Get ready for a dad-joke groan: Not all the beautiful swimmers are in Rio this week. D.C. dance-music duo the Beautiful Swimmers was in Europe recently for Amsterdam’s annual Dekmantel Festival — one of the primary tastemaking events on the European summer scene — and buzz about the performance was strong. (It’s hardly the first time they were on the bill.) There’s evidence: a joyously funky one-minute clip on Instagram that features a mix of Sheila E.’s “Love Bizarre.” (The bearded one is Andrew Field-Pickering, aka Maxmillion Dunbar, and the one in the black T-shirt is Ari Goldman.) For an extra taste of what the Swimmers are generally up to, here’s a mix they did for the Dekmantel organization:

The duo is back in D.C. this weekend, for a show at Flash nightclub on Aug. 13, followed by a performance on Aug. 20 at the Petworth Summer Jam series with DJs from D.C.’s 1432R label.

It’s a “utility thing,” the D.C. producer and DJ says about the no-frills tracks he releases as Dolo Percussion, including four he’s freshly dropped this week on the appropriately titled Dolo Percussion 2 EP. The energetic drum knocks and inviting bass tones maintain the core personality of the boundary-stretching funky music he makes as Maxmillion Dunbar, but without a lot of the far-out facets.

And by utility, Field-Pickering means that before any Dolo cuts are released on vinyl, he’s been using them — typically burned onto CDs — in DJ sets as Max D or with Beautiful Swimmers, his askew house-music duo with Ari Goldman. And with functionality as his motivation, he often finds himself pushed into a simpler headspace.

“With Max things, there’s infinite options, but with Dolo … you can get something wrong — it’s not gonna work unless you put a little bit of function to it,” he says. “I don’t ever think of a Max song as having a wrong way to go, but a Dolo thing can definitely be like, ‘Nah, this is not gonna work.’ It’s kinda cool because it’s this thing that talks back to you, almost.”

Dolo Percussion 2, on Field-Pickering’s own Future Times label, follows the format of 2013’s Dolo Percussion EP on New York’s L.I.E.S. label: four tracks, titled sequentially and generally presented in the order Field-Pickering created them.

“It’s utilitarian down to even the mixing, sometimes,” he says. “There’s pretty clear high, mid and bass things, like in terms of just the drum blocks — they’ll mix in with any record, it’s a bridge to anything else you’ll want to play.”

Field-Pickering says he typically shares the tracks with an inner circle of DJ friends once he’s had a chance to work them into his own sets for awhile. The response, as he describes it, is fittingly minimal.

“There’s a lot of exclamation-type things,” he says. Just like, ‘Whoo!’ You know, like, I get an email back, like, ‘Whoo! I can use that! Whoo!’”