Altered Zones points to this cool video from LA Vampires Goes Ital—a project from frequent-collaborators-of-spooky-buzz-bands LA Vampires and Ital, which is one of D.C. expat Daniel Martin-McCormick's many outlets. Martin-McCormick, a former Black Eyes member, gets ink 'round these parts mostly for his work with Mi Ami—lately of fucked up nu-disco fame—and Sex Worker, which is his project of screechy, contorted electro-glam. Ital, obviously, is where Martin-McCormick toys with Italo Disco sounds.

"Streetwise" is music for zoning out stylishly: Vocals from LA Vampires' Amanda Brown are glazed over and seductive; Martin-McCormick's loungey instrumental is smeared in Vaseline; and the cut-and-paste video is apparently inspired by George Michael's fashion-plate "Freedom '90" promo.

"Streetwise" comes from the 12-inch Streetwise, out on Not Not Fun on May 25.

I started reading this Anne Midgette piece—about a performance of Japan's NHK Symphony Orchestra at Strathmore—expecting a big, heaping dose of feel-good. But Midgette thinks hard about cliches re: the universality of music, as well as the strangeness of seeing a Japanese orchestra led by a non-Japanese conductor (Previn, Andre) performing a program of non-Japanese works amid, well, such a tragic week for Japan. Do read.

Earlier this week at the Anacostia Community Museum, Philippa Hughes moderated a panel discussion on arts east of the river. She has a recap on the Pink Line Project blog.

Comments watch: There are some truly amazing negative reactions to our negative reaction to The Strokes' new album, Album.

There's some decent music going on this weekend—even though a gazillion bands are in one place right now, and it isn't D.C.—and the best show is probably Mi Ami at Subterranean A. Hey, we reviewed that band's latest release, too.

Get ready to get weird. Mi Ami, the trio-turned-duo featuring former D.C. resident Daniel Martin-McCormick (ex-Black Eyes), just released a new music video to promote their forthcoming 12-inch, "Dolphins." This bizarre synthesized odyssey is the album's title track; it's the longest of the record's four songs, clocking in at more than nine minutes. With the departure of bassist Jacob Long last summer, Mi Ami abandoned abrasive guitar scrapes, groove-centric basslines, and live drums. Mi Ami's latest incarnation offers twisted, creepy keyboard sounds and thumping electronic drums alongside Martin-McCormick's signature vocal squeals. The video is as disconcerting as the music, mashing manipulated clips from feature films against footage of Martin-McCormick dressed like a private eye. It's not an easy watch, but if you like Mi Ami, then you probably weren't looking for easy in the first place.

Mi Ami performs with Protect-U and Hume Saturday at Subterranean A.

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.

We really like Mi Ami. Arts Desk contributer Aaron Leitko really really likes Mi Ami. So it's a good thing, then, that the noisy, experimental San Francisco group—which includes two D.C. ex-pats, former Black Eyes members Daniel Martin-McCormick and Jacob Long—will release its sophomore album, Steal Your Face, on April 13 on Thrill Jockey. The album's title notwithstanding, for some reason we're pretty sure this one won't sound like vintage Grateful Dead.

Neon Hates You/Smell Anniversary Fest: The Smell is the sort of DIY space that makes a scene. All ages, with a bent toward the experimental and interesting, this L.A. spot is about to mark its 12th anniversary with a weekend festival (Jan. 22 and 23) that seems heavy on the stuff it trades in: Participants include Mi Ami, Lucky Dragons, Foot Village, and Robin Williams on Fire. $10 (we repeat: $10) gets you in for both days.

Sounds Like Brooklyn Festival: We here at Festival Watch can kind of feel the Brooklyn hate. Being based, as we are, in the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World,” we've seen for ourselves what happens when every honky with a tonk feels like they have a right to be a rock musician. Brooklyn, we think, suffers from a similar sort of self-assuredness. Except there, the obnoxious proliferation of honest-to-God musical goodness almost seems to justify that sentiment. Which makes it all the worse.

As if to drive this point home, even academe has embraced the whole Brooklyn-as-the-edgy-Mecca thing—well, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to be exact. Over the last weekend of January and the first weekend pf February, the residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint (and at least some portions of Bed-Stuy) will, for the third time, presumably decamp and witness what BAM believes is a representative cross-section of their borough's sonic creativity. What, exactly, that means is a little unclear. Says press: “BAM's Sounds Like Brooklyn Music Festival celebrates some of the best music from the borough with two weekends packed with concerts at BAM and at clubs all over Brooklyn.” But the organization lists only the shows it plans to host at its own facilities. Performers there include Les Savy Fav, Vivian Girls, and the reunited Anti-Pop Consortium. Tickets for those performances are still available—and will be for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, any of those bands can actually sell out the multitiered opera house that will host their performances.

As for the rest of the weekend, your guess is as good as ours. But if you should find yourself in Brooklyn, upset at the lack of shows that appeal to you, we’d remind you that there’s plenty of other stuff to do.

Noise Pop 2010: OK, so we realize that the last time we did one of these, we told you all about Noise Pop 2010. But that was before we found out that Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band would be playing. And despite the hit-or-miss craziness associated therewith, we still feel like that experience is probably worth the $39.50 admission price. Of course, if you’re planning to be out there anyway (reminder: Four Tet, two nights of Magnetic Fields, and assorted other awesomeness is included), you could just get a badge.

I'm pretty sure I tried to call Merriweather Post Pavilion "Record of the year" back in January, when I reviewed it, but City Paper managing editor Andrew Beaujon argued that this statement might be a tad premature, given that '09 still had 11 months left to go. But here we are in December and it's still great.

Mi Ami
Watersports
Touch & Go/Quarterstick

From a sort-of-embarrassing-but-earnest blog post that I wrote after attending three Mi Ami's shows last March:

But yeah, they really dropped the A-bomb on me. I had seen them before–when they were still a duo and then last February when they came through DC–and I liked it, but thought it just sounded liked a more stripped down version of Black Eyes. This time though, I don't know, it really clicked. The good shows had the same energy as some of the Evangelical church services that I went to back when I was writing the Service Industry column. The kind of thing where the band doesn't play hymns so much as they act as a foil for the preacher's gradually intensifying emotions and everything just gets crazier and crazier until some old lady passes out in the isle. Except at the DC show, it wasn't an old lady, just some tragic punker kid who had a septum piercing and smelled sort of like salami.

More after the jump:

Love of Diagrams
Nowhere Forever
Unstable Ape/Remote Control

The Melbourne, Australia trio graduates from scrappy post-punk to expansive space-rock that's one part shoegaze uplift and two parts Flying Nun Records-style skronk. The Northern hemisphere slept on Love of Diagrams this year, big time.

Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Glassnote

French pop band reaches for the stars, benefits from not being American.

Deleted Scenes
Birdseed Shirt
What Delicate Recordings

Sad, uplifting, and bizarre in just about equal measure, Birdseed Shirt is probably the best record anybody in D.C. put out this year. It really deserves that spot in Black Cat's jukebox.

Polvo
In Prism
Merge

Hey, not everything has to be like Star Wars. Sometimes your heroes take ten years off, come back, and really kick ass.

Obits
I Blame You
SubPop

Obits guitarist Sohrab Habibion called me out on Black Plastic Bag (R.I.P.) because I made fun of him for wearing shorts onstage at SXSW. In hindsight, I was being a lazy critic and a bit of a jerk. We got it sorted out, though (I think), but even if Habibion and his bandmates hate my guts, I'll still listen to this record.

Kurt Vile
Childish Prodigy
Matador

Philadelphia songwriter and mega-producer Daniel Lanois are privy to the same secret: If you take the music of the baby-boomers and run it through a ton of effects, it sounds cool again. Hey, don’t laugh, it worked for Bob Dylan on Oh, Mercy. And it works for Kurt Vile, too.

Blues Control
Local Flavor
Siltbreeze

The ultimate soundtrack to the final beer of the evening.

Dam Funk
Toeachizown
Stones Throw

Dam Funk has the chords of eternity at his fingertips. Yeah, that sounds like a cheesy Jim Morrison lyric, but when it comes to synthesizers, the Los Angeles-based modern-funk pioneer really does have the touch. "[I'm trying to get] the best chord that I’ve ever heard in my life. It can hit your heart strings," he told me during a Q&A last May. "Not that Lil Jon effect–those are the devil chords. I’m trying to get the beautiful chords, to get to something inside." His debut, Toeachizown, is crammed with just those chords.

Records that I probably enjoyed just as much, but was too lazy to blurb:
Omar S Fabric 45
Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca
Flaming Lips Embryonic
True Womanhood Magic Child Digital 7"
Fresh & Onlys The Fresh & Onlys
The Clientele Bonfires on the Heath
Circulatory System Signal Morning
The Points Beat In Hell 7"
Real Estate S/T

Local DJ faves Jesse Tittsworth and Will Eastman and a group of partners are opening up their own space on U Street, the Going Out Gurus report at The Post. Expect the 250- to 300-capacity U Street Music Hall to open early next year at 1115 U St., formerly the Cue Bar. "The whole place is going to be a dance floor," Eastman told the Gurus. "There will be a few booths and bar stools, but it's a dance club. It's for dancing, not sitting." Eastman will still be hosting dance nights elsewhere though, like his popular Bliss night at the Black Cat.

From the Dept. of Ex-Washingtonians: Ted Leo And The Pharmacists, whose last two labels stopped releasing music, are now signed to Matador Records. And the dubby, noisy group Mi Ami—which, like Leo & Co., was on Touch & Go—has signed with Thrill Jockey. The San Francisco outfit includes two members of the disbanded Black Eyes.

The Kennedy Center announced its 2009-2010 jazz season, Jazz Times reports. Highlights include Mavis Staples on April 23 and a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald on Jan. 24 featuring Dee Dee Bridgewater, Al Jarreau, Janis Siegel, and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band.

In other jazz news, the Congressional Black Caucus is hosting a free jazz (but not Free Jazz) forum and concert tonight in Ballroom A of the Convention Center. The evening features lots of local names, and caps off with a tribute to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, in celebration of the album's 50th anniversary this year.

Area DJ Dave Nada and engineer Matt Nordstrom's Nadastrom project dropped a digital EP today.

Aural Suppository has some videos from the Black Cat's recent 16th anniversary show with Dead Meadow and The Shirks. Including this one:

Dead Meadow performing at the Black Cat's 16 anniversary in DC from Denman C Anderson on Vimeo.

Photo courtesy of Mi Ami's MySpace page.