There are few locations in Washington, D.C. the place you’ll be able to hear a band cowl SOPHIE, Model Pussy, Bruce Springsteen, Joyce Manor, the Beatles in succession. However because the clock struck midnight and Pleasure Month started, DC9 was that place, and Ekko Astral was that band. Joined by a rotating solid of native and visiting musicians, the punk trio cycled by what frontwoman Jael Holzman calls “a fucked-up Russian Roulette” of crowd-pleasing covers, in addition to just a few originals—from early cuts off the group’s first EP to an unreleased monitor a couple of nation going up in flames. After two days of dwell music from indie rock family names and DIY newcomers alike, that they had no alternative however to exit in a blaze of glory, overlaying Fleetwood Mac’s “Goals” with Berra frontwoman Roba Djalleta singing lead and Ted Leo on the guitar.
Lower than per week earlier, about three miles away, President Trump’s “Huge Lovely Invoice”—which might ban Medicaid and Inexpensive Care Act insurance policy from overlaying gender affirming healthcare—handed the Home of Representatives. From its inception, this inaugural Liberation Weekend has stood within the shadow of the Trump administration’s all-out warfare on trans Individuals. With the Huge Lovely Invoice threatening to move the Senate, the message of this new music competition couldn’t be clearer: No hesitation, the time for motion is now.
In a dialog with the members of Pop Music Fever Dream lower than an hour earlier than they kicked off the competition’s first day, bassist Carmen Castillo tells me that rising up within the D.C. space and returning there casts her band’s protest music in a private gentle. “The final time we have been at Black Cat after we performed our nearer ‘18 States,’ which is a not-up-to-date account of all of the anti-trans payments that have been about to be handed, there was someone breaking down in tears within the entrance row,” she says. “It was actually sobering to understand the direct affect listening to the lyrics was having on individuals.”
Below the elevator pitch of “Pitchfork Competition for Trans Rights,” Liberation Weekend was the brainchild of Ekko Astral and the Gender Liberation Motiona grassroots collective preventing for trans individuals’s rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination on a nationwide scale. Additionally collaborating is Crimson Sizzling—an artwork and music nonprofit whose latest output consists of the 2024 TRANSA compilation—and Trans Music Archivea corporation devoted to curating and preserving the work of trans musicians.
Tilley from House Is The place // Jael from Ekko Astral
With this two-day competition (three if you happen to depend a Liberation Weekend Eve occasion that includes The Dad Rock That Made Me a Girl writer Niko Stratis in dialog with author Rax King), Ekko Astral and firm got down to showcase the expertise of a majority-LGBTQ lineup and fundraise for a coalition defending communities immediately below assault. With GLM because the recipient of all of the competition’s proceeds, Liberation Weekend not solely supplied a possibility for individuals to place their cash the place their mouths are, it’s additionally a name to arms, rousing the general public to take a stand in opposition to transphobia and different types of bigotry earlier than it’s too late. And it seems that the easiest way to make individuals listen is to make plenty of noise—and to indicate them a superb time.
