Cam Jus

Moombahton, moombahton, moombahton. I'm not sure I have anything left to say about the ethnomusicologically fascinating, yet-for-all-practical-purposes-kind-of-stoopid, but-still-pretty-danceable homegrown EDM microgenre, other than that it's pretty striking how much it's remained a local presence even though its international ascent really has very little to do with the particulars of D.C. (and a lot to do with Soundcloud). The 11th Moombahton Massive party takes place tomorrow at U Street Music Hall, and the lineup includes moombahton pioneers Nadastrom and Sabo. Closer to the ground, here are two new EPs of moombahton edits from local producers.

Jon Kwest, whose moombahtonization of MLK Day I praised last week, dropped his The Last Don EP today on Think 2wice Records. Bonus, Wire fans: Track 5 has lots and lots of Omar dialogue. (Because why not? Anything can be moombahtoned.)

Earlier this month, local producer Cam Jus dropped his own moombahton EP, Badman, on Rot10 Musik. Cam Jus co-hosts a regular moombahton night at Velvet Lounge, Tropixxx, that's been holding it down locally for the sound for more than a year. Here's a megamix of the EP:

You can buy both releases at all your favorite online retails. Moombahton Massive XI takes place tomorrow at 8 p.m. at U Street Music Hall. $8 advance; $10 at the door.

Well, maybe some slow-motion riots. The producer team—which includes moombahton inventor Dave Nada—turns in four original moombahton tracks and a pair of remixes, exploring the microgenre's manic and spaced-out sides in more or less equal measure. On first listen, the most striking track is "Say My Name," which features another formerly D.C.-based DJ, Jen Lasher, and fellow moombahton pioneer Munchi. Wait for the middle portion—a soulful dubstep-style cool-down in which the percussion goes from throbbing to downright paranoid.

Since it's  Scion release, the download is free.

"We grew up in vastly divergent places, but we all grew up with the disco sound ingrained deeply," says Wisconsin native Will Eastman, one third of local production team Volta Bureau (mentioned on this blog a couple times recently). The trio, which includes Philippines-born Micah Vellian (Miguel Lacsamana) and New York-born Outputmessage (Bernard Farley), kicks off a busy fall schedule with a DJ set at Eastman's club, U Street Music Hall, this Saturday. Original headliner Gui Boratto postponed due to visa problems.

Volta Bureau usually works with a BPM between 114 and 120, a range familiar to fans of nu-disco. On his Jack mix, released earlier this week, Eastman slowed classic house cuts down to that range. The mix includes a slowed-down version of John Tejada's "Sweat (On The Walls)," Nadastrom's remix of  Laidback Luke and Diplo's "Hey," and of course, Volta Bureau's track "Hope." In this format, says Eastman, "There's more space for the bass to breathe, more room for the melodies."

Volta Bureau makes its live debut October 8 at Artisphere's first anniversary party. "We all DJ and love it, but Volta Bureau's live performance is also at the top of our agenda right now," says Eastman. "I'm excited for what we can become as a live group."

Jack DJ Mix by Will Eastman

THEATER

The Shakespeare Theatre Company's annual Free-for-All begins today, with a free (yes free!) run of performances of Julius Caesar. It's a remount, in fact, of the production from several years back. At the time, Bob Mondello wrote that the play's central betrayal

never generates much heat in David Muse’s staging, led by Tom Hammond’s stiff, uncharismatic Brutus, against Dan Kremer’s distracted, similarly unprepossessing Caesar. Both men, surrounded by followers nearly as undifferentiated as their senatorial togas, appear impressive mostly when situated on balconies, high above the throng. And when lesser folks stand out, it’s not always in ways that are dramatically useful. Scott Parkinson’s Cassius has a lean and mostly petulant look, Nancy Rodriguez turns Portia’s pleas to Brutus into a florid, woe-struck aria.

Still, there’s often an eloquence of gesture when Muse finds ways to blend intimacy into the surrounding spectacle, seen in Caesar’s brusque impatience on the morning of his assassination as he shrugs off both barbering attendants and his wife (a wonderfully natural Kim Martin-Cotten), and again in the shock with which he realizes there’s a knife in a hand he’s reached out to for support.

Want tickets? There's an online lottery every day, you could line up at theater around 4 p.m., you could try to snag tickets via Shakespeare Theatre's Facebook and Twitter accounts, or you can become an STC subscriber or member of Friends of Free for All. Tonight's performance is at 8 p.m.

MUSIC

Ryan McLaughlin, the frontman of local folk-punkers Typefighter, opens up for Smoke Fairies. McLaughlin recorded a great mini-set on the parking deck of Washington City Paper back in December. It was fucking cold. 8:30 p.m. at Red Palace. $10.

Tonight's Moombahton Massive party is the strongest, lineup-wise, since the first. Nadastrom's Dave Nada invented the microgenre, Sabo and Heartbreak helped popularize it, Munchi—a Rotterdam DJ who hasn't been able to travel to the U.S. in recent months because of now-resolved visa issues—might be its biggest star. Here's a free mix to get you pumped.

Moombahton Massive V ep by SolSelectas

Books

You'll probably want to avoid former U.S. Senate candidate/Tea Party fave Christine O'Donnell's book event at the Barnes & Noble downtown.

Film

A selection of Disney short films commissioned by the U.S. government during World War II, including Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Firing Line (!). Noon at the National Archives. Free.

Dance

Step Afrika! is the centerpiece of tonight's Phillips After 5. Which is at the Phillips, after 5.

Sopranos Fans

See Alicia Witt play music! On the roof of the W at 9 p.m.

One goodie before you go: On his blog, U Street Music Hall co-owner Jesse Tittsworth has a download of Nadastrom's Moombahton edit of "You've Got the Love" by Florence and the Machine. One goodie for when you're there: Nada's mom will be selling homemade empanadas.

Last bit of Moombahton news: Here's a bit of a visual teaser for the upcoming Moombahton comp on the Mad Decent label.

Moombahton Massive Tres takes place tonight at 9 p.m. at U Street Music Hall, 115 U St. NW. $5.

Besides, as proponents of the Wammies are quick to remind critics, if you don't like the artists that WAMA rewards, you can always pay to join the organization and have a vote next year.

Godfrey has an excellent post on  the hits and misses among this year's nominees. Check it.

I'll add one miss, which I think speaks to the notion that the Wammies privilege known quantities over neophytes.

Check out the Washington Area Record Company category (toward the bottom of the full ballot): Eight labels are nominated. One of them is Dischord, the legendary punk label. It released only one (very good) album of new material this year, and continued reissuing titles from its catalog. Sockets Records is not nominated, even though the local label run by Sean Peoples released five very good albums this year and packed the Black Cat at a showcase last January. The label and its releases earned positive notices throughout the year in City Paper and the Post.

Fine, whatever. There's a reason none of the Wammies' categories employ the word "best." These are WAMA's picks; they're no more a be-all-and-end-all exercise than any group or publication's annual list of superlatives.

But a browsing of this year's Wammies nominees raises enough red flags—like, where's all the good indie rock? It's great that Bob Mould is nominated again, but did he actually release music in the last year? Props for nominating Nadastrom, but why does the list otherwise ignore the EDM scene's banner year?—to suggest that this well-intentioned awards ceremony is pretty removed from much of the great music that comes out of D.C. each year.

I trust my colleagues Mike West and Steve Kiviat will want to add their thoughts.

Meanwhile, Sockets has its annual showcase this Saturday at the Black Cat. Vote with your feet and go.

This is a couple of months old, but I just came across this D.C.-minded iteration of the greatest Internet meme ever. Looks like Hitler's a tad upset that none of his underlings invited him to that Nadastrom set at U Street Music Hall. Kudos, YouTube user krinkle909.

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.

Spinner, AOL's upstart music Web site, approached this year's South by Southwest festival with Texas-sized ambition: It would interview every band and artist performing there—all 2,000 of them.

And so Spinner put out an APB to writers experienced and un-: Give us an interview, we'll give you $50. Don't worry about being familiar with your subject; just listen to enough to write a pithy intro. Never done a Q&A? Totally cool. We've prepared some questions for you.

The assignments went out through Seed, AOL's algorithmic content-assignment site. What started out as embarrassing—interview after interview featuring variations on questions like "Beatles or Stones?" and "How did your band form?"—yesterday became very embarrassing, when Spinner's editors sent a frantic e-mail to their contributors: File your interviews. Please!

That's the thing about hiring untested writers: They may suck at deadlines. Or they may suck altogether.

Or they may not suck at all: Browse through Spinner's South by Southwest Q&As, and you'll read some insightful stuff that goes off the Spinner script. But mostly, Spinner's South by Southwest coverage has been amateur-hour (via Arts Desk contributor Leor Galil). And often, the bands noticed. Take this Japandroids interview:

What's your biggest vice?

Probably last year's September issue.

What's in your festival survival kit?

Water and a seat.

What's your biggest vice?

Probably last year's September issue.

With several dozen D.C. artists attending South by Southwest, it was inevitable that some would end up in the Spinner hot seat. After the jump, check out how they put up with Spinner's citizen scribes.

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INTERVIEWEE: Vandaveer, the gentle, folky project of former These United States member Mark Charles Heidinger.

INTERVIEWER: Simona Rabinovitch, who "covers music, pop culture and travel for the Globe & Mail, Lonely Planet, Dazed & Confused, and more. She's also an editor at Zink Canada, works in TV, and is writing her first book. She enjoys carrots, basslines, and practicing her Russian accent."

THE INTERVIEW: Heidinger gives a few honest (if jokey) answers before realizing he's participating in the least human interview of his life. From the end of the interview:

Who was your first celeb crush?

According to the scrapbook my mother kept, when I was seven I wanted to be a "mommy." When I was eight, after the Big Talk, I wanted to be a daddy. Ergo, my first celeb crush was Michael Jackson but my first self-aware celeb crush was Madonna.

Beatles or Stones?

Definitely.

What's the craziest thing you've seen or experienced while on tour?

The mirror in the morning.

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Dry. And wry.

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INTERVIEWEE: The Mynabirds, former Georgie James member Laura Burhenn's soulful, classicist claim to the legacy of Dusty Springfield.

INTERVIEWER: Anneliese Curtis Place, no Spinner bio. Great MySpace page, though.

THE INTERVIEW: Burhenn's either oblivious or a good sport. She doesn't even wince at the cookie-cutter questions:

Describe your sound in your own words.

I had always wanted to make a record that sounds like Neil Young doing Motown. After Georgie James broke up, I went back to the idea of hymns and melodies that have been passed from generation to generation. I went into the studio to make this Neil Young doing Motown thing. I had been listening to a lot of Dusty Springfield, Bobbie Gentry, and other amazing female singers like Carole King and Grace Slick. A little bit of gospel, soul and a little bit of straight country. There is something very comforting about it. The whole record is really about loss and recovery, I wanted to make music that felt comforting, that people felt familiar with, like family.

As opposed to, like, someone else's words?

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Undercooked.

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INTERVIEWEE: DJ Gavin Holland, who's about to move his popular Nouveau Riche dance party to the new U Street Music Hall.

INTERVIEWER: Rika Nurrahmah, no bio. According to Nurrahmah's blog, the writer is a "Junior in the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University who bathes herself in the dandy pleasures of life."

THE INTERVIEW: Holland gives a pretty interesting interview, even though the stock questions are more band- than DJ-appropriate. This one's just weird:

If you had to be on a dating show, how would you pitch yourself?

Dead sexy, ambitious, loves to party, skilled at DJ-ing, and tender and caring. I am a great boyfriend!

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Smoky.

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INTERVIEWEE: Nadastrom, the house duo of DJs Dave Nada and Matt Nordstrom.

INTERVIEWER: Patrick Shea, no bio.

THE INTERVIEW: Shea works the terrible canned queries into a pretty cohesive interview. Not bad.

For those of us who can't guess, how did you come with your band name?

Dave: Man. It was definitely not the first thing that we were gonna do. You know, obviously it's a partnership and wanting to reflect both our names as individual producers and artists. By the way, Nada is not my last name, it's a nickname I got from this punk band I was in called De Nada. The sad part is, a lot of people will kind of miss that. But the sadder part is when people call us 'Nada Storm.' And sometimes it's our friends.

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Mesquite.

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INTERVIEWEE: Meredith Bragg, the delicate folkie who's way more adventurous than he gets credit for.

INTERVIEWER: Jessica M. Alexander, no bio.

THE INTERVIEW: There is absolutely nothing about this Q&A that suggests Alexander has ever listened to Bragg's music. The intro:

As part of the Kora Records showcase, Washington D.C. artist Meredith Bragg makes a second appearance at SXSW, with a new record forthcoming in 2010. Spinner recently spoke with him about his visit to Texas, where he'll play some new songs and get out of the blistering cold.

So I've learned that: Bragg has played South by Southwest before, he's recording an album, and D.C. is cold.

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Plain fucking awful.

This was the third violent incident inside the club in a week, police said. "Whenever there is a weapon inside of a club I'm going to do an emergency closing," District Police Chief Cathy Lanier told the Post. While Love is closed, police will examine the violent incidents and review the club's security.

- The Office of Future Plans' appearance at DC9 on Wednesday—which I blurbed here—is canceled. According to booker Steve Lambert, the J. Robbins-led group had a scheduling conflict. Adam Franklin & Bolts of Melody and the Jet Age will still perform.

- Apparently the LateNightShots New Year's Eve party really sucked.

- A great All Our Noise session with Typefighter, who dropped an EP last year that I've been meaning to write about for a while. This'll have to do for now.

- Wale, Phil Ade, and J. Cole perform at the 9:30 Club on New Year's Day:

- A new video from local DJ duo Nadastrom: