Per the Kickstarter page, recordings for OneTwoThreeFour are in progress and will feature guest appearances from Linda Smith, Rose Melberg, the Dum Dum Girls' Dee Dee, and Honeymoon Diary's Jenny Robbins.

Funds raised will also go to, literally, bringing the band back together. Though it's been announced that Black Tambourine will be playing chickfactor's "For the Love of Pop" reunion tour (which includes two nights at Artisphere), it looks like the band will need some help getting to the shows: "And while Archie and Brian still live in the D.C. metro area, Mike now lives in California and Pam lives across the drink in London. We're trying to raise money to cover flights for the far-flung among us and travel to/accommodation in the towns we don't live in." (Full disclosure: Brian Nelson is also a City Paper staffer.)

Here's the Kickstarter page. The thing's pretty dang well-funded already, with $3,427 donated and 29 days left to go. Let yourself be briefly entranced by the Xtranormal video at the top, featuring likenesses of Pam Berry and Archie Moore.

Great reunion news that is better than all the other reunion news: Black Tambourine, the beloved D.C. noise-pop group, is reuniting this April for a pair of shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of chickfactor magazine, the very cool publication that (ahem) was founded by two former WCP staffers, Gail O'Hara and Black Tambourine singer Pam Berry. Great news all around!

2012 is also the 21st anniversary of the last time Black Tambourine played a show. The concerts are April 6 and 7 at Artisphere and also feature a ton of other indie-pop groups that should be on your bucket list: Stevie Jackson (of Belle & Sebastian), Honey Bunch, Dot Dash, and Frankie Rose on night one, and Black Tambourine, Lilys, Fan Modine, and Lorelei on night two. Three more chickfactor shows —one of which features Black Tambourine—take place a few days later in Brooklyn. Lots more info here.

If they're trying to indicate we're blue collar they're obviously not paying attention. Clearly from this photograph we don't wear collared shirts. Some of us don't wear shirts at all. (Did they sell PBR in stubby's twenty years ago?)

Anyway, we typed in a few local artists to discover their Drinkify-recommended beverages. Serve blog post over ice with slice of lime.

Stinky Dink

Drinkify say: 1 bottle Honey Vodka. Serve on rocks. Stir slowly. Garnish with national flag.

We say: Remove flag until statehood.

The Sweater Set

Drinkify says: 10 oz. Kaoliang. Serve on rocks. Garnish with fresh berries.

We say: Artisanal earl grey.

Channels

Drinkify says: 10 oz. Canadian Club Whiskey. Serve on rocks. Stir quickly. Garnish with maraschino cherry.

We say: Ditch the cherry.

Black Eyes

Drinkify says: 8 oz. Ecstasy. Serve on rocks. Stir quickly. Garnish with celery stalk.

We say: Imagine that, listen to this, and realize that the combination is a terrible idea.

Raheem DeVaughn

Drinkify says: 6 oz. Hennessy. Serve neat. Stir quickly.

We say: Sadly boilerplate, but it works.

Pentagram

Drinkify says: 1 oz. Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey. Serve on rocks. Stir quickly. Garnish with fresh berries.

We say: For beer, Victory Hop Devil.

Wale

Drinkify says: 1 bottle Gin. Serve neat. Stir vigorously.

We say: Why is this the same as Thievery Corporation's drink?

Marginal Man

Drinkify says: 1 bottle Red table wine. Serve at room temperature. Garnish with pickled asparagus.

We say: Gross enough to be punk rock.

Nation of Ulysses

Drinkify says: 1 bottle Red table wine. Serve at room temperature.

We say: Asparagus, apparently, is the pickled vegetable of the bourgeoisie.

Minor Threat

Drinkify says: 8 oz. Woodford Reserve Bourbon, 8 oz. Tomato juice, 12 oz. Monster Energy Drink. Combine in highball glass and serve. Stir vigorously.

We say: We can haz straight edge?

Mojito via Flickr user TheCulinaryGeek, Creative Commons

When I spoke with Schulman today, he was battling the flu but still working on upcoming Slumberland releases. "I can’t take days off right now," he said, emitting a muffled laugh. "I can’t afford to—I’m self-employed."

Slumberland was founded in 1989, and has been home to plenty of great D.C.-area bands—Black Tambourine, Velocity Girl, Lilys, Lorelei—and plenty of great bands, period—like the Aislers Set, Boyracer, and Stereolab. You'll find lots of variety in Slumberland's discography, but most of the label's acts have tended to balance a pop sensibility with a penchant for noise.

Which, of course, is an aesthetic that's found purchase among indie-rock fans in recent years. Schulman says he first thought about taking Slumberland, which is now based in Oakland, Calif., full-time in 2008, when he released Crystal Stilts' debut full-length. Saleswise, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's 2009 debut became the biggest album in the label's history, Schulman says, and in the last year Slumberland has released well-reviewed albums by Weekend and Frankie & the Outs and reissued music by Black Tambourine. (Also, I thought the Procedure Club album was awesome.) "I’ve always sort of had this nagging feeling that if I was able to apply myself more to the label, everything will do better," Schulman says. He doesn't seem to be doing so bad, though.

And in an era in which Merge Records can have several No. 1 records and win a Grammy, it's an interesting time to run an indie label, Schulman says. Labels like Slumberland or Mexican Summer can now have an impact on the broader culture, he says, while sticking to the kind of music they've always championed.

At any rate, this spring will likely be Slumberland's biggest yet: Anticipated releases from Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Crystal Stilts, Brown Recluse, and others are in the pipeline. Slumberland currently has a part-time intern, and Schulman says he hopes to "staff up, one might say" down the line. As for staying a full-time label head: "I figure I’ll re-evaluate in about six months and see how it’s going."

Wanna know more about Slumberland? A while ago I assembled a miniature oral history of the label, in two parts.

True story: If you send me a cassette tape, I will totally listen to it. This is because 1) I have a working cassette deck at home; and 2) guess how often I get to use it?

So I was pretty happy to get this demo cassette from D.C.'s Black Telephone yesterday. I was also pretty happy with what's on it: stripped-down, nostalgic indie pop with lots of fuzz—although not as much fuzz as the classic, similarly named D.C. pop outfit Black Tambourine. Homage? Sure.

In indie circles—including some very mainstream indie circles—limited-run cassette releases have been on the rise in recent years, as Pitchfork's Marc Hogan wrote in an excellent essay last February.

Bands in D.C. are in on it, too. In 2008, The Cassettes ended a career-long string of CD/LP releases and finally put out, yup, a cassette. Speaking with City Paper's Casey Rae-Hunter, the band's frontman Shelby Cinca said:

We were hassled quite a bit for years at the merch table by snarky individuals asking why we didn’t have cassettes for sale. So we figured it was time to do that. Plus, we feel like it’s a much better cultural object than a boring CD that ends up in a closet after being ripped to a MacBook or [is] used as a coaster for a soy latte.

The Cassettes' Countach tape came with a few things—a toy car, for example, and a plastic horse. And, naturally: An mp3 download card. The Black Telephone tape also points to the band's site, where you can grab the four songs for free.

Maryland's Fan Death Records also releases cassettes, including recent ones from D.C. bands Screen Vinyl Image and Bodycop. The label's Sean Gray even has a new, cassette-only imprint for "avant/fringe stuff" called 2,632 Tapes, which over the next year will put out releases by D.C.'s Phonic Riot, Gray's project Détruire Voile, and others. The imprint will release six tapes in 2011, in 100-copy runs.

The Cassettes' Cinca used to play in Frodus, which released one cassette-only album in the '90s. If you search the Dischord online store for cassettes, you'll find a ton of stuff from that label and others, though it's mostly from the age when labels regularly sold tapes.

What other D.C. bands have released worthwhile cassettes in recent years? My tape deck is lonely.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

At the time, member Archie Moore teased that there was more to come—specifically, a hissy cassette recording of four of the band's songs, mixed at Inner Ear by Don Zientara. The master of the mixes was stolen out of car, and the band then quickly made new mixes of the songs for a single and compilation. Recently, Moore found a cassette dub of the Zientara mixes, and made a digital rip. You know these recordings already—these are just different mixes.

They're still very much worth your time: More so than the versions you can hear on Black Tambourine's Complete Recordings or the self-titled comp, Zientara's mix emphasizes power over pretty. "They're hissy, and there's a little bit of cassette wow and flutter, but you can still hear what made them interesting, so I figure some people might enjoy hearing them," Moore told me in January.

Download the recordings at the Black Tambourine bandcamp page. Or listen after the jump:

City Desk runs down another recent Listserv-fueled controversy involving public art in Adams Morgan—involving, it so happens, a number of people who figured into the last one we wrote about.

Scott Vogel, the fine arts editor at the Post, resigns.

You dig the new M.I.A. song; you're not sure what to make of its bloody, NSFW video. Now learn about the band it sampled, Suicide. Obligatory D.C. connection: Vintage D.C. indie-poppers Black Tambourine recently recorded a cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" for an excellent reissue.

When will Brightest Young Things introduce us to some gallery boys?

Pitchfork's oral history of Galaxie 500 is really special. Spend your morning reading it and listening to this:

Cheerio!

Sean Peoples

• A new HUME EP this summer, with a tour to follow.
• A Laughing Man EP.
• An Aaron Thompson LP, with lotsa guests.
• An EP from N'Digo Rose, who plays keys in the Cornel West Theory.
• A Cornel West Theory mixtape.
• A Sean Peoples EP.

And other stuff! Sockets' next release is an EP of Extra Life remixes.

Reissue corner! Dr. Strange has rereleased Government Issue's Joyride; VHF has re-pressed Skullflower's This Is...

The new Medications record is out next week on Dischord; we've got a review in this week's issue, on stands Thursday.

Cunieform has a bunch of new releases slated for May, including another installment of its Soft Machine archival series.

This Friday's "Taking the Piss" DJ night at Marx Cafe in Mount Pleasant is doubling as a release party for the new Black Tambourine anthology out on Slumberland Records.

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.

In today's print City Paper, I write about the recent flaring-up of rumors concerning Drunkdriver and Pygmy Shrews drummer Jeremy Villalobos. In the last two weeks, allegations that he'd committed several acts of sexual assault caused Drunkdriver to break up and Fan Death Records, which has released music by both bands, to drop Pygmy Shrews from its annual DNA Test Fest, citing concerns raised by other groups performing and on the label.

Perhaps lost in there is that top to bottom, Test Fest features some of the best music you can see in the area this weekend, especially if your taste skews to the noisy and difficult. The show is in Baltimore this year after 2008 and 2009 concerts in D.C., which I suppose you could hold against Fan Death if you want. Certainly, the label has no problem pissing you off, an attitude co-founder Sean Gray discusses in this lengthy interview with Express Night Out. He touches on the controversy he and his co-founder Chris Berry sparked when earlier this year they told All Our Noise how much they think D.C. indie rock sucks. (We wrote about it here, here, and here. Baltimore City Paper wrote about how we overdid it here.) But Gray also talks about what he loves, like the Siltbreeze label and Home Blitz, one of the bands performing at Test Fest. He calls Home Blitz's 2009 album Out of Phrase "probably the best pop record of the year — hands down, you can't tell me otherwise." Hyperbole? You decide:

Black Tambourine, an Irish prankster, and an ode to the organ after the jump:

Black Tambourine members Mike Schulman and Pam Berry talk to eMusic about the new Black Tambourine compilation, touching on the Maryland group's strange, long-fomenting influence, that rain sound on "By Tomorrow," and why they're more like to play a reunion barbecue than a reunion gig. Also: Pitchfork gives Black Tambourine an 8.3.

Only Vanna White could decode who's playing at this year's Lollapalooza, writes Arts Desk contributer Leor Galil.

An organ skeptic becomes a convert.

Joanna Newsom has weird things to say about Avatar.

Solas Nua's pranksterish artist-in-residence, Nevan Lehart, is unveiling an installation today at 1200 1st St. NE at 6:30 p.m.