The band hails from Washington, DC, and have been denizens of the byways and highways of the city’s musical underground for years. Jacky Cougar Abok is the six-foot-five-inch tall Kenyan punk singer who has drummed with Thee Lolitas and Foul Swoops. Guitarist Mark Cisneros has bent strings with Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, Deathfix, and Medications, and has pounded the traps for The Make-Up and Benjy Ferree, the latter alongside organist Paul Vivari. Joe Halladay (Citygoats) on bass and Ryan Hicks (Suns Of Guns) on drums round out this squared circle of sight and sound.
A staff-led art talk about artwork chosen by the performing artists starts at 5:30 pm followed by a performance at 6 pm. As always, the show is free & all ages so RSVP here!
In case you haven’t heard, our next show at the Luce Unplugged Series at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is none other than indie rock superstars Washington Social Club!
Recently reunited after an agonizing hiatus, DC indie power-pop band Washington Social Club takes center-stage to spread their raucous energy and spitfire melodies. Join us to celebrate their reunion, and their snappy new EP They’re Talking to Me Strange, their first release in 11 years.
Luce Unplugged invites local musicians to perform in the beautiful Luce Foundation Center surrounded by 3000 works of art. A staff-led talk about artworks chosen by the performing artists starts at 5:30 pm. The music starts promptly at 6 PM on Thursday December 5th. Free & all ages!
The next collaboration between Hometown Sounds and the venerable Luce Unplugged Series at the Smithsonian American Art Museum brings experimental jazz guitarist Anthony Pirog to the stage to lead a quartet of musicians combining the intensity of punk with the inventiveness of jazz.
Photo credit: Shervin Lainez courtesy Cuneiform Records
Luce Unplugged invites local musicians to perform in the beautiful Luce Foundation Center surrounded by 3000 works of art. A staff-led talk about artworks chosen by the performing artists starts at 5:30 pm.
Well-known as a member of The Messthetics with Fugazi’s rhythm section Joe Lally and Brendan Canty, Anthony Pirog also frequently performs solo and with his partner, cellist Janel Leppin.
We are terribly excited to announce our new partnership with the Luce Unplugged series to curate and present the most exciting #DCmusic in their expansive art-filled space.
Luce Unplugged invites local musicians to perform in the beautiful Luce Foundation Center surrounded by 3000 works of art. A staff-led talk about artworks chosen by the performing artists starts at 5:30 pm.
At 6 p.m on Thursday September 5th, virtuoso drummer Isabelle De Leon and friends fill the Luce Foundation Center with jazz, pop, and soul tunes from her vast repertoire.
Hometown Sounds continues our dedication to the music of DC in all its many forms with a February #DCmusic showcase at the Kennedy Center’s free Millennium Stage featuring Champion Sound Band. Champion Sound Band blends their love for jazz, blues, funk, soul and hip-hop to create something all their own. With passions for tried and true musicianship and exploration, their ever-evolving soundscapes feel both warmly familiar yet one of a kind.
Champion Sound Band draws from their individual backgrounds to form a special harmony. With shared passions for tried and true musicianship and exploration, their ever-evolving soundscapes feel both warmly familiar yet one of a kind.
The Washington Post most recently described the group as “a sensitive soul-jazz sextet”. Going on, The Post’s Chris Richards affirms in his review– “after a couple of years songwriting in this current lineup, a tender touch comes reflexively, with everybody working delicately around (Anastasia) Antoinette’s blue-flame voice until their supporting gestures coagulate into a song.”
Champion Sound Band blends their love for jazz, blues, funk, soul and hip-hop to create something all their own. A community of like-minded musicians who feel kindred. The love and care they have for each other translates to their art, and the music is at once positive and empowering. With a sense that we are all champions, the aim is clear– to uplift and inspire. Altogether, the vibration is tranquil and transformative. This dichotomy delivers an impressive result. It’s music you won’t soon forget. A feeling of enchantment. Something worth sharing. And Champion Sound Band invites all to join their family.
The band includes Anastasia Antoinette on vocals, Gudo on drums and production, Kareem ‘Reemz’ Johnson on keys and production, John Eamon on sax, Jimmy Keith on bass and Alex James on guitar.
RSVP here and come to the free performance at 6 PM on Thursday February 28th!
Hometown Sounds wraps up another successful full year of hosting monthly #DCmusic showcases with a performance by Boat Burning on Tuesday December 11th! Boat Burning, a DC-based experimental rock ensemble featuring original works for multiple electric guitars, celebrates the holiday season with an evening of shimmering harmonics. The program will include favorites old and new, selections from the ensemble’s 2018 debut EP, and a few surprises especially for the holidays.
Boat Burning is a multi-guitar, experimental music collective that combines classically-influenced, minimalist compositions with the maximal ferocity and power of punk.
Featuring a core of five composer/guitarists, the DC based ensemble explores “maximum minimalism,” an intricate hybrid of composition and improvisation where elemental passages played by a multitude of instruments — sometimes 100 or more guitars — produce shimmering towers of densely-stacked harmonics. The result is majestic, evocative music that fuses the widescreen sweep of classical with the sheer physical thrall of punk rock.
Boat Burning’s obsession is with how music of astonishing complexity and beauty can arise by radically embracing simplicity and diverisity. Musical passages and instrumentation are stripped way down, and special tunings are used, to bring out and emphasize the differences in each player’s unique technique, ability and gear. This creates striking sonic effects: phantom instruments, created by the massive additive and subtractive harmonics — piccolos, French horns, bassoons, even entire string sections — flicker into life, and then disappear…
Formed 2008 in Chapel Hill NC’s roiling experimental music scene, founder Andras Fekete relocated Boat Burning to the U.S. capital in 2011 to take part in the District’s exploding musical renaissance. Since then, Boat Burning has attracted an astonishing array of collaborators from multiple cities.
RSVP here and come to the free performance at 6 PM on Tuesday December 11th!
Before relaxing with family and loved ones for Thanksgiving, visit the Kennedy Center on Wednesday November 21st for another Hometown Sounds #DCmusic show at the Millennium Stage, this month featuring dark trip-hop quartet Luna Honey.
Luna Honey draws on influences from The Birthday Party, Morphine, Carla Bozulich, Swans, and early 4AD to combine murky bass grooves, unhinged distortion, and haunted vocals for a sound that builds from darkly hypnotic to feverishly unmoored.
Their songs examine what it means to grow older, to let go of guilt, to embrace fear, and to find the balance between safety and a meaningful existence.
Luna Honey was formed on vocalist Maura Pond and bassist Levi Flack’s honeymoon in Colombia when the couple decided that they should spend the first year of their marriage dedicating themselves to something both had always wanted to do – putting out a full LP of original music.
That dream became a reality in April of 2017 when they befriended music scene veteran Benjamin Schurr at a Br’er show at DC’s Black Cat. While waiting in line together for a Nick Cave show they had road-tripped to Philadelphia for, Schurr made an impassioned speech on the duty of the artist to work with what you’ve got to create whatever original and meaningful art you are capable of.
Inspired by those words to try and overcome the feelings of inadequacy as a musician that had kept her from finishing songs for most of her life, Pond set about writing an album to help process what it means to be reexamining yourself in your 30’s and weighing what accumulated burdens help ground you and keep you steady, and what just weigh you down and should be cast off.
On a Friday the 13th in October that was also the release date for Schurr’s Brunch is for A$$holes LP with Br’er, as well as Maura and Levi’s anniversary weekend, the three spent several frenetic days in Maura and Levi’s house in Anacostia, DC recording the bulk of the songs and fulfilling the pledge made a year before.
Looking to translate the energy of the recordings into a live set, Luna Honey added baritone sax player Madeline Billhimer in February 2018. Though coming from a strong music background, Luna Honey is also Billhimer’s first band and represents a turning point in her career as a musician. Together, the group is eager to spread their gospel of confronting that things that scare you, and seeks to embody the possibilities of what you can achieve when you surrender your ego and open yourself up to other people and ideas.
RSVP here and come to the free performance at 6 PM on Wednesday November 21st!
Hometown Sounds celebrates two years of hosting #DCmusic shows at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage with a raucous free performance on Wednesday October 10th by garage rock band Wanted Man!
Fronted by Kenny Pirog, Wanted Man plays all kinds of music. Their debut self-titled album has the colors of punk, surf, rock-a-billy, blues, folk, and country, varying from song to song.
RSVP here and come to the free performance at 6 PM on Wednesday October 10th!
Hometown Sounds brings punk mysticism to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage with our September #DCmusic showcase featuring Time Is Fire!
Time is Fire is a band rooted in Washington DC’s punk scene but reaching out to embrace rhythms from across the world. The five-member group summons a kaleidoscopic sound that knows no borders – a sonic blast of radio distortion from a country that doesn’t exist. Fronted by an Iranian-born Sufi poet and backed by players steeped in punk, dance and experimental music, Time is Fire mixes pan-cultural rhythms, floor-shaking funk grooves and acid-laced guitar leads into a mind-expanding geopolitical dance party.
RSVP here and come to the free performance at 6 PM on Monday September 24th!
Every month Hometown Sounds presents one of DC’s finest bands on the Kennedy Center’s free Millennium Stage series, and in August we are thrilled to bring you the cutting edge dance punk of Light Beams.
Light Beams began in 2015 when longtime Dischord artist Justin Moyer (El Guapo, Supersystem, Edie Sedgwick, Puff Pieces) — influenced by 80s-era freestyle music and Sheila E. — started playing sampler and timbales with Sam Lavine, the longtime drummer of D.C. hip-hop mainstays the Cornel West Theory. With the addition of bassist Arthur Noll, formerly of Kid Congo Powers and Alarms & Controls, the resulting polyrhythmic melange, sometimes called “block rock,” reinvents late-20th century dance-pop using the tools of the 21st. Known for their blistering live performances and relentlessly positive attitudes, the band hopes to inspire audiences to feel good about themselves in an era when the menacing shadows of night seem more threatening than ever before.
With a cassette out on Don Giovanni Records and a split-seven inch with Ian Svenonius’s Escape-ism out on Lovitt Records, Light Beams has just completed a full-length record and has just completed a full-length record and is touring the Midwest in September. They are proud to be playing the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage for the first time.
RSVP here and come to the free performance at 6 PM on Friday August 31st!
Hometown Sounds 