Pizza & Ping Pong: Tussle Plays Around

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THANKS TO A RABID fight from Advisory Neighborhood Commission commissioner Frank Winstead, Comet Ping Pong is known more for trying to host live music than actually hosting it.

But with a proper license now in place, Comet is welcoming the San Francisco experimental-groove group Tussle to its pong-and-pizza parlor — just the sort of off-the-beaten-path joint that suits the band, said founding member Nathan Burazer.

"We like weird places like that — as long as they're legit," he said by cell phone as Tussle traveled to a normal rock venue in Minneapolis, Minn.

Burazer said some of the oddball spaces Tussle has laid down its bass-and-drums-heavy music in include the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles ("There were buffalos and these beautiful dioramas all around us"), Super Happy Fun Land in Houston, Texas ("It's a weird art collective, gallery-type place"), and a junkyard in Brooklyn.

"That was kind of perfect for us, but in Brooklyn it's kind of odd," he said. "It was under the Brooklyn Bridge, and there were chickens running around. I guess someone's chickens were just out for a walk."

The seven-year-old Tussle — which features two drummers in Jonathan Holland and Warren Huegel, bassist Tomonori Yasuda and Burazer on electronics — is out supporting a new CD, "Cream Cuts." It's the group's most outward-looking release to date, and the band's music can no longer be tagged simply as "punk-funk" or "neo-Krautrock." And it was a conscious decision for Tussle to make a more challenging recording.

"All these songs had been written right after 'Telescope Mind' [2006] came out, [when] all these reviews said, 'Yeah, gee, Can,'" Burazer said, referencing the legendary German prog-rock group. "The feedback we were getting was the same references every time. ... We wanted to go in a new direction and try to create something that didn't have such definitive reference points."

"Cream Cuts" can be abstract on the surface, but the outer-space electronics are underpinned by dub-inflected bass lines and hip-shaking clangs from two percussionists, so the music is still immediate and accessible — even to someone who might wander into Comet for a late-night slice and a round of table tennis.

» Comet Ping Pong, 5037 Connecticut Ave. NW; Sun., 10 p.m., $10; 202-364-0404. (Van Ness-UDC)