Tonight at the Velvet Lounge. a rare opportunity to catch two artists active in the Beijing underground experimental music scene: P.K. 14 and Xiao He. Active since 1997, though with only one original member in the current lineup, P.K. 14 is one of the most influential bands in that scene and plays an energetic brand of post-punk. Xiao He is much more “out,” with recordings showcasing surrealist folk, free electronic improv, and dadaist vocal experiments. More information about these artists can be found at Maybe Mars, with free recordings available for download.

Tonight’s show is at 10pm, $10. Xiao He will also be performing a special show at Georgetown’s Govinda Gallery on Saturday at 8pm. Free admission.

On Sunday, a virtual all-star cast of free improv musicians hits Bossa in Adams Morgan for an event in which two silent films, Order From Chaos and Shades of Jazz in Noir, will be screened and accompanied by a live improvised score. The mighty lineup includes Herb Robertson, Oscar Noriega, Vattel Cherry, Hans Koch, Jack Wright, and locals Ed Ricart and Sam Lohman. Ricart—pictured above playing with Matta Gawa in Baltimore—helps curate the Bossa events and promises that this will be something special. Starts at 8pm, $8.

Partyline (2005-present): Fascination with the riot grrrl movement burned brightly and briefly, but the members of Bratmobile—which formed in 1991—kept making music, on and off, until 2002. Sort-of based in D.C., Partyline isn’t the first other project for singer Allison Wolfe, but it’s had the most staying power. The band’s name sort of reminds me of that chirpy Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie where they share a phone line, but Partyline’s music—snotty, high-adrenaline, feminist—quickly corrects that association. The trio plays at the Velvet Lounge tomorrow night at 9 p.m. with Edie Sedgwick and Noisy Pig. Tickets are $8.

More riot grrrl second acts after the jump: flowcharts, riots in MTV studios, and Christina Aguilera!

Julie Ruin (1998): When Bikini Kill split up in 1998, singer Kathleen Hanna recorded a one-off album under the sobriquet Julie Ruin. Sonically, it’s a bridge between Bikini Kill and Hanna’s later electroclash outfit Le Tigre. The lyrics, too, are of the same smart, anarcho-feminist mold, but they also irreverently take measure of riot grrrl itself. Take “Aerobicide,” whose spoofy video plays with the cop-show aesthetic of Beastie Boys’s “Sabotage” promo, and contains mustachioed suits strategizing how to sell riot grrrl. Best shot? A flowchart in which all arrows point to “dance party.”

Sleater-Kinney (1994-2006): This jagged Olympia, Wash.-based band emerged from Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, and took the riot grrrl ethos to its largest audience yet. The best testament to the trio’s success? None of the Sleater-Kinney fans I know have the same favorite album. Also, member Carrie Brownstein’s Moniter Mix blog is one of the Web’s best blends of hard thinking and excellent taste.

Comet Gain (1993-present): The members of the U.K. band Huggy Bear all joined other groups, none better than Comet Gain. This jangly outfit featuring bassist Jon Slade—one of the few males to play in a riot grrrl band—formed around the time Huggy Bear started a minor riot in an MTV studio, thus earning canonization by British rockists. Production assistants have rested easy since: Comet Gain’s vibe is decidedly calmer.

Le Tigre: (1998-present): Kathleen Hanna’s second second act. Originally conceived as the back-up band for Julie Ruin, Le Tigre pumped out three loud, rude, and synthy releases beginning in 1999, and is still making music in 2009—with Christina Aguilera. Don’t get snooty: A decade after the fact, Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” remains the best part of any dance party where people have the chutzpah to play it.

To hear its members tell it, Girl Loves Distortion is a group obsessed with substance and sound. “I can’t sing songs that are about nothing,” Jenn Thomas, who sings and plays drums and keyboard, told me yesterday, a few minutes after my voice recorder had run out of memory. She had much to say about music as an instrument of societal change, about women making independent music, and about Girls Rock! DC (she was running late, in fact, from a meeting for the girls-only rock camp, which she helps run).

Thomas’ bandmate, singer/guitarist/bassist Christopher Goett, showed enthusiasm for more aural topics—like why he loves My Bloody Valentine and colored vinyl, his band’s jagged, layered post-punk, and its studio sessions with Hugh McElroy in 2007 and Devin Ocampo this past winter.

The latter session, at Inner Ear Studios, yielded You Better Run, Your Highness, which the group (Steven Rubin is the third member) drops this week on its own Etxe Records. Girl Loves Distortion plays Velvet Lounge Friday with Trophy Wife and Thee Lexington Arrows to celebrate the release.

After the jump, my (condensed) interview with Goett and Thomas.

Washington City Paper: It seems your first record—most of it was very visceral, and then there were a couple more electronic numbers. But this one is more coherent.

Christopher Goett: I would totally agree with that. While I love our first record for what it is, in terms of documenting where we were at the time, I think it represents us figuring out how to play together. We got into the studio in Summer 2007 so we were just playing together for over a year. The last song on this new record is actually one of the first songs we ever played together, in ‘06.

Washington City Paper: I was going to ask about that song [“Ascend”]. I think you can read it as a bit of a band manifesto. Or at least that’s how I read it.

Christopher Goett: Yeah, yeah. It was literally the first song we played together. I kind of came in with those rough chords … those lyrics, they’re a little bit nostalgic, a little bit about getting a sense of your time and place. And that’s kind of how we approach a lot of things. I work for a nonprofit. I met Jenn at a community nonprofit in Northeast D.C. [eSharp Music Center] I think we’ve been involved in community in a lot of ways. I know it sounds cliché but it’s important to us.

Washington City Paper: It seems you write a lot about neighborhoods.

Goett: Yeah, I think in neighborhoods [he laughs again]. I was a community organizer for several years.

Washington City Paper: The blog party line seems to be that you’re one of the last bands embodying a “D.C. sound.” Do you buy that?

Goett: I have mixed feelings about that. I think most people are saying that as a compliment, but when I think of the D.C. sound, I think of a wide swath of kinds of music. There’s so many different kinds of bands. If you take Teen Beat or DeSoto or Dischord, even within there there’s a large spectrum. I love the D.C. “sound,” I suppose, and I’m not ashamed to be part of it at any stretch. I am a part of this community, and I’m entrenched in it and I like it. It’s one of those things [where I say], “Oh yeah, that’s really nice, but I don’t really know what that means.”

Washington City Paper: Can you tell me how the band formed?

Goett: Steve and I were in a band called Eight Track Mind that kicked around for most of ‘05 and some of ‘04, and it was becoming a situation where band members were moving further apart … It was mostly Steve’s songs and I was kind of playing second guitar. And Jenn and I were working together … in a studio called eSharp. And so kids were learning midi and learning guitar, bass, drums … it was actually really cool. Some young Go-go bands started cropping up. And so Jenn and I worked at the same nonprofit right around when our other band was stopping, and I knew she was an awesome drummer. And I said, “Hey, are you interested in playing rock again?” [Jenn Thomas walks up] … that was probably March of ‘06. We played a house show, I think in May …

Thomas: It was pretty much “let’s do it right now. O.K.” Then it what was like, “O.K. it’s working. Now let’s keep going.” And that’s that.

Goett: We all bring a different thing to the table.

Washington City Paper: What are those things?

Goett: I mean our perspective in terms of our library. That’s just an audiophile term, sorry, but I mean our collection. I love My Bloody Valentine, Ride and shoegaze stuff as much as I love punk, like T.S.O.L. and The Germs and all that other stuff.

Washington City Paper: … like the horror-rock T.S.O.L.?

Goett: No, the earlier stuff, please. [Everyone laughs.] And then Jenn turned me on to the Big Boys and stuff I wish I’d heard about … We’re not one-note in terms of where we’re coming from. I don’t mean to sound nerdier than I need to be, but I think that it helps. Steve has a certain proclivity where he’s coming form, I have a certain proclivity, Jenn has a certain proclivity …

Thomas: Steve comes from a little bit more of a smoother background.

Goett: Actually, Steve was in a hip-hop band for 10 years.

Thomas: And he comes from a melodic classic-rock [background], like Pink Floyd, and he really loves the stories behind the music and he brings in a lot of that in lyrics. … And my background is more like protest punk, like early D.C. stuff. I came from Austin to here, and I was at University of Texas for a while and saw the Big Boys and Minor Threat. And I moved up here as a skate punk. At some of the shows I remember being the only girl in a bright yellow Zorlac shirt amid an entire sea of people dressed in black. I was wearing cowboy boots and people were like, “whoa …”

–

Photo by Kristian Whipple. You can hear songs by Girl Loves Distortion on its Web site and MySpace page, and purchase You Better Run, Your Highness at www.etxerecords.com or in local record stores.

“Wasn’t he just here?” you might be thinking. Well, yes, but the last time famed free-jazzer Peter Brötzmann played the Velvet Lounge, just a few weeks ago, he wasn’t backed by a rhythm section straight out of the extreme metal world.

Full Blast sees Brötzmann in a trio with electric bassist Marino Pliakas and whirling dervish/drummer Michael Wertmüller. Pliakas and Wertmüller both indeed have metal backgrounds, and if you can imagine a grindcore band going full tilt with Brötzmann wailing mercilessly on top, you’ve got the right idea. Since I can’t make tonight’s show, I caught this trio last night at the Windup Space in Baltimore, and, just like two years ago at The Red Room, it was a show of epic proportions. Full Blast builds tension relentlessly, and while the music ebbs and flows, the overall feeling is of being swamped underneath an exhilirating wall of sound.

If Brötzmann and Wertmüller are obvious focal points, the crashing waves in this sea of noise – Brötzmann because he’s Brötzmann and Wertmüller because he is absolutely one of the most amazingly dextrous drummers I’ve had the pleasure of watching – Pliakas is the undertow: dangerous, unpredictable, rising with unexpected ferocity at various points in the music. Seeing the trio together in action is a revelatory experience, and this is pretty much mandatory if you’re a fan of free jazz, noise-rock or extreme music. And if you found Brötzmann solo a bit too much to handle, Full Blast is more accessible, even if simultaneously more extreme.

Full Blast plays at the Velvet Lounge tonight; PRV Trio and The Undisco Kidds are opening. Doors at 7:30, show at 9, $12, don’t miss it.

Check out some more photos from last night’s show after the jump. Full gallery here.

At the Windup Space, a brand-new free improv trio calling themselves Matta Gawa opened. This trio included guitarist Ed Ricart, pictured below, who will also be playing tonight as one-third of PRV Trio.

That’s not to say that I didn’t want it to. I mean, love Heavenly and McCarthy records as much as the next bookish, sensitive, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing guy. But in keeping with that indie-stereotype, I thought I was completely alone in a lonely world of philistines and haters and that C86 was dead. You know, right up there with IDM on the scrap heap of unsalvageable sub-genres.

Fortunately, I was wrong, though. Slumberland is back to putting out good records, Vivian Girls have music videos, and when I was at SXSW I couldn’t cross the street without stumbling into a Crystal Stilts show. And now there’s Liechtenstein, who do pretty much the same naive and reverb-soaked style of pop as the bands listed above, only with elegantly arranged vocal harmonies.

Liechtenstein, Sundresses @ Velvet Lounge
915 U Street NW
9 pm, $8

The solo was classic Brötzmann, requiring great intellectual energy to penetrate his harsh, often shrieky tone for the melody and pace (”rhythm” isn’t quite the right word) of his tenor/alto/soprano saxes and clarinet. The clarinet was a particularly intense tune, Brötzmann running his fingers up and down the (much simpler than a saxophone) keyboard, hard—as if sanding down the burnished wood—and blowing with such force that he was audibly grunting.

Brötzmann’s ferocity was impressive…but honestly hard to take in a large (nearly 60-minute) dose. Without an accompanying ensemble, however chaotic, it’s hard to stay with his many twists and turns; my mind wandered, and I looked at my watch more times than I care to admit.

So, when Brötzmann called intermission after the solo, I decided to get a recharge — and headed over to 1905, in 9th Street’s Little Ethiopia corridor. D.C. trumpeter Joe Brotherton was playing his regular Thursday gig with his Cricket Fusion Quartet, featuring bassist Oliver Albertini, James Brown veteran Mousey Thompson, and 19-year-old tenor saxophonist Elijah Balbed — already one of the scene’s hottest up-and-comers. They were starting Art Blakey’s “Moanin’” when I came in, then moved back to their usual 100% improvised tunes. The solos from all four were killer, their interaction edgy and dramatic; the audience was rapt and the staff were delighted. “They’re playing some different shit tonight,” I heard the bartender tell one of the waiters. “I like it!”

Thus re-oriented, I ducked back out of 1905 and back to the Velvet Lounge just in time to see one of the most transcendent sets of free group improvisation ever performed in this town. Largely drawn from Verrastro’s large experimental collective Kohoutek, Chromatic Mysteries created an atmosphere of alien psychedelia in which Brötzmann was a natural fit: two additional saxes, guitar that wandered mostly through the lower registers (and had more than a little freaky noise from a console of pedals and electronic equipment), and drums and percussion (marimbas, mostly). The sync between the three saxophonists was uncanny, but the whole ensemble’s ability to listen to and follow each other was astonishing and as rewarding on the surface as in penetrating.

Perhaps this second set would have been just as good had I not gone to 1905, but it was nonetheless a refreshing, stabilizing experience. So a hat tip to Brotherton and his band – it ain’t easy to compete with a monster like Peter Brötzmann. You guys held your own without even trying.

At any rate, this year should be even clumsier, weirder, and better (relatively speaking) than the last, at least if the line-up below is any indication.

DNA Test Fest II @ Velvet Lounge
$10/1-Day Pass $15/2-Day Pass
915 U Street NW, Washington, DC

Friday: True Womanhood, Screen Vinyl Image, Rosemary Krust, Lampshades, Pygmy Shrews, Pfisters, Armida & Her Imaginary Band.

Saturday: Pink Reason, Kurt Vile, Drunk Driver, The New Flesh, Twin Stumps, Unholy Two, Eightyfive.

If your scaled-back, ramen noodle budget allows for such luxuries as rock and roll shows on a week night, then the Velvet Lounge is offering up a doozy this evening: Not only are Baltimore hip-hop knob twiddlers Food For Animals and cacophonous a capella goddesses Lexie Mountain Boys on the bill, but San Francisco dub-punkers Mi Ami will also revisit the District (two of the band’s members, guitarist/vocalist Daniel Martin-McCormick and bassist Jacob Long, were both in the raucous DC Dischord band Black Eyes).

Mi Ami is in the midst of a massive tour to support their new album, Watersports, which has been absolutely killing our stereos since it dropped in mid-February. Equal parts urgent and hypnotic, chaotic and funky, Watersports is a truly compelling, relevant rock record that goes well beyond the wealth of genres it references. You can preview a cut from the new album on Quarterstick’s Web site via a download of the awesome track “New Guitar,” which is discussed further in the following interview.

The band dropped off Baltimore tour-mates Thank You last night after a show at Floristree, ending the co-tour and beginning the circuit back west on their own, stopping off at SXSW along way.

Washington City Paper recently caught up with Daniel while the group was on the road from the Northwest down into California, which didn’t bode well for a cell-phone conversation throughout their mountainous trek. Despite a steady stream of dropped connections and static-laden reception, Daniel was kind enough to chat about the tour and the new Mi Ami record. Full text after the jump, details for the show at Velvet Lounge below.

Mi Ami
Food For Animals
Lexi Mountain Boys
@ Velvet Lounge
915 U Street, DC
9pm
$8
18+

WCP: So you all started this tour with Thank You in early February?

DMM: Yeah, we played our first show in Denver on the 5th — last night [February 23rd] was our first night off. And we’ve got one more night off in March, but we pretty much have shows every night.

WCP: Well it’s a pretty grueling schedule. Are you used to such an intense itinerary? How do you cope with so much time on the road?

DMM: It’s hard work, but it’s good to play. Up until when we started getting the tour set up, I was getting nervous at home just wanting to go out and play live. In a way it’s depleting, but it’s also refreshing, because I think it’s a really good thing to do. I dunno — it’s fun. It’s fun and hard and a lot of things. Day to day, it’s been monotonous, but it’s also really deeply satisfying in other ways.

WCP: What’s been the best show so far?

DMM: We’ve had a couple really good ones — two really good ones in Chicago. We also had a good one in Denver, at this warehouse called Rhinoceropolis. And there was a really great show in Ann Arbor, and Iowa City — I feel like those shows really stood out. Both the Chicago shows were at legitimate venues, but the ones in Iowa City, Ann Arbor and Denver were all in weird spaces, which I think gives us something. Sometimes clubs are really nice, but a lot of clubs are really shitty, or will be nice but have shitty sound men, or will have good sound men, but won’t promote the show very well, so I dunno. We have better shows that have something a bit more personal going on. But the Chicago shows were really good, even though they were in clubs, but I guess that’s just an exception to the rule.

WCP: So on your new album, Watersports, you pretty much set up and played most everything live in the studio, right?

DMM: Yep.

WCP: Is that an accurate representation of how you sound live? Are there any major differences between your record and your live show?

DMM: Yeah, we didn’t really do anything different than we do live on the recording. We did overdub the vocals, but the only thing that’s gonna be different live is that the rendition of the songs will be particular to that night. We do improvise a bit, and the songs and riffs grow and change over time. But I think the one thing that we’re happy with about the record is that there’s the sound of us actually playing together, and going into all the changes together. We don’t have a lot of set changes — the changes in the song are set in that they go in a certain order, but they’re not set as a certain number of repetitions per part, so we have to feel that out every time we play it and coordinate with each other. Part of that is eye contact, and part of that is just really listening to how the others build, and letting yourself be flexible when you’re playing. Always knowing where you are and where the other people are, to some degree. Every performance of the song is just one performance of the song, and the song is sort of this loose structural concept with room for variation. And then there’s an essence that you try to tap into through these constructs.

WCP: So the songs are constantly evolving?

DMM: Well, we don’t really talk about it a whole lot — they kind of change on their own accord. A lot of it is about finding certain things that work or don’t work, and exploring those to see how long they work for. Our songs aren’t very complicated; there’s not a lot of little bridges or anything, it’s more down to the specifics of the performance, and the specifics are like what makes it come alive for us, the way we can really throw ourselves into trying to focus and play. It’s a weird thing: you might might have a little movement in the song that really makes it that much more vibrant for you, and by being able to tap into that vibrancy, you discover more things you can do that change the song subtly, but also help you reconnect with what the whole point of the song is. I don’t feel like we’re the kind of band to write perfect little songs. For us, we’re a live band, and we need to be able to have room to be present in the music every night, and it is gonna be different from night to night.

WCP: What’s the significance behind the title Watersports?

DMM: We had a couple different reasons for the name: First, we wanted something that would be strong, like a political statement. I liked the term Watersports a lot; it was already loaded with reading as a term for the sexual act. As a sexual practice, it seems really interesting to me as this way of deriving pleasure from this extremely humiliating thing — something that a lot of people consider deviant — but in a way, relates to a very powerful way with these forces that are running through your body. I was thinking a lot about how in some ways, everybody has these different forces moving through their bodies, informing their own actions — not any sort of really mysterious sense, but everybody has experiences of love, violent desire, and happiness, sadness, hunger, and all these different forces that you experience. There are ways of relating to them that can be — you could say positive or negative, creative or destructive — all sorts of different ways of engaging with or trying to deflect these experiences and these energies. It seemed to me that something like the sexual practice of Watersports was one way of relating to power, relating to violence, relating in a way that actually transforms these destructive forces into joy. But you know, only for a specific set of people. Not everybody is gonna want to use those those strategies; although deviant in one sense, it’s almost beautiful in a way — you know, relating to what’s often seen as the darker side of human experience.

At the same time in 2008, you also heard a lot about waterboarding as a torture practice, and you head a lot about water rations, like the depletion of the world’s water supply — crisis stuff. And I felt like “watersports” then took on this new meaning in a way. It’s not like a term in the same way as it is in the sexual practice, when you think about waterboarding and this torture dialog that was happening, “is it torture? is it not torture?” It most definitely is torture. And it felt like the dialog that surrounded it, the sort of general approach to the war in Iraq, or like world conquest, we felt like this weird, fucked-up game that these guys were just sporting, essentially. It felt like they were sporting with people as a game, like toying around, trying to decide the rules. It’s like the same power that you’re relating to in a way when you’re engaging in watersports as a sexual practice, but its being enacted upon other people violently, rather than created reciprocally or something like that. And it became clearer and clearer, at least in some respects, that the war in Iraq was motivated and used as a way to make money by the people that engineered it all, and we felt like, you know … fuck that, basically. Just like for a little bit of money — they don’t need the money — it’s just about winning, about being powerful, and playing this fucking game, so it’s really disgusting and upsetting.

So there was that, and we wanted to reflect that. But at that the same time, we wanted the title to be flexible too, because the music is not a manifesto. It’s a conversation, or a commentary, or a plea — it’s many things. The lyrics are one part, and the music is another part. And it’s material, so we didn’t want to bludgeon you, but we wanted to stake our claim. I don’t know if anybody’s gonna pick up on that, but we put it there for ourselves at least. And the third part is that it sort of feels like there’s an aquatic aspect to the record’s sound from the way we produced it, so maybe that would be the more … not “lighter,” like a joke, but maybe make it a little less heavy, in terms of an interpretation of watersports as this aquatic activity.

WCP: One of the things that you employ throughout the record is echo — it’s something that you use in the lyrics, the effects, and the production. Especially with the lyrics, is there an underlying theme that you’re trying to get at with the association of echo?

DMM: I can count two uses of it on the record off the top of my head, and they’re very different. The first is in “Echononecho” which is sort of about a raw music experience, like alienation or something like that. It started with this article I read about parenting, and how it’s a really formative experience for children to have an emotional reaction and seeing that echoed in their parents. It treats the experience as an acceptable and normal thing, if the parent is blasé or removed, then it can be an emotionally hampering experience. I read that one day in the New Yorker or something — it was mentioned in passing. But it struck me as really interesting, because it’s something that I see paralleled in the adult, while it’s not like everybody is just having these isolated experiences — people are really searching all the time for confirmation that whatever they’re experiencing is ok, and real. And at the time, I was really struggling in a personal relationship with somebody who I wanted very deeply to connect with, and in a sense it was the same, wanting to have your experience echoed and not just in a narcissistic way, but just to feel that you’re understood and accepted by people.

The other reference is in “New Guitar”: (sings) “Everybody’s talking to me, but I can’t hear the words they’re saying. Only the echo of my mind.” Yeah … that song, to me, is really touching. It’s just one of the ones that throughout it, or every time I hear it, I just think it’s a great song. I really like that feeling of isolation that mostly got expressed there …

–cellphone reception cuts out–

… But yea, it’s just like trying to understand one’s personal experience in the world, where you feel like a lot of other people are probably having like parallel experiences, but at the same time not always being able to connect … I don’t know, I’m not trying to write a Morrissey song. But it’s like, there’s a lot of stuff about life that’s pretty scary and a lot of stuff that’s pretty exciting, and how do you understand your place within this whole chaotic thing, I dunno …

WCP: Well I wanted to clarify one thing in particular about your lyrics in New Guitar; in the breakdown, do you say: “It’s 2008, we’re moving under the wall”?

DMM: Oh no, it’s “We’re moving up in the world.” That was kind of a riff on the anxiety about the coming election, because there was a lot of hope and excitement in the air, and I definitely could feel it too. But it’s also a certain wariness … I mean, it’s hard to get too excited about a politician, even though we wanted to so badly, because we needed change so badly, about the way we exist in the world. And really hoping that all the promises weren’t just a bunch of hype, I guess.

WCP: When was “New Guitar” written?

DMM: We wrote the bulk of it in late 2007, but that part came about last Spring — late Spring, I think.

WCP: Throughout Watersports, you seem to cultivate a feeling of paranoia and anxiety … is this a personal sentiment that you were trying to convey on the record, or were you trying to reflect the instability and unrest in today’s broader social/economic climate?

DMM: I think it just came naturally. We wrote most of the album in kind of a weird stretch for me. It’s very natural and acceptable to be worried about the state of global and political affairs, and also personally it was a pretty dark time for me, so it just came out very naturally. At the same time, I also didn’t want to just make some party record. Like a lot of bands just write some whatever lyrics and blow it off, and just write fun music, and that’s cool. But I felt like I just wanted to be real … I take art pretty seriously, and growing up in DC, it was definitely expected that you were gonna be intense about music. You know, if there’s one thing about the “DC sound,” it’s that I feel like you’re supposed to be intense, and not, you know … what’s the word I’m looking for? Uncompromising, or something like that. And although I don’t necessarily want to sound like that, it’s kind of a lesson in a way from living there … like don’t just make some light shit or something, you know?

WCP: Like you need to have a message?

DMM: Yeah, or just be real, I guess. Make as much as you can, and be real about it.

This could be the perfect getaway from all the official events.

This comes right on the heels of an excellent feature story in the nationally distributed improvised music magazine Signal to Noise, which explored the same DC experimental music scene. (That article is actually mentioned in the NPR story linked to above.)