Kevin Pace Trio – 7524
PREE – Alvin
Nick Hakim – Heaven
Griefloss – łłł
Projected Man – Raspberry Jam
CrushnPain – Forms Of Relaxation
Max D- Bubblegum
Three Man Soul Machine – Kiki
RDGLDGRN – Hangout
Cheick Hamala Diabate – Diamonds and Gold
Todd Simon – Amalgam
Lands – Sometimes
Sligo Creek Stompers – Cuckoo’s Nest
small craft – of the mountain
Aztec Sun – Get Up
Boat Burning – RM1
Smoke Bellow – Patient Belongings
Corm – Then I Built My Own Violin (Instrumental)
Calm The Waters – Stay
Olivia Neutron-John – 16 BEAT

Brian Wilbur Grundstrom – An Orchestral Journey
Jon Miller – Swimming
Mary Chapin Carpenter – Come On Come On
So Spirited – Lifted
Arlin Godwin – Bangkok Matinee
Vanessa Renee Williams – We’re Together
Cynthia Marie – Harbor
Ben Williams – Strength And Beauty
Olivia Neutron-John – 16 BEAT
Nitemoves – Port au Prism
Fellowcraft – Glass Houses
Foozle – Sofa Couch
The Jennifers – Christmas In Reverse – Instrumental
Mirror Factory – Sold
Fort Knox Five – Reach (Instrumental)
Fulton Lights – If You Can Make It Through the Dark
Fellow Creatures – Expectations
Sam Cooper & The Sleepwalkers – Worship
Lungfish – Necrophones
Big Moth – Dim

Astronaut Jones – Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas
Jonathan Parker – Jacqui
Three Man Soul Machine – Rastaman Chant
Redline Graffiti – Two Face
Joy Buttons – Other
East Ghost – Clouds and Their Shape
Golden Looks – Rooftop
Justin Jones – My Father’s Gun
Griefloss – łłł
Lands – Sometimes
Olivia Neutron-John – 16 BEAT
Sligo Creek Stompers – Cuckoo’s Nest
Astra Via – Fast Forward
Young Master Sunshine Photogenic 1982 – West Georgia
Bad Brains – Ragga Dub
Peyote Pilgrim – District City
Cigarbox Planetarium – Oh! Tinnitus
Philip Lassiter – Set You Free
Wale – Love Hate Thing (Tone P Instrumental)
Bossalingo – Manha de Carnaval

The video corresponds with Olivia Neutron-John’s guttural, passionate track “death/tango.” Back in May, Nasty—who also plays bass in Chain & the Gang—traveled to Philadelphia with Cigarette‘s Richard Howard to film the single-camera visual. Nasty directed and largely choreographed; Howard helped film and edit. The back-up dancers come from SWARM, a Philly-based music and dance group. In an email, Nasty writes that the video’s main dance sequence was capped at three takes—and the team filmed the whole thing in a single night.

Nasty held quick rehearsals in Philly about a month before filming, and things just kind of worked out naturally. “Basically, I showed everyone the dance I had made for the song, and there were certain moves I imagined doing together, and other moves that were just for me to make,” Nasty writes. “We all felt it out and the dance came together as a group.”

Dance is a huge part of Nasty’s intense live performances—behind a Casio, the artist jumps, kicks and lunges—so structuring the video around dance seemed like a no-brainer. Nasty’s dance style and vocal delivery bear similarities: They’re excruciatingly raw, and in this case, both reflect suffering. “The video is another way of articulating the pain I went through when my best friend passed away,” the performer writes. “First through the song, then through the movement.” The video is dedicated to Nasty’s late friend, who went by Richie Terrific.

“I don’t really know how to talk about dancing, as I’m not a trained dancer,” Nasty writes, “but for me, dancing is moving in a way that only makes sense to you [and] letting your body be a violent reaction.”

Now, the artist is on a path toward a calmer state of mind. “I guess you can never know for sure, but I feel like this is the last manifestation of this feeling (of not knowing how to cope),” Nasty writes. “I feel a new beginning. I feel at peace with it now, ready to celebrate his life and what it meant to me.”

Olivia Neutron-John plays a release show Thursday, Sept. 18 at 8:30 p.m. at Meeps in Adams Morgan, and another show Friday, Sept. 26 at Comet Ping Pong.

For more Priests, check out Bandwidth’s video sessions with the band.

Naomi Punk:

Priests:

The brains behind the outfit is Anna Nasty—also a member of Ian Svenonius’ Chain & the Gang—who brought the project to D.C. upon moving here from Tempe, Arizona, just a handful of months ago. Olivia Neutron-John is the artist’s (mostly) solo act, a project whose sound feels like a rare experimental gem discovered in some neglected attic.

Easy listening this is not: The vocalist’s guttural screams mingle with fluttering, screeching saxophone as Nasty hovers above synthetic drum beats with occasionally indecipherable but heartfelt lyrics. A couple of ONJ’s tracks on Bandcamp are actually multiple songs strung together into short albums, with names like Injury Train And I’m Never Getting Off It. They’re somewhat long but worth the journey. (Nasty’s Tumblr page promises a proper debut album—and a music video—sometime soon.)

Olivia Neutron-John performs at CD Cellar in Arlington tomorrow night. Before the show, Bandwidth caught up with Nasty to discuss performance style, the inclusiveness of the D.C. music scene and the unlikely influence American Idol had on the project’s name.

Bandwidth: Tell me about Olivia Neutron-John. How do you describe your sound?

Anna Nasty: I describe it as “aggressive bedroom pop”—music made in my bedroom with emotion and aggression. It’s post-bro music. There’s a lot of music that’s post-feminist. I don’t really like that term. A lot of music made is post-feminist, but I’m actually post-bro. Music made outside of the influence of bros.

What’s an Olivia Neutron-John performance like?

Visceral. I wear a 100 percent wool jumpsuit. I wear it year-round. I don’t know how to describe it. Some would call it, maybe, provocative, in a weird way. It’s just a jumpsuit that I wear. But my performance is very emotional and aggressive, like my music. I dance when I play. I make these dance routines to all my songs, but I can’t fully perform any of them because I have to play keyboard and sing when I play. So live is just me trying to negotiate that.

Since you’re new to D.C., what do you think about the music scene? What kind of response have you been getting to your act?

I think it’s really cool here. I’ve gotten such an overwhelmingly positive response being here that I really feel welcome and a part of D.C. I knew some people before I got here. It’s been really good being in D.C.—I feel like I’ve been able to be really active and I play in other projects besides Olivia Neutron-John and I’ve been totally busy with music since I got here, which is cool.

You also play in Chain & the Gang. Is it difficult to devote time to Olivia Neutron-John when you’re busy with them?

Yeah, I’d say so, but I like to keep my plate full. So it’s OK with me—I’d rather be busy than not.

Are you a huge Olivia Newton-John fan, or is your band name the kind punny of joke that’s been rampant among indie-minded bands lately?

It’s out of admiration, really. I’m not one of those people who made this weird celebrity funny band name because I’m making fun of anyone. I was watching an episode of American Idol and Olivia Newton-John was the judge, and she was just wearing this shirt that said “it is what it is,” and it was really inspiring. I love that phrase, and I just love that she was a judge on American Idol, wearing that shirt. And then my friend turned to me and said “Is Olivia Neutron-John a really bad band name, or a really good band name?” And I had just shown everyone my music for the first time, and I didn’t know what to call it—and everyone kinda looked at me and was like, “That’s what your thing should be called.”

Olivia Neutron-John performs with Feral Future, I Im Eye My and Nox Saturday at 8 p.m. at CD Cellar in Arlington. Top photo by Michael Andrade. See the original at andradexcobain.com.

Both nouveau and sepia-toned hip-hop get stage time this week, with tomorrow’s Phil Ade/Lightshow twofer at U Street Music Hall, Thursday’s D.C. Loves Dilla showcase, De La Soul’s 25th anniversary party at Howard Theatre Saturday, and Salt N Pepa’s stop at Verizon Center Sunday. It also happens to be a great week for earwormy pop ensembles: Bandwidth video stars Phox perform at The Hamilton Saturday, Glasgow pop geniuses Camera Obscura (above) play 9:30 Club Friday, and Philly’s Cheers Elephant headline DC9 with support from locals The Jackfields Thursday. But if you want to see two rising acts in D.C.’s punk-rock scene, don’t miss Priests at Fort Reno Thursday and Olivia Neutron-John in Arlington on Saturday.

More chaos, fuzz and hummable indie-rock in this week’s playlist, below.

Having trouble loading the playlist on your iPhone? Try whyd’s mobile app.

“When I first started [shooting], I had the cheapest camera,” he says—a Canon 60D that he used with a “bootleg flash” and a battery pack. Shooting five shows a week with his heavy equipment, the 26-year-old photographer began to feel pain in his right arm. It got scary a few months ago when Andrade was traveling back home from a show at Tenleytown’s Casa Fiesta. “My whole body started shaking,” he says. “I thought I was going to die.”

Andrade sought medical help and physical therapy. “I had to take a lot of medicine,” he says. Eventually, the pain receded. He soon invested in a lighter, more expensive camera.

Now, Andrade gets to show off the work that almost put him out of commission: Tonight the photographer opens “IN MY EYES,” an exhibit of his concert photography, at The Coupe in Columbia Heights. It’s his first solo show.

The exhibit features a few dozen images of 11 D.C.-area bands, including Chain & the Gang, Dudes (shown above), Olivia Neutron-John, Warchild, Give and Baby Bry Bry and the Apologists.

“I fell in love with hardcore music when I was 17 years old,” says the Alexandria native. “Bad Brains’ Pay To Cum changed my life.” Later on, the photography coming out of D.C.’s hardcore scene didn’t impress him. He felt more drawn to the work of photographers like Pulitzer winner Lucian Perkins—particularly his visceral images of a young D.C. punk scene, like the ones published in the 2013 book Hard Art DC 1979. “I decided to take it upon myself” to start shooting hardcore shows, Andrade says, aiming for a similar look and feel as Perkins achieved in his work.

Andrade has been shooting punk shows for two years—still a newbie by most standards, but his work stands out as some of the best in the scene. He’s now a familiar face at shows. Though, it helps that he doesn’t have a lot of competition at the tiny events he chooses to capture.

“When I go to these house shows, it’s like, two photographers,” Andrade says. When he recently shot a show at Rock & Roll Hotel, there were too many photographers there for his taste. He prefers the little gigs—where he can get right in the pit and shoot the kids. That’s where he says he finds the best shots.

“Lucian did a great job of documenting not just the band but the crowd,” Andrade says. In Perkins’ photos, you don’t just see the band—you see people in the audience, like Alec MacKaye, who would go on to become influential in their own right. “The crowd for me is half of the battle because they’re just as important as the band.”

Even after a couple of years—and who knows how many shows—the photographer says he still gets antsy before a shoot. “I always get super nervous,” he says. Why? 

“I don’t know—I’ve done this a million times,” Andrade says. “I guess it means I’m still enjoying it.”

“IN MY EYES” opens at 6 p.m. tonight at The Coupe. The show is on view to Sept. 1.

In it, Betsy Wright (Ex Hex), Francy Graham (Dudes), and Anna Nxsty (Olivia Neutron-John) join Chain & the Gang’s Ian Svenonius in a low-budget tour through urban decay. Everyone is wearing chains, fake-looking fur, and denim vests as footage of impoverished, boarded-up and industrial landscapes roll by in the background. “Rip! Bite! Shred! Tear! Just about everywhere,” Svenonius sneers.

“Devitalize” will be released on Chain & the Gang’s “Minimum Rock N Roll,” out May 6 on Svenonius’ Radical Elite label. It’s the band’s fourth (!) LP.

Shortly after 10 p.m., the next act started setting up. But it wasn’t a rock band, or anything as pedestrian as that—it was Olivia Neutron-John, a newcomer to the D.C. area who plays an intense and minimal strain of synthpop on a Casio. The rest of the performers occupied a similar vein: dark techno, much of it industrial-tinged. The headliner that night would be Secret Boyfriend, an experimentalist who toys with the boundaries between electronic and acoustic music, and who released a record that a reviewer for Resident Advisor called possibly “the most abstruse thing Blackest Ever Black has ever released.”

The lineup that night came courtesy of Select DC, a young duo bent on bringing more abstruse electronic music to the District.

Recent D.C. transplants Josh Levi, 27, and 24-year-old Jacob Knibb—who lives in the Petworth house—met on Facebook in January 2013 and bonded over their mutual desire to see more weird or overlooked synthesized music in the city. Levi booked bands back home in St. Louis, Mo., and Knibb had been into punk and noise while growing up in Chesapeake, Va. Two months after they met online, they booked their first show together. That event brought electronic music-makers Ital (D.C. expat Daniel Martin-McCormick) and Container (Providence’s Ren Schofield) to Comet Ping Pong.

Despite the excitement surrounding Ital in 2012, the Comet show flopped, by Knibb’s account. He says attendance was low, and they didn’t make enough money to meet the tour manager’s guarantee. But the curation set the tone for the other shows Select DC would later book: independent, dark, and vaguely punk synthesized music, usually performed in noncommercial venues and people’s houses.

It’s not a money-maker, but that’s not the point.

“Josh and I are mainly interested in creating opportunities for marginalized performers whose work generally resemble noise, techno, house, minimal synth, American primitive, industrial, avant-garde electronic, or some mutant hybridization of styles,” writes Knibb, who has his own musical project, Rosemary Arp. (Levi plays solo as Radiator Greys.) “I say ‘marginalized’ because they don’t represent a typical band/DJ dynamic or their sound doesn’t fit within the current interests of other venues or promoters. I wanted to create an ‘Other’ outlet for the people who didn’t fit in with an established D.C. scene.”

The pair has booked about 20 events so far, their most recent one a noise night at Ghion restaurant near U Street NW. April 12 at Union Arts DC, they embark on their biggest gig yet: a nightlong production called the Vanguard Festival.

“Vanguard Festival came together by chance when a number of artists contacted us about shows on the same date. It gave us an opportunity to put together a huge bill of acts we wanted to see, and whom we want to expose to the greater DMV area,” Levi writes. So far, the lineup includes a mix of noisemakers like Los Angeles’ John Wiese and Philadelphia’s Embarker alongside dance-friendlier artists like Claire and—again—Ital. Numerous acts on the bill, from DJs to live performers, are local.

Of course, noise isn’t underrepresented in D.C., not by a long shot. Just look at the annual Sonic Circuits Festival and the related shows it helps put on throughout the year. The broadest definition of electronic music has a home here, too, though dance clubs like U Street Music Hall and Flash tend to focus on more accessible house and techno—the kind of thing more likely to pack floors and sell liquor. (Though Select DC has worked with Flash before.)

Select DC exists mainly to plug the holes unfilled by commercial venues and larger promoters. “Many of my friends who have hit me up for shows in the D.C. area have either had a rough D.C. show five-plus years ago, or have never played the District before,” Levi writes.

With its DIY ethos, Select DC clearly sprouts from punk-rock soils, but not just when it comes to eschewing commercialism: Knibb and Levi also try to support women musicians working in an otherwise very male genre. Levi points to a December show the pair booked for Providence’s Unicorn Hard-On (Valerie Martino). “Having her play to an audience mostly comprised of women” was critical, he says. “We are huge proponents of promoting female musicians in such a male-dominated arena.”

While Select DC remains a strictly underground operation, Knibb says their small community of followers probably know what to expect from him and Levi at this point. “I think we’ve gotten a reputation for being the weird, noisy dance people in the city.”

A sampling of some of the artists Select DC has brought or will bring to D.C.:

Select DC is on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.