Stranger In the Alps – Love/Afraid
Martyn – Fashion Skater
Suzanne Brindamour – Fireflies
Timothy Soller – Water and Light
Miyazaki – Torrents
Projekt Eins – Vacillate-Venerate
The Shifters – She’s So Fine
Aaron Agre – Stormglass
Young Rapids – Singing World
Feedel Band – Ethiopian Ocean (Live At WAMU)
Klauss – Mixer
Peals – Koan 1
Borracho – Redemption
Ricky Eat Acid – Big Man’s Last Trip Outside
Vandaveer – The Knoxville Girl
aerialist – proteus
ZOMES – Beckoning Breeze
Flash Frequency – Corner of The Room
Bonjour, Ganesh! – Tito
Diamond District – Back to Basics Instrumental

Patuxent Partners – Washington County
ZOMES – Ruminants
Supper Club – Chambray
Fort Knox Five – Swinging On a Rhyme (Instrumental)
Tomás Pagán Motta – Love In Her Lies
Justin Jones – Miracles
Kev Brown – Always (Instrumental)
Be Still, Cody – Wrong Right
Buildings – Everything Is Possible
Lifted – Silver
Sun Machines – Mono Mind
Derek Evry – Wake Me Up
Iritis – Pedal
A Tale Of – Oh, We Owe This to Ourselves
Nitemoves – Ashe
The Petticoat Tearoom – Kundalini
Jonathan Parker – CO86
Girls Love Distortion – Sleepwalking
Dawit Eklund – Lies Are Chic
Masego – I Do Everything (More For Cruisin’)
Otis Infrastructure – Furniture
Oooh Child Ensemble – Diko’s Groove
Extra Golden – It’s Not Easy
Kev Brown – Party People Dedication (Instrumental)
Marian McLaughlin – Your Bower
The Greatest Hoax – Opus no. 28
Marvin Gaye – What’s Happening Brother
Aerialist – Naiad
Wanted Man – Interlude
Baby Bry Bry – Slumzzz
April + Vista – Theme In Adagio
Stranger In the Alps – Love/Afraid
Swings – New Year

That’s what I asked Bandwidth’s contributors to help me do last month. Our writers sent me their picks for their favorite D.C. music of 2015 thus far, and the result was this extremely awesome playlist (stream it below).

One limitation, though: I had to pick songs that have been uploaded to Soundcloud. As it turns out, not everybody puts their music on the service. A lot of rock and punk bands, in particular, use Bandcamp, and some artists — for reasons my under-30 brain is still struggling to understand — don’t even put their songs on the Internet for free.

So this playlist still isn’t as exhaustive as I wanted it to be, but it’s still pretty freaking great. Give it a listen on your computer or chosen mobile device, and be sure to chide us in the comments, on Twitter or via email for missing your favorite D.C. music of the year. (Seriously! Send me your nominations — we want to hear it all.)

For more coverage of D.C. music, follow Bandwidth’s Track Work series.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Image, clockwise from top left: April + VISTA, Kali Uchis, Young Rapids (partial image), Ras Nebyu, Prinze George (partial image), Visto.

NPR received more than 5,000 eligible submissions to the national competition, which gives musicians a shot at performing a live concert at the radio network’s headquarters in D.C. But fewer than 60 submissions came from inside D.C.’s borders.

NPR’s data shows that more than half of entrants from this region identified as Marylanders or Virginians, many of them far outside the beltway in places like Bluemont and Clarksburg. And if you watch all 130 local submissions like I did, you’ll find that many went the coffee-shop route: a solo performance, usually involving an acoustic guitar and a tender song.

But those who took another path made a big impression. That’s why — if you asked me to judge a regional Tiny Desk competition — I’d hand the prize to D.C. hip-hop artist Kokayi.

The established producer, vocalist and rapper from Deanwood has been nominated for a Grammy. He was a member of ’90s-’00s hip-hop ensemble Opus Akoben, who had a short stint on a major label. He’s prolific — last year he challenged himself to release a new track every day — and he’s taken hip-hop to Senegal with the grant-funded DC2DK project. So it’s no surprise that Kokayi brought his A game to his Tiny Desk submission.

On a song called “The Lick,” Kokayi sings, speed-rhymes, plays the keys, chair-dances and punctuates his verses with goofy faces. NPR’s official Tiny Desk Contest rules say that stage presence and charisma make up 20 percent of the judges’ criteria. Kokayi nailed that category, all while sitting down.

As for the rest of the field, I’m finding it tough to pick a clear runner-up, so how about I just name a bunch? D.C.’s M.H. & His Orchestra, Stranger in the Alps and Virginia’s The Plank Stompers turned in dynamic performances — and brand-new local band The El-Mansouris made a strong impression for a group that hasn’t even played its first show yet (see their debut Feb. 26 at Transformer).

I also enjoyed the videos from Reston’s Space Waste (they start the song by chanting “Yoko! Ono!”), Takoma Park guitarist Angie Head, Silver Spring smooth-pop trio The Walking Sticks and D.C.’s Be Steadwell, Sara Curtin, The Sea Life, Boon and The Highballers.

Watch Kokayi’s video plus 12 handpicked runner-ups in this playlist, below. NPR announces the national Tiny Desk contest winner on Feb. 12.

Want to share this playlist? Find an embed code on YouTube.

Pattern Matching comes from Mount Pleasant resident Steve Kolowich, Stranger In The Alps’ sole songwriter. He’s exceptional at capturing that young-but-weary Gram Parsons style of songcraft; yet as steeped in the 1970s as Pattern Matching sometimes sounds, producer Louis Weeks (who also contributes synthesizers, vocals, guitar and an egg shaker) brings a contemporary sheen to Kolowich’s gently twangy compositions.

Kolowich says he wrote much of Pattern Matching while flying. “For a lot of us, being in an airplane is the closest we are to dying,” he told Bandwidth in a 2014 interview.

Stranger In The Alps’ new LP is streaming today on Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and arrives later this week on iTunes and Spotify. Listen to it below.

Stranger In The Alps plays Black Cat Feb. 8.

“For a lot of us, being in an airplane is the closest we are to dying,” says the 29-year-old singer-songwriter, who lives in Mount Pleasant.

But it’s not really a fear of flying that inspired Kolowich to write “Black Box.” It’s his fear of losing control of his life. He says he was thinking about a friend’s grandmother who had aphasia, a disorder that affects communication. “The last couple decades of her life, she couldn’t really communicate, although she was very much alive,” says Kolowich. “When communication fails, and there’s this silence, this failure to connect or understand, that’s the most terrifying thought.”

Aviophobia did factor into the song’s mood, however. Kolowich says he felt moved by an anecdote he read in a 2013 New York Times Magazine cover story about author George Saunders. The writer described being on an airplane that almost crashed; he heard terrifying noises, and the cabin filled with black smoke. Gripped with fear, the master of the English language could only bring himself to repeat the word “no.”

“You write during times of lucidity. You think you have it figured out,” Kolowich says, “and then you can get jarred off of that pedestal pretty easily when you’re seized with panic.”

Last March, amid the frenzy surrounding the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Kolowich sat down on his couch to transcribe a flurry of thoughts into song. “It starts with me and my guitar,” he says. “It’s just me working out the words and the melody.” After a week and a half, he had a rough cut, and enlisted the help of his producer and roommate, Louis Weeks. The two headed to Clean Cuts in Baltimore, recorded Kolowich’s guitar melody and filled in the rest with ambient synth tones.

The end result has the soul of a folk song, but all the spaciousness and slight creepiness that ambient music creates. “I like the idea of having rhythmic pulse, something a little synthetic,” says Kolowich. He says “Black Box” is “a little more ambient and electronic, and a little poppier” than the usual folk fare.

Grim lyrics like “Eat your breakfast/Mind your checklist, and your angle of attack/Look for pieces/Feel for pulses/Try to bring them back” conjure images of a plane crash and a rescue attempt. But don’t look for a direct connection to events or an overarching narrative, says Kolowich. He prefers to dwell in the realm of feeling—a place as wide open as the sky.

Stranger in the Alps plays Black Cat on Friday, Oct. 17.

Stranger in the Alps, Aaron Tinjum and the Tangents, and The Low Bends
Friday, April 4 at the Velvet Lounge, $8

Local indie-folk act Stranger in the Alps released its debut album in December and has been playing in DIY spaces since then—until now. I’m not clear on whether this will be a solo performance or if main man Steve Kolowich will have guests recreating the album’s rich harmonies, but either way, these downtempo tunes are just the right speed for a Friday night after a long week. This is an all-D.C. bill with singer-songwriter Aaron Tinjum and the Tangents and Americana band The Low Bends.

Cigarette, Margy Pepper, and Olivia Neutron-John
Friday, April 4 at Paper Sun, donations accepted

D.C. ambient shoegaze quintet Cigarette embraces the area’s DIY spaces, and this is another one: Catch the band’s ethereal tunes at this Columbia Heights house, along with Olympia noise-pop trio Margy Pepper and D.C. bedroom-pop act act Olivia Neutron-John (yes, it’s my favorite local band name, too).

Lazapalooza: The Bills and Brews Craft Beer and Band Fest
Saturday, April 5 at Union Arts, $35

Get a jump-start on the upcoming festival season with this all-day fest that joins local tunes and local beer as a benefit for reporter Matt Laslo’s “Bills and Brews” Web series. The ticket price includes all-you-can-drink local craft brews (while supplies last, of course) from your favorite locals: 3 Stars, Bluejacket, Chocolate City, DC Brau, Devils Backbone, Heavy Seas, and Flying Dog. If unlimited booze isn’t enough enticement, there’s also a solid music lineup of U.S. Royalty, Pree, Paperhaus (acoustic set), Marian McLaughlin, Beyond Modern, Margot MacDonald, Laughing Man, and The North Country, with DJ sets by Brett and Ra Ra Rasputin.

Cavale, JoyCut, Pleasure Curses, Furniteur
Saturday, April 5 at the Dunes, $10

Cavale calls itself post-punk, but the D.C. duo’s fusion of electronic beats and eerie vocals sounds more like uptempo trip-hop. Devise your own description at the pair’s debut-album release show, which also features Italy’s darkwave electronic duo JoyCut, D.C. synthpoppers Pleasure Curses, and the first show from Furniteur, the new pop collaboration between Brett and artist Brittany Sims.

David Klinger
Sunday, April 6 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, free

Luce Unplugged is a concert series that pairs musicians with art: They select some pieces from the museum’s collection and perform after a staff-led talk about those pieces. This week’s performer (note the 1:30 p.m. start time!) is David Klinger of the experimental indie band Frau Eva, which is currently on indefinite hiatus.

All That Remains, Darkest Hour, Wilson
Wednesday, April 9 at the 9:30 Club, $20

If you’re wondering which one of these shows is not like any of the others, you’ve found it. Massachusetts metal band All That Remains has its own followers, but I’d like to highlight opener Darkest Hour, a local metalcore outfit that formed in our Virginia suburbs in the mid-’90s. The quintet has definitely worked its way up over the years, and it’s great to see them on the big stage on a national tour. Catch them here, because their next area stop is at Jiffy Lube Live for Mayhem Fest in August, where they’ll be sharing the stage with Ice-T’s metal project Body Count (I’m not joking).

D.C. Music Salon: DC Jazz, Deeper than Duke
Wednesday, April 9 at Shaw Library, free

Hankering for a music event that won’t require earplugs? This is for you. For this edition of the D.C. Music Salon, WPFW DJ and jazz scholar Rusty Hassan will show an excerpt from the documentary “7th & T” and discuss D.C.’s rich jazz history beyond Duke Ellington, touching on national musicians (Charlie Byrd, Billy Taylor, Frank Wess) as well as lesser-known locals and the clubs they played in.

These and other show listings can be found on ShowListDC.