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.

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.

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.

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.