No Doubt: POTUS' 2012 campaign playlist is confusing. Arcade Fire. Florence and the Machine. Wilco. Someone please forward me the names of the aides responsible.

Coming Soon: The LeDroit Park Civic Association reminds us of the Howard Theatre's progress.

Today on Arts Desk: This year's Oscar-nominated shorts, reviewed.

Attention Dudes: Ital, the electronic-music moniker of Black Eyes' Daniel Martin-McCormick, will release its full-length debut, Hive Mind, on March 6.

Gross: Photos of the No-Pants Metro Ride.

Strictly for the Females: TBD's Andrew Beaujon talks to Maryland MC Your Boy Fuse, who considers himself a "renaissance person" for making music that women might like.

Theater News: Ford's Theatre has hired a new literary and casting director, Nicholas Stimler (read his bio here); Signature Theatre will open its fourth world premiere of the season, Really, Really, on Jan. 31. The play, by Paul Downs Colaizzo, is inspired by—but not about—the Duke University lacrosse team scandal. Signature is calling it "edgy" and "controversial."

Matheny went American University and studied physics, a subject he selected based on its difficulty. "I figured, 'At what point in my life am I ever going to have to do the hardest thing possible,'" he says. "'If I don't do it now, I probably never will.'" Matheny says he had an interest in physics from a philosophical perspective, and his education gave him the confidence to tackle any kind of subject, not to mention given him some grounding as an artist.

A.U. also happened to be where Emperor X got its foundations. Matheny lived at Hughes Hall during his first semester, in the fall of 1997. That's where he first began creating music, recording whenever he had time to himself in his room. But with a roommate who stuck around a lot, Matheny had to get creative, using a "secret compartment where they would store cleaning supplies" in the elevator shaft to do his thing. "That's where I learned how songs work," he says. Matheny also had a friend taking drum lessons, and made an illegal copy of his friend's key so he could teach himself how to play drums and piano.

During that school year, Matheny wrote and recorded what eventually became his first album, The Joytakers' Rakes/Stars on the Ceiling, Pleasantly Kneeling. The following summer, he assembled all his tapes to get pressed onto vinyl, adding an additional song later on in the fall while studying abroad in Buenos Aires. When he heard the full thing in the spring of '99, Matheny had a change of heart about his songs. "I tried to cancel the order 'cause I hated them so much."

courtesy Adam Witt

He hid all 300 copies under his bed until he mentioned the album to Adam Witt, a friend he met while studying abroad. "I forgot when he told me about the record," Witt says. "It became sort of this thing where I really really wanted to hear it." As the Paste profile details, Matheny and Witt had a peculiar standoff when Witt tried to grab a copy of the record, which resulted in a bloodied hand and shattered vinyl.

As Witt recalls, he finally saw his chance to snatch a copy at the end of 1999-2000 school year while hanging out in Matheny's dorm room. "Chad doesn't have very good eyesight, so I thought I could hide it under my shirt and he wouldn't see it," Witt says. Matheny didn't miss a beat, and chased Witt outside where the leftovers from winter were still thawing out on the ground, which Matheny decided to use for his quest to get his music back. "We were running around my car and he's holding up a giant chunk of ice, threatening to throw it at my car," Witt says.

Witt jumped into his car, and Matheny followed suit: The two called a truce and drove off to Witt's house in Tenleytown. Once Witt lulled Matheny into a false sense of comfort, he bolted for the house. "My plan was just to stonewall him and keep the record, and Chad starts banging on the door," Witt says. Eventually, Matheny broke the door's window and hurt his hand, which is when Witt realized the fun had really died. He let Matheny in and went to grab supplies to fix Matheny's hand, not thinking Matheny would find the record: When Witt returned, he saw Matheny snapping the vinyl over his knee.

Though the Witt and Matheny's takes on the events differ slightly, they agree on the ending: Matheny decided Witt could hear the record and left him a new copy, with a humorous note scrawled onto the vinyl sleeve: "On either side of this lame record is the Regal Albatross. He will poke your eyes out if you play this record for anyone else without first clearing it through me." The sleeve isn't the only thing Matheny wrote on. "There's one track that he actually scribbled a pen, took a pen and went into it so that it doesn't play right because he hated the song," Witt says. Still, Matheny wanted his friend to listen to the record and like it, and Witt certainly did. "I listened to it, I don't know how soon afterwards, but it's amazing, it's awesome," Witt says. "It's very flawed, but in an amazing way, it totally works."

courtesy Adam Witt

That early support is just what Matheny needed to eventually take to doing Emperor X full-time, a task Witt helped out with as well, playing bass for Matheny on a couple national tours. Witt's got some local music roots as well, having played in a old-school D.C. screamo band that's better known for its parts than its sum. In Amalgamation, Witt played with Jacob Long, a future member of Dischord post-punk act Black Eyes, and Matt Safer, who went on to join The Rapture (which he left in 2009). Witt, who is studying to be a nurse in New York City, is just about the only person from that band not pursuing music full-time. "One guys is a jazz musician now, and another guy has a hardcore band in the Phillipines," Witt says. "These guys are all still doing music stuff. I've been lucky that I've been able to play with good musicians."

Musicians like Matheny. It appears that after touring the country for years and cranking out album after album of gorgeous anti-folk music, people are finally starting to come around to what Witt first understood about his friend decades ago: In October, Bar/None will release Emperor X's latest album, Western Teleport.

It's certainly been a long road for Matheny to get to this point, one which brought him back to D.C. a couple years after graduating to briefly teach freshman-level engineering at Howard University. With Matheny revisiting that long-lost first record, perhaps now is an excellent opportunity to listen to "The Coursebook," a cut off The Joytakers' Rakes that Matheny says is the best example of where he would take his style and approach in the future. It's warm, a little rough around the edges, totally genuine, and perhaps the best thing ever created in an elevator shaft at American University.

LISTEN: Emperor X – "The Coursebook"

Photo by Jennifer Hope McCharen

The band gave me a taste of record last July with "Full Flight," which I described as "a lengthy post-punk tone poem that shoots off synth bursts and guitar sirens and several menacing bass grooves before settling on a clackety, feedback-laden build." That rubric applies to much of the album, but the variations are pleasing: On opener "Soft Needles," Caldas produces a snarl of a bass motif that lends the song some movement early on but doesn't feel compelled to stick around; Authorization does well with repetition, but nothing repeats too long, and no idea is overexploited. The big touchpoint is minimalistic, prominent-bass post-punk (read: early Factory), and so the main mood is menace. And so appropriately, almost everything here is big and dark and danceable—except for closer "Slow Growth," which for purposes of our analogy is basically version 1's "Decades." It snakes, it hypnotizes; it feels weary and at points defeated and then strangely and perversely game for another go.

Artificially Sweetened is best treated as something akin to a The Death Set for Dummies: Clearly, the dudes in The Death Set are big fans of all the artists featured on the mixtape, and the brief selections and odd mash-ups of hip-hop acts and punk bands certainly show their mark on the frenetic punk act.

A few D.C. acts make an appearance on Artificially Sweetened. Black Eyes shows up early on, as track No. 7 fuses the screeching "Deformative" with Jamaican dancehall artist Buju Banton's "Circumstances." Fugazi's "Public Witness Program" remains almost untouched for most of the 1:07 cut that's included on the mixtape. That is, until the end of the tune,when Notorious B.I.G.'s voice shows up to drop some rhymes from "Hypnotize." Bad Brains' "At the Movies" shows up at the end of the mixtape, though it's not mashed up.

You can grab the rest of The Death Set's ADD-addled mixtape over at Mishka Bloglin.

Hugh McElroy performs with Cephalopods. Tonight he'll be axe-less.

The holidays can be unbearable for a whole host of reasons, but the most grating has to be that wintry form of a capella—caroling. This won't be like that.

D.C. music fixture Hugh McElroy—formerly of Black Eyes, Horses, and Hand-Fed Babies, and these days of Cephalopods and Ruffian Records—will perform a special, mostly a capella solo set tonight at Everlasting Life Cafe.

For the most part, it'll just be McElroy and his voice, though he'll toss in a spare amount of samples and tape effects for some songs. If you're skeptical, fear not: McElroy has a whole history of  a capella solo shows. .

"I started doing a capella sets a few years ago when a band called A Day in Black and White asked me if one of my bands could play a record release show," McElroy writes in an e-mail. "I had recorded some of the tracks and they wanted people involved in the record to perform. For whatever reason, none of my bands was available so I offered to do a solo set. I took some inspiration from a woman in New York called Jane Hohenberger—now Jane LeCroy—and decided to do it a capella. I also sang a couple of her songs, some songs by friends, some songs I wrote, some other songs."

Others took to McElroy's solo stuff, including Chris Grier of Demon Fling, who asked McElroy to open for his band. Soon after, McElroy did a couple more sets with Mass Movement of the Moth and was involved in a Taffety Punk production. Things have remained quiet on the solo front for McElroy the past couple years, but tonight's show came about similarly to McElroy's first solo set. "Ryan Little from Tereu Tereu was setting up the show and asked if I knew of anyone who might be free for it. I told him if no one else was that I'd do it, and it turned out he was into the idea enough to just ask me to play," McElroy writes.

Fans should come to the show prepared for a wide array of songs and performances pieces in McElroy's set, including some poems, a couple Hohenberger tunes, and some Cephalopods jams. "I don't have the full set totally ironed out yet, and there's a song I just heard on Sunday I might want to add to the show," he writes. "I also have some medieval secular and religious music on the shortlist and a Diamanda Galas cover. Some of it will be folky and some of it will be punky. Some of the songs are written to be sung a capella and others are songs that I feel can stand alone without accompaniment."

Hugh McElroy performs with Tereu Tereu, Conductive Alliance, and Listen Listen tonight at 8:30 p.m. at Everlasting Life, 2928 Georgia Ave. NW.

On Oct. 24, 2000, Dischord Records released No Kill No Beep Beep, the classic debut by Q and Not U. The cover is an arresting, whimsical snapshot of the punk-rock community that spawned the record—the band asked its friends and peers, most of them under 25 at the time, to pose for a portrait that would show D.C. wasn’t just a town of old punks. In this week’s Washington City Paper, Q and Not U’s members reflect on their rookie achievement. On Arts Desk, we’re catching up with some of the community Q and Not U immortalized.

Left To Right: Jacob Long, Hugh McElroy, Daniel Martin-McCormick, Dan Caldas

From the start, the musicians who would later form Black Eyes were involved with the boys in Q and Not U. Back in 2000, most of the Black Eyes crew played in a go-go-inspired punk band that shared the stage with Q and Not U now and then. "I was in a band called No-Gos with everyone from [Black Eyes] except Daniel [Martin-McCormick], and we were sharing a practice space with Q in the Resin Records house," recalls bassist Hugh McElroy.

At the time, Martin-McCormick says, "I was living at my parent's house in Northwest D.C. I was 16, and that was the summer in between my junior and senior years of high school. I grew up there, but I was happy to stay after high school precisely because of the scene and infrastructure. It baffles me now thinking about how easy it was to start playing shows. I submitted my first demo to Fort Reno when I was 15 and immediately had a show about a month and a half later. The year after that was kind of a whirlwind of hanging out, meeting bands and everybody at shows. The scene was exceptionally supportive and fun and being in a band was a piece of cake."

McElroy was still home at the time as well. "I was living in my parents' basement between living in a group house with Jacob Long and Caroline Hostetler (also on the cover) and living in college accommodations at St. Cross College, Oxford. I was as old as my nose and a little bit older than my teeth." McElroy met the musicians who would later be his Dischord labelmates in 1997. "I met them through the Resin Records dudes," he says. "I think I met them first at that Annapolis basement show. Better Automatic played, and I know Matt Borlik's old band The Challenger Commission played that show, and I think Harris [Klahr]'s The Glenmont Soundsystem played that show. I can't remember if Chris [Richards]' old band Tilden Shirtwaist Fire played that show, but I think he was there... That was before he was in The Elusive with John [Davis], I think... Treiops Treyfid, which was Treiops from Pitchblende, also played that night."

The photo shoot was a pleasant representation of the house show attendees of the time. "Pretty much everybody knew each other," said Martin-McCormick. "With the exception of a few people who couldn't make it out, that was pretty much everyone you saw at every show from '99-'01." The top of his skull is all that appears in the photo, but McElroy postures this may be his own fault. "I don't remember much, except that I violated the primary color theme of the shoot by wearing black. There was a lyrical reason I wasn't supposed to do this, but in violation of the spirit of the occasion, I decided I wasn't comfortable being garish; this is perhaps why only my forehead appears on the cover."

After the record was released, it was actually hard for some of the most loyal show-goers to handle. "It's funny," says Long. "I don't know if I should say this, but I was kind of disappointed with this record when it came out. I had seen Q play shows for a while at this point (and played shows with them in a few bands), and I loved these songs live, but I always felt something was lost in the translation to recording." Martin-McCormick echoes the sentiment. "At first I was a little disappointed in the album because Q and Not U had been such a huge deal for me," he says. "Of course, any band that makes a name for itself playing crazy house shows is going to have a rough time translating that energy in the studio. As I got a little more distance from it, though, I came to enjoy the album more and more... You can feel the time and place (nobody dresses the way we dressed on the cover anymore, there are so many fewer rock bands without synthesizers, there's no reverb on the vocals etc etc) and that's a truly beautiful thing." As he looks at the front, Martin-McCormick says, "I don't think [the cover] came out like they intended, but it's pretty perfect. You can tell that none of us were very cool, you know? Everybody just hung out and were kinda nerds but also very enthusiastic and jazzed about music. And Q felt very much like our band."

McElroy met Mike Kanin (later of Black Eyes) in '96. He was playing in a riot grrrl band called A.K.A. Harlot #1 (with author Sarah Marcus, among others), and Kanin was booking Fort Reno with Carleton Ingram. Years later, while McElroy was at a vegan potluck at Katy Otto's place, Kanin called him up and asked him to join him in the No-Gos. He agreed. Eventually, McElroy headed off to Oxford for some higher education, but not long after No Kill came out, Black Eyes started to coalesce. "I was in England from 2000 to 2001," says McElroy. "I got home and Jacob, Daniel, and Mike Kanin were in Trooper. Paul Jickling was also in it, and I think Amanda MacKaye and Sean McGuinness of Pissed Jeans also played in it briefly. When I got back I roadied with them for a while—I had a van, and they needed one to go on tour." After those tours ended, McElroy ended up with the other members of Black Eyes playing music at Martin-McCormick's house and their noise-heavy sound began to take shape.

"We played shows with [Q and Not U] early on, and we were all super tight. When we made our first record, they took the single on tour with them. In 2003, Black Eyes went on tour for seven and a half weeks, and we were with Q for six and a half of those weeks." As a teenager, getting to be so deeply a part of the punk scene was an enormous deal to Martin-McCormick. "I felt like I was a part of the biggest thing in the world," he says. "I had no idea about the internet or about what was happening in New York or anywhere else. I mean, I knew about other music, like Kraftwerk and Fela and stuff, but I had no concept of what the national scene was like. It seemed so full and complete, this amazing band right in front of us and everybody was into it, going wild and having a great time."

The Black Eyes/Q and Not U shows were rife with odd anecdotes. "When we were all in Providence, RI in 2003 with El Guapo," says McElroy. "We stayed at the space we played at, and all three bands had an extended jam with the people who lived there. People where just switching instruments. It was in the morning, people had had some coffee, they were in different rooms, and it started an idea that never happened, where were going to have a 3-way split collaboration. It was a really cool coffee-fueled jam." Caldas recalls: "We did a lot of fun percussion jams/collaborations at the end of [Q and Not U]'s sets. Some of these would end with us leaving the stage and kind of drum line style marching into other rooms or outside on to the street."

"In '03 Chris got really into wearing uncomfortable clothes live so that he would be pushed to play harder," says Martin-McCormick. "But they also became costumes, big ugly sweaters with rips and stuff, and then a tie." Caldas adds: "Chris wore a brown sweater that looked like a toddler had cut arbitrary pieces out of it with scissors."

McElroy remembers, "At an early show in Norfolk at this weird-ass arty-bar space that No-Gos played with them (and I think Engine Down) they had so much energy that I remember them seriously flying across the stage. I can't remember if it was because they were psyched or pissed off. I think Harris walked up a wall. Chris broke his guitar and we had to trade guitars for the rest of their tour and we took his broken guitar back to D.C. "

The entire punk experience left them all changed. McElroy says: "This may sound hokey, but it gave me a place where I felt comfortable being my weird, queer, anarchist, classics-geek, bass-playing self and the comfort to carry that self into the world outside of punk rock." Says Martin-McCormick: "Punk was the ultimate confirmation for me: that you could be the person you were and run with that; do your own thing, make your own music, and there was a space for you in the world." He continues: "Before I found punk, it seemed like all the people doing weird cool stuff were as distant as could be, and that the best I could do was to squeeze the stuff I loved in between the cracks of what would ultimately become a rather dull life. Punk, and especially the scene in D.C. at the time, gave me so much hope and relief and excitement. I still feel that quite a bit and still think about a lot of conversations I had or shows I saw at that time." Looking back on that now, especially considering his age at the time, he realizes: "A lot of my life has been trying to make good on the promises of youth."

Now the scene has changed, and the city is different, but the former members of Black Eyes aren't without hope for the District. "D.C. feels way less exciting musically to me, but I think a lot of that is my age," Caldas says. "There is a big difference between being 19 and everything feeling fresh and exciting versus being 30 and having experienced a lot more, as well as having different interests and focuses in your life. There is music I like in D.C., however. Title Tracks, Insect Factory, Protect-U, and America Hearts are making great music."

Long admits: "I know very little about D.C. at this point. I don't want to be one of those 'things were better in my day' people—I mean, things were great for a number of years when I lived there but a lot of that had to do with having a huge group of awesome friends that was always around/hung/went to shows/etc. and it was great. I'm sure for some people that might still be there. It just happens that I, along with most of my friends from that time, have moved on. That said, I know there are some great friends from back then really doing some great things in D.C. and really building there own scene, it just happens to be different music-wise."

"It seems (from San Francisco) like most of the people from that era have moved or settled a bit," says Martin-McCormick. "Between '03-'05, a ton of people (myself included) skipped town, mostly for NYC but also Chicago and the West Coast. The upside to such a small, supportive scene was that it was easy to feel included and play a lot of shows and hang out without tons of pretension. The downside was that if you wanted to expand your musical palette, you were kinda stuck with the same small pool of musicians. So at a certain point, it made sense to leave. I know the Future Times crew is doing a lot there, and that's awesome. But it seems like the 'D.C. sound' that got so much attention in the late '90s kinda went the way of the dodo along with so much punk-based music some time in the last decade. Some old D.C. heads are doing really well with their music, though, and that's such a nice thing to see."

Now Caldas (whose band Authorization will be releasing an album soon) is living in New York, after living in D.C. for 12 years. "I'm currently working in television as an assistant video editor and trying to play music whenever I can. I recently did some music for a friend of mine's experimental film called 'Crusher,'" he says. Martin-McCormick (who now plays in Mi Ami and Sex Worker) and Long are both in San Francisco at the moment. "I left town because I wanted a change of scenery and to try some new stuff. I had an opportunity to study classical guitar in San Francisco and thought it might be cool, but I also wanted to see if all the ideas and energy I had picked up in D.C. would hold elsewhere. So far, life has been exceptionally good," says Martin-McCormick. McElroy is still living in D.C., playing in Cephalopods, and running Ruffian Records (which has lately partnered with Sockets Records on a number of releases). McElroy notes: "It's nice to look back, as long as it doesn't take our eyes off all the beautiful things people are making and doing now. It's way too easy to be nostalgic instead of engaged."

In case you missed it, here's the rest of the series.

But listeners will be reconsidering "Harmonics" by the time the next track, "Latin Lover," slithers along on a guitar groove practically pulled from a top-tier classic-rock tune. It's the kind of counterintuitive kick in the pants that post-punk fans should know to expect from a band with Mi Ami's subversive pedigree.

Or maybe they're just looking for "crazy, off-the-wall musical experimentation." Or some other post-punk cliché. Which means they may be taken aback about halfway through "Latin Lover," when Martin-McCormick invokes "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)" by Whitney Houston.

That's exactly what's great about Mi Ami—that it will go where other art-punk bands won't. While 10th-generation Public Image Ltd. rip-offs do their best to reiterate the standard that band set in the late '70s, Mi Ami—which has two members who are alumni of the arty D.C. dance-punk act Black Eyes—does far better bringing in the complexities of pop music and society in the present.

So it's slightly frustrating. The dub-inflamed sound of Watersports is still here, just not always on the surface. At its heart Steal Your Face is a grower: There's less of Watersports' straight-to-the–jugular immediacy, and more of a spellbinding, slow-burning quality, realized most fully on Steal Your Face's closer, the aptly titled "Slow."

And although the album only contains six cuts, it's satisfying—a multiple-course art-punk feast. It's filling, it's exhausting, and when you're ready for more, you can return to it. But that shouldn't suggest leftovers: Everything here is too fresh.

Mi Ami performs with Maximillion Dunbar and Steve Summers on April 15 at the Velvet Lounge.