“For a lot of us, being in an airplane is the closest we are to dying,” says the 29-year-old singer-songwriter, who lives in Mount Pleasant.

But it’s not really a fear of flying that inspired Kolowich to write “Black Box.” It’s his fear of losing control of his life. He says he was thinking about a friend’s grandmother who had aphasia, a disorder that affects communication. “The last couple decades of her life, she couldn’t really communicate, although she was very much alive,” says Kolowich. “When communication fails, and there’s this silence, this failure to connect or understand, that’s the most terrifying thought.”

Aviophobia did factor into the song’s mood, however. Kolowich says he felt moved by an anecdote he read in a 2013 New York Times Magazine cover story about author George Saunders. The writer described being on an airplane that almost crashed; he heard terrifying noises, and the cabin filled with black smoke. Gripped with fear, the master of the English language could only bring himself to repeat the word “no.”

“You write during times of lucidity. You think you have it figured out,” Kolowich says, “and then you can get jarred off of that pedestal pretty easily when you’re seized with panic.”

Last March, amid the frenzy surrounding the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Kolowich sat down on his couch to transcribe a flurry of thoughts into song. “It starts with me and my guitar,” he says. “It’s just me working out the words and the melody.” After a week and a half, he had a rough cut, and enlisted the help of his producer and roommate, Louis Weeks. The two headed to Clean Cuts in Baltimore, recorded Kolowich’s guitar melody and filled in the rest with ambient synth tones.

The end result has the soul of a folk song, but all the spaciousness and slight creepiness that ambient music creates. “I like the idea of having rhythmic pulse, something a little synthetic,” says Kolowich. He says “Black Box” is “a little more ambient and electronic, and a little poppier” than the usual folk fare.

Grim lyrics like “Eat your breakfast/Mind your checklist, and your angle of attack/Look for pieces/Feel for pulses/Try to bring them back” conjure images of a plane crash and a rescue attempt. But don’t look for a direct connection to events or an overarching narrative, says Kolowich. He prefers to dwell in the realm of feeling—a place as wide open as the sky.

Stranger in the Alps plays Black Cat on Friday, Oct. 17.

“I just need to get these things out,” says Lacsamana, 38, who has been posting his new output on Soundcloud. (Lacsamana has also worked on Bandwidth videos with his friends at Wilderness Bureau.) The latest spans just two tracks: “Never Gonna Get It” and “Crystal Clear”—but it represents a playful period of experimentation for the producer and his self-described “party persona.” He calls the new tunes a “weird hybrid” of house, indie dance and nu-disco.

“It’s dancey stuff…part pop and part weird electronic stuff,” Lacsamana says. “It’s not necessarily something that I’m completely invested in.”

Still, for something he’s not invested in, Lacsamana spent a lot of time remixing and editing the tracks with precision. Named after Crystal City, “Crystal Clear” uses the famous hook from DJ Kool’s sample-driven “Let Me Clear My Throat“—and it wasn’t as simple to make as it may sound. Instead of borrowing the track wholesale, Lacsamana deconstructed the three main elements of Kool’s pastiche: the introductory horns from Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging,” the funky sax loop first constructed by 45 King and DJ Kool’s original vocals. The resulting samples came out cleaner and more malleable. “I basically tried to recreate what DJ Kool had done,” he says, but in a different, poppier context.

Doing things differently is a kind of mantra for the Arlington-based artist, who first broke into D.C.’s electronic music scene in the mid-1990s. While other DJs spent time honing their skills, Lacsamana was partying and trying to find himself. “I was kind of a late bloomer,” he says.

As a college student in 1996, Lacsamana had his first epiphany after dropping acid in the parking lot of the now-defunct D.C. nightclub Tracks. “I listened to Daft Punk’s Homework. It was a mind[freak],” he says. While tripping, he realized that he felt drawn to making music. “I was like, ‘Hey, I think this is what I want to do,'” he says.

Skip ahead to this year, and Lacsamana, who swore off drugs and alcohol in June, isn’t done discovering himself. That’s what this solo project is for. He’s not sure he’ll release more music under the Micah Vellian name, but even if he doesn’t, he says, it was worth the effort.

“I had to push through my ego,” Lacsamana says. “That’s what these [songs] are. Sort of the detritus of that journey.”

“We broke up abruptly and she didn’t call me back, so I didn’t get any closure or understand why it happened,” says Waqar, 33. “I wanted to deal with that musically because that’s how I deal with stuff.”

When writing the song’s lyrics, Waqar drew inspiration from the Islamic concept of Sufi, which he describes as “the celebration of the beloved, heartbreak and separation from the beloved.” In other words, it’s deeper than its catchy chorus and upbeat tempo may suggest. “‘Edison’ might seem conventional, ‘Western,’ but it is essentially very Sufi in the way it deals with worldly pain.”

Once he had the basic chord progression and lyrics down, Waqar took the song to bandmates Nicholas Michalopoulos and Austin Gaske, and the trio hammered it out in Waqar’s Brookland art loft—not exactly an ideal venue, the frontman says, because it sits adjacent to a stretch of the Red Line. “The train would drive by and mess up the track, which was really frustrating.”

But what does “Edison” refer to? Well, that has a nerdy backstory. The song is loosely based on the 19th century feud between electrical engineer Nikola Tesla and inventor Thomas Edison. In short: Edison is thought to have thrown his former colleague under the bus, defaming Tesla’s work with alternating current electricity to protect his interests in direct current. “It’s me trying to think of a time when someone betrayed someone else’s trust,” Waqar says. Though Waqar doesn’t recall betraying his former flame, his point is that he’s OK taking the blame for the breakup if that means she’ll talk to him. “The line, ‘Call me Edison, call me,’ is like, ‘Fine, you can call me Edison, but just… call me.'”

And the ex? Waqar says she eventually reconnected with him, a fact he invokes in the last line of the song. “She told me the reason she never called me back is because she couldn’t find her phone,” Waqar says. “Maybe she lost it, maybe she didn’t.”

Sarmust plays IOTA with Chess Club Romeos on Friday, Aug. 29.

“This song came out of nowhere. I’m lucky to have it,” says Bobbie Allen, the D.C.-based singer behind the electronic dream-pop project. “But it almost flew by me.”

Allen recorded the album at Ready Set Records in Nashville with singer-songwriter Trent Dabbs and producer Jeremy Bose. Recording days stretched on, and the trio usually hammered out two or three songs a day at their busiest. At the end of one of those days, with help from Dabbs, Allen came up with the lyrics and melody for “Siren.”

“I had an idea and it was really simplistic,” she says. Though Allen says she likes to write big, emotional ballads with complex meanings, “Siren” was different. The song is slow and repetitive—like, well, a siren. “It’s an easy song, perfect in its meaning,” she says. “It doesn’t mean too much.”

Allen usually finds inspiration in Sinead O’Connor, Annie Lennox and Prince, but she had a different muse for “Siren”: classic R&B. “I don’t know why, but I picture The Ronettes,” she says. “I even see arm motions in my head. I see Ed Sullivan, black-and-white TV, beehive hair.”

Allen tracked the vocals for “Siren,” then promptly forgot about the whole thing. “It was one of these afterthought songs,” she says. But while on tour, Allen flashed back to a strange melody, and realized that forgotten song had reappeared in her head. So she called Bose, and together they retraced their digital steps. “We almost couldn’t even find the track later,” Allen says.

It’s good they did. With an assist from Bose, Allen’s simple idea became a three-and-a-half minute love song that sounds ready for radio. Allen liked it so much, she built an entire album around the tune’s central theme: feeling deeply smitten.

“The more I listened to it, the more I fell in love with it. It became my favorite song on the record,” she says.

Now, when Young Summer performs the song live, it grabs the audience’s attention, she says—but not through sheer force. She thinks “Siren” breaks through the noise by being quieter, not louder, than everything else. “As soon as ‘Siren’ comes on, people are like, ‘What?’ It gets attention, which is funny because that’s exactly what the song is about.”

Young Summer’s debut LP, Siren, comes out Aug. 26.