*These are not political designations. We kinda just divided the room in half. Sorry if you're not comfortable with where you ended up. Shit happens.

Suggestion for improving this: Make it art therapy	tense and smelly
That's "conga" not "congo."	"but every single person you talk to from that time ... will say she was the most devastatingly powerful stage presence they'd ever seen"
If you were trying to think of the most 80′s thing possible, this might be it.	This is NOT the plot of this year's remake of Footloose
"he then anthropomorphizes them by making them dance to Foreigner’s 'I Want to Know What Love Is'"	Look for the BIG BUTT
CURTAINS TRANSFORM RESTAURANT	CAFETERIA DEFEATS GIFT SHOP
Somebody really needs to explain that divot in the mustard.	"I just want to reassure potential audiences that it doesn't smell"
Antoine M: "I had a dream I was rappin Jeru's "Da Bitchez" with Biggie"	Raheem DeVaughn: "All women are flirting on this flight.... The eyes can say many things the voice won't allow u to cause of the man or woman u traveling wit"
PROG	THUNDER
"She even gave everyone in attendance a copy of her latest book 'Satan’s Sisters.'"	Any list with Fatherfucker on it is all right by us.

The Muffins in Rockville in 1979

It’s a somewhat ludicrous thing to say about an event that spotlights so many alienating artists, but in its 10th year, the Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music feels, well, kind of big.

This year there are veteran prog and avant-rock draws, like Magma and Univers Zero, and the noise and improv fans that the festival has traditionally drawn can look forward to two of the most notable, critically adored names in those spheres: Fennesz and Merzbow. And so it’s a marquee year for the area’s umbrella of experimental music, whose homegrown acts can now regularly be seen at venues like Bossa in Adams Morgan, Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, and Orion Sound Studios in Baltimore.

But more than 30 years ago, D.C. also housed a constellation of progressive and experimental acts—a small scene that emerged but never quite flourished in the 1970s.

And then, says Steve Feigenbaum of the well-known, Silver Spring-based experimental label Cuneiform Records, D.C. punk rock killed it.

So it might be appropriate that The Muffins—an obscure, D.C.-based prog group that’s made music in the area since the mid-’70s—is headlining the first event of Sonic Circuits this Saturday. It’s a well-deserved spot. Despite its relatively under-the-radar status, The Muffins have made six challenging full-length albums; performed at numerous experimental music festivals, including at the prestigious Rock in Opposition festival in France; and collaborated with high-profile names like experimental guitarist Fred Frith.

While jazz-rock is the easiest label to apply to The Muffins’ music, no one descriptor suffices. Heavily influenced by the British “Canterbury” scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s (think early Soft Machine, Henry Cow, and more obscure practitioners like Hatfield and the North and National Health), The Muffins take this aesthetic and throw in collective improvisation, noise, and a touch of psychedelia. It’s a sound that at first impression can seem aimless and unfocused but, if you have the patience, eventually rewards.

This kind of demanding music is well in character with the progressive rock scene of the 1970s, and although D.C. was hardly a hotbed of prog, The Muffins weren’t alone. Grits (another jazz-rock band with a pair of out-of-print releases on Cuneiform) were an influence, and Muffins drummer Paul Sears lists a host of other D.C.-area groups of varying obscurity that formed at the time a loose local scene: Happy the Man, Crank, Love Cry Want, Sageworth, and Drums.

While the scene was small, it was active: Feigenbaum, 52, says he saw a number of “decent to pretty good” progressive rock bands at bars and outdoor shows. “Every bar used to have live bands back in the ’70s. That was a standard currency of the time… [but] The Muffins didn’t go over well in bars, because their music wasn’t good drinking music,” he says. “So for bands like The Muffins or Happy the Man or whoever, it was generally DIY spaces or ‘time to rent the Washington Ethical Society and do another show.’”

“Gigs were hard to come by,” says Sears, 57. “We did some university gigs, gigs in churches, coffeehouses, and a few nightclubs like the Psyche Delly in Bethesda, and Childe Harold in Dupont Circle.”

The Muffins’ DIY spirit didn’t end with gigs. The band—which also includes Tom Scott, Dave Newhouse, and Billy Swann, multi-instrumentalists all—created a label, Random Radar Records, which in the last few years of the 1970s released The Muffins’ first two official full-lengths, Manna/Mirage and <185>, and a handful of other recordings, including a U.S. pressing of the debut album by Art Bears, one of the earliest Henry Cow spinoff groups. Perhaps most importantly, Random Radar was a collaborative effort between The Muffins, Feigenbaum (who actually contributed some guitar parts to Manna/Mirage), and others. Feigenbaum helped keep the band’s music in print even after its initial demise.

That demise came in 1981, as The Muffins suffered the same fate as countless prog bands: changing musical trends and transient young members.

Feigenbaum blames punk. “It killed [the local progressive scene] dead,” he says. “You have to remember what punk did. For good or bad, punk was the great cleansing fire. It changed everything that came after. It’s very open now, but at the time, lines were drawn in the sand: Anything that existed before it was ‘bad.’ Anything that smelled of what came before was ‘bad.’”

In a punk-rock town like D.C., that seismic shift was pronounced, Feigenbaum says: “The audiences were getting smaller, the chance to be reviewed was getting smaller, and this for a band that had certainly paid some dues and had done some higher-level projects. What we were all doing was always marginalized, but by 1980 or ’81, it was marginalized and also mocked.”

Although Sears found the then-new D.C. punk scene “severely insular,” his judgment is a bit less harsh. “I thought we had more in common with some of them, and today I regret that we, or specifically I, did not try to initiate some collaboration,” he says. “We knew some of them. Tom Lyle from Government Issue was a friend of ours before he was in that band. He even set up at least two shows for The Muffins at American University that I can recall…When Fugazi hit the scene I thought I recognized a name—Canty. I knew Brendan Canty’s family back in the ’60s when he was, I’ll say, quite young!”

Regardless of the causes—and putting aside whatever a Muffins/Fugazi collaboration would’ve sounded like—after The Muffins’ split in 1981, Random Radar dissolved and Feigenbaum went on to found Cuneiform Records, which continued releasing challenging music in what Feigenbaum calls the “dark ages” of the 1980s. The Muffins found a posthumous home on Cuneiform, which reissued Manna/Mirage and <185> and has printed each of the band’s subsequent full-length recordings. This includes recent reunion albums Bandwidth (2002) and Double Negative (2004), recorded after the band reformed in the late 1990s for a gig at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room in Adams Morgan. That show happened after the band realized it still had an audience: Web reviews and retrospectives on The Muffins—an active and highly explorative Internet prog community developed in the 1990s—were almost universally positive.

Ironically Feigenbaum, perhaps the band’s biggest supporter (“They are pretty much single-handedly responsible for why I do what I do,” he says), was opposed to the reunion. “I’m a little ashamed to admit that I thought it was a bad idea, that they couldn’t do it again, that it just wouldn’t work,” he says. “They proved me quite wrong. And I’m glad. I think their work since their reformation is quite splendid and they still sound like themselves without repeating themselves.”

Since the release of their last Cuneiform full-length in 2004, The Muffins have played sporadic shows and festivals, made a short recording with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and are working on a new album, Palindrome. Of course, the band’s music is as unfashionable as ever, and its gigs remain few and far between, but now there’s now a thriving, open D.C. experimental music scene that exists beyond Sonic Circuits’ week of shows. In other words: The Muffins, cool or not, have young, like-minded peers.

That just leaves one problem: Sears is moving to Arizona immediately after Sonic Circuits, which means The Muffins’ D.C. shows will become even more rare. But that might be OK for a group that found a far-flung audience but few fans in its hometown. Says Sears: “We will work remotely and still play festivals.”

Photo courtesy Cuneiform Records

Zevious and Seabrook Power Plant were a perfect pair at Baltimore's Orion Sound Studios on Saturday night, each bringing a viciously complex brand of mathy rock to the table. Zevious' compositions stood out, building enormous tension and proving to be much more than just an exercise in counting out weird rhythms. Seabrook Power Plant was like a mix of extreme metal and prog, except with a banjo as lead instrument. It was about as ridiculous and amazing as that description would seem to imply.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Seabrook Power Plant:

Kevin Hufnagel led off with a contemplative solo acoustic guitar set:

Full gallery here.

What does Fan Death think about prog rock? What does Fan Death think about door polling? And what does Fan Death think about ELO? We don't know, but we bet that if we wrote about it, it'd get some serious hits.

1. D.C. Punk Vets Record Prog-Rock Song to Promote Novel
2. Snobpocalypse! Fan Death Unleashes Storm of Criticism, Butt-Hurt
3. Head-Roc's Mouth: Venue's "Polling" Practice Is Some Bullshit
4. Arts Roundup: McQueen Is Dead, Metropolis Lives Edition
5. Arts Roundup: ELO Should Play the Super Bowl Halftime Show Edition

This week ended with snow, but it also ended with PROG—in the form of “Song of the Great Kataklysm,” which author Jeffrey Rotter recorded with a number of D.C. punk-rock vets to promote his recent novel. We also looked at an eerie J.D. Salinger portrait, and people remained upset about Fan Death. But their ire's nothing a snowball fight won't fix: Go play outside, folks!

1. D.C. Punk Vets Record Prog-Rock Song to Promote Novel
2. Robert Vickrey's Salinger Portrait: A Myopic Reading
3. Photos: Epica @ Jaxx
4. Fan Death Records to D.C. Bands: "Stop Sucking"
5. Fan Death to D.C.: "We stand 100% behind what we said."

Much of the BLK JKS's press to date invokes afro-beat tinged comparisons to TV on the Radio, Bad Brains and Living Colour, though guitarist Mpumi Mcata brushes off the comparison game by encouraging "the reader to seek out and envision" rather than relying on, you know, critics.

The four-man group has erupted from South Africa as evangelists of any-influence-goes prog rock. Their latest, After Robots (Secretly Canadian), is a rousing yet challenging post-apartheid free-for-all. Such a frenetic melding of different styles, tempos, and instrumentations, though, can threaten to bury the central idea of a song.

"Funny you should say that," Mcata said. "We used to have talks about a return to innocence... We hope people follow and see and feel this music as we do; music—and not its mathematical sum, which in any case is just guitars, vocals, bass, brass drums, and piano."

D.C. residents will get their second chance to hear BLK JKS on Tuesday night at the Black Cat with openers Laughing Man. (After a coast-to-coast tour, BLK JKS will move on to Europe in support of After Robots.

"We are totally into D.C.," Mcata said. "Really interesting and suprisingly mixed open communities even if it was kind of together but not together together, which is kind of the case in most places, it's still beautiful to see people making an effort....re-imagining society in everyday mundanities; we're looking forward to it."

Prog-rock band Secret Machines frontman Brandon Curtis helped produced After Robots, and Mcata's said of his contribution, "He was there to mediate—expedite the process so to speak. The brother really helped us get to the sounds we wanted.... He was a little bit of amazing."

With so much going on, it must be difficult to reproduce After Robots onstage, no?

"The show is its own beast."

The BLK JKS also project a positive image of post-apartheid South Africa, a role they believe artists have in interpreting the political and social events that transpired in their country.

"Oh it's a major role...our part  is to be ourselves; no preaching or politiking—at least not yet. [Laughs.] You know, most of the world is unaware that such youths walk the streets of Africa."

BLK JKS plays with Laughing Man at 9 p.m. on Tues., September 29 at the Black Cat Backstage. $10.

Fresh off a well-reviewed performance at NEARfest, the most prestigious progressive rock festival in the United States (don't laugh), Mexican instrumental trio Cabezas de Cera are playing two dates this week in D.C. plus one in Baltimore. Cabezas de Cera aren't your typical bombastic prog band; rather, they combine folk, prog, free improv and a touch of the avant-garde into a fascinating and fairly uncategorizable mish-mash, and they've been doing it for about ten years now. While the basic format of the trio (plus a member credited as a "sound designer") is guitars/saxes/drums, in reality they play a bewildering array of instruments, from traditional instruments to nontraditional rock instruments like the Chapman Stick, plus a variety of homemade implements.

Cabezas de Cera are playing the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage tonight at 6pm sharp, then at Artomatic tomorrow night at 8:30pm. Both these shows are free. On Sunday, they will make an appearance at Orion Sound Studios in Baltimore alongside Might Could – you can expect a longer set at this show for your $15. Orion is at 2903 Whittington Ave, shows are usually scheduled to start around 8pm.

Have a listen at Myspace or check out their website for more info.

Image courtesy Cabezas de Cera's Myspace page

• Led Bib – Sensible Shoes
• Miriodor – Avant!
• The Ed Palermo Big Band – Eddy Loves Frank
• Positive Catastrophe – Garabatos Volume One
• Upsilon Acrux – Radian Futura

Let's see. This is all potentially good stuff. Perhaps most exciting (for me) is the Upsilon Acrux – this is a young avant-rock band who were once upon a time on D.C.'s own Planaria Records, whose last record Galapagos Momentum was a feast of heavy odd-time riffing. Miriodor are a Quebecois band who have a humorous and peculiarly Francophone take on avant-rock (you know it when you hear it); Ed Palermo has carved out a niche for himself reinterpreting Frank Zappa tunes, and by the name of this new album it doesn't seem like anything has changed.

Then there's the jazz. I know nothing about Led Bib, but apparently the Times (UK) said of them, "Sun Ra didn't die in vain," so that bodes well. Positive Catastrophe is a new group fronted by the always excellent Taylor Ho Bynum (and includes a favorite saxophonist of mine, Michaël Attias) and sounds really, really, interesting, purporting to combine Latin jazz and free/avant-jazz in a way that, as far as I know, hasn't really been done before. Cool!

I listened to the five tracks that comprise Phantom on the Horizon over 40 times (some tracks more than others) during the process of reviewing the Fall of Troy's new album for the dead-tree version of City Paper. As a result, I can sort of hum at least one guitar riff, which you can listen to below (and nobody hums to prog unless that prog is Rush).

But I'm not sure if listening to an album as many times as I did is good for the review process. Stuff that I didn't like the first time around grew on me, though that fact didn't make it into my review (the 400-word limit doesn't leave much room for a discussion of personal listening habits). On the other hand, aspects that stood out at first–red-hot guitar solos and great screaming come to mind–gradually faded as I grasped the significance of the album as a complete composition. Compared to other media for criticism, it's easy and–taking  a random sample from the music critics I know personally–commonplace for us to fall for the music we're supposed to be reviewing skeptically. (Why is it that good film critics seldom have this problem?)

However, I can think of some great albums (Say Anything's ...Is a Real Boy) and great bands (Radiohead) that I had to listen to over and over again before I saw what was so great about them.

For your listening pleasure, a few seconds of "A Strange Conversation," the second "chapter" on FoT's Phantom on the Horizon:

And here's a snippet from the review (or you can just read the whole thing):

"[I]t’s a worthwhile listen for anyone looking to dip a toe a into contemporary mainstream prog scene led by Coheed and Cambria, blending screamo vocals and mathcore rhythms with punk antics and an art-school sensibility. That’s a lot to pack into a tune, and Fall of Troy has recorded plenty of inaccessible or just plain noisy music in the past. (“Whacko Jacko Steals the Elephant Man’s Bones,” from 2005’s Doppleganger, oscillates between cacophonous technical sections and tuneless, distorted interludes.)"

I want to clarify that I don't think Coheed (who I used as a gold standard of sorts) is mainstream, or that there's any such thing as "mainstream prog," but that within prog you can find accessible and less-accessible music (big, resounding "duh"). Coheed and Cambria, the Fall of Troy, and–to a lesser extent–the Mars Volta are easier listening than Dream Theater and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Behold...The Arctopus–that's what earned FoT and Coheed the mainstream tag.

I still haven't decided if Phantom will make my top-10 list. I'd like to include at least one experimental/prog act, and I'm currently considering Idiot Pilot's reissued EP Heart is Long–even though it falls entirely on the experimental side.

Would anybody care to plug a 2008 prog album?