D.C. punk band Priests will headline a benefit show Friday at 411 New York Ave. NE, the location of the arts facility slated to become a boutique hotel. Also on the bill are experimental duo Janel and Anthony, synthesizer musician Adriana-Lucia Cotes and Ian Svenonius‘ solo project, Escape-ism.

The building on New York Avenue has operated under the name Union Arts since 2013, serving as a work and practice space for musicians and artists. Before that, it was used regularly for underground concerts and dance parties. But property taxes on the building became too high for the previous owners, and they sold the property last summer.

D.B. Lee Development, Inc. Construction and Brook Rose Development, LLC, purchased Union Arts in June 2015. They later announced plans to transform 411 New York Ave. NE into a high-end hotel with eight studios and other art spaces managed by the nonprofit CulturalDC. But up to 100 artists use the building on a rotating basis, according to supporters, and the new configuration is likely to push many of them out.

Supporters of Union Arts packed a zoning commission hearing Feb. 1. Many offered testimony about the scarcity of affordable arts space in D.C., which has rapidly gentrified in the last 15 years.

Janel Leppin of Janel and Anthony says the outpouring of support inspired her, and she decided to organize a show to bring attention to the situation.

“More than anything,” Leppin says, she wanted to “raise awareness for the need for spaces for artists in D.C.”

A flyer for Friday’s Union Arts benefit show

Leppin has performed at Union Arts numerous times. She says when choosing bands for the benefit concert, she picked acts who have been involved in the space in some way.

Priests fit that description. The band’s members have set up shows at Union Arts and two of them testified Feb. 1 on the importance of Union Arts to local music.

“It’s definitely a hub of music activity,” says Priests singer Katie Alice Greer in an interview. “It is a unique building right now in D.C. in certain ways. There aren’t a whole lot of other spaces left that are not private homes or businesses. … There’s not a lot of middle-ground spaces where people are actively making art and putting on shows for any band that they think is cool and interesting — in a way that’s not really driven by alcohol sales.”

But saving the building as it is now may not be feasible. According to Gail Harris, managing member of the LLC that sold Union Arts last year, the rent paid by artists did not cover the building’s property taxes. The new owners have asked the current tenants to vacate by Sept. 1. (Though at the hearing, D.B. Lee President Dennis Lee said that date may be flexible.)

CulturalDC says the new studios will accommodate “up to 20-plus artists” who can apply in an open call. Developers point out that musicians will also be considered for art spaces.

But current tenants are still challenging the redevelopment plans. Leppin says proceeds from Friday’s show will help the building’s artists with “whatever cost[s] they are faced with.” She later writes in an email that funds should go to help artists who are trying to find new studio space.

“We will raise the money to help Union Arts continue its work as an arts venue and basically a community center for the public — for as long as it can,” Leppin writes.

Desirée Venn Frederic, founder of vintage shop Nomad Yard Collectiv, which operates out of Union Arts, says that means lawyer’s fees. “In our current fight we acknowledge we need legal support and legal guidance,” she says.

The number of people who signed up to give public testimony Feb. 1 was so great that a second zoning commission hearing was scheduled for Feb. 23. Leppin says she hopes Friday’s show sparks enough interest to overwhelm that hearing, too.

The benefit concert for Union Arts takes place Feb. 19 at 411 New York Ave. NE. 8:30 p.m.

Top image: Protestors at a Feb. 1 zoning commission hearing on the planned redevelopment of Union Arts.

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

The music on “Clarity,” a recording that Leppin’s eight-piece Ensemble Volcanic Ash made at the 2013 Sonic Circuits Festival, is as nebulous in category as the duo’s: elements of jazz, electronica, ambient, avant-garde and chamber classical music (or at least chamber instruments, like harp and bassoon) all interact within the mix.

If none of these musical strands quite defines the ensemble’s sound on “Clarity,” jazz comes the closest — between Leppin’s stark rhythmic figure and Sarah Hughes’ dark and mysterious alto sax solo, the jazz feeling is unmistakable. Perhaps that’s what landed Ensemble Volcanic Ash a prime spot in the lineup of 2015’s Washington Women in Jazz Festival, taking place throughout the month of March.

Watch Janel Leppin perform live with Marissa Nadler at Bandwidth’s Wilderness Bureau.

Ensemble Volcanic Ash performs tonight at 8 p.m. at Union Arts.

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.

Check out their beautiful performance of “Dead City Emily” above, and “1923,” both from Nadler’s latest album, July available now from Sacred Bones.

The Claudia Quintet +1 with Kurt Elling & Theo Bleckmann, “What Is the Beautiful?”
Drummer-composer John Hollenbeck uses his cutting-edge small ensemble (augmented by pianist Matt Mitchell) to create layered, spectral backdrops for the poetry of American writer Kenneth Patchen. The latter is delivered by vocalists Theo Bleckmann and Kurt Elling; Bleckmann delivers with his clear haunting voice, but Elling abandons his usual croon for a gruff spoken-word delivery. It’s as beautiful as it is head-scratching.

Fred Frith & Henry Kaiser, “Friends & Enemies”
Frith is English, Kaiser American; both are experimental and idiosyncratic guitarists known for never making their music easy to digest. Even for each other. And yet, in this compilation of material from across 20 years (1979 to 1999) and styles from rock to jazz to contemporary classical to plain-old-noise, they repeatedly find ways to groove together. “Groove” is not an incidental descriptor, either: The never-conventional rhythms nonetheless make for a good entry point into the music (even though sometimes, as in the wonderfully titled “Twisted Memories Give Way to the Angry Present,” you have to search them out).

Gutbucket, “Flock”
“Flock” actually should be judged by its cover: the jazz-punk therein is as weird, goofy, and ultimately pleasurable as the cartoon that adorns it. Gutbucket channels funk, free jazz, Eastern European music and heavy metal pyrotechnics into the play-freaking-loud ethos. True, it’s always too melodic and thought-through to truly get the DIY feel happening, but it is as danceable (and mosh-able) as they come.

Janel and Anthony, “Where Is Home”
D.C.’s most eclectic and experimental duo brings together cello and guitar. If that suggests a kind of folk-psychedelia, you’ve got the right idea, but filter it through spooky, electronic ambient textures and free-floating improvisational structures that nonetheless shape themselves into logical forms. More importantly it’s soaked in otherworldly (almost, but not quite, familiar in its sources) beauty. In fact, it took me an extra 10 minutes to write this description, because I once again got mesmerized by it.

Microscopic Septet, “Lobster Leaps In”
Breezy and gregarious, the Micros’ 2008 reunion album (after a 16-year hiatus) picks up where they left off: a glorious mash-up of every jazz style they could find. The emphasis is heavy on the swing era, though, with slippery horn riffs, bluesy piano licks, and pounding, danceable rhythms oozing out of every corner. Still, most tunes would be equally at home in some squealing avant-garde loft or upscale jazz club as out on the dance floor.

Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, “Tabligh”
“Ten Freedom Summers,” Smith’s acclaimed magnum opus, is also a Cuneiform release—but don’t go perusing its 4.5-hour program unless you really know what you’re doing. An excerpt from it, however, opens “Tabligh”—a 2008 release by trumpeter-composer Smith and his Golden Quartet (featuring Vijay Iyer, the poster boy of the jazz zeitgeist, on keyboards). The music is difficult and abstruse, but a wash of moody soundscapes, a la fusion-era Miles (one of Smith’s heroes), makes it go down easier.