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.

“I just need to get these things out,” says Lacsamana, 38, who has been posting his new output on Soundcloud. (Lacsamana has also worked on Bandwidth videos with his friends at Wilderness Bureau.) The latest spans just two tracks: “Never Gonna Get It” and “Crystal Clear”—but it represents a playful period of experimentation for the producer and his self-described “party persona.” He calls the new tunes a “weird hybrid” of house, indie dance and nu-disco.

“It’s dancey stuff…part pop and part weird electronic stuff,” Lacsamana says. “It’s not necessarily something that I’m completely invested in.”

Still, for something he’s not invested in, Lacsamana spent a lot of time remixing and editing the tracks with precision. Named after Crystal City, “Crystal Clear” uses the famous hook from DJ Kool’s sample-driven “Let Me Clear My Throat“—and it wasn’t as simple to make as it may sound. Instead of borrowing the track wholesale, Lacsamana deconstructed the three main elements of Kool’s pastiche: the introductory horns from Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging,” the funky sax loop first constructed by 45 King and DJ Kool’s original vocals. The resulting samples came out cleaner and more malleable. “I basically tried to recreate what DJ Kool had done,” he says, but in a different, poppier context.

Doing things differently is a kind of mantra for the Arlington-based artist, who first broke into D.C.’s electronic music scene in the mid-1990s. While other DJs spent time honing their skills, Lacsamana was partying and trying to find himself. “I was kind of a late bloomer,” he says.

As a college student in 1996, Lacsamana had his first epiphany after dropping acid in the parking lot of the now-defunct D.C. nightclub Tracks. “I listened to Daft Punk’s Homework. It was a mind[freak],” he says. While tripping, he realized that he felt drawn to making music. “I was like, ‘Hey, I think this is what I want to do,'” he says.

Skip ahead to this year, and Lacsamana, who swore off drugs and alcohol in June, isn’t done discovering himself. That’s what this solo project is for. He’s not sure he’ll release more music under the Micah Vellian name, but even if he doesn’t, he says, it was worth the effort.

“I had to push through my ego,” Lacsamana says. “That’s what these [songs] are. Sort of the detritus of that journey.”