Ask the people behind promotions group WERC, and they might say it’s the present. That’s because the Atlanta event planners are bringing their alternative party, VIBES, to D.C. for the first time tonight.

“It’s all about the energy,” says WERC co-founder Will Edmond. “If you come to our party, whether you’re 18 or 40, you can still have fun. When people actually experience a whole different side of the clubgoing scene — we’re not about bottle service or ‘Come in and spend $100 to sit in this section’ — it’s really about having a good time.”

Tonight marks WERC’s first event outside of Atlanta, but VIBES has always had a link to the DMV region — particularly its more bracing, contemporary hip-hop scene.

Founded in April 2014, WERC looked to a DMV artist to set the tone for its first party. Producer Lakim, known for his work with ascendant Virginia rapper GoldLink and tastemaker collective Soulection, filled what was then a void in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene.

“[Lakim] kind of spearheaded what we wanted to represent,” says Xavier BLK, one of WERC’s resident DJs. “We realized a lot of Atlanta was listening to more of a futuristic, progressive fusion of Atlanta-based music with the 808s and the Southern bounce… but no one was bringing [those artists] out here.”

The group — which Atlanta’s Creative Loafing recently named the city’s “best creative event planners” — wanted to present an alternative to the pricey and predictable nightclub scene, a culture that’s been declining in popularity. WERC co-founder Will Edmond says VIBES focuses on music, particularly the stuff you won’t catch on the radio. (He cites Canadian producer Kaytranada and Seattle’s Sango — both of whom have worked with GoldLink — as examples.) That approach meshes well with D.C.’s existing alt-club scene, which draws a young-adult crowd to midcity venues including U Street Music Hall and Velvet Lounge.

Two selectors on VIBE’s bill tonight at Liv Nightclub are U Street regulars: DJs Native Sun (who’s already played the party in Atlanta) and Underdog. Headliner Elhae isn’t local — he’s an Atlantan, too — but he is a triple threat: a producer, singer and rapper.

For a group based in Atlanta, WERC has built surprisingly strong connections here.

“I went to Trillectro [in Maryland] this year, and hanging out with all the DMV people was great,” Edmond says. “I met a lot of people up there who are doing the same things we’re doing… and I feel like there’s a scene in D.C. that’s building.”

Xavier agrees. In a way, the VIBES party is practicing a form of diplomacy.

“It wouldn’t be right to just pop into another city that we respect without showing love,” the DJ says. “We want to represent what it feels like there, too.”

VIBES takes place tonight at Liv Nightclub in D.C.

All photos by Rhiannon Newman.

There’s a good reason for that transparency: Eastman, a founder of U Street Music Hall, has spent much of 2015 clarifying who he is as an artist. He handed over day-to-day control of the now-landmark D.C. dance club in January to concentrate on making music, and “Sugar” marks the beginning of a new era, he says.

“It was a long-overdue thing,” he says. “U Street Music Hall sort of absorbed my entire life for the first five years of its existence. I love that place, and I’m very proud of it. But as a career move for DJs and producers, I’d say, opening up a club can be one of the worst things to happen to your music career.”

The new track isn’t the only big marker in the process. Saturday night, Eastman will DJ a six-hour set at his club (he’s still majority owner) to mark the end of Bliss, the party night he’s been running since 2000.

“I love [U Street Music Hall], and I’m very proud of it. But as a career move for DJs and producers, opening up a club can be one of the worst things to happen to your music career.” — Will Eastman

Bliss, with a history of blending of punk and dance music over the past 15 years, is considered a crucial element in the development of D.C.’s DJ scene. He started it partly because he thought D.C. needed it, but now that it’s ending, he hesitates to say what the city needs next.

“There’s a lot of things that I think could be done better. But I’ll leave that question to come back to later, because part of the process of what I’m doing now with ending this is to sort of free up my brain for fresh inspiration and new ideas,” Eastman says. “So maybe ask me again in six months when I’ve had some time to really think about it. I feel like nothing lasts forever. You shouldn’t try to drag every last ounce out of something that you can.”

As for “Sugar,” Eastman says it’s one of two tracks that he’ll release this fall as a ramp-up to an album next year. It’ll feature D.C. vocalists, but he won’t say who. “Sugar” is on Nurvous, a sub-imprint of legendary New York dance label Nervous. Eastman declines to specify which label will release the next track, but it’ll have a decidedly different vibe: “French house and big-beat sounds from the ’90s,” he says. The purpose is to channel the sounds he loved “when I was very young and first excited about dance music.”

His next single will be released under the name “Will Eastman.” He’s basically retiring the moniker Pentamon, which he’d been using on techno tracks over the last few years.

“I spent some time with that, and I sort of got that out of my system,” Eastman says.

Also, the trio that he formed with D.C.’s Micah Vellian and Outputmessage — Volta Bureau — is effectively on hiatus, he says.

“My attention had been divided for years. I spent all of my energy in 2011 and 2012 on Volta Bureau, and a lot of it in 2013 on Pentamon, and I got sick of dividing my attention,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, what if I released all of this s*** under my own name — it might not all sound the same, it’s counter-intuitive in terms of a branding strategy … but that’s not how my brain works. I like to make disco, I like to make house, I like to make techno, I like to make ambient electronic music, and if people can’t wrap their brain around that, I’m tired of trying to brand to meet them.”

The good vibes in “Sugar” seem to spring directly from what’s inside Eastman.

“All of my tracks are optimistic tracks. I am a glass-half-full sort of guy,” the producer says. “Even if it’s a track that is sort of in a minor key or is sort of somber, everything is designed to be uplifting. And I firmly believe that music is better now than it was five years ago, and it will be better five years from now than it is right now.”

The final edition of Bliss takes place Sept. 26 at U Street Music Hall.

Son Lux with members of the U.S. Marine Band

Son Lux

Landlady

All photos by Rhiannon Newman

Friday and Saturday, Bandwidth is pairing up with WAMU’s weekly newsmagazine Metro Connection to tackle music communities in the Washington, D.C. region.

We’ll be covering a lot of bases, talking about the remarkable growth and vibrance of the District’s jazz scene, the evolution of D.C. hip-hop music, local cassette culture, boutique electronic-music label 1432R and Baltimore’s Deathfest.

Plus, Art Beat reporter Lauren Landau will take us on a backstage tour of D.C. music venues, and we’ll have a little slice of oral history from one prominent figure in D.C.’s punk community.

To get you primed for this special edition of Metro Connection, we have a sampling of some of the perspectives you’ll hear on the show when it airs 1 p.m. Friday (and 7 a.m. Saturday):

D.C. jazz promoter Dick Smith discusses the “high art” of jazz and his take on electronic music:

Rapper and producer Kokayi doles out advice to up-and-coming D.C. musicians who want to be heard:

The founders of D.C. electronic label 1432R remember how a fortuitous night at U Street Music Hall helped them understand their calling:

A backstage tour of the 9:30 Club with venue spokesperson Audrey Schaefer:

For more teasers from this week’s show, check out WAMU 88.5’s Soundcloud page — and don’t forget to tune into the program at 1 p.m. Friday or 7 a.m. Saturday. Of course, the show will also be streaming online as of Friday, May 22.

Photo by Flickr user bootbearwdc used under a Creative Commons license.

D.C. acts Baby Bry Bry & The Apologists, BRNDA and The Sea Life have more or less cornered the city’s market for noisy, oddball pop that delves into all varieties of other stuff, from The Sea Life’s hazy lo-fi to Baby Bry Bry’s throwback garage punk. They’ll be playing with kindred spirits What Moon Things, the “dreamo” ensemble based in New York.

For Sunday’s show, the bands and their cohorts at The Sea Life’s label Chimes Records will release an eight-song cassette (plus a download card) with two new songs from each of the bands. The label produced 200 tapes for the show, which will be given out free to the first 200 folks who turn up. All these bands plus a tape for $15? Not bad.

“All of the bands on the bill this Sunday are buds, so our excitement about finally getting to play together made us want to make the show feel as special to the audience as it is to us,” says Baby Bry Bry frontman Bry (Bryan Gerhart). A tape giveaway is also a pretty good way to fill up a club on a Sunday night.

Today Bandwidth premieres four songs from the limited-run tape — one from each of the bands. But don’t let that excuse you from hitting up the show this Sunday and nabbing your own copy.

Warning: Some explicit language.

Baby Bry Bry & The Apologists, “Reluctantly Inspired”

BRNDA, “Serious Band”

The Sea Life, “Let Me Out” (Live Demo)

What Moon Things, “Insturment”

Like the legendary electronic ensemble from Düsseldorf, Paperhaus’ members are audiophiles who can recognize a good sound system. Frontman Alex Tebeleff—who’s put in years playing through crappy PAs in basements and rock clubs—came up with the idea to cover Trans-Europe Express around the time he played a Madchester-themed DJ set at the U Street club in September. After his set that night, he spent some time admiring the venue’s sound system with U Hall co-owner Will Eastman.

“Me and Will were talking and I made a comment like, ‘Can you imagine something like Kraftwerk coming out of these speakers?'” says Tebeleff, 27. “It just came out of a conversation between two music nerds, basically.”

A Kraftwerk superfan, Tebeleff cites the German ensemble’s influence on pop music of all kinds, from hip-hop forebear Afrika Bambaataa to dance-punk ensemble LCD Soundsystem to his band, which usually plays a fairly straightforward strain of indie rock. When he spins music for his pals, “I always enjoy surprising people playing ‘Trans-Europe Express’ into [Bambaataa’s] ‘Planet Rock,'” says Tebeleff. Plus, Paperhaus used to cover “Neon Lights,” a melodic cut from Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine.

Paperhaus doesn’t plan to alter the record or put a unique stamp on Trans-Europe Express, save a few minor tonal adjustments. He says the group will play 85 percent of the melodies on the record, but expects to add live drums and bring new timbres and textures to the songs. The Petworth band recruited neighbor and Br’er keyboardist Erik Sleight to play a synthesizer, and they’re plotting to stack the stage with twice the amount of normal Paperhaus gear, including drum samplers, bass synths, poly synths, a vocoder and effects pedals.

Tebeleff says Paperhaus wants the audience’s focus to be on the music and not the band’s image onstage, but it wouldn’t be a Kraftwerk-inspired act without a light show. Accordingly, Tebeleff says, there will be one—though something more low-key (and low-cost) than Kraftwerk’s spectacular recent performances.

The one-off December show promises to be a dramatic detour for Paperhaus, which is currently recording its new album, scheduled for a Feb. 10 release. All of this electronics-tinkering probably won’t show up on the record; Tebeleff says that the band’s latest songs represent “some of the dirtiest, nastiest rock ‘n’ roll that we’ve done.”

While Paperhaus has already started practicing for the Dec. 14 gig, the group still isn’t sure how it’ll turn out.

“Part of the fun of getting to see us play it is seeing how the [hell] we pull this off,” Tebeleff says. “I’m not even quite sure how we’re gonna do it yet.”

Paperhaus performs Trans-Europe Express Dec. 14 at U Street Music Hall.

Behind the fence, signs of creative life flicker. Inside the building, up a flight of stairs, producers and rappers bump beats in a two-room recording studio. Outside, a PA and a stage are planted in the yard next to a garage equipped with a DJ booth, old couches and bar stools. Elaborate street art tattoos the fence and the garage’s interior walls. Teenagers are out here, smoking cigarettes in camp chairs. They’re waiting for a show to start.

Since June, this has been the headquarters of Bombay Knox, the hip-hop promotion and management group that has carved its own space in D.C.’s small but growing hip-hop scene with an approach that, at least here, is usually associated with punk rock: It books low-cost all-ages shows, often at unconventional spaces like this one.

It’s difficult to understand the importance of Bombay Knox by describing what it is. Technically, it’s a business that offers a range of creative services—from artist management to promotion to videography to recording. But its reputation is staked on its hip-hop concerts, which it hosts at places as unrefined as an Adams Morgan auto shop and as professional as U Street Music Hall. As local hip-hop begins to produce national stars—Wale, Fat Trel—the group is positioning itself to foster even more homegrown talent in a city that has never been seen as a hip-hop capital.

The architect behind Bombay Knox is Jesse Rubin, a soft-spoken D.C.-area native with a robust red beard. Rubin handles almost all of the group’s noncreative business: He books the shows, answers emails and runs the Twitter account. He conceived Bombay Knox in 2011 while studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and managing hip-hop production team Odd Couple.

“There was a lack of these local shows,” says Bombay Knox founder Jesse Rubin. “There wasn’t a real, solid underground scene [in D.C.].”

Rubin spent his time after graduation floating around New York’s underground hip-hop world, shooting music videos and working in artist management for members of Joey Bada$$’s Pro Era rap crew. The scene felt too crowded for his taste—he had to split management duties and he wasn’t getting big-picture control of artist booking and promotion—but he liked its energy. “In New York, there are cool underground shows every day,” he says. “You can see people from the area and from outside the area that put on cool affordable shows.”

When Rubin returned to the D.C. region in 2012, he realized he could start his own thing in a city that has no equivalent to what he saw up north. “There was a lack of these local shows,” he says. “There wasn’t a real, solid underground scene.”

Bombay Knox hosted its first show in spring 2013 at the now-defunct Georgetown gallery MOCA DC. The format—a cheap, all-ages show featuring young, occasionally unpolished rappers—has changed little since.

The group rarely charges more than $5 to $15 for its events, and many are free. So far, it’s maintained a busy schedule—unlike other local independent hip-hop promoters that book shows sporadically or have fizzled out completely. The group has put together more than 30 events in the last year and a half. Last week, it co-hosted a video game tournament and show with a local hip-hop collective called Kool Klux Klan. Admission price: $5.

Booking cheap shows isn’t always a money-maker for Rubin. “I go into the show knowing my best-case scenario is breaking even on expenses,” he says. “But for me, even if I lose some money, in terms of building up the brand it’s not a bad investment.”

Some promoters might choose to recoup their losses by charging artists to perform on their shows. But Bombay Knox claims to offer an alternative to pay-to-play, which many consider predatory. Pay-to-play is fairly common in local hip-hop and across the country, according to some reports—and Rubin says he stays away from it. For young, cash-strapped artists on the rise, that can make all the difference.

The steady supply of shows has helped Bombay Knox raise its profile and grow: That creaky stage in Hyattsville has hosted acts with healthy followings outside of D.C., like Mr. MFN eXquire, Bones and Drake-endorsed freestyler Nickelus F. Some of the artists it manages have made an impression online, too: Gaithersburg rapper Uno Hype has appeared on tracks with massively popular rappers Smoke DZA, Joey Bada$$ and Chance the Rapper, and he’s been praised by tastemaking outlet Complex. Another Bombay act, D.C.-based Akoko, has sharp ‘90s flows and tight harmonies that have earned the duo thousands of YouTube views.

Rubin hasn’t done everything on his own. He holds down Bombay Knox’s business affairs while a coterie of associates help out with things like merchandise and event art. Manny Phaces handles some of Bombay’s sound engineering. Bombay’s creative director, Kevin Chambers—also a producer known as Flash Frequency—cranks out the group’s clean and modern photos and posters, and—yes—GIFs.

Rubin and his associates have gone the DIY route mostly out of necessity. He suspects that some spaces haven’t wanted to work with him because they associate hip-hop with bad news. Bombay’s time at MOCA DC ended quickly: Rubin says some neighborhood restaurant owners, who were already upset with the venue’s nude art parties, complained that the gallery’s hip-hop shows hurt their businesses.

“When people hear rap or hip-hop, they have this assumption that it’ll be something like Fat Trel,” he says, referring to the rising D.C. rapper with a tough reputation. “Then they see something and they’re like ‘Oh, trouble.'”

Other venues haven’t had the same reaction. In early August, D.C. go-go artist turned rapper Yung Gleesh headlined a wild Bombay Knox show at U Street Music Hall with Uno Hype, Sir. E.U. and Flash Frequency. It was Bombay’s biggest event yet. Meanwhile, Rubin says he’s already in talks with even bigger venues.

For small gigs, the Hyattsville building—which Rubin took over from a friend who had hosted parties there—will do for now. The Akoko show in mid-July drew around 50 people. It was a small turnout by the group’s standards, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind, as it vacillated between head-nodding and moshing. When Bones played the spot in June, multiple guests said it attracted close to 300 people.

Bombay Knox sees the Hyattsville studio as its key to profitability. It offers in-house artists a means to crank out more music, and studio fees could help fund future endeavors. It’s been a blessing for Bombay’s current artists, too; Sir E.U. has been finishing up his album Madagascar there while Rubin works on finalizing details for the first Bombay Knox compilation. Eventually, Rubin wants to ease off on hosting events at the space, and transform the studio into its primary operation. The venue isn’t easily accessible by public transportation, and Rubin says that noise complaints have brought police to the venue before.

But while Uno Hype, Chambers and Phaces hang out in the studio that July night—chatting about Cuba Gooding Jr. and watching Cosgrove’s video interview with Complex—it feels like this cheap, raw space could be the incubator that talented but untested artists need to grow.

Top photo: From left to right, Kevin Chambers, Ace Cosgrove and Manny Phaces in the Bombay Knox studio.

Saturday, a couple of thousand people flocked to Dock 5—the warehouse venue behind Union Market—for the first Union BBQ, a daylong festival booked by U Street Music Hall.

The lineup united a few different strains of local and international electronic music: The xx’s Jamie xx headlined the outdoor stage, with warm-up sets from former locals Tittsworth and Nadastrom, among others; the inside stage hosted a full and diverse slate, including Animal Collective’s Geologist and Deakin, Virginia resident (and Netherlands native) Martyn, and event co-organizer Will Eastman, alongside acts like Montreal’s Kaytranada and San Francisco’s Viceroy.

Below, scroll through Bandwidth’s photos from some of the night’s performances.

U Street Music Hall co-owner Will Eastman, one of the architects of Union BBQ, DJed the indoor stage.

Washington, D.C. local Steven Faith briefly joined Will Eastman on stage following his set.

Producer, DJ, and U Street Music Hall co-founder Jesse Tittsworth spun a set outdoors.

Tittsworth

Tittsworth and crew

Turnout skewed young, as demonstrated by the high number of X’s on hands

Dutch producer and DJ Martijn Deijkers (Martyn) performed on the indoor stage.

Martyn

Martyn

Martyn

Brian Weitz (left) and Josh Dibb (right) of Animal Collective collaborated on a DJ set.

Brian Weitz and Josh Dibb (right) of Animal Collective

More young fans

Jamie Smith, better know as Jamie xx of London band The xx, played the last set of the night outside.

Jamie xx closed out the evening with a stunning performance and light show.

The crowd during Jamie xx’s set

Much of the night probably wound up on YouTube, Instagram, and Vine

… and good night.

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.