehow it tastes familiar. Every track is spot on.
• Sand by Philip Jeck – For me, Jeck manipulates sounds in such interesting and engaging ways. Instead of just using laptops, he approaches sound sources with older tools, always producing something beautiful and new.

—Sean Peoples