Capital Swamp: The DC Resource Thread

http://img19.picoodle.com/img/img19/3/2/13/f_930m_8100866.jpg

lol

now when you say 12:30am do you mean eastern standard time

if obama visits what is our contingency plan

anyway thanks for making that easy.

mike s put me on the list based off just an email i sent him. <3 the internets right now

Hope y'all had a good time. I wimped out and did not go to Cucu D. at Black Cat as I planned.

R.I.P. Coleman Mellett who died in that plane crash near Buffalo. He was a local guy from Maryland apparently--
An accomplished jazz guitarist, Mellett was a touring member of trumpeter Chuck Mangione's band for the last several years. The group was scheduled to perform Friday night at the Kleinhans Music Hall with the Buffalo Philharmonic.
Mellett grew up near Washington, D.C., and moved to New Jersey to study at William Paterson University, according to his MySpace profile. After graduating he moved to New York and earned a master's degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 1998.

sneak delivered so well last night, i seriously haven't seen a full floor of people enjoying themselves like that in ages.
closed out with FLOWERZ.

the openers, measax + docindo were surprisingly funky as well, should have expected it as they're with the 88 crew.

I kinda wished I had splurged and bought tickets for the reunited Labelle at Constitution Hall

Who are these people in this year's Wammies ceremony. This organization gets more irrelevant every year-- Other than go-go band Familiar Faces

Performers Include: (in Alpha Order)
Christylez Bacon
Cletus Kennelly and Lori Kelley
with Arthur Loves Plastic
Esther Williams
Familiar Faces
4 out of 5 Doctors
Jon Carroll & Love Returns
Juniper Lane
Margot MacDonald

Hosts:
Andrea Roane
Jim Bohannon
Kojo Nnamdi
Pit Band:
Tommy Lepson Band

Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty and wife and 4 kids in the Washington Post real estate section Saturday talking about their Tenleytown home

cool to meet people saturday night. fun show, weird space--love 930, but configured for dj nights it feels like maybe too much dead space? was hoping someone'd drop that juan maclean track everyone is going apeshit over. happy house was a good consolation prize tho.

think i'm seeing the points thursday. i know john tejada's coming to muse and man i'd like to see him, but i forgot i'd already made plans for points with gf, plus it's a weeknight so i'd probably bug out before it got good.

I haven't seen the current lineup of the Points. Am curious but can't make it Thursday. Report back if they do anything crazy (or crazy for them; beer-spitting is normal for them).

The late Link Wray's bass player from his days in DC, Chuck Bennett, just died.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/18/AR2009021803307.html?wprss=rss_metro/obituaries

― curmudgeon, Thursday, 19 February 2009 17:22 (3 hours ago) Permalink

As Chuck Bennett, his stage name, Mr. Avery had been a singer and bass player with Link Wray and the Raymen, a hard-rocking Washington band of the 1950s and 1960s known for the menacing sound it produced on "Rumble" and "Jack the Ripper," songs that influenced hard rock, grunge and punk.

"Chuck had an unbelievable voice and an unbelievable amount of energy, kind of like James Brown," musician Elwood Brown recalled. "He'd glide across the floor, down on his knees; he had great moves."

― curmudgeon, Thursday, 19 February 2009 17:23 (2 hours ago) Permalink

That was originally posted on the Link Wray thread

The 3 week Arabesque Fest kicks off at the Kennedy Center this week. Female oud players from Bahrain Monday for free at the Mil. Stage, and on Wednesday Brian Jones' favorite trance music from the mountains of Morrocco, Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

The Arabesque (private only) preview show last night was pretty cool--I posted about it on the "Arabic music-not otherwise classified" thread. I think Pete and Zach and others who like noisy jazzy din should go see Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka on Wednesday--4 percussionis and 4 guys on oboe-like horns

Anybody looking at Wonkabout? can't decide if it's just more of the same ol same ol indie bands and djs. Maybe need to give it more time

wonkabout seems more or less dcist peppered with bits of byt

hey steve - that arabesque thing seems nifty! i don't really know MMoJ outside of dancing in your head, which obviously rules.

wonkabout seems...well, dcist + byt = do not really want but wvs. anyway they hype future times stuff and that's good.

Yea, big shocker, I would rather see a calendar added somewhere online that's a combination of the places mentioned in ads on El Zol 99.1, AM radio international shows, the TMOTTGOGO e-mails, one-off myspace postings, and the dcist.com week in hiphop, but no one's doing that (I do not think)...

apparently zanzibar was the spot back in the day... my salsa teacher called a short thursday class in order for everyone to show their respects that night.

Two prolific punk legends both have new bands, and they're the same band. The Hive Dwellers is the new project from former Beat Happening frontman and K Records mastermind Calvin Johnson. And ex-Nation of Ulysses/Make Up leader Ian Svenonius now fronts Chain and the Gang. Here's the twist: Both bands have the exact same four people backing their respective frontmen, including Saturday Looks Good to Me's Fred Thomas. That shared lineup will probably save room in the van when both bands tour North America together this spring. K Records will release Down With Liberty ... Up With Chains, the first Chain and the Gang album, on April 7, and the Hive Dwellers will also release a full-length later in the year.

Hmm. I thought Svenonius had a new band with Brendan Canty called Felt Letters... Have Chain and the Gang played shows yet?

I haven't seen any Chain & the Gang shows but I saw Felt Letters. K records and others are busy hyping the Chain thing and how the project is gonna tour nationally. No mention of any Brendan Canty involvement in this one. I think K might be streaming the Chain

Benjy Ferree from Washington City Paper Black Plastic Blog interview by Hilary Crowe:

What did you mean by “D.C.’s lookin’ a little weird these days”?

Oh you know, it’s just gentrified, that’s all. It’s expensive - beers cost a lot of money in bars. It’s real bourge-y and, you know, it’s just the way it is. When I jumped on the Metro to come to D.C. when I was a kid, it was a lot more wild, there was a lot more culture, but you know, this is what everybody bitches about nowadays. I think it’s like that all over the country, everything’s expensive, and I’m sure it’s like that in every city too. It’s just that D.C. used to be a little bit more wild. I think right now it’s lookin’ pretty tame. But what do I know, I’m a musician; I’m not a politician.

Plastic Bag blog...

i don't know who hilary crowe is, i'll google her in a sec, but i'm curious (genuinely) why you posted that--do you agree/disagree? see something insightful in that quote?

ah i see i confused interviewer and interviewee. well, the question still stands.

I thought it was provocative. I think DC is more gentrified now, but there seems to be little gained from complaining about how things aren't the way they once were (and I like that LCD Soundsystem song about NYC). Plus one should also note the positives of the changes, and it's not like folks have a way-back machine anyway. There's some 'wildness' in every era, you just have to look for it.

it's a pretty standard complaint but entirely valid - real estate prices hiking and the general shifts in the direction of music and nightlife seem to hit DC a lot harder than in other metro areas only because it's so tiny in comparison. there wasn't much to hold things down but of what was there, especially for the "back when" crowd, it was all relatively quality and intense at the time. it hurt to have that really good end of the edm and punk/hardcore era in the city snatched out from under us by mid-decade.

notable nails in the coffin? the redevelopment of u street (r.i.p. kaffa house)... the nationals' stadium wiping out that entire entertainment/ne'er do well neighborhood... club red closing, becoming "fly lounge".

but as it's always said, dc has it's waves. there are actually good alternatives to what once was, albeit more disjointed as a community, and more spread out physically.

All good points.

Hey, you got a vote in the house of representatives.

Till the Republicans challenge it in Court and get the conservative Supremes to find it unconstitutional

Rob Garza of Thievery quoted in the NY Times regarding what music he is listening to at his vacation home in the Yucutan

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/arts/music/01Play.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

has anyone been to the disco city night at rnr hotel? chris burns is the resident. been wanting to check it out for a while, maybe this friday.

I have not been but I do have to give Chris Burns props for being respectful and mentioning African-American DC djs who came before him (and in some cases are still out there) when certain bloggers and newspaper folks seemed to want to suggest or imply (possibly unintentionally) through their coverage that that the only house and disco djs in DC worth mentioning were those ones who reached a crossover indie-rock crowd in '08.

The space is not that big btw, either upstairs or downstairs.

thanks for the info. i don't really know much about him but was hoping his night was more disco+house, less indie/blog house. i saw he also has a night called "hometown heroes" at trinidad and tobago in petworth. maybe you know recognize some of these names:
OJI and POPE (Poji Records - Baltimore)
LOVEGROVE
JOE L.
VERSION SOUND
KING SELASSIE I

I have not been but I do have to give Chris Burns props for being respectful and mentioning African-American DC djs who came before him (and in some cases are still out there) when certain bloggers and newspaper folks seemed to want to suggest or imply (possibly unintentionally) through their coverage that that the only house and disco djs in DC worth mentioning were those ones who reached a crossover indie-rock crowd in '08.

i'm sure it's unintentional and mostly out of ignorance, especially among the blog crowd. out of the people that tend to throw parties as part of/alongside that crossover group, i can't think of anyone aside from maybe eastman that've both been around dc long enough to know about those djs, and actually attended the kind of parties they'd have been at... or at least not anyone with as much enthusiasm for traditional deep house as chris.

i was chatting with him about this night a bit ago, i hadn't realized lovegrove actually lives in dc now (doing more management than actual djing) - he used to be my highlight at starscape back in the day and i wish'd he'd come down from baltimore more often.

it won't be indy/bloggy at all - you'll get alot of classic-sounding disco/deep/gospel-y stuff out of oji and pope, they used to be residents at the old sanctuary parties (i've still yet to find out if they drop "we lift our hands in the sanctuary," outside of the sanctuary). lovegrove and joe l'll probably be more contemporary, funkier disco + jacking cuts. version sound and king selassie i being dub/reggae, surprise.

i was talking with juan of the former-ish east coast boogiemen last week, also in the everybody loves music crew with joe l - had a lot of good things to say about these parties in terms of the overall good vibe of the crowds that show up for this in petworh as opposed to some club downtown.

xpost - found the comments here illuminating. i'm assuming that commenter "curm" is you, curmudgeon. great response from chris burns.

it's interesting to me the expectations you have for music coverage from the cp, based, i imagine, on a history which i wasn't around for. and the couple of cp reporters i am acquainted with, well, i'm not impressed with--would give any articles i read by them about as much credibility as something i read on a personal blog. i think of cp as trend journalism for college kids with little or no sense of history, i guess, and am slightly disappointed by not overly bothered by it. you want in-depth anything these days, you have to go to blogs, messageboards, books--personal outlets.

on friday i went to red lounge, a new place above international grill on 14th next to marvin. the crowd early on was fairly diverse, racially, 20s and 30s age-wise. the dj crew was composed of what looked like 19 or 20-year old kids, all white. it really seemed like their shitty djing killed the diversity--i watched people take off after trying to make a go of it on the dancefloor, until the crowd looked more and more like the dj crew. blown opportunity?

thanks for the info, fauxmarc. can you tell me the venue, trinidad and tobago?

*about the venue

i've never been and don't have anything on it, except that it's not usually a party venue - it's the actual building for the cultural association of trinidad and tobago or something along those lines, just people getting together in a public space to dance.

I think Wonkabout is a good thing - sure there's plenty of overlap with CP/BYT, but more coverage is always better.

I think the DC scene hit a real low point maybe 3-4 years ago and has gotten much better since - a substantial number of new venues have opened, more people are throwing more parties with more diverse lineups, and more people are showing up and having a great time, which allows weekly and monthly parties to flourish.

I was talking with friends a few weeks ago about how DC's EDM scene is actually better now than at any point since the end of Buzz, and to be honest probably a good deal before the end of Buzz. Loads of talent coming through and loads of great parties - a few years ago it used to be hard to find a great event a couple times a month, now there are sometimes several in a night.

have you heard anything about what electric cabaret is up to? i can't find anything beyond damian lazarus from last week

2.26.09 DAMIAN LAZARUS (Crosstown Rebels - London)

3.05.09 RETURN of the MEXICANS (Jorge HM, D-Bug Live, Paravoice Live – Mexico)

3.12.09 GUIDO SCHNEIDER (Poker Flat Recordings – Berlin)

3.19.09 THE ELECTRIC CABARET TAKES A WEEK OFF (Forward Festival)

3.26.09 RADIO SLAVE (Rekids – Berlin)

I mean, holy shit.

wow.

x-post to Will. Old guy me remembers when Alona Wortofsky was at the City Paper and writing up go-go and dancehall regularly as well as Dischord stuff, and I remember more recently Sarah Godfrey (who still writes for them on ocassion) highlighting go-go, rap and r'n'b. So when new folks post "indie and indie-crossover is the world" stuff I get frustrated. They don't have to like other stuff, just acknowledge that it exists.

gotcha.