Reece loved music, but his parents hoped he’d go to college, then law school. So when he graduated in June, he struck an agreement with mom and dad.

“I said, ‘Just give [my music] one year… If I don’t do anything, then I’ll go to school,'” Reece says.

The agreement would end up changing the teenager’s life. In November, Reece posted his debut song to Soundcloud. Called “Ghost,” the sparse and moody track quickly picked up steam online. Months later, music website Pigeons and Planes featured the song, earning him even more attention.

Now, only a year after his debut, Reece is scheduled to open for major-label rapper Angel Haze at the Rock & Roll Hotel in D.C. Friday night. It’s his first show.

Reece calls the anticipation “nerve-racking,” but he doesn’t seem to regret choosing music over law school. “In my life, I never really had anything that I loved doing until I started doing music,” says the 19-year-old.

Reece — whose full name is Reece Miller, though he records under a mononym — began dabbling with music in December 2012 and immediately found it more exciting than the other options arrayed before him. By the following summer, he’d cobbled together a mixtape. He took a break from music to wrap up high school, but he jumped right back into it after graduation.

“I felt like I really wanted to prove not only to my parents but also to myself that I can do this,” says Reece, who lives in Woodbridge, Virginia. “I was really working hard to get somewhere — to get anyone to notice me.”

“Ghost” introduced listeners to Reece’s chill-inducing vocals and stirring lyricism. He’s since published three more songs on Soundcloud, all of which showcase his natural ability to emote.

“I am very happy, but I’ve also spent a lot of time not being happy,” Reece says. “It’s easier for me to write something sad than to write something really happy, because I feel like when I’m writing something sad, I’m writing something that’s honest.”

Reece’s propensity toward melancholy may stem from feeling like an outcast growing up. The youngest of five, he says he’s the only one in his immediate family who makes music — somewhat of a dream killer for the Jackson 5 aspirations he once had. Plus, he says, he was an odd kid.

“As a 9-year-old, instead of playing with the neighborhood kids, I was listening to Imogen Heap and, I don’t know, watching Ancient Aliens,” Reece says. “Maybe not weird, but different for my age. I was really interested in conspiracy theories and stuff like that. I don’t know why.”

Reece’s music doesn’t steer into alien territory, but he does vividly convey his feelings of loneliness — the rasp and vibrato of his falsetto channeling a distinct anguish. His cover art deepens the feeling: He likes to appear ghostly, his face a blur. (“I love using blurred photos for my cover art because I find it to be the aesthetic equivalent to the music,” he told Pigeons and Planes — though he posts plenty of selfies online.)

His latest track, “Don’t Go,” caught the ear of singer and rapper Angel Haze who, in addition to sharing Reece’s ties to Northern Virginia — she once lived in Springfield — is similarly known for the honesty and vulnerability in her music. In September, Angel Haze tweeted to her nearly 200,000 followers, “Been listening to [“Don’t Go”] my whole flight. Chorus is killer.”

Reece was stunned. “I started freaking out, but I didn’t really think that anything would come of it,” he says. “Then I got an email from her manager.”

Just a year into his life as a musician, Reece has already found thousands of listeners. But his songs come from a feeling of isolation, and he hopes to reach people in the same space.

“It was always hard for me to say how I feel,” Reece says. “But with my music now, I try to take everything I’m feeling and help people who are also feeling that way who may not have people to talk to about certain things.”

Reece plays with Beau Young and Angel Haze Nov. 20 at the Rock & Roll Hotel.

Ask the people behind promotions group WERC, and they might say it’s the present. That’s because the Atlanta event planners are bringing their alternative party, VIBES, to D.C. for the first time tonight.

“It’s all about the energy,” says WERC co-founder Will Edmond. “If you come to our party, whether you’re 18 or 40, you can still have fun. When people actually experience a whole different side of the clubgoing scene — we’re not about bottle service or ‘Come in and spend $100 to sit in this section’ — it’s really about having a good time.”

Tonight marks WERC’s first event outside of Atlanta, but VIBES has always had a link to the DMV region — particularly its more bracing, contemporary hip-hop scene.

Founded in April 2014, WERC looked to a DMV artist to set the tone for its first party. Producer Lakim, known for his work with ascendant Virginia rapper GoldLink and tastemaker collective Soulection, filled what was then a void in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene.

“[Lakim] kind of spearheaded what we wanted to represent,” says Xavier BLK, one of WERC’s resident DJs. “We realized a lot of Atlanta was listening to more of a futuristic, progressive fusion of Atlanta-based music with the 808s and the Southern bounce… but no one was bringing [those artists] out here.”

The group — which Atlanta’s Creative Loafing recently named the city’s “best creative event planners” — wanted to present an alternative to the pricey and predictable nightclub scene, a culture that’s been declining in popularity. WERC co-founder Will Edmond says VIBES focuses on music, particularly the stuff you won’t catch on the radio. (He cites Canadian producer Kaytranada and Seattle’s Sango — both of whom have worked with GoldLink — as examples.) That approach meshes well with D.C.’s existing alt-club scene, which draws a young-adult crowd to midcity venues including U Street Music Hall and Velvet Lounge.

Two selectors on VIBE’s bill tonight at Liv Nightclub are U Street regulars: DJs Native Sun (who’s already played the party in Atlanta) and Underdog. Headliner Elhae isn’t local — he’s an Atlantan, too — but he is a triple threat: a producer, singer and rapper.

For a group based in Atlanta, WERC has built surprisingly strong connections here.

“I went to Trillectro [in Maryland] this year, and hanging out with all the DMV people was great,” Edmond says. “I met a lot of people up there who are doing the same things we’re doing… and I feel like there’s a scene in D.C. that’s building.”

Xavier agrees. In a way, the VIBES party is practicing a form of diplomacy.

“It wouldn’t be right to just pop into another city that we respect without showing love,” the DJ says. “We want to represent what it feels like there, too.”

VIBES takes place tonight at Liv Nightclub in D.C.

The first collaboration between Maryland’s Coexist Music Group and Devin Jano, “Cloud 9” is appropriately light and fluffy.

It’s a slight departure for Coexist, an Anne Arundel County-based collective made up of four teenagers — King Caesar and Kimani (both age 19), Charlie Radical (18) and Surrency (17) — who explored a rougher sound with “Bang Bang.” This track has a bounce — one the group calls “modern retro.”

“[The sound] wasn’t fully intentional,” Charlie Radical writes in an email. “The concept grew from us having a liking for old and new music.”

“Cloud 9” is helmed by Baltimore singer Devin Jano, whose smooth vocals set the tune’s feel-good tone early. Coexist bring a youthful energy, one so buoyant they find themselves lifted off their feet in the song’s charmingly old-fashioned video, directed by Nathan Colby (watch it above).

Outside of this project, Jano and Coexist have formed another collective, Legacy, which the vocalist describes in businesslike terms.

“We’ve formed our own brand together to broaden our musical horizons for our collaborative releases and build social capital,” Jano says.

Legacy plans to release an EP in late 2015 or early 2016.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in a Christian community in Newport News, Virginia, Masego — real name Micah Davis — could be called musically blessed. He’s a vocalist who also plays cello, trumpet, drums, guitar and piano, but he specializes in the saxophone, both alto and tenor. So even though he could be classified as a hip-hop artist, that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. He prefers a genre of his own making: TrapHouseJazz.

Released in June, Masego’s Pink Polo EP (stream it below) is the fullest realization yet of his TrapHouseJazz style. It merges traditional jazz sounds — saxophone, scatting — with the thump of trap music and the swing of house. That combination is probably what attracted eclectic, tastemaking label and collective Soulection to the Virginian’s music: He works within hip-hop, but burrows deeper, down to its roots.

Masego doesn’t limit himself to just music, either; he dabbles in comedy (on Pink Polo and on social media, he plays a lecherous-but-lovable character called Uncle Sego, inspired by a Dairy Queen employee he’s known for years) and he’s even broken into tech, helping build an app that makes it easier for musicians to link up and collaborate. Called Network, the app is expected out next year.

Before Masego came to D.C. last week to play a midnight brunch hosted by Made in the DMV, Bandwidth asked him about his DIY approach to music composition, his love of comedy and how he sneaked onto Soulection’s radar with a bit of Internet trickery.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bandwidth: You don’t know how to read music. Do you ever plan to learn?

Masego: I feel like I need to learn it eventually just to open up another door of connections. There are some people who aren’t going to respect you if you can’t read music. I don’t need to, but I will [learn how] eventually, just so I can write sheet music and give it to people. Everyone communicates with music in a different way. With some people, if there’s not sheet music, they’re not playing it.

So what about writing music — can you do that?

If I sit down for an hour, I can figure it out, but I’m not fluent. I made my own rulebook. I made this chart of my own that’s not staff or music. [I] say, “This [symbol] represents a G note.” In my mind, I know what G sounds like. I show it to people and they’re like, “That’s not [notes].” But to me, it makes perfect sense.

I really just go with what my soul says. There’s not a lot of thinking in my music. I freestyle a lot of things and organize it later, and then it becomes a song. Or I just turn my piano on and put my hands on the keys and whatever happens, happens. It’s real soul-driven. Anytime I’ve tried to make this recipe for dopeness, it just doesn’t work.

I saw an interview you did back in January in which you said you wanted to get down with Soulection. About eight months later, you play their Sound Of Tomorrow show in L.A. How did you make that happen?

Basically, I ripped three songs from YouTube from Soulection recap videos, put it in a beat, played sax over it and titled it “Soulection x Masego 2015.” I was like, “The public is going to think that we collaborated,” and “[Soulection] is going to think [I’m] bold for stealing [their] content and playing sax over it, claiming that we’re about to be a thing in 2015.” So Joe Kay [a Soulection co-founder] found that and emailed me shortly afterwards. [Laughs] I’m pretty much like, “Come fight me if you think this is bad.”

You’re extremely active on Soundcloud and you work closely with people who are also active online. But some of those people are across the country, like Medasin, the Dallas producer you collaborated with on the Pink Polo EP. How does that dynamic work, versus recording with someone in person?

With younger producers nowadays, the Internet really works out the best. People are very, “I don’t want to tell you I don’t like this, I’m just going to change it.” It works out to where I do what I feel is dope, I send it off to you, you do your thing and then send it back and we just create this thing.

But as far as being in the studio with somebody, the vibe definitely has to be right because I’m not going to force it. I wouldn’t want someone to be like, “Create ‘Girls That Dance’ again.” Music doesn’t work that way for me. I don’t go in the studio with the mission to kill the game.

Tell me about TrapHouseJazz, the band.

There’s 100 people that are in TrapHouseJazz. In Virginia, people get it now. I had a bunch of auditions to see who understands that you can’t just play gospel music your whole life. I played some Soundcloud beats to see if they could get down with that, and then they were just in the band. So it’s two things after that. I can call you for gigs that make sense with you, and we just get these different combinations of instruments. I got a harp player, a stand-up bass, violin, violas. And then on top that, I have stems from everybody. So anytime I make a beat with their stems, it’s a TrapHouseJazz band song.

You made the song “Peace & Love” after the Charleston church shooting. Do you feel a certain social responsibility as an artist?

I’m aware and I feel like we should be consistent more as a culture. I try to help with that via music. I can try to allow someone to be changed by a song. I made “Peace & Love” right after Mike Brown [was killed]. First I just made a small loop, then another incident happened and I worked with it again. So each time something happened, I kept making that song. And by the end, “Peace & Love” kind of came out — the lyrics came last. I feel like it’s my responsibility to contribute to a good vibe in the world and to do what I can, when I can.

In addition to everything that you do musically, you have your app, Network. How did that come about?

Early on, I wanted to help out other people that were low-key. I feel like I was one of those low-key gems in Virginia, and I feel like a lot of my friends are as well. There are so many people that aren’t poppin’, but they should be. With the app, I tried to make an environment where everybody that’s dope could be in the public eye.

What I’ve been learning with music, at least at this stage, is that there’s not crazy money in it if you just do it the music way. If I just do shows, I’m not really [earning a lot] because I’m trying to bring my band with me. That is to say, I wanted to make something that was the foundation of my income and my lifestyle so that I could continue to do music for fun. I don’t want to create music or do a partnership because of the money. I don’t want to be money-influenced. A lot of my friends are [doing well], but music is not fun for them.

You have an alter-ego you call Uncle Sego. Who is he? Can you describe the marriage between your music and comedy?

There are, like, four people in my life that I enjoy making fun of, but it’s in a flattering type of way because they’re cool and influential people. [One of them is] the ice cream man that’s worked at Dairy Queen for as long as I can remember. He’s who he is 100 percent of the time. He’s got that Uncle Sego voice and he’s always hollering at women. Uncle Sego is a character that exists in a lot of places and allows me to have more fun onstage.

I think I structure my show around stand-up comedy, and we just sprinkle music into it. That’s just the easiest way for me to do what I do. Jamie Foxx was one of those people where I could see how you finessed the comedy and then hopped on the keys and then you’re making them laugh four seconds later. I felt most comfortable doing it like that.

It’s a sentiment echoed throughout the album’s nine tracks as Cosgrove interrogates both himself and his environment. On “Freddies Dead,” he refers to the death of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray and the protests that followed; on final track “Need Somebody,” he’s talking about the death of his love life.

Baby Need Food is produced by Robbie Anthem, who is based in upstate New York; the two never met face-to-face as they worked on the album. While working with a single producer can add up to a more cohesive sound, on this project it saps some of the range and intangible extra magic Cosgrove achieved on 2014’s UsVsRobots, which was produced, in part, by fellow DMVers Black Diamond, Royal and i.V.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Still, Anthem’s classic style meshes well with Cosgrove and lends a space to new sounds: Drums and basslines are right up front and, on “Black/Flawless,” a saxophone stands out. That richer sound bodes well for Cosgrove’s performance Sunday at the Landmark Music Festival — where the emcee plans to perform with a live band.

Ace Cosgrove performs Sept. 27 at the Landmark Music Festival in D.C.

Raupp is a 27-year-old Maryland native who works as a certified arborist, having earned his degree in environmental science and policy from the University of Maryland. Both his parents have strong pedigrees in science: His mother is a science teacher and his father is renowned entomologist Michael J. Raupp, also known as “The Bug Guy.”

But Brian Raupp’s main passion in life is hip-hop. He’s a rapper who’s made the rounds at music festivals like Artscape, Epic Fest and Broccoli City, performing under the name Brain Rapp. Meanwhile, his dad makes his own rounds on CNN, PBS, The Dr. Oz Show and WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, discussing the world of insects.

Raupp says he’s inspired by his dad, as different as their ambitions may be.

“He tells me all the time, ‘When I started doing this, never in my wildest dreams would I imagine I’d be on Good Morning America or talking to Kojo about bugs.’ You don’t get into entomology to be that,” Raupp says of his father. “The parallel between the two of us and our careers now… is that I didn’t ever get into rap to be famous. … I just never thought that anybody would really want to listen to me.”

In the four years since Raupp began performing, he’s made significant headway: He’s released three full-length projects, played regional venues and gigged at the A3C Festival, a major hip-hop gathering in Atlanta. True to his background in science, Raupp’s approach to marketing himself is methodical: He realized the value of moderation early on, and now he mainly plays shows that put him in front of new eyes. (He also knows how to make a clever promotional video.)

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Both of Raupp’s parents are supportive. Though, the elder Raupp admits that his son’s foray into rap gave him pause at first.

“Like any parent, I thought, ‘Whoa, after all this time and education, what’s up with this?’” Michael Raupp says. “I was a little concerned about the real odds that this choice could turn into a career that would allow him to pay the rent, put food on that table, and maybe have a family of his own if that is what he wanted to do,” Michael Raupp says. “But I also told him that if he had a dream, then he had to chase it.”

For Raupp, working up the courage to pursue hip-hop took time. He started writing raps at 13, but it wasn’t until he got involved with a hip-hop group at the University of Maryland called The Undergrounduates that he gained the confidence to start recording at 19.

An obvious student of hip-hop, Raupp writes cleverly candid and personal lyrics, each song exposing portions of his autobiography as he pays homage to the artists that inspired him.

On “Hello,” the opening track on his latest project Elevator Music, Raupp addresses the obvious head-on: “Hello, I’m Brain, I rap, I’m white.” It’s not a topic he shies away from, welcoming the opportunity to speak on both race and rap.

“I think it’s humbling,” Raupp says. “People lose their lives over this and I just get to feel uncomfortable because I’m the only white guy in a room — and I don’t feel uncomfortable, actually. The main thing is to always be adding to a narrative instead of trying to drive it, since that’s what white people have always done.”

Raupp attributes at least part of his racial awareness to his upbringing in Columbia, Maryland, a town created with the explicit goal of eliminating class and racial segregation. (It was here that he also met Elevator Music producer Nature Boi.)

Ultimately, Raupp hopes to build a bridge between science and hip-hop, too.

“There’s a social responsibility [that comes with] with being an artist,” Raupp says. “That’s the way I see my part.” He says his audience might not be listening to his dad on the radio or TV, so he’s happy to be the rapper who finds unique ways to talk about science. “It might not be on a record that I get to talk about the environment,” Raupp says, “but I’m going to do it.”

In a way, Raupp is still following his father’s lead.

“He had to go for it,” Michael Raupp says of his son’s hip-hop journey. “I chase my dreams and don’t have regrets.”

Lanterns opens with a serene instrumental — one of two on the six-track EP — that sets the release’s contemplative mood. The project was a joint effort between members April George, 24, and Matt Thompson, 22, both graduates of Hampton University who found their creative boundaries being pushed while making the EP.

One of the instrumentals, “Overture,” marked Thompson’s first time writing anything of the sort. “I never thought I’d co-write a classical composition, at least not at this stage in my production,” Thompson writes in an email. “Being a part of the production process for the ‘Overture’ was surreal.”

George and Thompson’s idea was to create something cinematic. “Originally, we wanted the EP to flow like a movie, so the overture and end theme are like the opening and closing of a movie soundtrack. They also tie everything together,” George writes.

Despite Lanterns being their first project, April + VISTA don’t present as amateurs. That could be because both were raised in musical environments. Thompson took guitar lessons, growing up with a father who played bass and introduced him to different styles at an early age. George is a classically trained violinist; her mother plays piano and her father also plays bass.

Together, the two artists mesh elements of themselves and their experiences for an exercise in presence.

The EP’s songs feel unforced, with George’s voice blending naturally into Thompson’s production and the tracks’ live instrumentation, none fighting for space. Their synergy comes as the result of nine months of working jointly, though not always in the same place — both geographically and creatively. George says she tends to understand music emotionally, and Thompson finds ideas through visuals.

“I think the coolest thing about our dynamic in this project is that the beats and lyrics were written separately,” Thompson writes. “So when we came together to actually make the songs, we unwittingly created a new narrative from two completely different stories.”

Religious roots on display, Chaz French takes viewers to church in his new Martin Amini-directed video for “Whatcha Know,” the second single from his 2014 debut EP, Happy Belated.

Paired with lyrics like “It got me questionin’ Jesus/So maybe it ain’t my season,” the video’s rose-tinted river calls to mind the first plague of Egypt in which water is changed to blood.

Elsewhere, Chaz appears to be preaching at a funeral (his mother is a minister) as he battles on wax to do right in the midst of things going wrong. The people in the video seem to alternate between good and evil, and at points, Chaz even becomes the Reaper himself.

Missed our 2014 interview with Chaz French? Read it here.

The collaborative effort, which George says intends to “depict the falling sensation of losing love,” serves as an alluring introduction to the duo whose EP, Lanterns, comes out March 31.

In the last video from Virginia crooner Visto, he took to the woods, surrounding himself with natural elements: earth, air and fire. Now he’s returned with another visual that swaps the nature for something more high-tech.

The new video for the Hippie Life Krew member’s club-ready track “Shinobi” (also the name of a Sega video game series) is the brainchild of Minista Millz of the Maryland-based Catwalk Studioz, and it finds Visto using some Matrix-style widgets to plot the seduction of a woman who’s with another man. It’s another example of Visto’s ability to keep his fans guessing.

“There’s no one direction for my art,” Visto writes in an email, “and we just thought that a futuristic hippie coming to take your girlfriend was just cool.”

Visto hopes to release a new project by spring, but in the meantime, he says he’s got more music and videos on the horizon.