The Red Lines – Foggy
Luke Brindley – The Journey
Rush Plus – Low For Me
Troy and Paula Haag – 27
Hurlebaus – Joplin
Big Sky Conspiracy – The Rise and Fall of Damascus
Wye Oak – Two Small Deaths
The Grit Pushers – Two Snakes
Kindlewood – In the Clearing
The Greatest Hoax – Pyrogens
Anthony Pirog – Summer Fog
Beauty Pill – The Western Prayer
Constant Alarm – Breathe You
Motion Lines – Bliss
Foozle – Sofa Couch
Daniel Bachman – Song For The Setting Sun II
Roger Aldridge – Connecticut Avenue SUVs
Language of Sleep – Act I
Dupont Brass – Killin’ Me Softly
Screen Vinyl Image – Edge of Forever

Howard University Jazz Ensemble – Is There Anything Still There
Lungfish – Cut to Fit the Mouth
HOTHEAD – Hothead
Rumpole – Jelly Bean 1
Kenny Mac – Feeling You (feat. 210)
Smart Went Crazy – A Brief Conversation Ending In Divorce
Logikbomb – The Heights (aka: Her Lips)
Wild Coast – Stare Scared
Anthony Pirog – Steven in the Light
Empresarios – Sabor Tropical (Nappy Riddem Instrumental Remix)
Jason Masi – In the Afternoon
Timothy Soller – Persuading
Lance Neptune – Pyxis
Daniel Barbiero & Massimo Discepoli – Autopoiesis
Pearie Sol – take me back
Rod Hamilton – Zoey
Higher Hands – Due Dilla-gence
The Funk Ark – Funky Southern
Wylder – Living Room
Sherwood Gainer – 404

Daniel Barbiero & Massimo Discepoli – The Occulted Measure
Supper Club – Rondamatic
Sunshowers Overnight – Lulu in the Sandstorm
Honey Pot Canoe – Reginald Fessenden
Antelope – Hollow You
Dubpixel – Through My Window
Rival Skies – Lion’s Den
Laura Baron – Mary In a Sardine Can
Joey and the Waitress – Random Song
Jonathan Matis – Akeboki
Jacob Gemmell – snail
Fields Burning – The Light On The Water
John W. Warren – Nisene (Dream In a Forest)
Tom McBride – Candle Light the Way
Anthony Pirog Sextet – One Tall Cliff
Sinister Spins – Long Way Down
The Greatest Hoax – Bound Nature
Nerftoss – Jump Street
Matt Rippetoe – Revisiting
YellowTieGuy – Anthem

Anthony Pirog Trio – Composition for You, You and Me
Milan Credle – The Conflict (Instrumental)
Rod Hamilton – Treppe 2 & 1
The El Mansouris – Walden
Nerftoss – Low/Highway
Rival Skies – Destroyer
small craft – last breath
Taiwo Heard – Eternal Night
Miter – Yr Gold
Ben Dransfield – Nostalgia
Roger Aldridge – Sleepy Creek Samba
Georgie James – Places (Instrumental)
Jordan Clawson – Good to Better
Abu Jibran – Bring Back Hippy Jesus
Aaron Tinjum and the Tangents – Roving Instrumental / Interlude #1
Sun Committee – Lake Effect
Matt Rippetoe – Ladybugs
Snail Mail – Thinning
Ronny Smith – Valentine
Mud Rey – Never Satisfied

Leppin announced today that she’s starting an imprint called Wedderburn Records. The label’s first release will be a single from Janel and Anthony, the experimental folk duo she shares with her husband, guitarist Anthony Pirog.

The cellist says she derived the label’s name from a piece of land that has been in her family for more than a century, a wooded oasis in Vienna, Virginia, once called “Midgetville.”

“Basically, it’s a really magical place,” Leppin says. She grew up on the Wedderburn land, gathering with friends and playing music there. Once upon a time, she says, “it was all just virgin forest and hand-built cottages that my ancestors built.” (The “Midgetville” moniker comes from an old legend that little people lived on the land.) The property has been whittled down over time — an emotional process the Washington Post documented in 2004 — but it holds a place in Leppin’s heart. “Wedderburn” is also her middle name, she adds.

Wedderburn Records isn’t just a tribute to the family land, however. Leppin says both she and Pirog have a “huge backlog” of unreleased music, and she’d grown exhausted working with other labels on it. Facing red tape, creative compromises and disagreements over credits — “I still have to fight to make people think that I write my own music,” she says — Leppin decided she’d just release the material herself.

Inspiration also came from the late David Bowie. “He died with a huge amount of albums behind him,” Leppin says, “and I can’t even get anyone to agree on the terms of a contract for one album.”

After Leppin releases the Janel and Anthony single in the coming weeks, she expects to debut her first solo album on March 21, followed by recordings from a “legendary” artist. (She declines to identify the performer until details are finalized.)

Leppin isn’t sure what kinds of sounds her label will focus on, but her own work reveals a fascination with the mystical — similar to the special power she traces back to the Wedderburn land.

“I’m really just interested in the kind of people who can capture the magic. Whatever that means,” Leppin says. “Music you can’t quite put your finger on.”

Watch: Janel Leppin performs live for WAMU 88.5’s Bandwidth.fm

“Obviously, at first, music and libraries seems like a head-scratcher because libraries are quiet,” says local promoter, artist manager and record-label owner Jim Thomson. But for the past six months, Thomson has been helping change expectations about what goes on inside D.C.’s public libraries.

On behalf of scrappy theater nonprofit Capital Fringe, Thomson has been programming “Fringe Music in the Library,” one of two series bringing live music to the D.C. Public Library system. The other series is strictly punk rock, presented by the library’s D.C. Punk Archive. DCPL has been hosting those noisy gigs since October 2014 to help promote its growing collection of D.C. punk ephemera. The latest show takes place downtown tonight — with D.C. bands Give, Puff Pieces and The Maneuvers — then Friday it’s back to Thomson, who’s bringing in D.C.’s CooLots under the Capital Fringe banner.

For the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library — D.C.’s central library downtown — these shows help it build a reputation as a cultural center. It’s a rebranding for a facility that’s been dogged by systemwide budget cuts and criticism of its Brutalist architecture. (The District is planning to overhaul MLK Library in two years and add an auditorium.) DCPL has also had to confront complaints from residents who openly — many would say crudely — gripe about homeless residents who utilize the library’s amenities. Then there’s the bigger picture: Libraries all over the world are facing questions about their role in the 21st century. Could it be prudent to focus on libraries not just as information warehouses, but cultural beacons?

“One of our primary goals is to establish the library as a go-to place for local culture.” —Linnea Hegarty, executive director of the D.C. Public Library Foundation

Linnea Hegarty, the executive director of the D.C. Public Library Foundation, seems to think so. She says the foundation covers the costs of both D.C. Public Library concert series — including fees to the bands — and says they’re now funded through 2016. “One of our primary goals is to establish the library as a go-to place for local culture,” Hegarty writes via email.

Capital Fringe is best known for its annual performing-arts event, the Fringe Festival. But last year, under Julianne Brienza’s leadership, the organization hired Thomson to take over music-booking at the festival, then asked him to handle the eclectic library shows she had set into motion. Those events overlapped with the D.C. Punk Archive’s basement shows, which Martin Luther King Jr. Library music librarian Maggie Gilmore says were “designed to increase attention to and support of the D.C. Punk Archive,” its ongoing effort to document the District’s three-chord rock scene.

Michele Casto, one of the librarians who helped get the D.C. Punk Archive off the ground, says DCPL wants to show that the punk archive isn’t just about long-gone history.

“Having shows that feature current local bands helps reiterate the point that the archive is 1976 to the present, that we’re documenting local music that’s happening now not just local music of the past,” Casto writes in an email.

The punk gigs also aim to support the next generation of D.C. musicians. “For every show, we’ve tried to include a band that’s either just getting started, or that consists of kids — i.e. bands that might have a hard time getting a gig in a club,” Casto writes. “This gives them a place to get experience performing.”

The punk shows take place every other month and have included raucous performances from Joy Buttons, Hemlines, Flamers and Priests. Under Thomson, the Fringe gigs have dabbled in punk, too — roping in punk provocateur Ian Svenonius multiple times — but they’ve prized diversity, bringing in the rarely seen soul singer George Smallwood, Afropop vocalist Anna Mwalagho, jazz/poetry act Heroes Are Gang Leaders and the Ethiopian Jazz Quartet with Feedel Band‘s Araya Woldemichael.

“I hope that the citizens will come in and get inspired by seeing an Ethiopian jazz quintet and go, ‘Wow,'” Thomson says.

Some younger residents, it seems, have already found that inspiration. When guitarist Anthony Pirog performed at the downtown library with his surf band, The El Reys, librarians projected the film Endless Summer while kids bopped around. They were “dancing and bouncing around wildly, full of excitement for the music,” Gilmore emails. “That put a smile on everyone’s face.”

Now, if only more people would come to the shows.

Woldemichael guesses that at his recent library gig, “50 percent of them were curious folks and the rest were my friends, family members and fans.” Thomson acknowledges that a recent performance at the Benning Road library only brought a handful of people. “The branch libraries are a little more challenging to get attendance,” he says. “Mainly location, location, location. It’s hard to get interest in it, or to publicize it.”

The promoter hopes that momentum will build over time. “I know from when you are working with regular venues, you don’t get a slam dunk in the beginning, always,” he says. “You have to plant a seed and let it have a chance to germinate. We are really in a very early stage.”

Meanwhile, artists seem appreciative of the series’ benevolent mission — even if the room doesn’t fill up.

“Heroes Are Gang Leaders really felt that this performance [at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library] was a special opportunity to reach out to and interact with longtime D.C. residents, amidst the city’s advanced stages of gentrification, displacement and widespread oppression of many Washingtonians,” band member Luke Stewart writes in an email.

Plus, it gives residents a chance to absorb culture — for free — that they wouldn’t normally come across, Thomson says. In a way, that’s the role of a library in the first place.

“For me, the side benefit is to go into libraries that are in parts of the city that are not part of my everyday life,” the promoter says. “It helps you interact with the city. I like to see these different things that makes the city as an organism come to life.”

Give, Puff Pieces and The Maneuvers play the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 6 p.m. June 11. The CooLots play at noon on June 12. For a complete schedule of Capital Fringe concerts at D.C.’s libraries, consult this calendar. The Punk Archive basement shows are usually publicized on the D.C. Public Library’s Facebook page.

Top photo courtesy of Jim Thomson

The D.C. garage-rock trio deals directly with that often suffocating pressure on “Gun To My Head” (listen below), the opening track on its new EP Gun, Medicine, Prayer.

“I remember being in my early 20s,” says singer and guitarist Kenny Pirog, “and I know I can’t be the only one who felt like I was under tremendous pressure. Pressure to get a career going, to find a new home. Kind of like the system was holding a gun to my head.”

Now 28, Pirog says he wrote the song “because I wanted to smack that gun out of the system’s hand and not succumb to the pressure, and find my own way to play with the system.”

While the track is more about taking control of one’s life than D.C. life in particular, the nation’s capital still sounds etched into the song. Pirog, an Adams Morgan resident, says he took some of his cues from punk bands he saw at an iconic local rock club.

“I was hanging around Black Cat all the time, seeing a lot bands — a lot of which were punk-rock bands — and just getting that ingrained into my musical vocabulary,” Pirog says. “Musically, ‘Gun To My Head’ is a very D.C. song.”

Drawing from the energy of D.C.’s punk-rock scene as well as his own background in blues and jazz — Pirog’s older brother Anthony is an established experimental jazz composer in town — the guitarist says that “this attitude and energy that they played all these songs with contributes as much, if not more, to the song’s identity than just the chords, the melody and the lyrics.”

That attitude is the reason “Gun To My Head” is the leading track on the EP. “It just hits you right away,” Pirog says. “There’s no intro or anything, it’s just immediately full-throttle.”

The combination of lyrics and punk lineage may make the song instantly relatable for anyone who has spent much time in the District, which is exactly what Pirog wants.

“When I write a song,” Pirog says, “I want it to be relatable for an audience, so that people can personally identify with each one.”

Some of this year’s most unforgettable local songs didn’t come from comfortable experiences. They sounded fed up, and particularly urgent in a year marked by growing inequity at home and multiple slayings by police in places that didn’t feel far away.

In one of the year’s rawest rock songs, Thaylobleu cranked up its guitars to tell a personal story of police harassment. Chain and the Gang and Jack On Fire assailed gentrification with wit and hyperbole. Punk band Priests declared everything right wing. Two remarkable hip-hop works channeled frustration and fatalism among young black Americans: Diamond District’s Oddisee cried, “What’s a black supposed to do — sell some crack and entertain?”, while Virginia MC GoldLink rapped about all the glorious things he imagines happening to him — when he dies.

Not that peace and love felt impossible in 2014: In a touching song released two years after his death, Chuck Brown sang of a “beautiful life” enriched by the warmth of community. Promising newcomer Kali Uchis made us kick back with a soulful number steeped in giddy infatuation. Experimentation thrived in D.C. music: Young artists built on the region’s strong punk pedigree and expanded its boundaries. Mary Timony’s band Ex Hex embraced a classic sound and made one of the country’s best rock ‘n’ roll records. Local bands with shorter but distinctive resumes — like Laughing Man, Two Inch Astronaut and Deleted Scenes — sounded better and more creative than ever before. A Sound of Thunder and Gloom reminded us that the D.C. area is still a reliable producer of top-notch metal.

As expected, Bandwidth contributors faced hard choices while making this list of the year’s best local songs, and not only because it’s our first one. Up until deadline, we were still hearing new D.C. songs we wanted to include. But in a place where mounting wealth has created a challenging environment for art, that’s not a problem, really. It’s a testament to a music scene that perseveres despite long odds. —Ally Schweitzer

Warning: Many of these songs contain explicit lyrics.

The Berklee-trained, D.C.-based guitarist so far has made his name as a jazz guy and sonic experimenter, but he’s never shied away from music that strives to directly satisfy the listener. That bbbbbrrrruuuuummmmmmm moment? The loud, almost sexy solo that eventually follows? Those sounds don’t need much translation. The wallop is elemental. Pirog wants his songs to go places.

“I just try to write in an intuitive way, and just try to be open and listen for things that I want to hear,” says Pirog, who is one-half of the duo Janel & Anthony with cellist Janel Leppin and has been featured regularly in D.C.’s annual Sonic Circuits festival. Palo Colorado Dream is on Cuneiform Records, the Silver Spring, Maryland, label known for promoting experimental music of all stripes.

It helps that his collaborators on the album, New York drummer Ches Smith and Baltimore bassist Michael Formanek, are equally flexible. They play more prominent roles elsewhere on the album, which has surges of free improvisation and post-rock, as well as stretches directly inspired by thinky ECM-label jazz. (One song is even called “Motian,” after the late drummer Paul Motian.) But their sense of touch and timing, nonetheless, is essential to the explosiveness of “The New Electric.”

“A good melody, and a deliberateness, and restraint—it allows room for things to really speak, and that’s what I’ve been attracted to,” Pirog says.

Pirog’s own work on the song does have some intellectual and experimental components underneath, of course. He plays baritone guitar, but through an effects pedal that makes it sound like a regular guitar. The trio performed the core track live in the studio, but a lot of the final product has been overdubbed. (He rehearsed the album with Smith and Formanek individually, but they didn’t play as a trio together until the album was recorded in March 2013.) Pirog wasn’t concerned about whether that was an un-jazz approach to things.

“It was a question that came up, but I quickly decided that that’s the kind of route I wanted to take. … I like overdubs—Janel and I use overdubs in the studio a lot—and I’ve always thought of the record as being completely different from the live performance,” he says.

For as direct as it is, “The New Electric” wasn’t born from a particular story or motive, Pirog says.

“I mean, I didn’t sit down thinking, ‘I’m gonna write this post-rock song on baritone guitar, for my jazz record’ … the song just came to me. It’s hard to describe where it comes from. … It just kind of presented itself,” he says. “I know that sounds weird, but … I just kind of wait for these little moments where there’s a melody or a chord progression, and then I can build on it from there.”

Anthony Pirog Trio plays Oct. 31 at Paperhaus.