Take the Silver Spring resident’s musical approach, for instance: It’s based on the teachings of Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus.

“He expressed himself obliquely, often through paradoxes or riddles,” explains Barbiero. “As with music, expression hinges on connotation and suggestion rather than denotation or declaration.”

His new album, An Eclipse of Images, draws from a similarly lofty place: philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s French language analysis of the symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, titled La lucidité et sa face d’ombre.

“The subtitle … would translate out to something like ‘lucidity and its shadow side,'” he says. “That fascinated me — lucidity being a transparency of thought, and its opposite, a shadow or kind of opacity. … An odd dialectic where clarity and obscurity chase each other in endless circles.”

This idea informs the structure of the album’s seven tracks. Made with Italian drummer/producer Massimo Discepoli, An Eclipse of Images is often dream-like, with Barbiero’s articulate bass lines fading in and out of Discepoli’s ethereal backdrop of electronics and percussion.

But the relationship between obscurity and clarity was also used as a specific writing tool. With literally an ocean between them, Barbiero and Discepoli made the album entirely over the internet. Barbiero recalls that during the creation of one of the songs, Discepoli intentionally kept him in the dark about some of the structural elements.

“Massimo sent me a basic track that had a distinct cyclicality to it, but one I couldn’t quite work out precisely,” says Barbiero. “After I sent him my part I asked him what time signature it was, and he told me it was 17/8.”

The name of the song? “The Occulted Measure,” because “at the time I was playing it, the length of the measure was hidden from me,” Barbiero says. (Songs in 17/8 are rare.)

They spent months exchanging ideas and piecing the tracks together, aiming to capture an improvised feel. The results are remarkably comfortable, and the tracks often have a naturalistic ambience.

Barbiero, however, remains modest about the effort. “It was very easy, thanks to modern technology,” he says.

An Eclipse of Images is currently available through Discepoli’s label, Acustronica. But Barbiero is already moving forward on another project exploring abstract concepts through music. Reuniting with previous collaborator Cristiano Rocci, Barbiero is focusing on “atopias, or places that are no-places.”

“We’ll combine field recordings of public, more-or-less anonymous places like train stations and airports with composed and improvised music. I’ll play double bass and Cris will add electronics and six-string electric bass. I’m very excited about it.”

“I thought it was really interesting how that sort of work-oriented sphere of quantifiable data was something that we were voluntarily heaping upon ourselves,” says the Silver Spring, Maryland, guitarist who makes drone-and-tone compositions under the name Insect Factory.

All that thinking about likes and shares — and what they really amount to — led him to call Insect Factory’s latest album Work and sequence it like a work day. The opening track, “We’re All Just Here For The Money,” has a motif that could be an echoing clock or a heartbeat or the thrum of an assembly line. The closer, “Sleep Instruction,” is a 17-minute ocean of sound that never quite becomes restful. In between: “Slow Oxygen Loss,” “Junk Machine” and “Cigarette.”

The album’s long, meditative instrumentals are classic Insect Factory: Barsky’s approach is enticing and personal even though his sounds earn the sometimes-daunting label of “experimental music.” (Insect Factory performs Saturday at Rhizome DC at a show headlined by Thalia Zedek, known for playing in Come, Like Skull and Uzi. Chris Brokaw, who was in Come, contributed to Work.)

But there’s definitely something sinister at the edges of Work.

“A lot of the tones on the record, they start off very short and clipped and a lot more measurable. And slowly over the course of the record, the sort of static that creeps in by the second track — by the end it kind of takes over the entire [album],” Barsky says. “I was thinking about how that form of measurement that used to be restricted to a 9-to-5 day was something that became a part of our existence right now.”

Barsky, who also plays in the band Plums, works as an elementary school teacher. In his profession, data and technology matter more than ever. When making Insect Factory songs, however, he tries to innovate from within. He won’t be adding software or extra gadgets anytime soon.

“For me, what’s more interesting than buying more equipment to allow me to get bigger and louder is to sort of modify what I’m doing with actual guitar playing,” Barsky says. “So maybe tuning in a different way, or finding a piece of metal that has a weight that sounds really nice on the strings.”

After more than a decade of Insect Factory creations, he says there’s a natural flow to how he manipulates the duration of notes, the volume of notes, stereo channel separation and so on.

“I think it’s become part of my body, where I’m able to articulate what it is I want to say as an artist without having to think of all these knobs, and think about all the volume pedals — for me it’s just become second nature,” Barsky says. “If I have an idea, I know probably the quickest way to get that out.”

Insect Factory performs Saturday at Rhizome DC with Hothead, Nice Breeze and Thalia Zedek.

While Pyramid Atlantic is still settling in at its new Hyattsville location, Sonic Circuits has found a new site for 2016: Logan Fringe Arts Space, the Northeast D.C. home of the Capital Fringe organization. The festival takes place Friday through Sunday.

Using the space was a “no-brainer,” says festival director/curator Jeff Surak. Sonic Circuits has a few basic needs, he says, and the Capital Fringe organization — which has its own music series — met them.

“Just a space where will no one will bother us, where we can do our own thing without any restrictions,” Surak says. “It’s hard to find that kind of space — and ideally, one that doesn’t cost anything. We are a zero-budget operation.” (It’s not the first time Sonic Circuits has tried a new festival venue — as recently as 2013, the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE was ground zero.)

Surak says the 2016 edition will stick to its core mission of presenting noncommercial music — some of it noisy, some of it not — made by people who buck traditions or invent new modes of making sound. Improvisation and oddness are valued, and outright chaos is always possible. The recipe has given the festival an international profile among experimental musicians.

“It’s always different, and the way the festival is put together, it’s not just going to see a collection of artists, like you’re going to some other music festival, where you know [a band] … It’s an entire experience,” Surak says. “People are put together in a certain order to either complement or contrast one another, and you’re taking the audience on a trip.”

That trip might include theramin (Pamelia Stickney), guitars and electronics (Eyryx), analog synthesizers (Analog Tara) or a dude who made an instrument out of a bicycle wheel (Zilmrah).

“Often the ones that you never heard of, and you’re clueless about, are the ones that leave the biggest impression on you,” Surak says. He likens the festival to a buffet, but he advocates taking the full three-evening excursion if possible.

“Afterwards you spend a week, or a couple weeks, or months — or even a year — trying to unpack everything you’ve just experienced,” he says. For anybody who wants more outside of the festival itself, Sonic Circuits also stages smaller shows throughout the year.

Bandwidth readers might recognize some names on the 2016 bill, including Janel Leppin and Anthony Pirog, who both perform Sunday. Surak says it’s crucial to celebrate home-grown talent.

“D.C.’s not a cheap place to live, so you don’t have that sort of artist-driven underground — warehouses and squats and those kinds of hotbeds for creativity,” says Surak, a longtime performer himself. “It’s more that you have people who have good jobs, are established in their careers and besides having their 9-to-5 gig, they have another life that probably would shock their co-workers.”

The 2016 Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music runs Friday through Sunday at Logan Fringe Arts Space, 1358 Florida Ave. NE.

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.

Wolf, however, sees it in a more cathartic way.

“I thought of it as a long exhalation,” he says. “I do yoga and I got the sense that this is a Lion’s Breath: this is the sound, ‘ha,’ stretched out over a long period of time.”

“Haa” is taken from a 2015 live recording, capturing a cathartic section towards the end of a longer work. Wolf aims his attention at the essence of the transition itself. It’s a philosophy espoused by his hero, legendary German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

“His compositional method was understanding a piece as a group of forces, allowing those forces to have particular moments where they dominate, and then have them come back under and play a more supportive role,” says the resident of Arlington, Virginia, who is a regular collaborator with other local experimental acts and a member of post-rock band The Orchid.

“Haa” and On se lève were released in May through D.C. experimental label Verses Records. He paired the track with a video of surreal images like ghostly faces, growing frost and close-ups of blood vessels, appearing and reappearing along to the music.

The video was put together by fellow artist and Verses label head, Dennis Kane, who used the minimalist tautness of the music as visual inspiration.

“There’s this suspension of time and movement and yet, in the layering, there is this ebb and flow,” Kane writes in an email. “I used the women as shades of movement and the various microscopic images as a push and pull element — like the microtonal movements in the piece.”

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.

Sounds like these capture a “changing of the guard” in Washington, says D.C. producer Kokayi — and he stitches them together with other locally sourced audio in a new project called The Sounds of the City.

In March, organizers of the annual Funk Parade put out a call for recordings captured in the District. “What sounds make you think of D.C.?” asked parade co-founder Justin Rood. “What is the song this city makes?” Recordings from the public, organizers said, would be turned over to Kokayi to sample, splice and loop into a “song for D.C.”

But Kokayi got more sounds than he expected — more than 30, all told.

“I got so much great stuff that I was like, ‘Ooh, I could do way more songs than just one,'” the artist says. So he decided to make four tracks — one for each city quadrant.

The result is a four-part audio soundscape that tells a story about urban change and the sharp contrasts that define many Washington neighborhoods.

Track No. 4, “Dreams Deterred,” portrays two sides of life in the neighborhood Kokayi calls home. “The recent crimes at Deanwood Metro starkly contrast the peace of nature that exists in Deanwood,” he says. To get at both sides, he combined a trap beat with sounds of Deanwood nature and rhythms heard at the Malcolm X Park drum circle.

The project’s third track, “Gentry & the Ebon Road,” sounds scattered and confused. That’s on purpose, Kokayi points out.

“The song begins with the sound from the corner of 7th and U and slowly distorts as a representation of the reconstruction and gentrification of U Street,” he says. He builds the track using sounds of go-go beats, a downtown D.C. violin performance, a walk through Shaw and a house flip in progress.

Kokayi dedicates “SoawesomE” to Southeast. Constructed from audio of a helicopter, birds and a band practice, the track aims to “illustrate how Southeast has always received negative media coverage without people actually knowing the tony estates of Hillcrest,” he says. Meanwhile, Southwest tune “SolidGold Waterfront” uses recordings of demolition, a motorcycle and a city bus to depict development in the city’s smallest quadrant.

The project took two and a half weeks to complete, Kokayi says. His main goal? The element of surprise. “I wanted to come up with different rhythms that wouldn’t be expected,” he says.

He hopes his work inspires more locals to create their own D.C. soundscapes.

“[Residents] should spend some time actually going out and taping their neighborhoods,” Kokayi says, “so you can hear some of the wild stuff that happens.”

Listen to “Sounds of the City,” also called “Hecho in D.C.,” below. The Funk Parade takes place May 7 in the U Street neighborhood.

Photo by Flickr user Ryan McKnight used under a Creative Commons license.

The new work from Bernstein, who plays saxophone in the adventurous Baltimore quartet Horse Lords, attempts to redefine how digital real estate is used. But exploring it may mean subjecting yourself to an uncomfortable experience.

Visit Bernstein’s website for The Great Outdoors, and you’re introduced to four sets of mind-numbing video and audio. The sound portion combines sax squawks and piano notes with helicopter drones, and they’re paired with repetitive animations that are the visual equivalent of locked grooves.

If it seems like intellectual porn, that’s because it kind of is. Bernstein says The Great Outdoors is essentially the final project for his MFA at Goucher College.

“[I was] pushing myself technically and artistically to try to figure out what an album could be in the Internet age,” Bernstein says.

The composition seems like something you’d encounter in a modern art museum, but Bernstein wants to bring unconventional art to an accessible platform, making the Internet a type of everyman’s gallery. But the work is immersive and beyond the audience’s control. In The Great Outdoors’ web space, there is no play, pause or fast forward.

Bernstein says he wants his work to challenge people to see and hear things in new ways, “or pay attention to their own vision and hearing in a new dimension.” He thinks the Internet medium can help achieve that.

Andrew Bernstein

“I’ve thought a lot about what a website is, and what websites try to do — be useful or get you to buy something,” he says. “[I] wanted to make something that … sort of didn’t have a purpose. A website that created a space that was just meant to be experienced, and not necessarily meant to do anything.”

Bernstein credits modern saxophonists and early drone music for influencing The Great Outdoors, along with Object Oriented Ontology, a domain of metaphysics that seeks to understand existence beyond a human lens. (According to scholar and game designer Ian Bogost, OOO contends that “nothing has special status” and “everything exists equally.” Bernstein says he’s still trying to wrap his head around the concept.)

However complex the theory behind it, though, The Great Outdoors synthesizes a common pre-Internet experience: It’s like staring at television static, waiting for something to emerge from the fuzz — because every now and then, something does.

Andrew Bernstein’s The Great Outdoors is out now on Ehse Records and its video accompaniment is viewable on the project’s website.

Pyramid Atlantic’s departure from downtown Silver Spring leaves MoCo with one less place to experience adventurous music. Since 2008, local experimental-music promoter Sonic Circuits has hosted roughly 200 shows at Pyramid Atlantic, including last year’s edition of the annual Sonic Circuits Festival.

Pyramid Atlantic signed a 25-year lease at 4318 Gallatin St. in Hyattsville last year, putting down roots in the small city’s growing Gateway Arts District. The arts organization — which specializes in printmaking, letterpress and book arts — hopes to open in the historic Arcade building by early summer.

Pyramid Atlantic is a boon for Prince George’s County, but leaving Montgomery County wasn’t the nonprofit’s original plan. Executive Director Jose Dominguez says the relocation follows the collapse of extensive negotiations with Montgomery County that initially aimed to keep the organization in Silver Spring.

Jeff Carey and Audrey Chen perform at Pyramid Atlantic, 2009 (by IntangibleArts).

The center decided to relocate when Montgomery County started pushing for redevelopment of nearby Ripley Street, Dominguez says. That development would have prevented Pyramid Atlantic from expanding, and the need for a new home became urgent.

But in 2008, Montgomery County began soliciting proposals for a large undesignated space in the new Silver Spring library, a slick $69.5 million project the county unveiled in 2015. Pyramid Atlantic threw its hat into the ring, and Montgomery County’s executive office approved their proposal, inviting the arts center to take over 15,500 square feet in the library. To pay for the buildout, Pyramid Atlantic sold its Georgia Avenue building to developer Harvey Maisel for $2.5 million. The sale was finalized in 2014.

But the arts facility never moved into the Silver Spring library. County memos show that Montgomery County’s executive office sparred with the County Council over terms of the lease agreement, raising questions about — among other issues — whether Pyramid Atlantic was worthy of the space’s estimated $421,000 annual market value.

Odal performs at Pyramid Atlantic, 2009 (IntangibleArts)

After the council ultimately shot down the terms of the lease, Pyramid Atlantic withdrew its proposal in November 2014 and started looking for space elsewhere. That’s when the City of Hyattsville stepped in.

“We knew [Pyramid Atlantic] would be a fantastic anchor for the Gateway Arts District,” says Jim Chandler, Hyattsville’s director of community and economic development. Pyramid Atlantic seemed like the ideal organization for the “gritty” space, which had been undergoing renovation for years, Chandler says. They signed a lease in May 2015.

In the meantime, Montgomery County solicited a new batch of proposals for the library space. It’s now poised to ink a deal with Levine Music, the $9 million nonprofit that operates four music schools in the D.C. region, including one in Montgomery County.

When Pyramid Atlantic leaves downtown Silver Spring, it won’t completely deprive the gentrifying neighborhood of inventive music. Avant-garde record label Cuneiform Records, Montgomery College’s Cultural Arts Center, Fillmore Silver Spring and several record stores are all part of the area’s official arts and entertainment district.

But neighbors say Silver Spring’s loss is Hyattsville’s gain.

“I have been deeply disappointed to lose Pyramid Atlantic. They have enlivened and served our community for years,” emails artist Anne Dyker, who studied papermaking and book arts at the facility in Silver Spring.

“We saw countless concerts there … a few blocks from our offices and our home,” writes Joyce Nalewajk Feigenbaum, Cuneiform Records’ director of publicity and promotion. “It’s been absolute heaven; Silver Spring serving as D.C.’s epicenter for experimental music.”

Now that distinction could be shared with Hyattsville. Sonic Circuits director Surak says he may hitch a ride with the arts center when it moves east.

“The new space presents new opportunities,” Surak writes in an email. “We’ll see what the future holds.”

Top photo of Keir Neuringer at Pyramid Atlantic (2013) by Flickr user IntangibleArts. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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