YEAR IN MUSIC Imagine a frustrated ghost floating above his own funeral. He might hear someone getting the eulogy wrong or even see an unwanted guest. One of the benefits of having your band come to an end rather than your own demise is living to react to retrospectives of your creative output and impact. But as I write this, Uzi Rash isn’t quite dead yet. In fact, it has one last breath of doing what it does best — live performance.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT?
It was the type of weather where you only sometimes need a coat and had been raining on and off. Wearing too many layers, I found the address where the band said it’d be practicing. The garage was wide open and I got a friendly wave to come in.
The group’s final incarnation, featuring founding band leader Max Nordile, Steve Oriolo (Steve0) on bass, and new drummer, Erin Allen, was preparing for a new recording and its first national tour. Aptly titled “End Days — Last Tour” it would be its last altogether. (This was solidified when I was handed a swag pair of generic party-dude shades wrapped in cellophane. I opened them and found Uzi Rash 2007-2012 boldly written in black on white on one of the temples.)
A live sneak-preview performance of the cassette, The Garbageman’s Uniform (Minor Bird Records) was preceded by stage-ready versions of more familiar sounding songs. We talked baseball a bit during a beer run, even though the postseason hadn’t yet begun. The A’s were still doing well and that’s where we were — on MLK in Oakland.
“You truly are a noise-ician. Keep it stupid, stupid,” Nordile, clad in a Grass Widow t-shirt, quipped to his drummer on a particularly up-tempo number. Earlier, he complimented the newest member’s ability to learn over 20 songs in about a month and a half’s time. Allen smiled at some of the mistakes that were made and the three wondered if they needed to dumb it down even more.
They ran through another song twice because Nordile said it went too fast. His bassist conceded with the line, “You’re the maestro.” To which he lightheartedly replied, “The maestro has decomposed.” After a few chuckles practice ended somewhat abruptly when Nordile’s guitar string broke.
COMMUNITY WASTE
Despite any corrections or control, it didn’t seem like perfection in a refurbished sense is what he was going for. I don’t think they were hamming it up for me when they foraged from bins of discarded food, which included some less-than-fresh looking bagels outside a church down the block. Nordile would later articulate part of his concept as a stance against the desacralization of nature.
“Waste, detritus, trash and garbage are documents, like fossils of the wasteful and destructive aspects of civilization,” he said. It’s that very affinity for what some consider undesirable that has fueled themes, inspired songs, and had allowed for five years of non-stop live shows that thrived on chaos and confusion (sometimes there was blood).
The industrial-strength cacophony is apparent when you listen to the final product of Uzi Rash recordings. What started as a solo project out of Nordile’s desire to not have to depend on anyone became a virtual who’s-who of East Bay-band inbreeding some 30-plus members later. Ultimately, Nordile would be calling the shots, but he’d rely on his like-minded community of supporting players and embrace their complimentary abilities by having them around. Something he considered a huge improvement.
By the time you read this, their last performance will have come and gone and Nordile will have screamed along to “I’m a Trashbag” with the deepest conviction. Oakland has long served as a gritty breeding ground for so many acts that never got their fair due or enough recognition, but with Uzi Rash, we recognize their ability to put Dylan in self-deprecating drag, to recycle a riff, rip a melody (sometimes a whole song title straight up), but to put their own “beach squelch shimmy” spin on it and make it exciting.
“Rock’n’roll has been mostly boring white boys with guitars. I am too, but I realize it and strive to acknowledge it and move on.” With that we take the boogie or, booji, as he’d say in stride and wait while Nordile casually contemplates his next music project because five years is up.
YEAR IN MUSIC “We weren’t supposed to be allowed to play live on the morning news,” Ty Segall says just moments after finishing a meal at In-N-Out, on his way down the coast from San Francisco, the city he can no longer afford to live in, to pick up his 16-year-old sister from his hometown of Laguna Beach. “Giving a bunch of long-haired weirdos really loud amplifiers and free reign on the morning news is just stupid. So I thought that was a great opportunity to do whatever the hell we wanted.”
“And I’m really happy we did that,” he says of the Ty Segall Band’s bizarrely mesmerizing performance of “You’re the Doctor” off this year’s Twins (Drag City), on the Windy City’s WGN Morning News in October. It ended with screeching feedback and Segall repeatedly screaming “Chicago!” into the mic. “It was way too early, so we were already feeling a little weird.” The weirdness rubbed off on the news anchors, who, when the camera panned back to them mid-song, were throwing papers up in the air and pogoing behind their desk. It made for a great split second.
The band also made its late night debut in 2012, on perhaps more appropriate Conan. Segall, drummer Emily Rose Epstein, bassist Mikal Cronin, and guitarist Charlie Moothart seemed a bit more in tune with that set-up and host, playing Twins‘ awesome “Thank God For Sinners.”
The group of old friends toured extensively this year, playing a whole bunch of festivals including Bumbershoot, the Pitchfork Music Festival (“I had no idea what to expect with that one, because like, you know, Pitchfork is almost a mainstream media outlet now. But that was one of the most wild, definitely craziest festival we played”) and Treasure Island in San Francisco (“most beautiful festival…the scenery — it was just psychotic”).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCMSYRgRdAo
And Segall again had a full hand of releases over these 12 months. He began the year with a White Fence collaboration: Hair (Drag City), following that up with a Ty Segall Band record, Slaughterhouse (In the Red). Then in October he dropped a solo album, Twins (Drag City).
Each record stood for itself. They were recorded with different bands at various locations (Eric Bauer’s studio in Chinatown, the Hangar in Sacramento). Hair was a true collaboration between Segall and White Fence’s Tim Presley, exploring one another’s strengths through fuzzy noise, psychedelic wanderings and the occasional surfy licks. It was originally slated to be an EP, but it was going well, they decided to put out a full LP.
Slaughterhouse kicks off with foaming feedback and maintains a sonic assault of aggressive, noisy guitars, screaming in the ether, throughout — a loud, frenzied, psychedelic garage-punk masterpiece. Bluesy-punk thumper “Wave Goodbye” turns down the riffs on the intro and lets Segall’s nasal intonations take charge, with a ’70s punk approach: “I went to church and I went to school/I played by all of your other rules/but now it’s time to…wave goodbye/Bye bye.” He shrieks that last “bye bye,” simultaneously recalling early Black Sabbath, and sonically flipping the bird.
Twins was the solo triumph, lyrically exploring Segall’s dual personalities between his thrashy stage persona, and his casual, polite, dude-like demeanor off-stage.
“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?” — Patti Smith in ‘Just Kids.’
Segall first picked up the guitar at 15 after hearing Black Flag. “I was super into Black Sabbath and Cream and classic rock and then I heard Black Flag and I was like ‘dude, I can play punk.'”
The multi-instrumentalist still plays guitar, first and foremost. Currently, he sticks to a ’66 baby-blue Fender Mustang he calls “Old Blue” or “Blue-y,” but brings along a ’68 Hagstrom as backup.
During the week of Halloween though, Segall, 25, played drums with the first band he joined when he moved to San Francisco eight years back, straight-forward punk act Traditional Fools. It was at Total Trash’s Halloween show at the Verdi Club with a reunited Coachwhips (with Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer) and it made for an epic night of reunions for the two men most associated with the current garage rock scene in San Francisco. “I have always thought, and will always think, that John Dwyer is the savior of rock and roll.”
When I bring up the news of Segall’s pal Cronin signing to Merge recently, he has a similar compliment for him: “He’s going to be the savior of us all. I can’t wait until you guys hear his next record; it’s insane.” Segall swears Cronin will be the next big thing.
Late last week, In The Red Recordings announced it would be reissuing Segall and Cronin’s joint 2009 surf-laden, chainsaw-garage record Reverse Shark Attack. In a video from that era for the song “I Wear Black,” Segall and Cronin cruise through town on skateboards in washed-out clips, ever the beach-bred rockers.
It was just three years ago, but that’s lifetime in Ty-land.
As the city has watched him grow Segall has maintained a youthful glow, a raucous, energetic punk spirit surrounded by sun-kissed California locks and a fuck-everything attitude. His sound, however, has expanded. How couldn’t it? He put out three records in 2012, and a dozen more in his relatively short lifetime.
But youthful abandon has caught up Segall. He can longer afford to live and work in San Francisco, the city that loves him so. He plans to move to LA in March or April of 2013. Will the wide sea of local rockers here soon follow suit? How many have we already lost to the rising tides of tech money? It’s a question currently without an answer.
“It’s really expensive,” Segall says. “I’ve loved it there, but I can’t even play music…I can’t work at my home. It’s a drag. I think a lot of musicians and artists are being forced to move out of San Francisco because they can’t afford it, and they can’t really work anymore because they can’t afford housing that allows for noise.”
It seems backward, that a year full of such booming professional success and critical acclaim should be the final year he’s able to afford the life he’s lead for the better part of a decade. But perhaps he just needs a break, to go back and focus all of his time and energy on a single release in the far-off future. Give his tired mind a minute to grasp his explosive last year.
“[In 2013] I’m going to like, get my head wrapped around the next thing and take some time, [and] slowly and lazily start working on demos,” he says. “There’s definitely not going to be a record from me for a year. I just want to focus on one thing and make it as best as I can. I’ve never really focused on just one thing for a year straight, so I’d like to do that.”
EMILY SAVAGE’S LIST OF NEW ALBUMS I LISTENED TO ENDLESSLY IN 2012
1. Grass Widow, Internal Logic (HLR)
2. Cloud Nothings, Attack on Memory (Carpark)
3. Ty Segall, Slaughterhouse (In the Red)
4. Dum Dum Girls, End of Daze EP (Sub Pop)
5. Frankie Rose, Interstellar (Slumberland)
6. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Alleluja! Don’t Bend! Ascend! (Constellation)
7. The Fresh and Onlys, Long Slow Dance (Mexican Summer)
Tofu and Whiskey Arbiter of good taste, Thrill Jockey Records is officially 20 years old. In another era, in another business, this would merely be a back-slapping milestone. In the present stuck-barreling-downwards roller coaster of the music industry, it’s an anniversary worthy of widespread jubilation.
“It’s a mind-boggling number of years,” label founder Bettina Richards says during a phone call from the main office in Chicago, where the label’s been based since 1995.
And how else would a record label celebrates its birthday than with a series of familial concerts? There have been shows booked in key Thrill Jockey cities such as New York (where it began in ’92), London, San Francisco, LA, Chicago. Those shows (some of which have already gone down) boast lineups packed with label notables Tortoise, the Sea and Cake, Trans Am, Liturgy, Future Islands, and Matmos.
The San Francisco version of the traveling Thrill Jockey rodeo will be headlined by the label’s Bay Area acts: psych-rockers Wooden Shjips and drone duo Barn Owl, along with Liturgy, Trans Am, Man Forever, and Eternal Tapestry (Dec. 13, 8pm, $18. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF; www.theindependentsf.com).
SF is considered a key Thrill Jockey city for a handful of reasons; there’s the aforementioned connection with Wooden Shjips and Barn Owl, plus, one of the label’s earliest releases was a band from here called A Minor Forest. And there’s another super-secret new signing set for 2013 (sorry, you won’t learn more than that here). “We’ve had a long, fond affection for the way San Franciscans can create super individual sounds,” Richards says.
Though they create different styles of music, Wooden Shjips and Barn Owl had some similarities that stood out to Richards when she was in the process of signing each. “They both share this transportive quality…taking you to an entirely different realm. With the Wooden Shjips, it’s an active feeling of motion, and with Barn Owl, it’s really an escape. It’s hard to put into words, but they both do something compelling to me.”
It’s that compulsion that’s lead Richards to many of her choices for the roster. She tells this story about one one the label’s most beloved acts: “Trans Am, way back in 1993, were the B-side of a seven-inch that John McEntire from Tortoise had recorded, and he gave me the seven-inch. It just happened that a week later they were playing. I saw them and was like, ‘oh my god, I love them.'”
While most of the acts have been found through musician friends and pals of the label, there’s the occasional random encounter, like Sidi Toure, the gifted Malian singer-songwriter. His CD arrived via snail-mail to the Chicago office right before Christmas last year. “We don’t usually get packages from Mali. I was on a drive to go see my folks, popped it in, and I just couldn’t believe it.” I tell Richards I had the same initial reaction to Toure’s mesmerizing compositions. “And the weirder thing,” she adds, “was that he sent it because he’s a really big Radian fan, which is a band from Austria with like, atonal drums. You just wouldn’t have guessed that, right?”
Austrian prog band HP Zinker was the first band she ever signed — at the time (’92), she was living New York City and was still bartending and working at a record shop. In fact, she did that for the first eight years of the label. The band lived in a decaying squat where White Zombie used to reside, and they all ended up moving in to Richards’ studio apartment. Richards lets out a raucous laugh recalling those early days.
From signing HP Zinker, to the label’s 330th release planned for next year, Thrill Jockey has maintained a comparatively sparkling reputation as a label that treats its artists well.
I asked Wooden Shjips drummer Omar Ahsanuddin why the label is so beloved and he replied: “Because they know their shit, are music fans, and mostly because [Richards] is a straight-shooter. As Phil Manley once told me: if you like getting paid on time, you’ll like Thrill Jockey.”
Barn Owl’s Jon Porras said, “It’s great to work with a label that trusts an artistic vision…Thrill Jockey upholds a level of professionalism and is open to unconventional ideas.”
“I think one of the main things, at least to me, is that these bands would be doing what they’re doing whether anybody is paying attention or not,” says Richards. “This is something they’re compelled to do. And in the same sense, we’re compelled to put it out, whether it makes sense or not.”
And that’s important in this current musical climate, a time when the mainstream labels are floundering, record sales have plummeted, and free music is a click away. “Trying to combat it would be like trying to swim against the tide. You’d exhaust yourself and get nowhere. Instead, we just try to adapt,” Richards says. “We’re small, so we’re flexible and can adapt quickly. The people that work here are super music geeks, that keeps them really involved.”
One shift has been the number of releases it puts out. It jumped a few years back from 10 releases a year, to three or four a month, including small print, specific collector releases, which appeal to the super music geek market.
In a nostalgic mood, given the anniversary shows, I ask Richards to look back and pick out what she’d want her legacy to be, after this thrill ride is over: “I hope people are as attached to some of the bands and the records that I am. I hope to, as an octogenarian, sit in my house and blast a Barn Owl record and really feel the same feeling I felt the first time I heard it. And I hope it’s as treasured to them as it is to us.”
Warm, fuzzy feelings abound.
REED FLUTE THERAPY
In these stressful last days of the year, we likely all need a modicum of relaxation, just a taste. Local reed flute master Eliyahu Sills, best known as part of the the Qadim Ensemble, has just released an acoustic solo tribute to the sacred music of Sufism; a haunting record meant to assist in meditation, yoga, and just some overall relaxation techniques. Song of the Reeds is 10 songs of original improvisations, created on a flute made from a reed; can’t get more organic than that. www.qadimmusic.com.
THE BABIES
That Vivian Girls-Woods collaboration just keeps getting cuter. It’s fascinating how it really feels split between the two out-fronts: Cassie Ramone and Kevin Morby, one part jingly lo-fi girl-group, one part folky, acoustic forest-dweller. With all the fuzz and tender melodies on half of the songs, it gets inevitable comparisons to Best Coast, but that’s only a shade of its output. Check the new karaoke-filled, warped VHS-style video for “Baby,” off Our House on the Hill, released this month on Woodsist, then go back and try alternating tracks such as “On My Time” or “Get Lost.” It makes for an engrossing, push me/pull you dynamic that will translate nicely to the stage. Plus, the Brooklyn band plays with our own headlining post-punk heroes, Grass Widow.
Another Brooklyn export: infectious 11-piece Afrobeat band Antibalas is coming our way, with its first full-length album in five years — a self-titled LP released in August on Daptone Records — horns blazing. The long-running act has been making a big, boisterous noise since the late ’90s, and closely followed in Fela Kuti’s steps, yet has suffered in relative obscurity until recently. Earlier this year, the New York Times asserted its belief that a post-Fela! world (i.e. the rise of crossover acts like Vampire Weekend, and the wildly popular run of Fela! on Broadway), might finally “catch up” and catch on to the skill of Antibalas. With Afrolicious DJs Pleasuremaker and Senor Oz.
Tofu and Whiskey The phrase “‘woman’ is not a genre” has been popping up again. It’s been in articles, board threads, and subsequently, conversations I’ve been a part of. It’s a good one. Kind of an earworm of a saying, because on its face, it’s implicit, simplistic, obvious, even. But it’s a good mantra, for music writers. “Woman” is not a genre.
Maybe it’s a backlash against Rolling Stone’s recent, ridiculous “women who rock” package, which sought out the “best” woman in rock with votes from readers, and somehow ended up with cloying pop act Karmin plastered across the cover, cleavage-y as all Rolling Stone cover ladies. Can you imagine a “best white guy in rock” contest in RS?
But this is nothing new. As far as I can trace it, Little Boots said “‘girl’ is not a genre” in 2009, but — seeing as how it’s so gosh darn simple — it’s got to have been uttered previously, and certainly, undoubtedly, felt since the first time a woman picked up a different instrument from her female neighbor, and got thrown in concert together.
It was the headline and thesis of a piece on Electronic Beats about the rise of thinkpieces sputtering about a supposed rise of women making electronic music, another fallacy; it’s just the cheap shots in feature pieces clumping heterogeneous acts together again.
One of the only things linking all ladies of wildly divergent sounds at this point is the gendered showcases, or gendered comparisons. That’s not to say all comparisons are entirely inaccurate, they just frequently are made based on little more than appearance.
Ash Reiter, the frontperson for her eponymous East Bay band, saw plenty of comparisons after the release of her first album, Paper Diamonds, in 2010, with passing references to Fleetwood Mac and Cat Power, both of whom she admires. The singer-songwriter-guitarist was also hoping to sound like a mix of Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Grizzly Bear, and OK, Jolie Holland.
Now, Reiter and her band have taken that sound for a walk in another direction. With the new LP, Hola — which see release on 20 Sided Records Fri/30 with a show at the Rickshaw Stop (8:30pm, $10. 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com) — the local musicians took notes more from bubbly 1960s pop and classic Motown cuts, arrangements interspersed with bits of funk and Afro-pop.
“With our first album, I was in a folkier place with a lot of those songs, doing the Jolie Holland thing, which, you know, I cut my teeth singing along to her songs,” says Reiter, remarkably cheerful on the phone the afternoon before her current 54-day tour ends. “But I’ve gotten more excited about writing more upbeat pop songs with grooves to them, and working with my band to write music instead of writing it alone.”
On this tour, Reiter and her drummer Will Halsey went to the Motown Museum in Detroit, which was particularly meaningful because of its influence on Hola: “that’s a lot of the music we look up to. Of course, [we’ve always looked up to] the Beatles and the Beach Boys, but also all these girl groups, the Ronettes, and the Shirelles, and the Crystals. And we definitively imitated a lot of what we heard in the background vocals listening to the Supremes.”
She had just gotten the Supremes box set, but also was listening to early Nigerian pop, and Os Mutantes when she first began work on Hola, and brought those inspirations to New Improved Recording, where the band worked for the first time with engineer Carlos Arredondo, who they met at a party at Anna Ash’s house.
You can hear Ash Reiter’s many complimentary influences on Hola opening track, “I’ve Got Something I Can Laugh About Now,” with jangly guitars, shakers, cooing harmonies, and Reiter’s crystal-clear, honey-sweet lead vocals. Funkier, electro-shot “Ishi,” written about the last member of the Yahi, very much a part of California’s history, follows. Reiter read his biography for that song, but also just liked the phonetic sound of his name.
Raised in Northern California (specifically, Sebastopol), Reiter looked to the state’s history for inspiration lyrically this time around; the former modern lit major was reading voraciously during the making of the record, including Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. The song “Little Sandy” has a chorus that’s a quote Didion included from a pioneer girl’s diary.
While Hola was girl group-influenced, Reiter wasn’t about to write a break-up album — she’s dating the band’s drummer, Halsey, who also plays with Oakland’s the Blank Tapes.
Another Bay Area act — freshly rejiggered and condensed — is headlining the release show with Ash Reiter this week: DRMS. It’s also a new progression for the plucky electro Afro-pop act, formerly known simply as Dreams. Down from eight players, the now-four piece has whittled to bandleader-keyboardist Rob Shelton, vocalist-percussionist Emily Ritz, drummer Ross McIntire, and Mark Clifford on vibraphone, melodica, and backup vocals.
DON’T CALL IT FREAK-FOLK
Local singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt just released a mystical, fleeing-through-a-foggy-forest folk album that’s so stripped down, quavering and personal, crackling yet crisp, it sounds like a rare, weird gem from the early ’70s that you’d unearth in the lower racks of Amoeba. The self-titled LP has such a true-blue timeless quality, however, to call it a throwback would do it injustice. White Fence’s Tim Presley is said to have created new label Birth Records solely to release Pratt’s debut, which came out Nov. 13. Pratt recently told Fader: “I was really afraid of some freak-folk comparisons because I’m from San Francisco, and I play electric guitar, and it’s kind of weird, folky stuff.” I’ll refrain.
TALES FROM THE FRONT LINE
Part of Nayland Blake’s ongoing FREE!LOVE!TOOL!BOX! exhibit, Show and Tell: Queer Punks in Conversationwill include conversations with Leslie Mah of Tribe 8, Brontez Purnell of Gravy Train!!! and The Younger Lovers, Jess Scott of Make-A-Mess Records, Brilliant Colors, Index, and Flesh World, and Matt Wobensmith, founder of Goteblüd Vintage Zine Store and Outpunk. Full disclosure, the panel discussion will be moderated by SFBG managing editor, Marke B., but I’d have gone regardless.
TOFU AND WHISKEY’S HOLIDAY GUIDE Before I expound on anything, I’ve got to spit this out: buy local. If you’re going to buy something; in particular, if you’re going to buy actual vinyl records or CDs or books or musical equipment, get them from an independent store in the Bay Area.
Support Aquarius, Amoeba Music, Black Pancake Records, GROOVES, 1-2-3-4 GO!, Recycled Records, Rooky Ricardo’s, Rasputin’s, Streetlight, and the smaller mom-and-significant-other type stores; otherwise, the brick and mortars will slowly die and we’ll be stuck rifling only through the virtual library, which will inevitably lead to a host of other problems (loneliness, fatigue, hive mindedness).
Making it even easier to shop live, Record Store Day has a Black Friday special releases list (Fri/23), which means there will be lots of specialty music and rare editions on the shelves. And yes, some detractors complain of the single-mindedness of asking shoppers to obsess over rare vinyl jewels just one day a year — actual Record Store Day takes place in April — and that most of the items end up online with jacked up prices anyways. I disagree with this mindset, especially around the holidays. That push can make the difference for a struggling independent shop. Keep in mind, this is not advocating for actual Black Friday shopping at Wal-Mart and the like. End rant.
Last year, all I wanted for Chanukah was the Phil Spector box set, each disc enveloped in tiny cardboard sleeves made to replicate the original records in miniature — like dollhouse versions. I got the CDs, and have listened to the Crystals’ “Frankenstein Twist,” on average, once a day for these past 12 months. This year, I’m just not sure what to covet, so I asked around.
From my non-academic study, I found that musicians tend to be of the practical angle when it comes to gifts. They want extra cables, or picks, headphones, or record needles. One mentioned the Fender Champ amp, which is good for thin-walled apartment use, or the $39 Fireye Mini portable headphone amp. Better yet, a gift certificate to a (local) music shop — try spots like Real Guitars (15 Lafayette, SF; www.realguitars.com), SF Guitar Works (323 Potereo, SF; www.sfguitarworks.com) or Starving Musician (2474 Shattuck, Berk; www.starvingmusician.com).
Those one step apart from the musicians, the quintessential music nerds such as myself, on the other hand, tend to desire the ostentatious and/or extraordinary. They want that rare, hard-to-find seven-inch on white vinyl, the oversized coffee table book, or that carefully curated box set.
Or something else entirely: a gift subscription to Turntable Kitchen’s pairing boxes ($25/month, www.turntablekitchen.com) is a particularly cool gift that’s based right here in the Bay. The boxes ship once a month and include dry ingredients, recipes, and limited edition seven-inches, often by local musicians.
Now on to the music shops. The specialty records, box sets, and CDs in general that stuck out to me as great gifts this year — of course dependent on the listener — are Blackbird Blackbird’s covers of Kate Bush on limited edition vinyl with origami, Castle Face Record’s The Velvet Underground and Nico Tribute, and new box sets from the English Beat, and Death Cab for Cutie. That Castle Face Records full album tribute features covers by a who’s-who of revered locals: Kelley Stoltz, Fresh and Onlys, Warm Soda, Ty Segall, the Mallard, and more (www.castlefacerecords.com).
There’s also Record Store Day’s Black Friday exclusives such as the Fat Boys pizza disc — the record looks like a saucy pie and it comes packaged in a cardboard box — Wanda Jackson’s Capitol Rarities, the Asobi Seksu/Boris split seven-inch,”obscure giants of acoustic guitar” trading cards, and a limited deluxe edition of Joey Ramone’s Ya Know?.
For all the Record Store Day Black Friday specials and to check participating Bay Area shops, visit recordstoreday.com/SpecialReleases.
For the Chanukah specific, I’d recommend ‘Twas the Night Before Hannukah: The Musical Battle Between Christmas and the Festival of Lights. It’s another release from the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, generally the best archivists of vintage Yiddish and Jewish-centric music from the past century or so. The 34-track double CD comp includes Chanukah songs by Woody Guthrie, the Klezmatics, and Mickey Katz, along with Christmas tunes performed by Jewish musicians like Lou Reed, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and the Ramones.
An added bonus, there will be a ‘Twas the Night Before Hannukah show at Brick and Mortar Music Hall in December (Dec. 15, 9pm, $15–$18, 1710 Mission, SF. www.brickandmortarmusic.com), with live appearance by Luther Dickinson, Sway Machinery, Thao, Steve Berlin, Ethan Miller, and Ceci Bastida.
As for books, there’s a new coffee table beast that I’ve been dying to talk about called The Art of Punk: The Illustrated History of Punk Rock Design (Voyageur Press, 224pp, $40), by Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg. It’s a beautiful hardcover with splashy images showcasing the aesthetics of punk; graphic fliers, posters, album covers, patches, and other imagery from the proto-punk era through the present, including international punk art, hardcore designs, and fringe elements (though aren’t they all?). Interesting, there’s another great book on punk graphics released this fall: Jon Savage’s Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli, 352pp, $55).
As The Art of Punk puts it, “The value of such groundbreaking artwork, which continues to have an impact on music, fashion, design, and media to this day, is even now only becoming fully apparent. The visual legacy of punk is extensive and its graphic codes — symbols of struggle and resistance, but also a complex subcultural visual vocabulary, and more cynically, a means to tap into deeply held antiauthoritarian consumer sentiments by lifestyle branders — still have resonance. “
The books will appeal to anyone that ever spent hours carefully sewing garish back-patches to jackets to represent the music they believed in, or those who stared at album covers so long their eyes crossed, and the imagery has been burned in their brains ever since. Basically, the music nerds we’ve been shopping for here today.
SHARON JONES AND THE DAP-KINGS
It’s the swinging, soul-funk group’s first headlining show in San Francisco in more than two years, and in the grand Davies Symphony Hall to boot. The Brooklyn nine-piece Dap-Kings, is of course led by the velvety, luminous Sharon Jones and will likely be belting tracks off 2010’s I Learned the Hard Way LP.
Is there anything more exciting than reverb-heavy surf guitar? It warbles through the veins. Last time the King of Surf Guitar, Dick Dale, popped up at the Uptown he roared through all the hits — yes, “Misirilou” was high on the setlist — and then some, rapidly fingering his custom guitar at a blistering speed, his long white hair whipping around him. Trust me, see the 75-year-old maven while you still can.
GOLDIES Nymphs of the Internet forest, rejoice. The multidirectional musical entity known as 5kinandbone5 (www.5kinandbone5.com) is here to soundtrack your perverse festivals with the latest sonic plug ‘n plays. “Fearless psychic shaman” production duo Matrixxman (Charlie McCloud) and Earthman (Paavo Steinkamp) have been behind many of the year’s most exciting electronic dance music developments, transmitting digital wizardry and analog obsession from a virtual basement laboratory/development platform/ecstasy zone embedded in the cybersphere.
“We forged a pact at a rave once way back in high school in Virginia,” Matrixxman told me over email. “We promised to be friends forever and make the most futuristic shit known to mankind.”
That futuristic shit-pact has yielded a pixellated spectrum of tracks ranging from swaggy rap to acid house flashbacks, on a roster of labels including Fool’s Gold, UTTU, Grizzly, and Unknown to the Unknown. Collaborators include the cream of the alternate Internet: Mykki Blanco, Riff Raff, Sinden, Le1f, Kid Sister, Babe Rainbow. Just as striking is the duo’s breathtaking Tumblr-squared visual and media aesthetic, which takes their love of MS Paint graphics, download glitches, anime porn, antiquated Unicode, and anonymous trollspeak to gnarly heights. (“I don’t care for Bay music artists,” Matrxxman said gently, “because they mostly really and truly suck but I dig Sly and the Family Stone if I had to say.” Later he posted on Facebook, “x-files sexual fantasy roleplay mood.”) Their shit is on Angelfire.
The optimal keys to 5kinandbone5′ success have been versatility and unpredictability. In 2012, the fruitful marriage of hip-hop and dub techno continued to demolish the boundaries between “pop” and “underground,” generating a trippy aural world of minimal flourishes, big bass atmospherics, and heady experiments. 5kinandbone5 had come up in the East Coast’s hardcore drum and bass scenes and revered hip-hop producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes — but also connected deeply to early Detroit techno, ’90s house, psy-trance, UK bass, grime, and gamer and vogue beats. With that deep knowledge and willingness to cross genre (and sexual, racial, and regional) boundaries in pursuit of something unearthly yet deliciously perverse, they were perfectly positioned to vault trendy sounds like trap and dubstep toward more unique dance floor environments.
So far the 5kinandbone5 vision quest has produced at least one masterpiece, “Wut” by the New York raper Le1f. The track — a 3-D aural aquarium swimming with infectious horn loops, staccato bass bumps, crowd-chant samples, and hyperreal, unabashedly gay lyrics — blew away critics and, with the help of its entrancing video, quickly went viral and invaded clubs last summer. True to 5kinandbone5 form, the whole production was done through the magic of the Internet. Le1f didn’t physically meet the producers of his hit until the second time he performed it in San Francisco.
“The Internet is cool,” Matrixxman said of the collab. “It allows people to scope out each others’ vibes and stuff. It allows for the sending of nude photos to remote locations. In some cases, it facilitates collaborative efforts in music and art.”
As for the artistic process itself, Matrixxman weighs in on how he generates inspiration: “Usually incense or candles are lit initially. An ambiance is created. Auras are projected and a distinct presence is asserted. Prior to actually making any music, I like to visualize myself styling on hoes viciously, and that tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.”
5kinandbone5 recently launched its own label, Soo Wavey, with local DJ Vin Sol, that concentrates on more house-oriented releases. And Matrixxman recently released a jack-jam with another local DJ, Robert Jeffrey, called “Penis Power,” that’s been burning things up. As for the future of 5kinandbones and everything?
“The future/paradise as I see it would be a post-corporeal society in which we live freely as data and can inhabit disposable cyborg bodies at will. Gender and class will not be of any concern and we’ll be traveling the far reaches of the galaxy in search of other intelligent life. Artificial intelligence will have emerged and present some interesting paradigm shifts. Cybersex will be utterly amazing and enter a new evolutionary era in how we touch each other as humans.”
GOLDIES “It’s been a great year for me,” says Van Pierszalowski, slightly out of breath after pushing his bicycle up a seriously steep hill. “It’s been the first year that I’ve lived anywhere in a long time.”
Pierszalowski has been part of the San Francisco indie rock scene for years, first with Port O’Brien and now with WATERS, but he hasn’t actually lived in the Bay Area since his days at UC Berkeley. He’s been mostly out on the road, couch-hopping at friends’ houses upon return, spending summers fishing in Alaska with his father — or in Oslo with his European girlfriend, Marte Solbakken, who also plays in WATERS.
But in 2012, following positive reviews for 2011’s Out In The Light (TBD Records), his debut album as WATERS, he’s finally on dry ground. He’s got a somewhat permanent structure — an apartment he shares with Solbakken — on the top of Potrero Hill, and a part-time job at the bottom of those hills, at Four Barrel.
“I haven’t had a job, other than music and fishing, since college,” he says with a laugh. “Finally I’m not touring for a little while, and I’m just concentrating on writing songs, and I wanted my days to have a little more structure. So I sought out a job — I love coffee and I love Four Barrel.”
Java-brewing skills aside, Pierszlawski’s been garnering notice from music fans for other reasons: his earnest, salty sea-referencing lyrics; matured and more aggressive vocals; grungy, fuzzed out guitar-work; and seriously tripped-out music videos. As far as imagery goes, there’s a lot to take in with the video for “For the One” — flaming dream catchers, creepy convenience store clerks, acid-laced dreams, purplish starry nightscapes that look like screensavers for Windows 95, extras fleeing through smoke machine fog, and Pierszalowski riding his bicycle through a tunnel full of trash and glitter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOJkUFTiwY
It’s kind of what WATERS is all about, the light and the dark, the weird and the weirdly confident, the grungier moments of the ’90s, soulful voyages through choppy seas, the hooks (pop and otherwise), a fisherman in a flannel.
Then there’s the more straightforward tour video for sparkly, garage-punk standout track “Back to You,” and two for moodier, yearning acoustic single “Mickey Mantle” — one clip that’s of Pierszalowski with a guitar on a rooftop, and the other a zoomed-in snapshot of his day — created for the 48-hour Music Video Race this spring. Live, the song’s a crowd-pleaser in which he pleads, “forever, forever” and gets the audience chanting the word back to him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izgmACVXVBA
Pierszalowski also toured a whole lot with WATERS this year, opening for Delta Spirit across the US and Nada Surf throughout Europe. But WATERS’ biggest moment came this summer, when the band topped a bill at Brick and Mortar Music Hall.
“It was the first WATERS headlining show and I was super nervous and anxious about it. I thought no one was going to come. I could feel that my mood for the next while was dependent on how it would go,” he says. “To my great surprise, it was an amazing turnout. It was packed, and people knew the songs and were singing along and dancing. It just really felt like almost a solid year of promoting the album had paid off. And I know that’s not a huge deal, but it kind of is to me. It felt like the start of something new.”
With a boyish gleam of hope in his eyes, he adds, “Getting to play for people in San Francisco, on our own, felt infinitely more powerful than any of those [previous] experiences.”
Plus, now that he’s got his own apartment in SF, it probably didn’t take him too long to find his way home after the show.
MUSIC Shellacked gummy worms, cherubic Ebay’d figurines, one of those ships in a glass bottle usually reserved for nautical-themed offices, a red bike reflector, a holarctic blue copper butterfly, a vintage stenograph. The physical items sit on separate pedestals as part of the release for Michael Zapruder’s newest album, Pink Thunder (www.michaelzapruder.com).
You have through Nov. 18 to visit the Curiosity Shoppe on Valencia in the Mission, stick some headphones on your ears, and press a small red button on a bubblegum-pink square circuit board affixed with a kitschy sculpture of a bear holding an empty pot attached, or that bowl of shellacked gummy worms, or that holarctic blue copper butterfly, and hear the single track encased within. Zapruder dubbed the structures “portmanteaus” after the linguistic term meaning two blended words.
These particular portmanteus are blends of vision and sound, sculpture and music. The objects, and the individual songs that pump out of them — Zapruder’s free-form pop built from poetry — force you, the listener, to think beyond your lazy current manner of music absorption.
“Just generally, I love the idea of a totally unconnected song. This is a song. That feels like an object that’s somewhere closer to the stature of the music, as opposed to a CD. This celebrates music. It dresses it up,” Oakland’s Zapruder says, smiling in the center of his portmanteaus.
Plus, it’s fun to touch the art.
“Imagine if you went into a record store and there weren’t that many things but each thing was really cool, you wanted to pick it up and play with it, and there was only one copy of each thing. Don’t you think that’d be cool?” He laughs after he says it. Could this be the future of the now-shuttered mega record stores? Could downsizing have saved the behemoths?
Of course, it all goes a bit deeper than that, the vision behind this multifaceted, six-year-long project.
“I think it’s good when people listen to stuff in an uncertain state. So many listening experiences are so familiar. You’re working on your computer and you’re listening, or you’re in a club. And it can be amazing. But you know what you’re going to get, you know the structure. [Pink Thunder] songs are all experimental, all free-composed. Hopefully they’re very listenable, but they’re odd, and I thought it’d be good for people to be in a ‘what is this?’ state.”
Though the songs are also being released through a few more traditional venues. Pink Thunder as a whole is the portmanteaus, each with one of 22 songs that are also compiled into CD form and 12-inch vinyl on The Kora Records (known for releasing records such as Philip Glass’ recent Reworked), seven-inches released by Howells Transmitter, which Zapruder helps run, and a bright pink poetry book, put out by Black Ocean.
The whole process took half a decade to create, completed with the Oct. 16 release on The Kora and the installation at Curiosity Shoppe, which opened in mid-October. Though clearly, the wider range of this project, beyond the physical objects, is the relationship between poetry and music.
It all began with a poetry tour organized by Seattle’s Wave Books; Zapruder’s renowned poet brother Matthew helps run the small publishing house. Zapruder jumped on the Green Tortoise poetry bus for a week of the 50-city tour and after a few false starts, he came up with the idea: “I wanted to see if songs could communicate those same kinds of things that these poets’ poems do.”
He gathered up poems by the likes of the Silver Jews’ David Berman, Carrie St. George Comer, Gillian Conoley, Noelle Kocot, Sierra Nelson, Hoa Nguyen, D. A. Powell, Mary Ruefle, James Tate, Joe Wenderoth, and his brother, and turned them into lyrics.
“The poets are such badasses,” Zapruder says, when asked if he sees the project as a way to deliver poetry to the masses. “Most of them are better known than me. The idea that I could give something to them, introduce people to their work, that’s incredible.”
As musician-writer Scott Pinkmountain says in the book’s introduction, “these are poets who understand that the big grabs — Love, Family, Confession, Death — can no longer be approached directly in a convincing way. Today’s audience is too savvy, too wary of manipulation and sentimentality. These poems instead stake their foundation on the minutia of accidental revelation, trusting the details of life to point out the bigger picture.”
We, as the music listener, hear this in the subtlety of a track like “Book of Life,” created from Noelle Kocot’s story about a monk and a phoenix meeting in the woods. At one point, the monk gives the phoenix a squirming worm — hence the shellacked bowl of gummy worms portmanteau at Curiosity Shoppe.
There are slightly more literal interpretations in songs such as the deceptively upbeat string-heavy “Storm Window,” based on the poem by Mary Ruefle, which tells a story of a sedentary couple — “She sat writing little poems of mist/he in his armchair/reading blood-red leather novels/their three-legged white cat wandering between them/24 champagne glasses sparkle on a shelf/never a one to be broken.” It’s about empty domestic harmony, so Zapruder created the portmanteau with that cheery Ebay bear holding an empty bowl. The found object is eerily revealing.
The project’s title came from Zapruder’s brother’s poem “Opera,” which ends with the line,”still riding your bike under pink hi-fidelity thunder.” (The object represented here is a red bicycle reflector.)
One of the more arresting combinations is for the song “John Lomax: I Work With Negroes.” The object is an old voltage meter. The poem, written by award-winning African-American author Tyehimba Jess, and subsequently the song, are about John Lomax, who “discovered” fabled blues musician Lead Belly in the 1930s.
The theme throughout is of the racism of exoticism, the way Lomax exoticized Lead Belly. “Racism that’s couched in admiration, this condescending accolade,” as Zapruder describes it. “So the idea [for the voltage meter] was that he’s constantly measuring and evaluating — but also, Lomax brought all this stuff in his car on tour, hundreds of pounds of equipment, so I thought maybe he had one of those.”
The piano-driven song is brief, just a minute and 35 seconds, but shifts from quiet plea to deep gravelly question mark, and back again, using multiple vocal backing tracks.
The songs often deviate, in tone, and in tempo. As a whole, it’s an impressive, if difficult listen. There are so many layers, so many twists and turns. They don’t have expected pop hooks, there isn’t a whole lot of repetition. Zapruder lets the songs wander, as if he’s creating a melodic new method of storytelling, occasionally dipping into child-like wonder. He builds songs in a Jon Brian-esque style, with Elliot Smith-like sensitivity and raw ache in his vocals, treading ever-so-lightly over tracks of electric guitar, drums, synthesizers, and in some cases, marimba or brass horns.
The actual songwriting process was quick. He wrote half of the them during a solo 10-day residency in a Napa cabin. The recording of said tracks took considerably longer — nearly three years, beginning in December of 2008. The Oakland resident hopped around with the songs in mind, recording some vocals in his own studio, some instruments at Closer Studios in San Francisco, and New, Improved in Oakland (where tUnE-yArDs and her ilk record), and mixed at Tiny Telephone.
He sang and played many of the instruments, but got backup musical help from dozens of fellow musicians, including Nate Brenner (aka Natronix) of tUnE-yArDs, bassist Mark Allen-Piccolo, and multi-instrumentalist Marc Capelle. An aside: Allen-Piccolo and his father are the ones who designed the music player circuit in all the wooden bases of the portmanteaus, as they have a circuit design business.
So Zapruder pieced together recordings from different studios and time periods in a situation he describes as a “free for all.”
“It took years,” Zapruder says with a shrug, “That’s what it’s like when you do something you’ve never done before. You make a lot of mistakes.”
And it is a relatively unique idea — there isn’t much to compare this project with. Zapruder mentions Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony on Bang on a Can Records, an electronic composition in five movements on a microchip in the jewel case. Also, a release from German ambient-experimental label tomlab that featured an album with an object (though the music wasn’t inside the object as with Pink Thunder).
In his own career, Zapruder’s recorded three well-received albums; Spin Magazine once called his work prolific, and described his compositions as “in the mold of Sufjan Stevens or Andrew Bird,” a pretty weighty and favorable comparison in the indie music world. But so far, he’s never done anything quite like Pink Thunder. The stunt for which he’s perhaps most well known is 1999’s 52 Songs, in which he wrote, recorded, and posted one new song a week for a full year; and this was back before the ease of the modern web with ubiquitous sites like Youtube, Bandcamp, or Soundcloud.
So while he’s dabbled in the avant garde, this was certainly the first time he Ebay’d and thrift-shopped physical items (he went to Urban Ore in Berkeley) to display and interlock with his music.
And now he’s back to his other undertakings. The married father of two also works part-time at Pandora (where he was the curator of the music collection for seven years), is in graduate school for music composition at California State University East Bay, and is making another record. He’s a third of the way through recording, and hopes to put it out next year. “I have a lot of songs that didn’t come out because I’ve been working on this,” he explains. He plans to release that in object form as well.
And he’ll be taking Pink Thunder on the road in the next year as well, stopping by the Mission Creek Festival in Iowa City, lecturing at New York University, and making an appearance with Wave Books and Black Ocean at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) in Boston, which is “the SXSW for writers.” AWP is also where he first premiered Pink Thunder.
As he describes all this, he wonders aloud if he has dark circles around his eyes, worn from the general life trajectory, and perhaps from explaining his vision for the last hour plus while standing in the diminutive Mission store. He doesn’t have raccoon eyes today, munching on a health bar as he first describes the portmanteaus, but I can see why he’d be tired.
On the same day the Curiosity Shoppe installation closes — Nov. 18 — Zapruder will also perform Pink Thunder live at Amnesia. Earlier in the day, there will be a closing party at the store; that will be followed by the live performance down the street.
At Amnesia, it’ll be a duo with backing tracks and audience participation. “Honestly, I think it can be hard to listen to these one after another if you’ve never heard them before,” he explains. “It’s a lot of new information. Without the help of familiar forms, you’re dealing with new sounds but also like, ‘where is this thing going?'” To help with that, there will be samples and audience members will likely be invited to come up and trigger different sounds during the show. A mad scientist approach to live music.
“Even with everything that’s going on, the main thing is that I’m a musician, and that’s why I did this,” says Zapruder. “It’s to clear the way for these songs to get through to people. The music is the center. I want people to hear it and be affected by it. But that probably goes without saying.”
TOFU AND WHISKEY If experimental artist Nick Zammuto was pulling from a storied sample library after all those years with beloved former band the Books, he’s now building from scratch with his new band, Zammuto. The first Zammuto record sprang from a more angsty place, a fear of the unknown after the breakup of the Books. Skyping from a McDonald’s in Springfield, Mass., a humble Zammuto admits to fears about “lightning striking twice,” regarding his musical evolution.
His fears are unwarranted; the Zammuto self-titled debut (Temporary Residence, 2012) is as invigorating as it is multifaceted; mixing classic pop sensibilities with digital burps, buzzy electronics, sampled found objects, and still a more traditional band set-up than the Books, the artist has again found his own creative niche: the mad scientist family man, digging through crates of toys and creating emotional connections with the sounds he squeezes out of them. And he’s kept his humor in tact, with tracks titled “Zebra Butt,” “Groan Man, Don’t Cry,” and “FU C-3PO.”
Zammuto, the band, travels to the Independent this week (Sat/3, 9pm, $15. 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com) but it’s been to SF once before. It came out west this spring to open for Explosions in the Sky at the Palace of Fine Arts. And after that show, Zammuto met some young Australian rockers. I’ll let him tell the story:
Nick Zammuto I was at the merch table, and this group of Australians comes up and buys everything on the table. I’m like, ‘you guys look like you’re in a band or something.’ And they’re like, ‘oh yeah, we’re Gotye.’ And I’m like, ‘cool, I’ve never heard of you, I’ll check it out.’ Literally, in that moment, they had the number one single in like, eight countries. I felt like a moron. Two weeks later I got a call from Wally [De Backer] to come tour with them, so we ended up playing seven shows with them. I live under a rock, I don’t have time for anything except working in my studio, and playing with my kids.
San Francisco Bay Guardian Has having children has affected your music?
NZ I have all boys, three sons, who are six, three, and one, you can’t help but live vicariously through them, because they experience life in such directness. I think it’s tuned me in to a simpler way of looking at things, and to be around that kind of innocence is inspiring. Just the sense of wonder they have is infectious.
SFBG How has your approach to songwriting shifted with Zammuto, as compared to the Books?
NZ I’ve never really been part of a band, I sort of came to that realization when we started rehearsing the [Zammuto] material. The Books was really a meta-band in a lot of ways, and at the end I was starting to think of it as a sort of glorified karaoke; we’d get up on stage and have all these electronic rhythms going on and we would just kind of play along with it. With the new project I really wanted to make something that was meant to be played live.
Key to that was finding a great drummer, and I think I found just an amazing drummer [in Sean Dixon]. Having a live time keeper on stage has been the biggest difference between the new project and the Books. And for me it’s been the most fun, to play with him, and see what he does. We really connected over this idea of polyrhythms. He helps me find these grooves that are really unusual. And I think the reason why I shied away from drums for so long is that it’s a very kind of genre-fying instrument. It’s hard to do anything out of the ordinary because it all sounds too ubiquitous. But Sean’s the kind of guy who sounds like nobody else. It’s a real balance with Sean between precision and heart.
I have [Dixon, Gene Back, and brother Mike Zammuto] up for sessions and we record things in a very loose way and then I go through those recordings later and pull out the parts that can go beyond expectation and build from those elements, rather than the sample library that the Books were drawing from.
SFBG But you’re still creating your own instruments out of found objects.
NZ It’s such a weird habit, and it’s something I’ve been doing a long time. My interest in music came out of recording these sculptures back in college…I started to make these sculptures that had this sound component, and I needed a way to record those sculptures. So it’s kind of been in the backdrop of everything I’ve done for a long time.
One of the first things I started doing was cutting into vinyl, cutting patterns into the circle at the end of each side of a record, and using that as a percussion. That sound sounds like clicks and pops, but if you take those impulses and put them through various environments you get amazing sounds, so playing them through PVC pipes or through filing cabinets with subwoofers installed in them you get these really strange but kind of naturalistic sounds at the same time, where you can’t put your finger immediately on what they are, and I think that’s why I’m interested in them. They have this mysterious quality.
SFBG What about the thematic elements, lyrically, on the record, it seems like it’s coming from a lot of new beginnings, new experiences, “The Shape of Things to Come” and so forth?
NZ The end of the Books was a harrowing experience, it took a very long time for it to go through its death throes. Lots of frustrations, then finally giving up and being like, ‘OK, what the hell do I do now?’ I’m asking lightning to strike twice, starting another band at this point in my life, so the lyrics are coming out of a very angsty place on this record. And I think I’m getting out of it, finally. Now that the band has come together in such an amazing way. I’m not in such a dark mood anymore [laughs].
I think I was writing about my own experiences, but in the frame of something more universal, for somebody who is frustrated out of their minds and in need of a new beginning. Just a general expression of having this need to move forward, but also going into unexplored territory.
ENDLESS SUMMER
San Francisco’s own Future Twin (soundcloud.com/futuretwin) released the second of its Summer Single series tracks last week. Angular “Sara” is tethered by a driving guitar line, and singer Jean Yaste’s caramel-coated vocals. Lyrically, it’s a testament to Yaste’s personal female heroes, and a call to action to all women to question the status quo and explore alternative experiences.
WOODKID (CANCELLED DUE TO TRAVEL CONDITIONS AFTER THE STORM)
French composer-artist Woodkid (a.k.a Yoann Lemoine) creates sounds that bloom like live-action role-playing background music. Or, video game music using entirely classical orchestration, strings, and Lemoine’s low octave, accented pipes. (You could easily picture Link chasing after Zelda during “Iron.”) Each track builds like a sassy, page-turning epic, which make his two EPs feel like brief odysseys. That’s right, he’s yet to release a full-length, but that record — The Golden Age — is coming. Though you might have seen his stylish videos for Agyness Deyn-featuring “Iron” or “Run Boy Run.” Or hell, you may know him from his other life as a music video director: Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” anyone? With Pacific Air.
MUSIC “When I was growing up, bootsy wasn’t in,” Deev Da Greed says. “I wish I was rappin’ when Seagram [1969-1996] was alive, when Rappin’ Ron and the Dangerous Crew were shining. There were a handful of real rappers back then and if you tried to fake it you were blown out the water.”
I feel him. Being a Bay Area rap critic is heartbreaking. I have nothing for or against Kreayshawn, but it kills me she’s the only Oakland rapper on a major label. Lil B gets the cover of Fader and Wire, but I can’t pretend to give a shit about Lil B when dudes like Husalah are around. Yet just when I’m ready to hang it up, something authentic emerges from the streets to renew my faith in hip-hop, and I find myself rolling with Deev through East Oakland’s notorious Murder Dubs (the 20s off International).
Deev himself hails from the equally infamous “Avenal” hood some forty blocks east, but we’re meeting his production crew—To-Da-T, a.k.a Sir Rich and Quinteis — to hear tracks from his new discs: Dem$Boyz (4TheStreets/RapBay), an eponymous group project with Jacka protégé Bo Strangles and Curcinado from Hittaz on tha Payroll that dropped in September, and GREED, his first solo album, slated for December.
The younger cousin of G-Stack, one-half of Oakland’s legendary Delinquents, Deev first entered the rap game to help Stack run his new label, 4TheStreets, after that pioneering group split in 2007. What began as a little trash talking on intros and outros soon turned into writing verses, as Deev formed a group called the HEEM Team with young label recruits Tay Peezy and Qoolceo, debuting, along with To-Da-T, on Stack’s Welcome to Purple City (4TheStreets, 2007).
“I didn’t really come to be an artist,” Deev says, “but once I tested the waters, the waters felt good.”
By the label’s second comp, Tha Color Purple (2007), Deev was clearly G-Stack’s breakout protégé, able to hold his own alongside old school vets like Askari X and new stars like Beeda Weeda on the Town anthem “Geast Oakland” with his elastic flow, switching effortlessly from rambling and conversational to rapid-fire gassing in mid-verse. By the fourth comp, Abraham Reekin (2008), Deev was sharing top billing with Stack, but was also in legal trouble.
“I caught a [parole] violation for sippin’ on some syrup,” Deev recalls. “They raided my house and found some guns. To get money in Oakland, you got to be a real dude because you can get shot for anything now. I don’t carry no gun thinking I’m gonna do nothing, I’m doing that shit because that’s what time it is.”
Rather than face the charge, Deev went on the run, moving to Atlanta with the HEEM Team and trying to establish an East Coast branch of 4TheStreets. Feeling homesick, the rest of the group soon returned to Oakland, leaving Deev on his own in the city that’s become known as Black Hollywood.
“Hip-hop out there is alive; the heartbeat is flowin’,” Deev says. “Like, going to get a burger, you see somebody famous. I bumped shoulders or shook hands with everybody. It was hella hard because all I had was group songs, and to do shows I couldn’t be doing one verse. I called To-Da-T and was like, ‘I’m gonna fly you guys out here so we can knock out some songs.’ I did like nine songs and we mixed and mastered them in five days. But then three or four months after that, I got knocked.”
Nabbed by the cops in Atlanta, Deev was extradited back to California for a 13-month stay in Pelican Bay.
“By the time I was free in May 2010, I had to adapt to how much shit had changed in Oakland,” Deev admits. “A lot happens in three or four years. So I had to dumb down my swag to act like these youngsters so I could get right and make them respect my mind.”
“I’ve been running these streets now for two years and I got my movement back active,” he concludes. “The streets are feeling me. They know what I’m about. I got no paperwork. I’m gonna do it right this time.”
TOFU AND WHISKEY While I don’t miss living in Long Beach, Calif. too much (save for some particular pals and the endless flat biking roads), I do sorely yearn for the yearly costumed Halloween performance — at steak restaurant/dive bar the Prospector — of the Shitfits, a Misfits cover band made up of local musicians. Luckily, in San Francisco, there are numerous bands-costumed-as-other-bands shows in late October, including at least one Misfits tribute: Astrozombies, a full-time tribute act, which will do the horror-punk legends right at Hemlock Tavern (Oct. 31, 8:30pm, $7. 1131 Polk, SF; www.hemlocktavern.com).
“The band was essentially formed to be a Halloween act,” Astrozombies’ vocalist-guitarist Kevin Amann, a.ka. Doyle Vonn Danzig, tells me.
Because what is Halloween without a Danzig-alike howling “Hallow-e-e-e-e-en?” Prefaced by, “Bonfires burning bright/Pumpkin faces in the night/I remember Halloween.” Doesn’t that make you itchy to slick down your devil-lock, and paint your face like the quintessential skull?
I ask Amann if his band’s Misfits (and some Danzig/Samhain) repertoire is constraining, and he says, nope: “I think, because there is some pretty serious diversity within the Misfits catalog, it really doesn’t ever feel limiting. We can go from a lightening fast punk song like ‘Demonamania’ to a brooding slow tempo rock song like ‘London Dungeon’.”
An aside: The actual Misfits — or, their current incarnation, minus Danzig — are playing the Oakland Metro on Nov. 16, but that’s still a few weeks away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpENY3nEAx8
Let’s get back to the Halloween tribute show in general. It’s often the peak of the year’s nights out, the pinnacle when one might revert to early show-going wonder and moshpittery. Everyone is feeling creepy, and the only true nerds are the kids who come in street clothes, or as something “ironic” or “thought-provoking.” This year, some friends and I hope to go out as Pussy Riot, as both a fun fashion choice, and in solidarity. Wait, is that thought-provoking? Well, my partner will be a bearded man in a hot dog suit, so it’s not all politics.
Along with the Astrozombies, another local year-round tribute act, Bob Saggeth, will play Halloween again: two Black Sabbath-ish nights at Amnesia (Oct. 30-31, 10pm, $7–$10. 853 Valencia, SF; www.amnesiathebar.com.).
Then there’s the kind of once-a-year special mashup tribute night I was blathering on about above at Thee Parkside (Oct. 31, 8pm, $8. 1600 17th St., SF; www.theeparkside.com), with Glitter Wizard “Pushin’ Too Hard” as the Seeds, Twin Steps as the Cramps, Meat Market as G.G. and the Jabbers, and excellent new local bluegrass band the Parmesans as the Kinks.
There’s also a few Total Trash Booking monster mashes, which are pretty much always guaranteed to be raucous, punkish blowouts. There’s the pre-party at the New Parish (Nobunny, Shannon and the Clams, who will also be the Misfits, Pangea, Audacity, Uzi Rash. Fri/26, 8pm, $12–$14. 579 18th St., Oakl.; www.thenewparish.com) and two totally exciting Coachwhips reunion shows.
Coachwhips of course being John Dwyer’s pre-Thee Oh Sees noise punk outfit. One of the reunion nights (Sat/27 at Verdi Club) is totally sold out, and you’re bummed because there’s going to be a haunted house inside the venue. I’m stoked because that’s where I’ll be Pussy Riot-ing.
The other (Sun/28, 7pm, $12. Lobot Gallery, 1800 Campbell, Oak.) espouses another epic blend of Total Trash and totally touring bands: the aforementioned Coachwhips, Pangea, Fidlar, Guantanamo Baywatch, and White Mystery. I can only imagine all the blood-soaked costumes and sweaty brows.
You can find tons more freak shows in the Halloween concerts and parties guide elsewhere in this issue. But for an entirely different kind of year-round showmanship (holidays be damned), there’s SSION, performing with House of Ladosha and DJs from High Fantasy at this freaky-colorful installment of Future | Perfect at Public Works (Thu/25, 9pm, $10-$15. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF; www.publicsf.com).
SSION, pronounced “shun,” is hard to take your eyes off of, a confetti-puke electro-art-pop party collective from Kansas City, Missouri, led sultry androgynous vocalist Cody Critcheloe, who now resides in Brooklyn, with the aesthetic of early John Waters oeuvre meets Pee-wee’s Playhouse. While the recorded music is often relegated to pre-party pump-ups, live is where SSION really shines, as some may have witnessed at DNA Lounge’s Blow Up night earlier this year.
CRYPTS
The people were weary at first of Seattle’s Crypts, a synth-based (specifically a rewired CR-8000) darkwave electro act led by Steve Snere. For Snere was already known and beloved as a former member of Kill Sadie and post-hardcore geniuses These Arms are Snakes, in an angular realm of post-punk proficiency. But Crypts is enticing in a new, much gloomier fashion, and yes, Snere still kills it, and it maintains a paranoid frenzy vibe. Check deep, dark, and ghoulish “Breathe,” off the band’s self-titled debut LP (Sargent House, Sept. 4). The band played SF this summer, but this time it’s much closer to Halloween, plus they’re opening for Omar Rodríguez-López, of At the Drive-In and Mars Volta fame.
If you had told me 15 years ago that I’d be almost 30 and still recommending Converge, I’d of called you a liar or a time jumping cheat. And yet, after a forceful return listen, suggested by a fellow music nerd, I too must admit it: new record All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph Records, Oct. 9) is the thinking person’s heavy metal album. It’s still the blistering axes of hardcore and heavy metal, with melodic guitar riffs, rapid-fire drums, and pained chants, but with a more grown up, complex sensibility — or maybe that’s just me?
And then there’s Hunx, or H.U.N.X., of Hunx and His Punx. In the past few weeks, Seth Bogart released an insta-classic Halloween music video for his track “I Vant to Suck Your Cock” — full of gothy late night cable access details, sexy vampires, lime-green wigs, and tombstone booty thumping — and announced both a new variety show, Hollywood Nailz, and his own record label, Wacky Wacko Records, which is releasing “I Vant to Suck Your Cock” as a single. According to the release, the label will be “an outlet to release novelty records, children’s music, holiday themed hits, songs from…Hollywood Nailz, and other bizarre things that most labels wouldn’t bother with.” Bogart is currently living in LA (as his variety show moniker would suggest) but still visits his store in the Bay, Down at Lulu’s, often. He’s doesn’t have any local shows booked as of press time, but he knows we vant to see him.
MUSIC Can the declining sales from physical albums ever be replaced by digital music apps and services? Can an independent artist make a decent living from services such as Pandora radio, BAMM.TV, or SoundCloud? Will the starving musician finally get a good meal?
These questions may be answerless for now, but they maintained a heavy presence at the SF Musictech Summit hosted by the Hotel Kabuki — a semiannual conference dedicated to establishing a network among entrepreneurs, developers, record industry figures, and musicians in order to promote digital music business and find solutions for the issues plaguing the modern music industry.
Last week’s installment of the summit featured five talks — in panels with labels like “How Technology Destroyed the Music Industry” and “Artist Revenue Streams.”
It also brought some star power. Actor-musician Jared Leto’s interest with this budding industry brought him to the summit too. And despite the formal nature of the occasion, the 30 Seconds to Mars front person was besieged by attendees eager to get his take on the event, and his autograph. He told me that he’s “curious as to what solutions are being presented.”
But as the summit carried on, it became very became apparent that there are perhaps too many of these solutions being offered. In one of the early morning talks entitled “Artist Tools” moderator Hisham Dahud from Hypebot and Fame House kicked off the conversation by mentioning many of the new ways bands can distribute and promote their music and interact with their fans but also opined that “with new tools comes new responsibilities.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7EaMxpKZZU
These new tools were well represented by David Dufresne of Bandzoogle, which designs web pages for bands, Matt Mason of file distributor BitTorrent, and David Haynes of the online audio platform SoundCloud. CEO of Global Digital Impact Taynah Reis and music industry veteran and Incubus manager Steve Rennie rounded out the panel.
During the discussion, Rennie’s stance was welcoming of the technological development, but later, when I asked him if the new digital music business could provide substantial income for the artist, he said, “I sure hope so. The fact is that more people are listening to music than ever but they are doing it different ways, including listening without buying…as people move to other formats like digital downloads and streaming services, we need more people to get comfortable with the idea that music has value and is worth paying for…We need to convince people that their favorite music is worth buying just as much as the beer they’ll spend $10 on at a concert or sporting event.”
The motivation and excitement to transform nearly every aspect of the music business was palpable at the summit. Elevator pitches were as ubiquitous as iPhones and Macbooks. However the fresh idealism was notably absent at the “Artist Revenue Streams” talk where musician Erin McKeown took center stage detailing the sobering situation independent musicians face, explaining that some obvious solutions aren’t so great
“Everyone keeps telling me to tour but the reality is that live performance revenue gets mostly eaten up by the costs and not to mention it’s also extremely taxing on my health”
But more importantly, McKeown emphatically addressed the one crucial issue that was sorely lacking attention throughout the conference: how are musicians suppose to keep up with and derive income from the rapidly evolving environment of music technology? Others on the panel brought up the fact that a lot of artists are unaware of nonprofits such as SoundExchange — an organization with the main goal of compensating artists for their royalties.
The Internet has been lauded as the great democratizer of this generation, and the adage was especially poignant for this specific realm of the digital world. Cellist and composer Zoë Keating, who spoke at the “Artists, Entrepreneurs & Technology,” panel expressed that digital music business caused her to be optimistic and it’s a more level playing field that’s “better for indie artists.” Keating has posted her 2011 income streams on her Tumblr to give her fans a glimpse of the financial situation her and other independent artists are grappling with.
No one seemed more interested in seeing the old music business vanquished than TuneCore founder (and former CEO) Jeff Price, who emphatically declared, “Artists never made any fucking money! What fucking world are you living in?!…The music industry is not collapsing, the traditional music industry is collapsing!” *
MUSIC There’s no better time for local composer Jake Heggie’s 2010 opera Moby-Dick to wash up on our shores, especially in terms of men’s fashion. Seriously — peacoats galore, henleys-and-suspenders perfection, button-up trousers, glorious galoshes, and perfectly nor’easter-tousled haircuts, not to mention a stubbly wealth of seafarin’ beards. The whole cast, outfitted by ace costume designer Jane Greenwood, might have dropped onto the stage from this fall’s All Saints Spitalfields lookbook. Forget the neoprene hoodies and double-breasted suitcoats of America’s Cup, here lies the real echo of San Francisco’s nautical past.
That echo emanates from Herman Melville’s water-logged epic of 1851, a massive compendium of American Romantic sensibility, arcane sea lore, fiery pagan-ecclesiastical poetry, and the archetypal thrashings of mad Ahab, captain of the Pequod, as he obsessively hunts his nemesis, the “great white fish” who nipped away with his left leg years ago, Moby-Dick. The book is also a full-throated exaltation of the culture of the North Atlantic whale trade, at its peak in the 1840s, and a furrowed-brow examination of humanity’s spooky morality, not to mention a rip-roaring, man’s-man adventure tale (complete enough homoerotic subtext to float a sperm whale).
Boiling all this down into an evening’s entertainment, even one as splashy and spectacle-drenched as opera can provide, is a bit like chasing a white whale itself. Fortunately, Heggie — who triumphed with 2002’s Dead Man Walking — and librettist Gene Scheer, along with a more-than-game San Francisco Opera cast and crew, dive right in.
Moby-Dick immediately grabs attention and grounds itself in the Bay Area (the production debuted at the Dallas Opera) with an eye-popping display of one of our native crafts, digital sorcery. Projection designer Eliane J. McCarthy’s gorgeous 3-D renderings of star-maps and ships’ masts engulf the curtain as Heggie’s roiling, swooning overture guides us into the story. The rest of the production and staging throughout this two-and-a-half hour work, directed by Leonard Foglia with set design by Robert Brill, is equally jaw-dropping, with mobile scrims doublings as sail, a web of rigging filling the stage, and ingenious use of a humongous hull-shaped wall.
Another of Moby-Dick‘s riveting special effects: the SF Opera chorus, in fine and lusty voice, vocally painting in the details of the story. That story contrasts the touching friendship of greenhorn whaler Ishmael and harpooner Queequeg, cannibal prince of fictional South Sea isle Kokovoko, with the contentious relationship between the driven Ahab and his first mate, Starbuck, a homesick family man and devout Quaker who sees the Devil’s work in Ahab’s doomed quest. One of the most affecting characters is Pip, the impetuous and mentally unformed ship’s mascot, whose unhinged ramblings after he’s saved from drowning serve as warped prophecy as the opera progresses.
There’s so many meaty possibilities for a composer in this story, but if you’re expecting “yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” performed by full orchestra you’re barking up the wrong mizzenmast. To be sure, Heggie’s cinematic, neo-Romantic instincts — he prefers the term “theatrical,” and sometimes we do drift into Les Miz territory — make hay with sea storms, crashing waves, drunken brawls, and the melancholy feel of life adrift on the ocean. (A goofy-cute waltz comes on when the ship’s tipsy crew realize they’ll just have to partner up if they want to party, one of the few funny bits.) Heggie’s white whale is a shimmering arabesque, breaching a swirl of strings and cresting horns, at one momentous climax exploding into an off-kilter samba.
The score is mostly atmospheric, however, its foreboding drama cranked up to eleven throughout, with little standout melody or tonal attenuation to help the characters’ souls drop anchor. Despite a few memorable moments of soaring vocal lines — a duet in praise of Kokovoko’s Edenic promise by Queequeg (Jonathan Lemalu, imposing) and Ishmael (Stephen Costello, cubbishly adorable), sung from neighboring masts ; Starbuck’s ode to homelife back in Nantucket (performed by wonderfully powerful baritone Morgan Smith); the occasional cryptic outbursts of Pip (spry soprano Talise Trevigne, who does a bit of magic with a tambourine) — you’ll have to cling to the singers’ voices and acting technique if you want to keep emotionally afloat.
This becomes a problem with Jay Hunter Morris in the Ahab role. Although strongly voiced and valiantly game, he didn’t connect with me as a man who was truly obsessed, yet who retained enough charisma and cunning to draw the rest of the crew into his singular madness. His role struck me more as “friends’ crazy Tea Party dad” than “scarily fascinating apocalyptic cult leader.”
This could be a wrinkle of the libretto, which retains some of the original’s poetry and blasphemy — a pagan hymn here, an anti-religion diatribe there — but strains to convey an engaging dramatic arc for the characters. (It barely registers when all is lost for the Pequod.) In its earnest bluster, this presentation of the opera also skims over Melville’s haunting metaphysics, the eerie pull of nihilistic depths, the ecstatic fog of moral derangement, that preternatural whistle in fate’s vast gale. I disembarked from the rousing Moby-Dick dazzled and exhausted, though neither questing nor blubbering.
MOBY-DICKthrough Nov. 2, various times, $10–$340. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. www.sfopera.com
TOFU AND WHISKEY Sitting on a pilled blanket out in Golden Gate Park, watching Australia’s folk-noise instrumental outfit Dirty Three tear shit up on violin, petting my SPCA-adopted chug and sipping my homemade beer, I thought, “this is magic.” And then, “I’m pretty drunk.” And finally, out loud, “I’m a cliché right now.”
No mind. This is San Francisco. We all fall prey to a rainbow of snarky categories. And this was the breezy, free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Gooey, grey-streaked hippies were dancing all around me. So I’m a cliché and late feminist punk icon Poly Styrene’s magnificent screeching vocals ring through my ears every time the thought returns: “I’m a cliché/I’m a cliche,” (off Germ-Free Adolescents).
Just a few ticks after the 1977 punk era that spawned Styrene, an LA doom metal band called Saint Vitus arose in ’78. Last Tuesday, a configuration of that heavy, Black Sabbath-loving, long-haired freak band played the Independent, much to my delight.
It was a new experience, seeing a true metal show at the Independent; it seems like those bands are usually saved for the Elbo Room, Sub-Mission, Slim’s, DNA Lounge, or the like.
There’s another venue in San Francisco we need to talk about now that’s entirely non death-metal affiliated but incredibly deserving of attention and unfortunately, concern. The Mission’s educator-run jazz outlet, Savanna Jazz (www.savannajazz.com) is in dire straits right about now.
Club co-owner Pascal Bokar Thiam — jazz guitarist, professor, Mission resident — and his two fellow co-owners are in danger of losing their building.
The picturesque jazz venue on Mission Street near 24th Street hosts live music six nights a week, and is one of just three true, full-time jazz clubs left in the city. It opened in 2003, and the educators purchased the building, including the four apartments upstairs (one of which belongs to Thiam) in 2005.
“It is so important to have jazz venues for the heart and soul of this nation, so that the younger generations can actually walk into a venue and see and learn about Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Benny Goodman,” says Thiam. “You have to have a place to incubate this process, and give the younger generation a chance to learn about what made this music an art form.”
Thiam and the two other owners were in the midst of a loan modification with their bank, Sonoma National, when Sterling Bank of Spokane, Wash. acquired Sonoma’s assets. Sterling refused the modification. Then, “Sterling forced a strategic default by refusing to take our mortgage payments unless we paid the totality of our property tax due to the City and County of San Francisco,” says Thiam, adding, “We have substantial equity in the building and the bank refuses to let us access it and it is now trying to take the property.”
By rejecting their mortgages, and putting them in strategic default, the bank was also able to claim a notice of sale after 90 days. They filed a notice of default in mid-August. So, as Thiam notes, the clock is now ticking. Sterling Bank of Spokane had no comment.
Supervisor David Campos and organizer Buck Bagot of ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment) and Occupy Bernal have been working with Thiam to spotlight Sterling Bank’s tactics and work as a third party between the bank and the venue. “If Sterling doesn’t agree to speak with him, and to give him a fair and affordable loan modification, then we’ll kick their ass,” says Bagot, sitting in Thiam’s office. “We’ll call them, email, and visit them in large numbers. People’s homes and businesses are at risk. It takes that kind of concerted action to get their attention.”
It’s a complex issue, but for Thiam, who has always paid his mortgages on time and maintained the facility, it’s all about the music, some of which comes piping in via bellowing horns from the main room while we discuss the venue in his cluttered office. “We’ve been trying to promote the aesthetics of the American art form, jazz,” he says simply. “We have students who come here from the community, from other states, from across the globe, to perform here at Savanna.”
“We talk about jazz, but we often forget that jazz gave America its identity markers away from the cannons of Europe in the beginning of the 20th century. Jazz elevated it to the level of a cultural superpower. It reflected a new consciousness.”
For more on the ongoing struggle between the jazz club and the bank, visit SFBG.com/Noise.
ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN
Picture an orchestra tuning, beginning, then wholly dropping to the center of the earth, while playing all the way down. Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘s first album in a decade, Alleluja! Don’t Bend! Ascend! (Constellation Records, Oct. 16) doesn’t stray too far from the Canadian collective’s proven track record: forceful plucks of orchestral strings (cello, violin, hurdy gurdy), swelling guitar riffs, crashing mid-tempo percussion, gloomy, dystopic atmospheres that feel like they’re swallowing you up whole, reaching a climax (err, crescendo) then tumbling back down to earth and respawning anew. It’s a tiring, beautiful, and emotional journey. Having spent a year falling asleep nightly to 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven so as to create my own powerful dreamscapes, I’m ready to return to my nightmares with Alleluja!.
CLARION ALLEY BLOCK PARTY
If you’ve never been to the Clarion Alley Block Party, then you’re not yet a true San Franciscan. That’s an exaggeration, but it seems like a true rite of passage for SF folk. The ever-evolving walls will boast new, brightly saturated murals, and in between them, a robust showcase of local musical talent on two stages: Future Twin, Moira Scar, Apogee Sound Club, Brass Liberation Orchestra, Afrolicious, Grandma’s Boyfriend, and more. Who doesn’t love an alley party?
Sat/20, parade at noon (led by Brass Liberation Orchestra), noon-8:30pm, free. Clarion Alley Mural Project, between 17th and 18th Streets, Mission and Valencia, SF.Facebook: Clarion Alley Block Party.
TOFU AND WHISKEY Kyle Statham, from the Oakland band Fuck, once gave Hemlock booker Anthony Bedard some laconic advice: “Music is easy, comedy is hard.” What’s interesting to me, is the comedian who brings a guitar to the stage, or the seasoned noise composer who tries his hand at stand-up; it has a boot-strapped vaudevillian, winking variety show appeal. And are you aware that cheeky, string-bean comedian Kerri Kenney-Silver, of The State and Reno 911, was once in a riot grrrl band called Cake Like? But I digress.
So, Bedard — also the drummer of Icky Boyfriends, Hank IV, and Little Queenie — has been booking the garage pop, swamp rock, surf-punk, and experimental avant-garde heavy lineups at the Hemlock (www.hemlocktavern.com) since 2002, and he established a monthly comedy night, Club Chuckles, there in 2003. It’s still running. When I started listing shows for the Guardian’s music calendar, the name Club Chuckles blew confused thought bubbles above my head. I thought perhaps there was a juggalo-esque rap-rock group that just happened to play the Hemlock monthly?
But no, it’s an experimental comedy night. Bedard, who also runs comedy label Talent Moat, calls it a “deconstructed comedy club experience,” that specializes in “weirder, bent comedy in an anything-goes rock club setting.” Neil Hamburger, Brent Weinbach, Jasper Redd, Louis Katz, Moshe Kasher, and Reggie Watts have all popped in.
When I ask about there seeming to be an increase in underground comedic talent lately, Bedard says, “The comedy scene, not unlike the music scene, is cyclical, and right now there is a bumper crop of funny, interesting, cool, weird, up-and-coming comedians pretty much seven nights a week in San Francisco.”
One such relatively new comedian is George Chen, who is better known in the local music scene as a member of KIT, Chen Santa Maria, Common Eider King Eider, and as a booker-promoter of underground, all-ages shows. Chen also runs Zum Records, and formerly worked for Alternative Tentacles. He’s everywhere. And one night this summer, he sent out a Facebook invite to his music fans, saying he and Kevin O’Shea would be hosting an eclectic live comedy night in the basement of Lost Weekend Video.
That show was electric, the room was buzzing and packed with people who didn’t seem like the comedy club types. And many of the comedians (12 in all, I believe? It went on so long that there was an intermission) riffed on San Francisco, LA, and what could best be described as hipster nonsense. By the end of the night, my cheeks hurt from laughing so hearty at the likes of Chen, Chris Garcia, Jesse Elias, and Jessica Sele.
That Lost Weekend night is now one of Chen’s frequent co-hosting gigs — Cynic Cave takes place every second Saturday — along with Talkies, a multimedia comedic variety show he puts together monthly at ATA (www.atasite.org) with Anna Seregina.
So how did he get here? From long-standing musician/musicians-ally, to comedy club host?
“It’s a lot of reboots with me. I’m a big rebooter. I’m a big control-alt-delete guy,” he says, smiling, sitting in Alamo Square park after we make our way from Rare Device curiosities shop on Divisadero, where his sister Yvonne has permanent pop-up shop Little Otsu; he also infrequently contributes graphics and moral support to that endeavor. He has a slight lisp and an honest yet sarcastic demeanor that’s incredibly endearing.
Chen, who’s in his 30s and grew up in San Jose, considers himself a late bloomer when it comes to comedy. But he’s been expressing himself artistically, in other manners, since high school, when he and his sister started the Zum fanzine, and later the record label. Now he has the Zum podcast, which was formerly music mixes, and now features interviews with musicians and comedians.
For the past few years, and especially since he started doing open-mics in late 2011, he’s been focusing mainly on comedy, with music gigs here and there.
“My entire music career was sort of an elaborate failure. It was sort of an abrasive, deliberate failure in some ways. I think it was a very defeatist attitude about what I was doing, like ‘oh, this isn’t going to be popular. This is just going to be super cult,'” he says in a typically self-effacing manner.
When we first start talking, he seems somewhat hesitant to link his musical past with his comedy present, but he keeps laying out all these perfect examples.
He was in a hardcore band called Boxleitner in the early Aughts with his friend Gabriel Mindel Saloman of Yellow Swans that he says was initially a joke band.
“I thought of it as a parody of a hardcore band at first,” Chen says. “It’s like a very sincere joke band, if that makes sense?” I mention the Locust as another example, and he counters, “but they’re such good musicians.”
Later, he just spells it out: “this is why I can say my comedy career started in music; I also did a cover band in the late ’90s …It was an all-Chinese cover band of the Northwest punk band Lync, so we were called Chync, and it was very odd that you had a band of four Chinese-American dudes that were all into this punk band hard enough that we knew all the songs.”
This week, Chen will be doing some free stand-up outside with more than a dozen other comics during the Ha!ccupy Berkeley event at Berkeley’s Sunday Streets (Sun/14, 11am-4pm, Shattuck Avenue from Hast to Rose, Berk., www.sundaystreetsberkeley.com).
Also, Chen’s monthly Cynic Cave night happens to fall during the first ever SF Comedy and Burrito Festival (www.sfcomedyandburritofestival.com), so it got swept into the lineup of that brand new fest. The Comedy and Burrito fest deal is this: more than a hundred comics will perform at six venues throughout the Mission over a three day period, Thu/11-Sat/13. Each ticket purchase comes with coupons for free burritos from nearby taquerias. Another great mashup of ideas, this time hopefully topped with hot sauce.
And lest we forget, there’s another, much bigger fest in San Francisco this weekend, as festival season continues: Treasure Island Music Festival (Sat/13-Sun/14, noon, single day $75; two-day, $129.50. www.lineup.treasureislandfestival.com). This year, I’m most curious about luminous Beth Ditto’s Gossip, to see how they work this glossy new dance-pop sound live, Grimes, to hear if her tiny voice can carry, and Public Enemy, because, it’s Public Enemy. There’s also M83, Joanna Newsom, and Divine Fits. Also, Sunday’s headliners the xx just released shimmering new LP, Coexist, which should create a sexy, foggy atmosphere. And then there’s Saturday’s pop culture regurgitater, Girl Talk, if you’re in to that sort of thing. Though the best part about Treasure Island — besides the outstanding views — is the lack of set-time conflicts.
IL GATO
This week, local baroque pop trio Il Gato released Tongues and Teeth (self-released), a folkier follow-up to last year’s All Those Slippery Things EP, and 2010’s All These Slippery Things LP. “The main themes are regarding the truth we hold inside us — from our bodies internal wisdom, to our intuition, to our patterns and rituals — and the beauty and struggle of being able to both think and feel,” says spiritual singer Daimian Holiday Scott.
The best and biggest surprise from local garage rock band Sic Alps on its newest self-titled full-length (Drag City, Sept. 18) was the inclusion of a string section. It adds a sparkly additional layer to an already textured and loopy blanket, er, release. The band’s fifth LP is dense, packed with strings, harmonies, and stoney psych riffs, whimsically weaving between pop and esoteric noise. With Thee Oh Sees, Sonny and the Sunsets, the Mallard.
Fri/12, 8:30pm, $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF; www.slimspresents.com.
MUSIC “We’ve done the ISAM show in venues as big as the Sydney Opera House and as small as a local rock venue, but we’re basically holding our breaths every time. Someone could plug in their iPhone charger and blow the whole thing. In Coachella, the act on the field opposite had the idea of turning on floodlights for half their set, which washed us out for a good part with the ambient light.”
Brazilian electronic music legend Amon Tobin is on the phone, recounting some of the mundane worries that come with operating one of the most brilliant stage concepts in years, ISAM Live. The show is a marvel of cutting-edge technology that bathes a towering tetrominal assemblage of stacked cubes in digital projections, while — like the pilot of a Tetris spaceship, clad in his trademark baseball cap, hoodie, and jeans, ensconced in one of the glowing cubes — Tobin performs tracks from ISAM, his seventh studio album, and several other sonic treats. The tour is now in its second, completely revamped conceptual leg, ISAM Live 2.0, coming to Berkeley’s Greek Theatre on Fri/5. Tobin promises that ISAM 2.0 is “totally different … not connected to the album as much at all” from the first version, which played at the Warfield last year. Perhaps he’ll be wearing a spacesuit this time, too:
The visual illusions conjured up by Tobin and collaborators and mapped on the sculpture, made real with the help of a crack team of production designers headed up by Alex Lazarus of local art-tech collective Blasthaus, recall everything from early 20th century Constructivist art and colorform animation to tomorrow’s Xbox 360 game. Some of the effects are absolutely lovely, as when the structure “shatters” to crystalline pieces or a flood of winged creatures take flight across the stage. Some are vertigo-inducing, as when the whole thing acts as a flight simulator, or a slightly different version of the structure is projected onto the structure itself, and then begins revolving: meta! It’s all a sort of hyperreal 3-D, as shapeshifting as Tobin’s ever-elegant and booming compositions. (The music on ISAM itself is typical technopoetic Tobin — what makes the album standout is really how much the rest of the music world has caught up to his signature style, which contains elements of moody ambient, classic drum and bass, squonky electro, and crunchy dubstep without ever falling wholly into any of those genres.)
“What drove me to this idea was trying to find my way around the universal problem of presenting electronic music,” Tobin told me. “How do I make an engaging experience out of an album when I’m really just pushing buttons and twisting dials — it’s what we all do as electronic musicians. I don’t make dance music — I don’t think I even can — so the challenge becomes the concert presentation. And then the unusual situation becomes how to integrate myself into the proceedings. I didn’t just want to go out there and hang about.”
The waving hands and bobbing heads at the Warfield last year may prove that “I don’t make dance music” remark incorrect, but the show certainly succeeds at bridging the rapt audience vs. some arty dude’s knob-twisting divide. Tobin’s projects have lately been as much about technological expression as producing music — although one could argue, especially in his case, that these are one and the same at this point in history. Previous album Foley Room was a mosaic of found sounds recorded on the street (“from neighbours singing in the bath to ants eating grass”), that was accompanied by a gorgeous interactive website called “Field Recording” that featured morphological subaquatic creatures and a night-goggle feel.
This time around, Tobin’s technological adventurousness is helping to pique new interests. The crowd at the Warfield was not composed of the typical intelligent dance music, underground glitch, and scruffy turntablism fans I know from previous Amon Tobin shows. Rather, the “oohs,” “aahs,” and “this is fucking amazings” were coming from what looked to be a distinctly tech crowd. With Industrial Light and Magic, Pixar, and countless other digital animation studios located in the Bay Area, is ISAM Live introducing a new wave on enthusiasts to somewhat challenging electronic music through geek-candy visual technology?
“Well, electronic music is inherently tech-y to begin with,” Tobin says, “but even when I was just starting out, I was never interested in scenes. I’m too wrapped up in what I’m trying to do. I’m just hoping people will be into it, no matter who they are or how they got there.”
Tobin’s known for being laidback almost to the point of reclusivity, and his recent relocation to the Bay Area — “I live a little north of San Francisco, in the middle of the woods: I can walk around or go for a drive and do what I like” — has helped contribute to to both his secluded genius image and access to tech opportunity. Once he had the inspiration for ISAM Live, it wasn’t like he put an ad out on Craisglist to find designers, he told me. But a serendipitous encounter with Lazarus and the ease of putting together an adventurous, California-based design team got things going pretty easily. It’s also helped him firm up connections with local musicians he admires like SF’s Kronos Quartet, who were featured on Foley Room and will open for his concert at the Greek, and incredible live-sample collagist Eskmo, who opened for him early in the ISAM tour.
But the mind of Amon Tobin is ever-restless, and ISAM has been around for more than as year — despite the 2.0 relaunch, our conversation perks up when we begin to talk about his new release as Two Fingers called Stunt Rhythms, a beats and bass album that also belies his claim not to make dance music.
“Stunt Rhythms is a tribute to the amazing electro and breakdance music that actually saved me, growing up in a shitty town called Hastings in England. Things like Cybotron’s ‘Clear’ or Man Parrish, JVC Force’s ‘Strong Island.’ My relationship to that sound is so deep. It’s music that keeps me pushing for something further off, pushing me through drum and bass, and making my own persona.
“It’s working my way toward that thing just over the horizon that keeps me going.”
Tofu and whiskey is music editor Emily Savage’s new weekly music column.
emilysavage@sfbg.com
Tofu and Whiskey There are loud grinding noises and those cinematic electric sparks shooting from a machine below a church pew-like balcony. It’s musky and filled with dark bordello wood. The arched main room, the one you see when you walk in the front door of 777 Valencia Street and turn a quick corner, is outlined in bright, bloody red, and there’s a stage.
Despite this transitional state a few weeks back, this stage at brand new Mission venue, Preservation Hall West at the Chapel — named after the jazzy New Orleans venue that inspired it — will hold star-powered spillover from Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com) this week, beginning Thu/4; the fest itself is Fri/5 through Sun/7. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans will perform each night of the long weekend with double-dipping special guests including Elvis Costello, Robert Earl Keen, Justin Townes Earl, and Steve Earle. Maybe this means we’ll see a bespectacled Costello riding a bicycle from Golden Gate Park to the Mission, with a guitar slung on his back? One can dream.
Back to reality: “There’s no shame in construction,” said Tracey Buck of Slim’s, who, along with Britt Govea of (((folkYEAH!))) and certainly others in the future, will be doing consulting and programming at the new all-ages venue. The building, now owned by Jack Knowles, was built in 1914, formerly housed the New College, and before that was a mortuary — which gives it a sort of macabre back story. The idea for the Chapel came from Knowles’ friend Ben Jaffe, creative director for the beloved New Orleans venue, Preservation Hall, and leader of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
In early 2013, the West Coast sister venue will have a full restaurant attached serving fare with elements of New Orleans cuisine. But for now, there will just be concerts, including the aforementioned HSB-linked shows and upcoming visits from the likes of Woods, White Fence, and Here We Go Magic — but not to worry, the Chapel does have its liquor license now, and the bar should be ready to serve.
I pushed for fears about the venuenot being ready in time for its rapidly approaching opening date, anxiety about the relatively short distance between that morning two weeks back and the first show this week, but got back little more than nervous laughter. “It’s crunch time, but everyone knows what needs to be done,” said Buck, diplomatically.
It’s no surprise. First of all, if you live in the neighborhood, or have been near it recently, you’ve undoubtedly poked your head in and have seen what I saw — constant work. Secondly, as rabid HGTVers know, programs like Love It Or List It and their ilk show designers and construction workers whipping out brand new pads in a matter of weeks. Buck even referenced the show Restaurant: Impossible, where they quickly turn around a doomed eatery. So, it can be done.
There was also some less literal rebuilding at the actual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2012. After the death late last year of the fest’s founder, head cheerleader, and billionaire backer, Warren Hellman, the crew had some personal reconstruction to work on.
Buck has been working the festival since it began 12 years back, and felt the loss personally. “It’s been tough, and I realize it more and more every day. But his spirit is there.”
Sheri Sternberg, technical director for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, also ruminated on Hellman’s passing, “There was something really great about having our first meeting with Warren each year…how excited he got about all the bands. If it was up to him, we would keep adding stages and days.”
The lineup this year is interesting, it’s a bit smaller — no more Thursday shows — but heavy on seriously disparate musicians such as Dwight Yoakam and Jenny Lewis and actor-bluegrass enthusiast John Reilly, and Cowboy Junkies, along with Giant Giant Sand (Howe Gelb’s hour-long opera) and a handful of younger acts such as Beachwood Sparks, the Civil Wars, and the Head and the Heart, along with the fest pillars like Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, and Steve Earle. Sternberg says Gary West is gathering a “greatest hits” of the festival to pay tribute to Hellman, Earl Scruggs, and Doc Watson, all of whom died last year, in a set called “The Founding Fathers.” It’s kind of the theme of this year as well. That tribute will likely be kicked off with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band doing a second line.
I asked Buck if it was hard to nab artists from Hardly Strictly to play an unknown, nearly unfinished venue like the Chapel and she claims it was the opposite: “They were really eager. I think it’s just exciting to finally have a venue opening — rather than closing.”
LAURA MARLING
While bone-rattling noise has its very important place in my heart, there’s something to be said for warm cooing and surreal lyrics. For that, you can crawl up the grand staircase of the Swedish American and opera clap for English folk plucker Laura Marling. Her honest lilt and fluttering riffs have gained her comparisons to Joni Mitchell, but she has a distinctly British affect to these American ears. She played Grace Cathedral earlier this year and returns this week on her “Working Holiday Tour” to play from her most recent album A Creature I Don’t Know (Ribbon Music, 2011) at this far more intimate venue.
Wed/3, 8pm, $25. Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, SF; www.cafedunord.com.
NOM DE GUERRE
Best band name of the week goes to members of San Francisco’s Butt Problems: Fuck You Cop, You Fucking Cop opens for Street Justice at the Knockout.
Here’s to Recess Records — the independent punk label formed in 1989 and thriving in the current web-and-micro record shop musical landscape — and its friendly kingpin, Todd Congelliere. The snot-nosed singer-guitarist-label owner, who also fronted F.Y.P. and Underground Railroad to Candyland, returned this year to his early Aughts punk outfit, Toys That Kill. Todd and the Toys That Kill gang released its first new album in six years — the energetic and well-received Fambly 42 (Recess Records, 2012) — earlier this summer and have sparingly journeyed up the coast from their mythic Sunken City homebase of San Pedro, Calif. to play it live. Fambly 42 might have taken so long to get here because Todd (jokingly?) told me that good bands only put out three albums then quit to form new ones. With Pins of Light, Elephant Rifle.
MUSIC “This is our biggest song by far,” Clyde Carson says wearily at his hotel room in San Jose. The song, “Slow Down,” features Clyde alongside his newly reconstituted group, the Team, and we’re waiting for Kaz Kyzah and Mayne Mannish to show. Mayne turns up, along with “Slow Down” producer Sho Nuff, but Kaz remains MIA, and the difficulty of keeping three rappers on the same page probably explains why the song is credited to “Clyde Carson featuring the Team,” though it appears on the crew’s reunion EP, Hell of a Night (Moedoe, 2012). In heavy rotation on KMEL, and branching out to other markets like LA and Chicago thanks to its Youtube-driven dance-craze, “Slow Down” has been bubblin’ for much of the year, as Clyde has doggedly pursued the hit with solo shows and Team dates.
Bay rap fans might experience a little déjà vu here. Back in 2004, when they burst out of Oakland with their regional smash “It’s Gettin’ Hot”— produced by a then-teenaged Sho Nuff — the Team helped launch what became known as the hyphy movement, following up with a memorable onslaught of local hits like “Just Go” and “Patron.” But what should have been the culmination, their sophomore album, World Premiere (Rex/Koch, 2006), was instead interminably delayed, blunting its impact. When Carson moved to LA in 2006 to sign a solo deal with Capitol through The Game’s Black Wall Street, the Team seemed prematurely finished due to business rather than personal or creative reasons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l9DJvESFlk
Like several Bay artists signed by the majors during the hyphy era, including Mistah F.A.B., Clyde never got to drop an album; Capitol only released a pair of singles, “2 Step” and the Sean Kingston-featuring “Doin’ That,” in 2007, but didn’t release Clyde until 2009.
“You never know what’s gonna happen so you can never blame a label,” he says. “At the time Capitol was merging with Virgin. [Capitol Executive VP] Ronnie Johnson took over my project once the companies merged. We was getting ready to shoot the ‘Doin’ That’ video and — he died in his sleep. And I didn’t have enough of a foundation where I could move without a label.”
Instead of succumbing to this blow, Carson got back on the grind, and the success of “Slow Down” has resulted from a perfect storm of factors, beginning with an October 2011 call from now-adult Sho Nuff, whose youth had limited his earlier participation in Team activities.
By November, Clyde says, “we were in the studio recording. I put the hook on ‘Slow Down.’ I wanted a feature so I reached out to Keak da Sneak, but it didn’t work out so I reached out to Kaz and he put that verse on. Then I sent Kaz five or six songs and he did them all in one day. So we were like, shit, let’s do a Team album and put Mayne on these songs.”
Mayne himself is a key element of what we might call the Team 2.0.
“There was a time where I fell back from rappin’ and started learning the game by managing Carson,” he admits. “I wasn’t as confident a rapper as Clyde and Kaz, really goin’ in there destroying shit.”
But “destroying shit” is exactly what Mayne does on the third verse of “Slow Down,” and all over the EP, his rapid staccato bark providing a perfect contrast to the low-register growls of Kaz and Clyde.
“Some rapper blood just came out of me,” Mayne laughs, “and when we started back working with Sho Nuff, he helped bring my whole character and style out.”
The final ingredient was unpredictable: when “Slow Down” first dropped early this year, an SF high school student under the handle J12 posted a Youtube video of a dance he invented to the song. “The J12” has gone ghetto viral, racking up 700,000 hits, spawning numerous homage vids, and fueling demand for Team appearances in previously unheard of areas like Chicago. Inevitably J12 converged with the group, dropping the dance in the official video and becoming Carson’s DJ.
“He put that shit on for real,” Clyde says. “I never imagined havin’ a dance to one of our songs. When I was a teen, niggas wasn’t dancin’. But it lets me know the music we makin’ is resonating with that generation.”
“I ain’t gonna start dancin’,” Carson laughs, though I submit he’s doing the J12 at 1:05 of the official video. “But I definitely appreciate it.”
MUSIC After a decade of tinkering on the fringes of lo-fi experimentalism, Ariel Pink has become synonymous with a distinctive production sensibility: submerging effortless, sun-drenched pop hooks in a queasy, viscous haze, like an impulsive, basement-dwelling Phil Spector for the 21st century.
From Worn Copy (2005) to Before Today (2010), Pink’s universe seemed to hinge on this murky aesthetic, making this year’s Mature Themes all the more confounding. Despite its clean, competent studio polish, Pink’s newest effort exudes all the vague perversity and outsider spirit of his most radically fuzzed-out 8-track explorations.
Next Monday, Pink will appear at Bimbo’s 365 Club in support of Mature Themes, armed with the Haunted Graffiti project, and the tightest lineup of his backing band to date.
Whereas many bedroom producers have lost their way in the transition to studio recording, (largely due to a forfeiture of creative control), Pink’s success in this new environment is attributable to a rigidly independent approach.
“We basically lived at the studio that we built ourselves… over the span of six, seven months,” Pink explains over the phone, from his home in LA. “It gave us the opportunity to… let ourselves get loose and comfortable. That’s the whole goal, I think… you don’t want to be keeping track of time. You’re not going to take certain risks.”
Surely enough, Mature Themes abounds with risky maneuvers, from the Ween-esque genre-emulsifying “Is This the Best Spot?,” to the lo-meets-hi-fi clash of “Schnitzel Boogie.”
“A song like ‘Schnitzel Boogie’ is not gonna come [about] when you’re punching clock at the studio,” Pink observes.
He would know, given his first foray into studio territory, which resulted in Before Today: the crossover hit that catapulted the Haunted Graffiti project to Pitchfork-level acclaim in 2010. It’s the most immediately engaging, song-oriented effort of Pink’s career thus far. However, he contends that even “Round and Round”‘s pop brilliance was the product of a torturous, creativity-stifling recording process.
“It gets expensive, very quickly, if you’re in somebody else’s studio, and there’s somebody else engineering you,” Pink says. “Really, it’s better if we just don’t involve anybody else.”
Bedroom producers are, by nature, control freaks: commanding the direction of their own creative universe with little regard for outside perspective. Therein lies Mature Themes‘ success; although the album finds Pink backed by a band for just the second time, it resembles the unfiltered product of a singular mind, much like his formative recordings.
Pink’s eccentricity, and his ever-expanding influence among laptop auteurs, can be credited to a self-described “aesthetic of all-inclusiveness.” Instead of cherry-picking artistic influences, or even preferences, his objective is to jam the entire art-world indiscriminately through his musical meat-grinder.
“I always did what I did with the notion of dispelling any kind of genre formality,” Pink says. “I wanted to make experimental music, [but] in the form of pop music, like some sort of joke.”
Truly postmodern, this philosophy hinges on isolating and extracting musical idioms, and reassembling those ideas in a new context. Given Hype Williams’ omnivorous sampling techniques, Neon Indian’s confused retro-futurism, and the scathing consumer-culture indictments of James Ferraro (who will share the bill on Monday), Pink’s all-inclusive approach has manifested itself far and wide, generating not just a trend, but a zeitgeist.
Revealingly, when pressed to explain the thread between “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop,” Neon Indian and Ferraro, Pink declares, “that thread is really my contribution, I feel.”
From pop artistry to vanguard tinkering, Pink refracts a heaping pile of musical possibilities through Mature Themes‘ warped lens, making a strong case for himself as the unifying figure of an otherwise fragmented musical landscape.
ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI
With Dam-Funk, Bodyguard (James Ferraro) Mon/1, 8pm, $20 Bimbo’s 365 Club 1025 Columbus, SF (415) 474-0365 www.bimbos365club.com
MUSIC There was a time, not so long ago, when the fanzine was a glittering portal. It was the best avenue for learning about new, underground, innovative music across the country, before the all-powerful grip of the Internet forced us to idly click our way through back catalogs. The ink and paper projects were passed to friends in the same manner one traded handmade mixtapes.
High among those infamous fanzines and punk mags was a pioneering indie pop-centric zine called chickfactor — put out by then-New York based editor-writer-photographer Gail O’Hara and Black Tambourine singer Pam Berry (who moved to London in 1995). Perhaps you’ve heard Belle and Sebastian’s song “Chickfactor” about it?
The publication’s print heyday lasted from 1992 through ’02, and is now present mostly as an online museum, but with some hints of movement in the near future. For one, its first paper issue in 10 years will be released next month, October 2012. And two, to celebrate her zine’s 20th anniversary, O’Hara has put together a series of shows around the country — and in London — featuring bands and musicians that came of age on the pages of the publication.
Just last week I saw something about an EDM blog that’s now putting on club nights up and down the coast. That’s not really what this is. This is a more DIY reunion, of bands, of fans, of readers, and of early twee pop enthusiasts (though the bands and the zine’s founders would probably disagree with the twee part).
“It was just an excuse to have a party with great live music,” says O’Hara, now based in Portland, Oreg. “I am pretty good at setting up shows, and it used to be something I did all the time when I lived in New York and London. One reason I’m good at it is that I ask people who never play, and sometimes they say yes. I really missed doing it, and the 20th anniversary seemed a good excuse to plan something in advance.”
“Many of these bands take a lot of prodding, and I was up for the task,” adds O’Hara.
All of the lineups are slightly different, but share in a common thread of the early twee and indie pop scenes in the ’90s Pacific Northwest. One of the headliners in San Francisco, the Softies, are only doing four shows this year, and the one in SF will be the last one.
The Softies, a beloved guitar-and-vocals duo formed in 1994, was one of those bands that hadn’t played in some time. The Pacific Northwest duo was made up of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia, both musicians who were in other bands prior to, during, and after their stint as the Softies (Melberg in Tiger Trap and Go Sailor; Sbragia of the All Girl Summer Fun Band). The Softies’ last show was in 2000 on a brief tour for their last LP, Holiday in Rhode Island.
“We had not even thought about the possibility of playing any shows until [O’Hara] asked us,” says Melberg, “and it never even crossed my mind that we could do it. When [Sbragia] said yes, I was amazed and totally excited. It was a lovely, unexpected surprise.”
Both have young kids and there’s a geographic distance between them now — Melberg in Vancouver BC, and Sbragia in Portland — but they made it work for the chickfactor shows.
Plus, they were never really out of touch, says Sbragia. The Softies first began as an intimate friendship between the two, so it came “as an extension of our friendship” says Melberg.
That closeness was apparent in the music of the Softies, a endearing, melodic blend of influences with tender-hearted vocals that inspire a still-dedicated fan base. It also inspired a somewhat dirty word to those involved: twee.
“[The ‘twee’ label] used to really bother me, because we were writing sad love songs with a lot of meaning packed in. We weren’t singing about daisies and ice cream,” Sbragia says. “But we got lumped in with that. Maybe if you weren’t singing about political ’90s issues then you were twee by default. It doesn’t really bother me anymore.”
chickfactor itself was often mentioned in the same breath as twee, but in truth, it was simply intertwined with indie music and indie pop from the start. “I worked at Spin and took full advantage of advance tapes, free concert tickets, and everything else music related in the early ’90s,” O’Hara explains. “Most of my friends were music intensive nerds too. I had a big Manhattan studio so I put a lot of bands up over the years and set up many concerts at Fez, Under Acme, Tonic, and Mercury Lounge…and I hired musicians to work as writers and/or copy editors at Spin and Time Out New York when I was there.”
She also asked musicians to contribute to chickfactor, including Carrie Brownstein and Stephin Merritt — an aside, O’Hara later co-directed and co-produced the documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields. And many of the interviews in the zine were casual riffs with soon-to-be-famous indie artists (Stephen Malkmus, Superchunk, Neko Case, Cat Power).
So what’s up for the 30th anniversary, next decade? Who’s left for O’Hara to pester for live shows?
“Well, since you asked. I plan to head into the woods in Northern California and find Kendra Smith and ask her to play. That would be my number one dream. I recently read an entry in a journal from 1995: ‘Kendra Smith called and left a message. She is still working on the chickfactor interview I gave her two years ago.'”
We’re still waiting on that interview, Kendra.
CHICKFACTOR 2012: FOR THE LOVE OF POP
With Stevie Jackon (Belle and Sebastian), the Softies, Lilys, Kim Baxter, Allen Clap, and MC Daniel Handler
MUSIC Singer-songwriter Bryan McPherson had this nagging feeling three years ago, that he needed to leave Boston and relocate to the Bay Area. Even he didn’t understand from where this itch grew.
“I came out here to go west, just to go somewhere, go as far away as possible, for whatever reason,” McPherson explains.
He didn’t know it when he left, but the new environment would instantly fuel a whole album’s worth of new material — just as political and folk-oriented as his earlier work, but now with a new level of focus.
“I wrote ‘I See a Flag’ right when I got here. I started seeing flags everywhere. I noticed all this American shit. I got in touch with this whole American theme. Then I was in Oakland during the controversy of the Oscar Grant trial,” McPherson says.
“I See a Flag,” and the rest of the new songs would eventually become the aptly titled American Boy, American Girl, which was released on Stateline Records this spring. Like much of the album, the power of “I See a Flag” is in observation, which explores the contradictory nature of American culture. (“The police shot him down/He was laying on the ground/And now the whole damn town is going to burn to the ground/I don’t understand/But I see a flag blowing in the wind.”)
Playing political folk music is obviously reminiscent of icons like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but what distinguishes McPherson from these songwriters is how emotion-centric his music is. His words aren’t just cerebral ponderings about the state of the government. It is one man belting — at the top of his lungs — his honest, emotional impressions of the world, which in this case, just so happens to be America.
“I’m not some crazy nationalist. I just grew up in America. This record was written mostly over the course of the last couple years, being broke, just working hard, not getting by, barely making ends meet,” McPherson says. “There’s stories in there about people who are forgotten, not remembered and never were mentioned. It’s all true. It’s all me or someone I know. I’m not sitting there making shit up, wondering what it’s like in Bangladesh. I’m not imagining something. It comes from real experience.”
On the surface, the songs discuss the injustices of America and the contradictions its citizens must bear in order to have a successful, easy life. But underneath the surface, the record is about the McPherson’s alienation, both as he identifies himself as an American and is surrounded by other American’s apathy.
“Americans are so ignorant now. They have no idea what this country was founded on. They’re more concerned with updating their status and throwing a picture of a fucking cheeseburger on the internet than actually thinking they have a little bit of power,” McPherson says.
Of course, his feelings of alienation were compounded while writing these songs because of his relocation to the Bay Area from the vastly different political climate of Boston.
“It’s like being in another country. I felt self-conscious. I came out here with a thick Boston accent. The culture is different. People are way different,” McPherson says.
But being an outcast wasn’t something new to McPherson. Even in Boston, as a young musician from Dorchester, which is a working class neighborhood in Boston, McPherson would play open mic nights in Cambridge, where the art section is. He says the rich kids there immediately identified him as different.
“When I opened my mouth and started talking to people and they start to look at each other, kind of be weird because of the way I talk. I’m stupid because I have this accent. I’m poor. I’m probably dangerous. I’m not them. I definitely don’t have anything to offer. That’s the vibe that I consistently got, my first experiences dealing with the status quo, those sorts of people calling the shots,” McPherson says.
He recorded his first album, Fourteen Stories, while still in Boston in 2007. McPherson already has his third album written. He just needs to record it.
FALLS ARTS The official last day of fall is Dec. 20 (seems really late, doesn’t it?). In between now and then, and in these brisk summer days leading up to the official seasonal shift, there’s a wide array of noise, just waiting to burst your eardrums ’till they bleed with joy.
Here’s a mnemonic device to help you remember some noteworthy upcoming shows and a few general SF music factoids. Read aloud:
A is for Apogee Sound Club, the local disjointed scrap rock band playing the Knockout, Sept. 4. www.theknockoutsf.com.
B is for Bimbo’s, Bottom of the Hill, Brick and Mortar Music Hall, and the Boom Boom Room, which are all venues you should be frequenting in the city.
D is for Desaparecidos, Connor Obert’s reunited early Aughts post-hardcore band, hitting Bottom of the Hill, Aug. 28 and the Regency Ballroom, Aug. 29. www.regencyballroom.com
E is for 8-bit, the video game music made by acts such as Crashfaster, Minusbaby, and Awkward Terrible, who all play DNA Lounge, Aug. 26. www.dnalounge.com.
F is for festivals. Still up this fall: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (Oct. 5-7) and Treasure Island (Oct. 13-14). www.strictlybluegrass.com
G is for Gibbard, Ben. The Death Cab For Cutie/Postal Service frontperson travels solo to the Palace of Fine Arts, Nov. 13. www.palaceoffinearts.org.
H is for Hunx and His Punx, the local bubble-gum garage pop band that just released new album, Hunx. Facebook: Hunxandhispunx.
I is for Bay Area bred torch song writer Chris Isaak, bringing croonership to the Masonic Dec. 13. www.masonicauditorium.com.
K is for KUSF — still in exile; and for KALX, celebrating 50 years on air with events beginning Sept. 7. at the Rock Paper Scissors Collective. kalx.berkeley.edu.
M is for Major Lazer’s spectacle stage-show, Oct. 19 at the Fox Theater. www.thefoxoakland.com.
N is for Noothgrush, playing with New Orleans sludge band Eyehategod at Oakland Metro Opera House, Aug. 31. www.oaklandmetro.org.
O is for British electro-dance duo Orbital, at the Regency Ballroom, Sept. 24. www.theregencyballroom.com.
P is for PrankFest 4, hosted by San Francisco’s punk-hardcore label, Prank Records, with Citizen’s Arrest at Oakland Metro, Sept. 1 and Dropdead at Thee Parkside, Sept. 2. www.theeparkside.com.
Q is for bumping queer parties, such as Honey Soundsystem and Daytime Realness. www.honeysoundsystem.com.
R is for Red Fang; the Portland, Oreg. stoner-metal band plays Slim’s, Oct. 27. www.slimspresents.com.
S is for Six Organs of Admittance, hitting Bottom of the Hill, Sept. 22. www.bottomofthehill.com.
T is for Tiny Telephone, the San Francisco studio where so many Bay Area bands hope to record with local legend John Vanderslice. www.tinytelephone.com.
U is for Under the Central Freeway, Public Works’ live music fest with both Kelley Stoltz, and food trucks in the parking lot (which is located under the freeway, natch), Sept. 30. www.publicsf.com.
FALL ARTS “You’re at the right place,” Tim Cohen mutters, holding a large laundry sack swaddled like a burrito to his chest as he walks up to the tri-level white Victorian on McAllister Street in San Francisco’s Western Addition. A prolific singer-songwriter with morose pop vocals and a gruff exterior, Cohen is preparing to once again tour with his band, the Fresh and Onlys. And Cohen is flying out to the East Coast earlier than the others so he can play a few shows in his other incarnation, Magic Trick.
After dropping off his laundry sack upstairs in the top tower of the Victorian, Cohen climbs down the steps and stands against a railing on the front stoop with the band’s newest member, pony-tailed drummer Kyle Gibson, who really isn’t all that new. Gibson’s first show with Cohen, bassist Shayde Sartin, and skinny, pompadoured guitarist Wymond Miles, was at Noise Pop on Feb. 26, 2009. Before he came along, the band dilly-dallied around with a bunch of different drummers for around eight months, says Cohen.
The cohesive four-piece hit the ground running, creating psychedelically swirled darkly moving garage and psych-pop in home recording studios, and releasing records and EPs at a dizzying speed, touring nearly nonstop through the past three years.
Now signed to Mexican Summer, the Fresh and Onlys have slowed down a bit, spending the end of last year recording 2012’s Long Slow Dance (which sees release Sept. 4), their fourth long-player and first since 2010’s noisier Play It Strange. This fall they’ll again pick up the pace, and tour the West Coast, East Coast, and Europe through early next year.
“I feel like this is the record we all wanted to make, we’ve been wanting to make this record for a long time,” says Miles, who slinks up last to Cohen’s stoop on this unseasonably warm summer day in SF. If not for the occasional cool breeze, the day would be downright hot. I ask him to expand and he laughs and says, “Take it, Tim.”
“We were all a lot more patient with the process,” says Cohen. “It was like, it’s already been this long, let’s do it right. Let’s get the sounds right, let’s get the takes right, let’s get the feelings and the moods right.”
Moods come up frequently in both the stoop conversation and the record itself. The dark poetic drawl is inherent within Cohen, that Morrissey-Robert Smith pain paired to jangly pop. Album opener “20 Days and 20 Nights” has a classic hook, but matched to Cohen’s words, it’s actually quite sad. “Something so heavy/in my mind/I think I want to try and get it out/So I cry/and I cry.”
Many of Cohen’s lyrics come lifted from his dreams, so naturally he keeps a notebook by his bed in the tower. “When I write something down, I’ll look at it a few days later and be like, ‘wow, that’s kind of strange,’ and I’ll usually turn that into something.”
He feels he may be subconsciously influenced by the absurdist and surrealist fiction he reads, by authors such as Kafka, and conversely, classic radio pop. On jangly “No Regard,” he opens with “ever wonder why fools fall in love?”
“I don’t know how aware Tim was of Frankie Lymon when he wrote it,” says Sartin. “Not only is it a classic lyric, it’s a classic sentiment in pop culture in general. Whenever you hear that song, Frankie Lymon still lives, even though he died a miserable death.”
After a hot pause of silent remembrance, Sartin continues, “So I think sometimes those things pop up in Tim’s lyrics. They get mangled by the time they get to the pen and paper in Tim’s hand or onto the record for that matter.”
“That’s exactly right,” Cohen says. “What I intend to do with lyrics is make them clear cut with a twist. Put sad lyrics over happy music, or happy lyrics over sad music, just to create a juxtaposition of moods that’s a more compelling listen.”
Gibson pops up, “Morrisseying. I made Morrissey a verb. That’s what he would do, he’s one of the best at that. So really macabre and dark over this like, jangle.”
While Cohen is the frontperson and lead lyricist, he doesn’t always get his way. He’s quick to bring up the example of “Foolish Person,” a dreamy ’80s-esque pop song — which dissolves into battling psychedelic guitarwork — that made it on Long Slow Dance after at least three different iterations. “Some people in the band really wanted to see it through, to see it to completion. I wasn’t totally into the idea, but I’m sort of glad we did it,” he says with a sniff. “At least, I never have to record it again.”
Gibson laughs, slipping on his sunglasses.
The band has had their share of rough spots, especially during grueling tours, but they’ve learned to communicate. “We wouldn’t have lasted this long if we couldn’t reign that toxicity in, and direct it elsewhere,” Cohen says.
The keys to the Fresh and Onlys’ success, both personally and musically, include their diverse sonic backgrounds, and relative age. Unlike youngster bands, the four musicians were already established, and had played in previous bands (including Black Fiction, and Kelley Stoltz’s band), when they came together all hovering around the age of 30.
Each blasted a different kind of noise from their childhood stereo. Cohen listened exclusively to hip-hop in Virginia (“I just listened to the way people put their words together. I would never really go off the beat — I never really have, I’m not really capable of this shambolic, careless approach to words and vocals.”). Miles came from an array of guitar schools of thought in Denver, Colo., listening to the Cure, goth, punk, and hardcore. Sartin came from the Florida punk scene, but also loves country, and his bass-playing is rooted in soul music. From DC, Gibson listened to punk and Dischord bands, which justifies his muscular drumming.
“In a fearless way, we welcome each others music genealogy into the fold,” Cohen says.
The band also thrives thanks to its San Francisco location. “I can call up any of my friends and say ‘let’s go play music.’ And if they don’t want to do it, someone else will,” says Sartin, adding “We also have a ton of inspiration from other people who live here, other bands, other artists.” He mentions former Girls drummer Garret Goddard, and Gio Betteo from Young Prisms, along with perhaps the most prolific musician in San Francisco, aside from Cohen, Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer (formerly of Pink and Brown and Coachwhips).
“You can have a conversation with John Dwyer and go fucking write three songs, just off the energy absorbed from him barking at you,” says Sartin.
All four musicians on the stoop shake their heads in agreement.
MUSIC Out of nowhere an isolated house groove surfaced from the ether of the Internet and touched an unexpected chord. It was called “Love Me Like This,” a throbbing re-edit of the early 1980s track of the same title from R&B group Real to Reel. Its author was an unknown British musician going by the name of Floating Points, a gerund whose aerial element reminded me at the time of another producer closer to home, Flying Lotus.
Apart from names, both applied jazz tendencies to their electronic compositions. And both were involved respectively in a loose constellation of musicians and producers, whose inspired theorizing on low end frequencies had just begun to crack apart the stale course taken by much of dance music, exploding it into countless directions.
This was the case in, at least, that nebulous sphere of grassroots creativity that many still lovingly call the underground — in which the alleged distinction between dance and head music (or, in industry parlance, between electronic dance music and intellectual dance music) just doesn’t make any sense. Is it head music dancing? Dance music getting head? How about this: dance music about dance music. That’s heady enough. And if you think I’m dancing around the issue, then I would be so lucky to have got my point across.
Putting my word games aside, Floating Points’s music hits a sweet spot. Something about “Love Me” suspends you in midair. Syncopated percussion lurches ahead, offset by a wandering snare. The song unravels joyously, arriving and departing from a series of peaks where the programmed drums and swirling vocal refrain come to be utterly overwhelmed by lush arpeggios, sweltering keys. Most of what we tend to place under the category of dance music operates precisely this formula in which claustrophobic discomfort builds and holds itself back until it’s finally spent in an expulsive release. Again and again. Floating Points, who is also called Sam Shepherd, often executes this to brilliant effect.
But something else can happen too, where the difference between claustrophobia and release is suspended. It’s as if, against all odds, you feel both restraint and letting go at the same time. And there you are, floating in the delay between them — in an extraordinarily ecstatic shuffle where the climactic drop that has become so essential to the huge financial success of EDM festival acts just doesn’t even count anymore. You’ve been taken instead somewhere else, outside of the drop’s comfort zone.
“Love Me Like This” appeared from nowhere more than three years ago, before anyone really knew the name Skrillex, before dub-step would begin to sell its signature wobble to the popular consumption of American cars and Brittney Spears’ songs. Then, Californian producers were in the midst of reinventing instrumental hip-hop, while others toyed with the boogie funk of Prince, as the sounds of UK club culture filtered into this experimental space.
I remember waiting impatiently for two specific aspects of these worlds to collide — waiting for someone to take what Dam-Funk was doing in Los Angeles with bounce driven soul and fissure it with the two-step drum patterns that made all the sub-genres splintering from and around dub-step sound so interesting. Floating Points answered my silent wish.
I exaggerate my prescience here, though, because Shepherd far exceeded whatever I could muster in anticipation. His first proper release was a seven-inch record that debuted Eglo Records, which he co-founded with Alexander Nut in London. The single’s two tracks stem from the disorienting free jazz belonging to another incessant breaker of rules, Sun Ra. “Radiality” warps Ra’s “Lanquidity” into a plosive shattering of synthetic rhythms and melodies. The way the groove lobs in time is a bit like the floating I mentioned earlier — there we are, languishing warmly in rhythm.
A couple EPs, a number of singles, remixes, and collaborations followed. On Vacuum, Shepherd shows that he can just as well make a no frills house groove. Subtle narrative arcs made up of punchy bass lines and sticky keys invite you to surrender willingly to the beat. Shadows is a bit more experimental. The extended compositions are fractured: bass lines disappear into quiet piano solos, chords dissolve into pulses spiraling in concentric circles around themselves. From these shallow swirls of sound arise huge swells of energy, only to dissipate once again.
Some of Shepherd’s most magnetic music, though, features fellow Eglo signee Fatima on vocals. She not only sings wonderfully with the Floating Points Ensemble, but has also done significant work of her own with Shepherd on production. What sticks with me most is last year’s Follow You EP, a subtle and lovely take on the intoxicating inner visions that music can conjure.
It turns out Floating Points is a classically trained musician, who only moonlights on analog drum machines and synthesizers. A great deal of his waking hours are otherwise devoted to pursuing a Ph.D in neuroscience. I assume that’s why it’s taken Shepherd this long to touch down in San Francisco for a live performance. And thanks to the curatorial teamwork between DJ Dials and Noise Pop’s Dawson Ludwig, he’ll join the eclectic bill for the upcoming Scene Unseen event.
Set among other headliners — including both the extravagant rapper, Riff Raff (who will be played by none other than James Franco in an upcoming film directed by Harmony Korine), and the showy Chicago duo, Flosstradamus — I’m not sure what to expect. Add to that set list two experimental beatsmiths from LA, Dibiase and Groundislava, as well as locals Ghost on Tape and the DJ crew KM / FM, among others, then you’ve pretty much run the risk of nullifying any categorical expectation. It’s really quite a gamble. Then again, that’s the liminal space in which Floating Points has thrived, and in which tomorrow’s music has always thrown its dice.
