"Don't Save Us from the Flames" - M83

Fugazi's Brendan Canty flexes his producing skills again with another installment in the "Burn to Shine" DVD series and a newish live tour film featuring Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.

"I felt like the DC music scene was in a state of flux," says Canty, the drummer for DC-based punk band Fugazi. This, he explains, was the inspiration in 2004 for the first in a series of DVDs he is producing entitled "Burn to Shine," each based in a different city and designed as "a snapshot of that [music] community inside of that city."

The format for these DVDs is unique: determine a city with a particularly rich or eclectic music scene, identify a house within that city scheduled to be demolished, and invite a handful of local bands to each play one hour (whittled on the DVD to one song) in the living room of that doomed home. After each band plays its song, the DVD concludes by documenting the eventual fate of the house. In the case of the DVD based in DC, we see the white structure that once belonged to a 94-year-old woman for 33 years slowly obscure behind billows of thick, peppery smoke as it burns away in a fire department training exercise.

Directly before he embarked on the Burn To Shine project, Canty had been composing music for political ads in John Kerry's campaign. "It drove me insane," he says, explaining that at one point he was told the drums sounded more appropriate for a mayoral campaign. Soon after that, he began looking for a new project with "Burn to Shine" director Christoph Green, who had been doing graphics for the Kerry campaign. About the time that the two decided to look for work together elsewhere, a friend told Canty about a former neighbor's house on Chestnut street that was scheduled to be torn down. Having befriended the 94-year-old woman who lived there, Cantys' acquaintence felt pangs of guilt at the thought of the destruction of the house and the fond memories that been created within its walls. They should have a party, he thought, or maybe some sort of send-off. Canty had a better idea.

"DC is extremely isolated from the rest of the world, musically" says Canty, referring to why the DC music scene is unique. "It's a scene for itself," he adds, "musicians play for other musicians and everybody has a band."

"I thought it would be interesting for the future to document what bands are doing in this tumultuous time," says Canty, who adds that this series is also one way he is attempting to get around the "self-censoring nature of artists," and other, extraneous factors that tend to shade our perceptions of art. For example, "There is a lot of bullshit information you get when you go to a concert, from the door price to the bouncers."

Canty and Green recently filmed the fourth addition to the series in Louisville, Kentucky, and it became available this past spring. "The bands on this one are way more obscure and way weirder" cautions Canty, who mentions Will Oldham, the Magik Markers, Shipping News, Ultra Pulverize and the Commonwealth as a few of the acts that are featured.

To see more of his producing work, also check out "Sunken Treasure: Live in the Pacific Northwest," released this past October. The film follows Jeff Tweedy on his solo tour in the Northwest and includes five live performances.