The cool-but-not-too-cool house and techno tracks — attributed to by Doms & Deykers, her and his surnames — sound unencumbered by life. But life has changed for the Sterling resident: He’s been maintaining his creative energy and his international profile with a new addition at home. The Dutch-born musician and his wife have a toddler daughter, and he’s had to learn how to compartmentalize things.

“You can’t do any eight- or nine-hour studio sessions and just sort of completely lose yourself into compressing drums or whatever,” Martyn says, chuckling. “Every two hours there’s something new, then you have to go there, or then she wakes up from a nap — there’s all these little things that you have to think about all of a sudden.”

Perhaps it was natural, then, for Martyn to find a different mode of making music for the time being. Known for his club sets and his creative, sonically adventurous solo albums — including 2014’s The Air Between Words on the Ninja Tune label — the 42-year-old says he was “never really interested in working with other people” until recently. The project with Doms stemmed from his DJ gigs in Europe. (He’s currently doing a monthly residency at Panorama Bar in Berlin.)

“When we sit together in the studio, ideas happen really fast,” he says. “We just lay jams down, and usually we spend a couple of hours on one, then record everything, and move to the next idea. And usually what happens when we get back home, and we’re in our own studios working, we take these jams and build them into complete songs.”

Doms, who is also Dutch-born, traveled to the Virginia ‘burbs in the spring to help finish the album, which was released this week on 3024, a label Martyn runs with artist Erosie. Martyn also found time over the past year for another collaboration: Fierce For The Night, by a Berlin singer called, coincidentally, Virginia. Martyn, Doms and the Dutch producer Dexter handled all the production.

Martyn moved to Ashburn, Virginia, in 2008 for love and was married the same year. In 2012, he became a U.S. citizen. The family has since found another apartment, in Sterling. He’s had some time to put Loudoun County in perspective.

“I must say that — especially with traveling to other parts of the U.S., I noticed that Ashburn and Sterling is not the norm,” he says. “I think we’re all quite privileged to live in this area. Although sometimes it can be a bit of a struggle, this is a really sort of wealthy area of the States. That’s something I only discovered when I started traveling to other places and see how other cities are laid out, also smaller towns and things like that … this is not what the entire U.S. looks like, you know?”

As his adjustment to suburban-dadhood continues, he says it’s “important to stay inspired.” He has time to listen to music on international flights, but he’s got a tactic at home, too.

“Once you actually find your groove again, you can actually make it part of your life again. Like, one thing we do is play a record almost every day — a new album every day so that in the house there’s always music,” he says. His daughter “really enjoys the music as well, even though sometimes it’s a bit weird for her, maybe. That way I can sort of engulf myself in music and give my child a little bit of education in a way.”

Martyn speaks highly of D.C.’s growing dance-music scene, particularly the Future Times and 1432R labels, and the roving-party series known as ROAM. He recently DJed at one in September.

“The crowd was just so healthy. It was so nice to see people really into the music and not really about posing or just taking pictures of themselves, just generally enjoying the music and generally enjoying the atmosphere and the other people,” he says. “It was just really cool to see that. It almost felt like a European party, you know? That’s something that I hadn’t experienced in D.C. before. … It was less sort of institutionalized clubbing, and more sort of, freedom. That’s obviously a very good time for people to play their music.”

Despite the recent stretch of working so much with other artists, Martyn says he’s returning to his roots in the coming weeks, with work on a new album that is likely to sound more “abstract,” given the club-oriented nature of the Doms & Deykers album and the project with Virginia.

“I’ve just been aching,” Martyn says, “to start working on solo material again.”

Ossi, left, and Bloch have known each other since elementary school, and they both attend the University of Maryland.

“We’re definitely inspired by not quite conspiracy theories, but, like, ideas about how the universe is really structured. … Not necessarily conventional ideas, but …” Alex Bloch starts.

“… These crazy-sounding alternative theories,” Chris Ossi says, finishing the thought.

The two are clearly in sync — the University of Maryland students have known each other since their days at Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda, Maryland. Together, they take listeners on a wordless deep-dive into the abyss. On their debut EPs, Examining Interiors and Exteriors 1 and Examining Interiors and Exteriors 2, released July 26, haunting, detached mumbles lurk below unhuman echoes.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Ossi is studying electrical engineering and Bloch is studying computer science. Some of BADTHRVW’s instruments are homemade digital noisemakers involving contact microphones on metal objects, or electronics that have been modified. An Akai MPX16 sampler and a MicroKorg synthesizer round out the kit.

They call their sounds “audio graffiti.”

“It’s kind of like a sound installation. Except, you know, nobody commissioned it,” Ossi says. It’s “drone-y, atmospheric stuff that’s [meant] to create a kind of sensation or atmosphere.”

The lack of lyrics in any of the recordings — most of which are more than 20 minutes in length — contributes to an overall sense of detachment from the physical world. It’s both ethereal and ominous.

The music “does make you a little uncomfortable, it makes you a little on edge,” Ossi says. “It takes you out of a place where you feel very comfortable and familiar and puts you somewhere else.”

But don’t go to their live performances expecting a straight performance of their recordings. Their shows rarely follow a set pattern and are tailored to the vibe of the venue.

“It’s heavily improvised,” Bloch says.

And like the expanding universe that we all inhabit, BADTHRVW’s catalog will continue to grow: Bloch and Ossi say they’re working on another EP.

BADTHRVW plays Aug. 5 at The Dump in Bethesda.

The two D.C. artists, who have played together since 2014, recently debuted their first collaborative album, Gut+Voltage: Viola da Gamba and Electronics in Synthesis. The hybrid acoustic/electronic effort brings the viola da gamba out of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, thanks to Domingues, an established cellist who received a Master’s in viola da gamba performance from Baltimore’s Peabody Institute.

Via email, Domingues writes that the viola da gamba, which boasts frets and more strings than a cello, “has a similar range but an incredible resonance.”

Resonance is the driving force behind Gut+Voltage, which Domingues recorded with Kane, a multi-instrumentalist and audio engineer who also plays in Soccer Team and Red Spells Red. Kane imbues Domingues’ elegant viola da gamba lines with layers of loops and echoes. The resulting sound is vast, but melodious and welcoming.

Domingues traces her fascination with the viola da gamba to the 1991 French historical drama, Tous les Matins du Monde.

“It was a film starring Gérard Depardieu as the 17th century French composer/viol player Marin Marais and his volatile relationship with his teacher and the idea of music as either worldly or for oneself,” Domingues writes. “The film featured some of the most beautiful music written for the viola da gamba, performed by Jordi Savall. It made a huge impression on me.”

Domingues and Kane set out to make an improvised record, which meant they had to become closely attuned to each other’s musical instincts. “I like to record everything and fish for the best bits and the happy accidents,” Kane emails.

“The writing was very organic — face to face, in the same room.”

The two musicians met through Kane’s former gig as a sound tech at D.C. venue Black Cat. Domingues, who is classically trained, has served as a go-to cellist in the local indie-rock scene since the ‘90s. She’s played with Fugazi, Dead Meadow and Mary Timony — among others — and led her own band, Garland of Hours.

But Gut+Voltage offered Domingues a chance to expand her repertoire.

“After spending about 20 years playing cello in bands,” Domingues writes, “I wanted to try something different.”

Domingues and Kane perform May 13 at noon at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C.

Growing up outside of Detroit, the birthplace of techno, Servito had plenty of peripheral exposure to underground dance music, but it was at Club Heaven, an after-hours spot at Woodward and Seven Mile, where he first witnessed the full power of a gay club environment. “It was queer, it was inner-city, it was black, it was trans. You walk into a place like that, being a kid from the suburbs, and it’s predominantly black and gay and Ken Collier is pumping incredible records,” he remembers. “Just being able to witness that energy was special to me.”

Heaven closed in the early ’90s, and Ken Collier passed away in 1996 (due to complications from diabetes), but he was part of a pioneering generation of queer DJs that ushered dance music through its earliest days. Alongside legendary figures like Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, he operated during a time when these beats were largely being created, played and, most importantly, danced to by queer people of color. Storied clubs like the Paradise Garage in New York and The Warehouse and The Music Box in Chicago featured undeniably brilliant tunes, but they were moere than just sites for dancing and ushering in influential musical movements — they were places of respite for the queer community. Long before any notions of “safe space” had entered the mainstream, these dance floors also played host to conversations, both verbal and non-, about exactly what it meant to be queer.

In contrast, today’s celebrated dance culture seems almost overwhelmingly straight. Although queer artists continue to lead electronic music’s push into bold new directions, the sounds being created by young contemporary acts like Arca, Lotic, Total Freedom and others tend to eschew traditional dance floor formulas in favor of something more abrasive, experimental, future-facing and conceptual in nature. Compared to what this new generation is coming up with, the sounds of house, techno, and disco have been labeled as downright conservative — and, given their relatively static formulas, the charge certainly carries some weight.

“Those genres are in an era of refinement, not so much innovation,” says Carlos Souffront, a San Francisco-based, Detroit-reared DJ who, like Servito, was also lucky enough to see Ken Collier work his magic at Heaven. From a compositional standpoint, these classic dance floor sounds may no longer seem revolutionary, but they do represent a marked improvement over the ostentatious, Euro-flavored circuit music and Top 40 fodder that has dominated queer nightlife for much of the past two decades. “It was dreadful,” says Souffront, thinking back to his younger days in Detroit. “If I wanted to hang out with gay people, I had to tolerate the worst music that everyone else seemed to love. I always felt like an outsider in queer spaces, but I was desperately drawn to them.”

Honey Dijon, a transgender artist raised on house music in Chicago, shares a similar sentiment while reflecting on her experiences DJing in New York during the late ’90s and much of the ’00s: “I had to make a living as a DJ … so I had to do a lot of compromising and incorporate a lot of [pop] music into my sets. It was really painful for me because I consider pop music to be corporate music …. I respected Madonna and the work she did, and I liked her earlier work, but I felt that if she put out a record, it was something that I had to play in order to appeal to people, especially to gay audiences, [regardless of] whether the record was good or bad.”

Simply put, from the mid-1990s forward, much of queer nightlife suffered from a deficit of taste, something that can be traced back to the devastating impact of AIDS. “A lot of people might have bridged the gap with an oral history of where I came from, but there are not a lot of people left from that generation to hand that down,” says Chris Cruse, who organizes an underground, queer-oriented party called Spotlight in Los Angeles. “There are some, but maybe they weren’t as hedonistic as the people who ended up disappearing in the ’80s and ’90s.” Ron Like Hell, who DJs as one half of Wrecked and works as a buyer at New York’s Academy Records store, remembers the impact that one mentor, a DJ from St. Louis who died in 1992, had on him back in his hometown of Albuquerque. Ironically, he can’t recall the man’s name, but the knowledge passed down remains fresh in his mind. “We had many great long conversations about clubbing and his personal life,” says Ron Like Hell. “He really loved records and clubbing and told me about [Chicago house legend] Larry Heard — no one else did. If he had kept on living, he could definitely be carrying some of that fire into today’s conversation about queer history.”

During the height of the HIV/AIDS era, circuit parties played a central role in queer nightlife, initially as benefits during the worst throes of the crisis. Over time, however, they grew in size and scope, many of them becoming massive “fly in” events dominated by commercial music and what some found to be an alienating aesthetic. “For a lot of us, the imagery on the flyer — the shaved, smooth guy and shirtless, beautiful boys — isn’t really our identity,” says New York’s Ryan Smith, who works as a booking agent and serves as the other half of Wrecked. “We didn’t really feel comfortable on those dance floors. They didn’t feel like home to us, so a lot us were going to see parties in traditionally straight venues.” His DJ partner Ron Like Hell concurs: “60-80% of my club life has been all about preferring to go to more straight parties because of the musical talent [they brought]. These guys were preserving more of our gay disco dance music history than gay DJs were at that time.”

That history is important, and a new crop of queer DJs and promoters are taking steps to reclaim it. Most prominent among them is Honey Soundsystem, a San Francisco collective that simultaneously pushes new sounds while celebrating the legacy of queer dance music. Often explicitly. Through a series of parties and well-received reissues, the crew has been instrumental in spurring the resurgence of interest in synthesizer wizard Patrick Cowley, a brilliant Bay Area songwriter who collaborated with the disco star Sylvester and tragically passed away in 1982, an early victim of AIDS. In 2015, Honey Soundsystem teamed up with Red Bull Music Academy for an event celebrating four decades of queer nightlife at the long-running San Francisco gay club The Endup, and used its DJ residency at Chicago’s Smart Bar as a platform to create a multi-faceted exploration of gay culture called Generators.

And Honey Soundsystem is by no means alone in its efforts. In recent years, a network of like-minded queer and queer-positive parties has developed across the nation, including A Club Called Rhonda and Spotlight in Los Angeles, Wrecked in New York, Dickslap in Seattle, Macho City in Detroit, Honcho in Pittsburgh and Men’s Room, Queen! and Hugo Ball in Chicago, with additional club-nights continuing to pop up all the time. These events are by no means uniform, yet they do seem to share an affinity for tastefully curated programming, transitory environments, uninhibited sexual freedom and a soundtrack of classic (or at least classics-inspired) dance music.

While the music at these parties is in many ways looking backwards — some of the records being played are literally decades old, and even the newer songs on offer are often designed to emulate, or at least reference, the salad days of dance music — they can’t just be written off as exercises in nostalgia. Honey Soundystem co-founder Jacob Sperber cites the intrinsic value of playing a song that’s “written by a gay man, about a gay man,” while Cruse points to the artists that produced these records and the voices that populate them, even in sample form: “A lot of them are black women or black gay men. Those voices are important.”

Of course, queer history and culture goes well beyond music and nightlife, and for much of the past decade the dominant narrative has centered on the drive towards mainstream acceptance. The 2015 legalization of gay marriage stands as this movement’s crowning achievement and queer people are seemingly more visible and accepted than ever before within the context of American culture. Still, not everyone in queer circles is happy with what they see as the increasing normalization of their community. “I have no desire to be accepted or validated by someone who is heteronormative,” says Dijon. “If you look, [straight] relationship models haven’t worked out so well. Their gender issues haven’t worked out so well. They’re still arguing about the differences between men and women.”

“I’m interested in holding on to our culture,” says Cruse. “I don’t aspire to a heteronormative life, so I think it’s important to keep creating these queer spaces, because if you don’t, you’ll see everyone get whitewashed, assimilated — it’s so boring. The desire isn’t for us all to be the same.” His Spotlight parties reflect this sentiment, and not just in terms of the clientele or the impeccably curated music — the environments themselves run counter to the mainstream. Exclusively staging his events in loft and warehouse spaces, off the usual club grid, Cruse puts just as much effort into piecing together the sound system as he does the construction of the darkroom, a key element of every Spotlight party. “They’re there if you want to use them,” he says. “It’s not mandatory. It’s just acknowledging that we have a sexual side to us. If you need to slip off into the darkroom, you can, and come back with a new friend — it’s not frowned upon or embarrassing.”

Chicago’s Men’s Room parties, which require all entrants to remove either their top or their bottoms before they walk through the door, are even more intensely sexual. “We only do our parties in spaces that allow sexuality to take place out in the open,” says resident DJ Harry Cross. Currently held at a venue called The Hole, the party previously took place at the Bijou Theater, the country’s oldest gay adult cinema and sex club before it closed in 2015. Over in Pittsburgh, the monthly Honcho events happen at Hot Mass, a party space inside of a gay bath house. “As gay culture has become more mainstream,” says Honcho founder Aaron Clark, “we needed to have the option for not everything to be family-friendly. It’s probably the only place that people can party in this city, find someone to hook up with, and get a little bit dirty in the club.”

It wasn’t long ago that this kind of overtly sexual attitude was frowned upon in the queer community, at least publicly. Even as new treatments have lessened the level of devastation, the psychological scars of AIDS continue to be felt. “Since the AIDS crisis, the message has been clear: There is only one way to have sex without getting HIV,” says Sperber. “For gay men specifically, as intrinsic as it is to put a wig on, is the fear that sex might kill you. Imagine taking a pill that changes all of that — it is some sci-fi movie s***.” He’s referring to the recent appearance of drugs like PrEP and Truvada, which drastically reduce the risk of transmission and have been credited with helping to reinvigorate the sexual element of queer nightlife. “In many ways, Truvada has created a ‘glory days’ feeling in the clubs,” says Sperber.

“There’s a level of freedom that’s not necessarily present in other parties, a freedom towards hedonism,” says Steve Mizek, a Chicago DJ who heads up the dance-music record labels Argot and Tasteful Nudes, and previously helmed the influential electronic music website Little White Earbuds. “There are a lot fewer inhibitions about body image and really letting go and dancing and doing whatever you want with whomever you want.”

At Los Angeles’ A Club Called Rhonda, a more mixed event which often bills itself as a “pansexual party palace,” being comfortable isn’t necessarily about hooking up — it’s more about being fabulous, with a crowd known for its over-the-top attire and outlandish behavior. “You see the queer people up on stage,” says co-founder Gregory Alexander, “in various forms of dress, with fans, dancing, voguing all over the floor, then you’re going to want to be part of that, because you realize that’s welcomed and put on a pedestal at our club.”

Rhonda’s elaborate decorations are another essential ingredient, as Alexander explains: “We like to go the extra mile and not only make an environment that feels free and interesting, but looks free and interesting.” Sperber takes a similar approach at Honey Soundsystem, stating, “It’s the last thing that certain promoters think about, but for a gay man, it’s just kind of instinctual to want to create a more pleasurable space.”

“It goes back to the stage, the theater,” says Ron Like Hell. “Lights, makeup, wigs, costumes — people love a show. Artists have always been uninhibited, whether they’re homosexual or not, and queer culture goes back to the days of classic, true, amazing entertainment — the spectacle of people being more than themselves, and unashamedly so.” There’s a political element too, as Sperber points out. “The culture of drag and the culture of parades,” he says, “and the idea that liberation came through these things that made people uncomfortable but were actually really theatrical and have been around forever … it intrinsically follows into the party spaces.”

“There’s something in the struggle that creates great art, music and community,” says Nathan Drew Larsen, co-founder of Chicago’s Hugo Ball. A self-described “polysexual, oppositional, surrealist” party with a political bent — its manifesto rails against “carpetbaggers, sanitizers and cultural dilettantes” — Hugo Ball was also conceived to combat the fractured nature of the city’s nightlife. “We just wanted to create something where people could get away from that and mix,” says Larsen. “We’re not a men’s party — I’m transgender …. Our whole point is to be open to just everybody across the spectrum.”

When it comes to inclusion, there’s certainly more work to be done. “Even in the alternative part of the underground, white men still dominate,” adds Larsen. Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. Souffront, Dijon and Servito — all three queer people of color — have seen their profiles rise significantly as of late, both in the U.S. and abroad, where they regularly play at top-line festivals and vaunted nightspots like Berlin’s Panorama Bar. (Last year, Servito was even voted onto Resident Advisor’s annual — and highly influential — DJ poll.) Honey Soundsystem has also seen its gig calendar dramatically spike in recent months. These artists are flying the flag for the queer history of American dance music. “Disco and house music, it’s all derived from the gay community,” says Servito. “A lot of us feel strong about that and more connected to it than ever. The way things are in dance music today, in club culture, it’s predominantly straight. It’s just a matter of time before [queer] people start to latch on and take what’s theirs.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Earlier this year, Rick Rubin asked a range of electronic music producers to plunder the vast Star Wars archive of Foley effects and weave them into dance tracks for Star Wars Headspace. It’s not the only franchise embracing its musical heritage, as there are numerous projects afoot that mine the nostalgia of both Generation X and millennials, from video game music label Materia Collective’s exhaustive six-disc set of remixes of Nobuo Uematsu’s scores for the Final Fantasy series to a deluxe vinyl reissue of the Pokémon soundtrack.

But even in a crowded field, Bwana’s newest effort, Capsule’s Pride, on LuckyMe, stands out. Toronto-based producer Nathan Micay plundered Akira, the genre-defining manga anime film from 1988 that’s rightly considered one of the greatest animated science fiction films of all time. As Micay told told dance music website Resident Advisor last year, he playfully made a few edits based on dialogue from the Akira soundtrack, which had recently been reissued on vinyl. But as he went along, the project grew in ambition and scope, until he fed the entire film through Ableton software and minced all manner of dialogue, music and sound effects for this album’s raw materials.

Just a few short years into his career, Bwana has already ranged wildly. His first single, “Baby Let Me Finish,” chopped up a Ciara sample and sprinkled it atop a post-dubstep track, which got him signed to Mad Decent. A few years on, the fluttering “Flute Dreams” ended up as a favorite of Sasha & Digweed’s progressive house sets. In lesser hands, Capsule’s Pride might have been mere homage, but Micay’s knack as a producer pushes the project into rarefied air.

Almost every track opens with a snippet of Akira dialogue, and as each song progresses, Bwana’s touch becomes evident. “Failed Escape Where You Belong” loops a bit of pipa flute and a wheezy exhalation, but when Bwana brings in a children’s choir and a heavier drum emerge, the track becomes more majestic. Those voices carry over to “K&K (Lovers In The Light),” set to a chiming loop and skittering trap beat.

The album moves from the stirring ambience of “Kiyoko’s Vision” to the early ’90s Warp Records style of “Tetsuo’s Dance (Ascendance).” The album’s highlight might be “Nightfall In Neo-Tokyo,” which opens with a noir ambience as rain-slicked as the film’s streets. Before long, Bwana brings in a pumping ostinato that brings to mind Four Tet’s recent club-friendly two-step productions.

The speedy, sparkling techno of “Capsule’s Pride (Bikes)” might be the track most likely to be played at Berghain. It’s as exhilaratingly fast as the title’s motorcycles. For all its velocity, Bwana still draws attention to the small details accruing behind the incessant kick drum: dialogue and a gamelan-like melody from the film, a wordless choir and a bamboo flute that sounds like a boiling kettle. It’s a track that displays the young producer’s knack for mise-en-scène.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“The best way to understand Brutalism is to view it as a nonhierarchical music collective with authoritarian tendencies,” they decreed. “All of our ideas belong to each other, and all carry the full force of sonic law.”

The D.C.-based electronic act consists of Gavin Holland, Zach Carter and Boston resident Benjamin Bruno. All musical ideas are credited as collaborative — but the dynamic has a decidedly Teutonic edge.

“Each member has sonic veto power,” they declare, “but given the political cost, it’s rarely invoked.”

The harsh tone is certainly in line with Brutalism’s first singles, “Friday Night (Home Invasion)” and “New Empire.” The songs were fist-pumping anthems celebrating the violent and the despotic. They both appeared on No Rave, the group’s cassette EP released in November.

“Amulets,” on the other hand, is a mood piece with largely hushed vocals. The song progresses like a deep breath. Soft piano notes punctuate a bed of krautrock-style synths, while singer Bruno sighs wistfully about the inevitable end of all things.

“We wanted to expand our horizons to encompass death itself,” the group explains. “If you can capture death in song, you can defeat it.”

The cover art extends this new direction. While Brutalism have previously identified themselves with photos of solid, large-scale structures, “Amulets” is presented with a close-up view of a ruined Ancient Egyptian tomb.

“Even monoliths crumble in time,” they state. “The tomb is shattered. It would be scarcely recognizable to its architects. Yet, in an important way, it endured.”

“Amulets” is the first of several singles Brutalism is releasing in 2016, and they plan to perform live again this fall.

Set List

• “Tearing Me Up”

Watch Bob Moses’ full performance at KCRW.com.

Copyright 2016 KCRW-FM. To see more, visit KCRW-FM.

Poliça‘s third album opens in a downcast mood, with a mother’s murky voice telling a newborn baby that, in no uncertain terms, “It’s all s***.” An excremental worldview rarely makes for rousing anthems — much less repetition of that worldview as a refrain — but there’s a spirit of defiance in that clear, forthright message that carries through United Crushers and somehow lifts it all up.

“I got mine / I’ll be fine,” the mother continues in “Summer Please,” mocking the ways many of us callously or obliviously bumble through the world. The music behind her follows suit at the start, pitched down electronically to a sort of despondent drawl, until about halfway through it breaks open and begins to buck to a feisty dance beat. It comes out of nowhere, and the tension activated — between charged, sometimes dark lyrical content and antic, dancey energy — remains for the rest of an album that plays with crosscurrents between the two. “Lime Habit” shifts the album-opener into brighter territory, with singer Channy Leaneagh’s voice sounding clear yet ethereal; inviting synth curlicues wrap around rhythms meted out with house music’s lightness of touch. “Wedding” turns heavier and more concussive, with bashing, enervated beats beneath lyrics in line with Poliça’s claim that United Crushers was conceived as “modern protest music,” crafted in the midst of rioting in its hometown of Minneapolis last fall. “Trigger after trigger, we don’t even know we’re sick,” Leaneagh sings, perhaps in mind of the incident that sparked it all. “Leaders, we have none.”

Poliça’s sound in service of such a message and mood is roiling, hands-on electronic music that hews between dance fare that could catalyze a club and slower new-wave sounds. “Top Coat” leans toward the latter, with synth lines that creep out of hidden corners, while “Baby Sucks” finds a notably different funky stride. Somewhere in the midst of such extremes lies a connective key to music cast out in lots of contrasting directions, with a sense of purging and purpose behind it all.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Femaphilia was basically a word that I created as a response to undertoned elements within the queer communities globally of femaphobia, and in the mainstream culture as well,” Barnes says. “Femaphobia,” he says, refers to a fear of “things that are feminine — especially feminine guys.”

“Femaphilia” counters that fear. It embraces “the love of the feminine,” he says, “to celebrate all the positive aspects that I’ve noticed so far on this journey.”

It’s also the name of Barnes’ new single. Alongside producer, DJ and singer/songwriter Rich Morel, Barnes recently began making music under the name SISTR MID9IGHT.

SISTR MID9IGHT happened by chance. Barnes says Morel spotted him performing in drag in 2014, and asked him if he sings. Why, yes, Barnes replied — he’d been singing almost since he was a toddler. So he and Morel began meeting regularly, laying down tracks in Morel’s home studio in Takoma Park, Maryland. The duo’s debut, “Femaphilia” officially arrived Monday.

Barnes says the subterranean and sensual track derives inspiration from ‘70s icons including Iggy Pop, Grace Jones and David Bowie. (The name “Sister Midnight” comes from a song co-written by Bowie and Carlos Alomar, recorded by Iggy Pop for The Idiot.) It’s all about “this hard, gritty, but also very seductive sound.” Barnes wrote the lyrics — inspired by an impromptu selfie session — and he says it reflects his life experience.

By day Barnes works as a manager at a local boutique, but he’s been performing in drag for the last five years. His stage name? Pussy Noir.

“Pussy Noir is this kind of black girl that went to Europe and came back to America and is really that epitome of French, smoking, cool, after-sex seduction,” says Barnes. “You know, [wearing] that gorgeous dress that’s just falling off the shoulder, revealing just a little bit of the nipple.”

Barnes explains that when he performs with SISTR MID9IGHT, there’s not a hard line between Jason Barnes — musician and person — and Pussy Noir. That said, Pussy Noir encapsulates his work to create visibility and sexual agency for the feminine male, who he says can be trivialized in mainstream media and culture.

“We’re there, we’re part of the gay world, we’re in the movies,” Barnes says. “A lot of times [it’s] comedy… [or] a buffer of something else, but not necessarily being a central character who actually is a sexual human being.”

Barnes says Pussy Noir and SISTR MID9IGHT are “branding this idea that I hope people understand and don’t fear it, and will look at it and say, ‘This is part of our world.’”

Barnes says the duo has more music on the way.

March 5, SISTR MID9IGHT makes its live debut at Comet Ping Pong in Northwest D.C.. While there’s no such thing as a typical SISTR MID9IGHT show yet, expect true showmanship from the duo.

“The costumes are coming out,” says Barnes. “I am expecting big furs and all red and body skimming, and a lot of sweat by the end of it, for sure.”

SISTR MID9IGHT performs March 5 at Comet Ping Pong.

When the music of Norwegian producer Prins Thomas began to be heard outside of his native country back in 2005, it was crafted in collaboration with his friend Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. The material was deemed “cosmic disco” — a fitting tag, as the duo loved both the moon-boot-stomping beat of 1970s disco and the ARP- and Moog-heavy head-trip tracks made by the likes of Giorgio Moroder, Herbie Hancock and Klaus Schulze, which hinted at the firmament high above the dance floor.

And while Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas haven’t collaborated together since 2009’s album II, Prins Thomas has continued to mine that fertile ground between the heady and the body-moving as a solo artist. Last year’s overly generous dance mix, Paradise Goulash, clocked in at nearly 60 tracks and moved from the bubbling Balearic of Wally Badarou to the minimal techno of Robert Hood, emphasizing the “disco” side of the equation. But for his fourth solo album, Principe Del Norte, Thomas is firmly focused on the “cosmic.” The nine tracks expand to nearly 100 minutes of music, soundtracking a voyage into the deepest spaces of the mind.

Which is not to categorize Principe Del Norte as merely an ambient excursion. The album’s first two-thirds do evoke zero gravity, which can be exhilarating and anxiety-inducing in equal measure. Layer after layer of arpeggiated synthesizers stack up in “A1,” building to almost dizzying heights. Each new synth line and shift reveals a new array of patterns, creating density that brings to mind Terry Riley‘s early electric organ explorations. Warmer and slower keys open “A2” before gently gliding into a slow, flanged drum-machine beat and distant chiming guitar. And the 14 minutes of “C” strike a balance between drift and dissonance.

Prins Thomas calls this his ode to late-’90s ambient music, and while it does love the tones of folks like Pete Namlook, The Orb, Black Dog and Spacetime Continuum, it also hearkens back to Prins Thomas’ beloved ’70s prog, especially the Virgin Records back catalog and side-long tracks. It’s a good fit, since Thomas has a knack for remixes that often extend into double-digit runtimes, and he’s comfortable working on such a grand scale. Some long, mesmeric sections draw on Faust’s playful and noisy song, “Krautrock” from Faust IV. With its spindly guitar melody, throbbing modular synthesizers and careful build, “B” evokes Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick, while the pinging, percolating blips of “D” sound like something Ashra’s Manuel Göttsching might have concocted in the late ’70s.

Almost an hour in, one of Prins Thomas’ telltale stomping beats finally appears in “E.” Over the last half-hour, Thomas gives his spacey tracks some propulsion. Album highlight “G” keeps all the ethereal washes of vintage synthesizers and tingling arpeggios aloft while also coupling them to a two-note bass ostinato and thumping beat — in the process proving that 10 years on, Prins Thomas can still craft some thrilling cosmic disco.

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