Sound experiments galore, courtesy of Sonic Circuits: Eli Keszler, Benjamin Nelson, Ben Miller, Berührung, David Pate, and Yolt perform at Pyramid Atlantic. 8:30 p.m. $8.

Prog, revisited: Nektar, Brainticket, and Huw Lloyd-Langton (from Hawkwind) get noodly and long-winded at Jaxx. 8 p.m. $25.

The band's origins are dark, but North Carolina's The Love Language knows how to write a pop song. 9 p.m. at Rock & Roll Hotel. $12.

Producer/songwriter Dntel is also one-half of The Postal Service. He makes clicky, acoustic-flecked electronic music for emo kids. 9:30 p.m. at Red Palace. $10-$12.

These days, German duo Digitalism traffics in big, gooey electropop songs. 8 p.m. at 9:30 Club. $30.

Gipsy Kings: The soundtrack to your produce-buying experience in Takoma Park. Or, Toy Story 3. Tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m. at Wolf Trap. $25-$42.

American Idols Live!: Exactly what it sounds like. 7 p.m. at Verizon Center. $45-$65.

Fourplay and Marcus Johnson Project: It does not get any smoother than this. 7:30 p.m. at Carter Barron. $24.50.

FILM

City Paper film writer Tricia Olszewski recommends The Names of Love, which opens tonight at Bethesda Row. Sara Forestier is Baya, a liberal who sleeps with right-wingers in order to convert them; Jacques Gamblin is Arthur, a conservative who just can't get enough of her. "Their ensuing relationship is rocky for them," says Olszewski, "but delightful for the viewer."

THEATER

Tonight and this weekend, catch reprisals of four Fringe shows at Warehouse: Flyboy, The Bird, But Love Is My Middle Name, and Cabaret XXX: Les Femmes Fatales. Tickets are $15 per show at City Artistic Partnerships.

ALCOHOL

Beer week wraps up this weekend. Check out our list of the remaining events.

Progressive rock has been a niche genre since it largely receded from public consciousness in the late 1970s. Like any niche, it has a small base of insanely dedicated fans, and Romantic Warriors, a documentary airing in the D.C. area several times over the next few days, is a paean to those devotees.

It's easy for prog fans—even casual ones with little exposure to the scene's surprisingly prolific underground—to enjoy Romantic Warriors. There are interviews with key figures in the current scene, including locals like Silver Spring's Steve Feigenbaum (owner of Cuneiform Records, which ironically prides itself on publishing outre music well outside prog's traditional genre confines) and Baltimore's Mike Potter (owner of Orion Sound Studios, which regularly hosts live performances by obscure prog and avant-rock bands). There's a fair amount of recent concert footage from a diverse range of obscure bands, as well as some excellent archival footage of British '70s stalwarts Gentle Giant. Those already into the music will eat it all up.

But Romantic Warriors lacks a cohesive narrative. Even for someone intimately familiar with the modern prog scene, the film feels like a pastiche of interviews and live footage rather than a truly well-crafted examination of the genre, its history, and its future. The documentary kicks off with a brief but surprisingly well-done timeline of prog as a genre; new fans and neophytes will find it quite useful, while old fans will doubtless delight in having more fodder for interminable debates about genre boundaries and whether or not such-and-such band "is really prog." But after that intro, the filmmakers jump to interviews and footage from the major U.S. prog festivals, and there is no obvious rhyme or reason to how the coverage is ordered.

Non-prog fans may also be confused by the documentary's unusually diverse set of performance footage. There are "traditional" symphonic prog bands such as Maryland's Deluge Grander, whose music evokes the grandiosity attempted by the classic '70s bands; there are jazz-rock fusion bands like Italy's DFA; there are bands that draw from a vast array of folk musics, like Mexico's Cabezas de Cera and Japan's Qui; there is the wonderfully understated solo instrumental music of Virginia's Rob Martino; there is even a bit of the uncategorizable avant-garde in Chicago's Cheer-Accident. The filmmakers' dedication to the truly underground part of the prog scene, and their decision to emphasize the current scene rather than focus on classic bands, is commendable. For existing fans, who understand why all these different bands fit into the same genre, it's wonderful to see a spotlight on the dark corners of the prog world. The uninitiated may just find it disjointed.

With all that in mind, Romantic Warriors is far from entirely incoherent. There are several themes that will be familiar to a fan of virtually any niche genre: prog as an outcast genre, prog as a labor of love on the part of both musicians and fans, prog as an international and vastly diverse scene, and, predictably if somewhat problematically, prog as a superior art form compared to more mainstream music. It's fascinating to hear various Important People weigh in on these issues, usually unprompted. We get some insight into what Feigenbaum considers strong sales figures (hint: the numbers are not huge), some interesting tidbits about how promoters at such festivals as NEARfest and ProgDay choose their lineups, and some quotable (for better or worse) gems like Gentle Giant's Gary Green saying, "We have to understand that [Top 40 music] is not music, should not be considered music, because that is fashion."

What we hear over and over again in these interviews is the sense that prog, ideally, is separated, but not completely isolated, from other forms of music, including the mainstream. Prog plays by different rules, but at the same time draws influences from everywhere it can, creating a rich and delightfully internationalized scene that—at its best—revels in the mixing of the old and the new. While I do wish the filmmakers had given a bit more attention to the bleeding edge of experimental music—they were present and filming at the first Avant Fairfax, for instance, yet that festival receives no coverage in film's the final cut—I respect that they needed to draw the line somewhere.

The end result isn't perfect, but Romantic Warriors, as a labor-of-love film about a genre that truly is a labor of love for everyone involved, is an illuminating peek at an eccentric underground scene. For anyone who has been involved in the scene to any extent in recent years, that's certainly good enough.

The film airs tonight on WHUT-TV at 10pm, and four more times between through Tuesday, May 24. Check the film website for the additional air times.

Camlin is still a part of Baltimore's Wham City arts collective, but she recently moved to Chicago, where she and bandmate Albert Schatz play together. Last July, they came through D.C. as Altered States; now they're going as Wumme. They keep things simple and psychedelic: She drums, he plays synths, they both chant.

The duo performs tonight in D.C. with another musician with Baltimore ties,sitarist Ami Dang, as well as D.C.'s Hume. Dang's songs take an incline toward classical Indian music, but she bends her singing and playing with effects pedals, creating an experimental twist to her sound. Some of her songs also take a folkier approach, like her cover of Dolly Parton's haunting "Jolene." Dang will release record this December on Ehse Records.

After nearly a month of touring in August and releasing its EP Penumbra, Hume doesn't seem to be slowing down. The group performed at Sonic Circuits with a vibraphone player and a cellist, and later this month, it'll bring back its Fat Daughter String Quartet, featured on a 2009 release, for Baltimore's Soft Fest, an acoustic-related music festival. In between, the band is working on a new 7-inch, "Inverse Fireworks," due out in December.

The show takes place at Paper Sun, located in the alley off of Monroe Street NW between 11th and 13th streets in Columbia Heights. Music starts around 7 p.m.

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?