Marke B.

The darn thing’s got wings

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The darn thing’s got wings

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO And thus the epic saga of the Eagle Tavern, legendary drunken gay leather biker den of iniquity (which secretly boasted one of the best DJs in the city, Don Baird, on Sundays), closed for a year and a half, ravenously beset upon by upscale restaurant developers, canonized by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, radicalized by queer activists desperate to preserve the scared space around which were scattered the ashes of some of our ancestors, transformed into a symbol of contemporary gentrification, gutted by real estate agents, tossed around by the Board of Supervisors like a hot potato, has finally entered another stage.

Please welcome new gay proprietors Mike Leon and Alex Montiel, who told me they hope to open the SF Eagle (www.sf-eagle.com) by Halloween, they’ll still hold charitable events, they’re looking forward to hosting live music nights again, and they’ll be doing their best to preserve that precious Eagle ambiance. You can read the whole story here, but little patent leather caps off to Glendon Anna Conda Hyde, David Campos, Jane Kim, El Rio (which hosted the Eagle’s wonderfully pervy Sunday beer busts in exile), and everyone else who pushed for the preservation of queer nightlife space in SoMa.

Says Glendon, who really led the push, “People thought we couldn’t preserve queer nightlife in this city — but that’s just a lazy excuse for gentrification. we should all be proud of what happens when we come together. Our nightlife history is a powerful force.”

That’s great. Now if we could only get the EndUp back on track, I could do my old Sunday bar (literally) crawl: Eagle, Lone Star, EndUp. Except for those times when I simply curled up beneath a parked car on Harrison. She was hella classy in the ’00s.

 

SF ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL

There’s a lot going on at this annual feast of nifty experimentation — Negativwobblyland, William Basinski, Dieter Moebius, Cheryl E. Leonard, Guillermo Galindo, soddering trio Loud Objects, Machine Shop’s amplified gongs — kind of freaking out about it, ready for scary beautiful.

Wed/5-Sun/9, various times, prices, and locations. www.sfemf.org

 

NEW WAVE CITY 20TH ANNIVERSARY

Holy Echo and the Bunnymen! San Francisco’s longest-running party is celebrating two decades? Somebody call Square Pegs. I adore DJs Skip and Shindog — they started being retro about the ’80s almost before the ’80s were over. And their selections (Bauhaus, New Order, the Cure, Depeche Mode) somehow transcend the casket of ubiquity, possibly because of the lively and actually old-school cool crowd still riding the brave new waves of aural devotion. Here’s to 20 more years of Tears for Fears, at which point it will be like listening to Elvis in the ’90s. Or something. Prefab Sprout had a song about it. Just go.

Fri/7, 9pm-3am, $12. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.newwavecity.com

 

PUSH THE FEELING: LES SINS

Underground indie impresario Kevin Meenan’s monthly Push the Feeling parties are a hot ticket already — but add in Les Sins and we’re entering another dimension? Who are Les Sins? Oh, just chillwave-plus genius Toro Y Moi dropping a DJ set. For an intimate crowd in Lower Haight. For $5. And you’re one of the only people who know about it.

Fri/7, 9pm, $5. Underground SF, 424 Haight, SF. www.epicsauce.com

 

DARK ENTRIES THIRD ANNIVERSARY

Speaking of New Wave Cities — Josh Cheon’s Dark Entries label has kept the Bay Area at the forefront of the minimal and dark wave movement, which mines overlooked bands of the synth music past and reverential present acts that are direct descendents of those slightly sinister new waves. (Recent signee Linea Aspera is to die for.) This dark celebration features a live performance by Max + Mara plus a glowering set by Cheon himself, with Nihar, Jason P, and Dreamweapon.

Sat/8, 10pm, $5. SubMission, 2183 Mission, SF. www.darkentriesrecords.com

 

SOUL CLAP AND DANCE OFF

Considering the garage powerhouse that is Oakland, it’s weird to me that we don’t have a huge dirty-funk, pervy girl group, kooky Hairspray 1960s dance-party scene here. (Hard French and any concert by Shannon and the Clams come close.) NYC DJ Jonathan Toubin was set to bring his great Night Train party here last year, but he was almost killed by a freak accident in Portland that made national headlines (a car drove into his hotel room and ran over him in bed). Well, he’s recovered enough now to get the party going again, and this groovy dance-off will also be an all-ages celebration of life. Celebrity judges and the cream of our underground garage crop will be in attendance.

Sun/9, 7pm, $13, all ages. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

 

OPERA IN THE PARK

Dearest drama queens, have you had a hard night out on the town? Do you need your over-the-top batteries recharged? How about just a lovely day on the lawn to check out other cute arts enthusiasts — like me! — swooning along to our hometown opera company’s overwhelming melodiousness? Bring a little (secret) wine, and let’s sing along.

Sun/9, 1:30pm, free. Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.sfopera.org

 

Beyond the Pink

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Beyond the Pink

marke@sfbg.com

LIT Molly Ringwald is 44, fabulous, and living a dream life in Santa Monica with her gorgeous husband and three daughters. She’s also far from shy when it comes to talking about her storied past as an 1980s movie legend, the red-headed dream girl of choice for a generation of disaffected teens.

No, she didn’t have anything to do with designing Andie’s prom dress in Pretty in Pink (1986). Yes, director John Hughes almost fired Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club (1985) for being mean to her (Nelson was staying in character). And — sorry those of us who spent hours pushing our boobs together — she cannot put lipstick on with her cleavage. That was “movie magic.”

Also? The quote she gets most on the street is “What’s a-happenin’, hot stuff?”

Ringwald is hot stuff for something else right now. She’s just released When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories (It Books, 256 pp., $24.99), a debut novel comprised of linked short stories that’s been garnering raves. (She’ll be appearing courtesy of Litquake at the Verdi Club, Thu/6.)

The book deals with the dissolution of the marriage of Phillip and Greta, and the unsettledness that ripples through their family and friends. It’s a naturalistic mosaic of betrayals, full of lovely observations of contemporary human behavior and well-wrought passages that jibe with her love of Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Carver, and poet Mary Oliver — yet still reveal a voice distinctly her own.

The promotion she’s been doing for the book has been revealing too: her sharp wit and playful literary intelligence have had many realizing how much they’ve missed her. (Example: She basically slayed all of Reddit during a community interview when she casually mentioned that she drinks the blood of Kristen Stewart to stay young.) Ringwald called me during a tumultuous morning at her household: her twins were starting their first day of preschool, and she was getting them ready to go. She briefly put one of them on the phone with me, who told me she was excited about her “new backpack and pink nail polish.”

 

San Francisco Bay Guardian Um, I just talked to one of Molly Ringwald’s kids — that’s kind of a weird time warp for me.

Molly Ringwald Ha, I can see that. Are you OK?

 

SFBG A bit dazzled, but I’ll survive. Another time warpy thing is finding out how much you’re a self-described “Internet junkie.” I feel that I and so many others connected with your ’80s movies because we were so isolated as weirdos and outsiders. Those movies were like the social networking of the time — not in terms of actually communicating with others like ourselves, but just knowing there were people like us out there …

MR I’ve never thought about it that way, but I certainly know how the presence of the Internet has changed the lives of young people now, which has so much to do with reaching out but also moving forward, always going on to the next thing. My children are Internet natives. And I have to limit myself because I can just dive in to all the distractions. I’m fascinated by the effect it’s having on movies, the opening up, the distribution. I’m working to adapt my book to a screenplay right now, but I could see writing a Web series someday.

 

SFBG I’m curious how your book took on the form of linked stories. One of the most famous examples of that form is John Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven, set in Monterey. Did you model When It Happens to You on any particular linked story collections?

MR You know, the form came about on its own — I wrote one story, and then I was so curious about what was happening with some of the other characters, another came out, then another. I was thinking about all the ways people betray each other, and that theme guided me forward. I didn’t want to do a lot of reading research while I was writing, I was afraid it would overly influence me. After it was all done, I found other linked story collections, like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kittredge, which I loved. But there were no intentional influences on the book.

 

SFBG Themes of motherhood pervade the book — from Greta’s chemical fertility rituals and presence of the super harvest moon in the first story, through the maternal ambivalence of Betty later on, and in between, Marina’s surprise at how much she loves her child Olivia, and her struggle to accept that child’s transgender identity.

MR Motherhood is obviously a huge part of my life right now, and in a way those characters define themselves by their reactions to it. Especially with Marina, I could never understand growing up how anyone could imagine a fulfilling life without wanting or having children — but of course people do. So that character lead me to live in that perspective for a while, so different from what I feel. And society really does judge women through the prism of motherhood.

 

SFBG You mentioned how much you admire Michel Houllebecq and love Georges Perec — both considered radical experimentalists. Would you ever write something outright experimental?

MR I would love to explore everything I can with my writing, and I do love challenging things. But I feel it still has to retain an emotional component that I can interact with — otherwise it’s like super-abstract jazz fusion [Ringwald is putting out a jazz album next spring], and my brain can’t handle it. I’m reading D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace right now, and I can totally see where his style was coming from, but that might not be my individual path. But this is my first fiction book, so who knows? *

LITQUAKE: MOLLY RINGWALD IN CONVERSATION

Thu/6, 8pm, $12–$15

Verdi Club

2424 Mariposa, SF

www.litquake.org

Nite Trax: The Eagle flies again

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Nite Trax: The Eagle flies again

I hung out yesterday evening with the new occupants of the Eagle Tavern (now known as the SF Eagle, apparently) at a celebration of the lease-signing at the Lone Star Saloon. Alex Montiel and Mike Leon seem perfect to replace the former Eagle operators Joe and John: Tough-looking and leather-bearish, a tad gruff at first but friendly once they warm to you, and a wee bit shy of the press right now.

They’ll be releasing their full plans for the storied queer bar in a couple weeks, but I did manage to squeeze some juicy info out of Alex. They hope to open the bar in time for Halloween, the liquor license has indeed been secured (in fact, they have two!), and they’ll be doing their best to return some of the Eagle’s ambiance to the now-pretty-much-gutted space, with a few slight modifications to the bar layout for code and traffic flow reasons.   

It’s certainly been a long, winding, super-convoluted road to get to this point!

I’m not sure anyone can convey all the twists and turns and backroom mechanations of the whole thing — Jay Barmann at Grubstreet has done some excellent reporting on it all, but there were still many, many balls in the air, shall we say, and the shady politics got slightly out of control. The fight to keep a historically queer space queer — despite the previous occupants’ quasi-abandonment, despite the lucrative offers from upscale restaurants, despite the limited power and will of the city to legislate such things — was a bit of a hot gay potato for the past year. (The Eagle’s infamous, charitable Sunday Beer Busts lived on in monthly form at El Rio in the Mission, at least.)

Even the idea of a “historic queer space” was questioned: if the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had sanctified it, and the ashes of multiple queer people were scattered about a place that raised tens of throusands of dollars for amazing local causes and was regarded as the heart of the old school gay leather rock ‘n roll biker community, was it important enough to fight for?

Hats off to Milk Club president and outspoken queer activist Glendon Anna Conda Hyde for saying, “Hell yes!”

Glendon (identified slightly incorrectly in a recent Chron story as the Norm of the Eagle’s “Cheers” — that was actually the frizzy-haired dear in the thong and flip-flops who stood around clutching a goblet of piss) kept the Eagle issue at the forefront of the city’s debate about gentrification and the loss of queer nightlife spaces, angering some fussy queens with his usual passion and stridency, but in the end succeeding in rallying an assortment of powerful players to the Eagle’s defense.

I talked to Glendon today about how the whole thing went down. His basic summation was that Supervisors David Campos and Jane Kim did excellent jobs of making sure the Eagle stayed queer (Sup. Scott Weiner does not get very high marks from him in this regard), and that dubious dealings by the person supposedly representing the owner of the building — who lives north of the city, and who Glendon said had indeed wanted to welcome in new queer owners all along — were what kept screwing everything up. Finally the building owner (actually, the manager of a trust that includes several elderly owners) awarded the lease to Mike and Alex after he realized what was happening with his representation and the reaction of the community.

“I think it’s so great,” Glendon told me. “People keep saying that you can’t revitalize queer nightlife in SoMa — but that’s just a lazy excuse for gentrification. I’m glad we could band together to ensure a future for queer spaces in this city. We should be proud of what happened here. Our shared queer history is a powerful force. 

“We’re still fighting for an officially recognized queer historical district in SoMa that will honor those who came before us, and also help preserve lively alternative queer spaces. Supervisor Christina Olague and CMAC [California Music and Culture Association] is working hard on that. One of the major problems is that it’s illegal to say something has to be or remain ‘gay.’ I think we saw here that it can be done within the limits of current boundaries.”

As for the future of the Eagle? “Mike and Alex have indicated that while they’ll still be preserving the main traditions and atmosphere — as well as probably hiring some of the old staff back — they are hoping it will be a much more open space. Already the Lexington Club is planning to host a fundraiser to help them remodel, so that suggests the Eagle will be more women-friendly, and there may be new parties there from some of the city’s younger promoters as well.”

My favorite part of this whole thing — besides the colorful faux-funeral outside Foreign Cinema restaurant, or the “assless chaps” takeover of the Skylark bar (both at one point identified as villains in the Eagle saga)? Beyond the banding together of the community to save an actually cool place that is a huge and drunken part of my life (also, DJ Don Baird on Sundays was secretly the best DJ in the city)?

At one point it was announced that the Eagle was to become a fancy pizza place with a wood-fired oven on the back patio. Glendon turned to me and hissed: “I always knew the straights wanted to put us in the oven!” 

Secret Scotsman

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Secret Scotsman

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO So: woozy hip-hop has snuck back onto better dance floors via trap music, neon mutant Goosebumps-Beetlejuice children are ruling the queer clubs, techno keeps getting rave-wiggier, a true house revival is lighting up Oakland — and right now I’m wearing 6-inch shiny black pumps, a canary yellow pencil skirt, and a pair of sexy hornrims, because I am breaking down summer nightlife for you like the busy head of a global conglomerate, power points everywhere. Now where’s my soy double mocha latte no foam with a single ice cube?

(Belatedly, also, can I give a wee squee over the strange EDM-dubstep party cheerleader-gang phenomenon? Air kisses to the Wompettes, and Atomic Girls. You make that music fun for me.)

However, my ear and heart are still captivated by the excellent wave of esoteric bass music rolling out of various world capitals (and our own backyard). Deep, dark, heavy, and moody will always be my type — I’m basically the fruit on the bottom.

Great SF parties like Soundpieces, Footwerks, Icee Hot, Ritual, and Tormenta Tropical and shindigs from DJ Dials and the Low End Theory crew help keep my bass mechanics well-lubricated. And one of my absolute favorite DJs in the city, Nebakaneza, is doing amazingly moody and apocalyptic things with the post-dubstep vibe of the moment.

But my true ears on the street — my secret weapon, really — belong to the one and only DJ Deevice, who is a bass snoop par excellence, at least of the more occult and groovy UK variety. Deevice, a.k.a. Martin Collins was a resident at Glasgow’s seminal Sub Club during its wild rave years before heading for our fair-but-still-foggy shores in the ’90s. (He threw the storied UK Gold weekly party). There’s a whole thesis to be written about how British Isles immigrants warped and woofed the history of Bay Area dance music, and Deevice is one of the big players, although he’s never held down a regular residency here.

>>READ MORE ABOUT DEEVICE AND HEAR HIS MIXES

Instead, Deevice takes to the airwaves, both invisible and virtual, for his weekly Gridlock radio show on Radio Valencia, 87.9FM (Thursdays, noon-2pm, www.radiovalencia.fm) — the play list of which, posted at gridlockfm.blogspot.com, is an ace cheat sheet for us bass- and househeads. He’s also an A&R scout for the legendary R&S Records’ Apollo imprint. Those two positions put him prime for hearing all the best things first. “For some strange reason a lot of this music isn’t finding a home here like it is in Europe,” Deevice told me through his clipped Scottish brogue in Lower Haight recently. “And people send me great stuff all the time, so I’m happy to be passing it on.”

 

DJ DEEVICE SUMMER ’12 TOP 10

Makoto, “Another Generation” (Apollo)

Om Unit, “Ulysses” (Civil)

Ave Astra, “More L (Original Mix)” (Filigran)

John Tejada, “When All Around Is Madness” (Kompakt)

Sarrass, “A New Day (Original Mix)” (Third Ear)

Steve Huerta, “Take Me Closer” (Amadeus)

Mathew Jonson “Passage to the other side” (Itiswhatitis Recordings)

Ghosts On Tape “Nature’s Law” (Icee Hot)

Volor Flex “About You” (Apollo)

BWANA “Baby Let Me Finish (Black Orange Juice remix)” (Somethinksounds)

 

THE FIELD

Last time gorgeously hypnotic looper Alex Willner, aka the Field, came through SF, he had augmented his formidable live bank of tech with a drummer and bassist — the effect was outstanding, even though a certain gaggle of talky gays in the Rickshaw Stop crowd would not shut up during his set. (You know who you are.) Now he’s back with musicians in tow on Mighty’s mighty sound system. Hush, children, and sink into the killer grooves.

Fri/31, 10pm, $15–$20. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.blasthaus.com

 

ORIGINAL PLUMBING THIRD ANNIVERSARY

The hot-hot-hot trans male quarterly always brings the party — if you missed its Pride weekend shindig, or want more of that uniquely seductive machismo in your life, hightail it to this. With Rocco Katastrophe, Billy Elizabeth, Nicky Click, Jenna Riot, Chelsea Starr, Rapidfire, and more.

Fri/31, 10pm, $3 before 11pm, $6 after. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

 

ODYSSEY

For well-nigh a year, Odyssey was the underground loft party of choice for those ready for an extralegal journey through the sparkling state of local house music. Robin Malone and crew aren’t letting some silly shutdown stand in their way — it’s bigtime, baby, as they take over Public Works all night with hometown hero DJs Sergio Fedasz, Doc Sleep, P-Play, and Stanley Frank. True SF family vibes!

Sat/1, 10pm-4am, $10. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.tinyurl.com/odysseysf

 

DUB MISSION 16TH ANNIVERSARY

One of the longest-running and consistently excellent weekly parties turns sweet (and deep) sixteen, with one of my longtime favorites, Vinnie Esparza of the Groove Merchants record store, guesting — if anyone’s got the mindblowing underground Latin funk dubs, it is he. Plus: Seattle Mistah Chatman MCing and Dub Mission founder DJ Sep and Ludachris rolling on decks.

Sun/2, 9pm, $8–$10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.dubmission.com

 

You must have a Peaches Christ mask

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You must have a Peaches Christ mask

Er, if you have $200 to spare for this flawless Nikki Dyer latex piece. Clean with warm water. Do not scrub; just wipe away dirt. And maybe keep away from kids? 

The gays ARE very active here!

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The gays ARE very active here!

The mother of extremely gay-faced, Prop 8-pushing, SF Archbishop-to-be Salvatore Cordileone, while very proper-Catholically blaming herself for his drunk driving arrest in San Diego over the weekend, puts her finger on exactly why he’s so delighted to be moving to the city: She fears for him, see, because, “The gays are very active there.”

We hope he’ll be OK too, Mama Cordileone! Something tells us his taste for refilling his glass at house parties for visiting Europeans will help him survive:

San Diego, California News Station – KFMB Channel 8 – cbs8.com

Yiddish curses for Republican Jews

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Yiddish curses for Republican Jews

May you be reunited in the world to come with your ancestors, who were all socialist garment workers.

Election 2012: Here’s the beef

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Election 2012: Here’s the beef

Fabulous food-and-junk-drawer-oriented collage artist (and legendary SF club denizen) Jason Mecier is back in our virtual orbit lately. His meme explosion beef jerky portraits of Obama and Romney seem to be everywhere. And his wonderful makeup-y likeness of Phyllis Diller, RIP, is giving us sad LOLs. But wait, the “meatraits” of Obameat and Meat Romney are sponsored! And there’s a video! Let’s go to the jerky tape:

Nite Trax: DJ Deevice wraps up summer, digs deep

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Nite Trax: DJ Deevice wraps up summer, digs deep

Ours was another SUMMER OF BASS. I love it, of course — who doesn’t like their buns to get a rumblin’ in the club? As an SFer I’m spoiled with low-low riches, and have amazing access to the very first and best in post-dubstep, moombahton, trap, and spooked. And when it comes to more driving, esoteric UK bass house? Oh, I have a very special secret weapon. A very special Scottish secret weapon.

Ay, it’s DJ Deevice, aka Martin Collins, host of the excellent Gridlock radio show on Radio Valencia (www.radiovalencia.fm), 87.9 FM, Thursdays noon-2pm. The weekly playlist is a veritable feast of cheat sheet for those of us looking for the latest hypnotic bass sounds rolling out of London, Brooklyn, and other woofer-blowing capitals. Here’s his latest radio show podcast:

And here’s an excellent bouncy mix he recently put up:

I’ll be profiling Deevice in the paper next week, where you’ll learn much more about him (and listen to his show tomorrow for some great tunes!). But I wanted to post his current top 10, which doubles as a good “best of summer 2012.” I also asked him to share a couple juicy stories from his long experience as a DJ and international player, which you’ll find below.

DJ DEEVICES TOP 10 FOR SUMMER 2012

1. Makoto “Another Generation” (Apollo)

2. Om Unit “Ulysses” (Civil)

3. Ave Astra “More L (Original Mix)” (Filigran)

4. John Tejada “When All Around Is Madness” (Kompakt)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJCeiyz-5yk

5. Sarrass “A New Day (Original Mix)” (Third Ear)

6. Steve Huerta “Take Me Closer” (Amadeus)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzoeTy233C4

7. Ripperton, “Let’s Hope (Bicep Remix)” (Mugpie)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdceMV92Yxw

8. Ghosts On Tape “Nature’s Law” (Icee Hot)

9. Volor Flex “About You” (Apollo)

10. BWANA “Baby Let Me Finish (Black Orange Juice remix)” (Somethinksounds)

 

>>COCKTAILS WITH STACEY

“In about 1995, I was doing a party at the Sub Club on Thursdays, a weekly house-techno night I did with another DJ, his name was Mark Ryal. And back then, we were playing pretty much everything that was coming out of Detroit and Chicago, all the stuff on Balance, Prescription, all the Ron Trent, all the Chez Damier, plus all the techno that was coming out on Underground Resistance, Robert Hood, you name it — basically if it came from Chicago or Detroit, we played it on Thursdays. It was really one of the most popular things that was happening at the the time and it was every Thursday on Jamaica Street in Glasgow.

“We were bringing in guests like Derrick May, who played a bunch of times. The Slam guys (Soma Records), Ralph Lawson, Darren Emerson, Dave Clark and Mark Broom were all playing. And then there was this one time Stacey Pullen was playing the Sub Club for the first time, on a Friday or Saturday and the management of the club asked me to take him around, shopping for vinyl for his set, since I knew all the good spots.

“It was Glasgow, and definitely not exactly the nicest day in the world. I suggested after we’d been to a couple of record stores, ‘Do you want to go get a drink?’ And we went to this place off Great Western Road — nothing special, just a typical Glasgow bar. So we went up to the bar and I asked Stacey what he wanted to drink. What you have to understand is, this was like the worst foggy day in San Francisco, but 10 times wore than that and all rainy and horrible and in Scotland. And here I was with Stacey Pullen from Detroit, the Kosmic Messenger, “Forever Monna,” etc…. in this hole-in-he-wall in Scotland on a shitty day.

“And I kid you not, he said ‘I’ll have a pina colada.’

“Needless to say he didn’t get a pina colada.”

>>BANNED FROM THE DJ BOOTH

“A couple years back, I played an all-night party, it was a friend’s birthday. We were up still and we had been partying, so a bunch of us decided to go to the End Up. It was me and maybe eight to 12 other people. We pulled up in separate cabs and I got out of my cab right in front of the End Up, and I had two bags of records with me. The door staff were really, really nice, as nice as nice could be, which really kind of shocked me a little bit.

“They were like, ‘Hey, how are you doin’?’ and asking me all these questions, ‘How’s things’ and everything. And I was, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.” And they asked me ‘Are you on your own?’ and I said, ‘No, I’ve got a bunch of people with me.’ So basically, we all just rolled in for free. And I thought, ‘That was nice of them!’

“So I’m coming in the door and going by the DJ booth, and the guy who’s spinning — this is a Saturday morning — says, ‘You’re early!’ It was only then that I realized what was going on — they thought I was the replacement DJ.

“So I answered, ‘Yeah, I suppose I’m a bit early!’ I went out on the patio and hung out with some of the people I came with and told them, ‘Hey, I’m actually going to go on in 15 minutes’ — they were stoked, and said they’d keep the party going.

“I ended up going on, played for half an hour, 45 minutes — and then the guy turned up, and he was pissed at the fact this was happening. He was late, so who cared. Basically what happened was I wasn’t banned or escorted out of the club.

“But I’m banned from the DJ booth. Not from the club — they still managed to get a lot of money from me at the bar, but I’m apparently banned from the DJ booth. For impersonation.”

Your hover bike is almost ready

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Your hover bike is almost ready

It’s true. (And just in time for my birthday, hint.) Could it finally eliminate the risk of this?

Nite Trax: Five magickal MK moments

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Nite Trax: Five magickal MK moments

Eighty-year-olds like myself keep finding new Wonders of the Internet: despite basically living at record stores in Detroit in the early 1990s (props to Buy-Rite, Record Time, and Sam’s Jams) and working my way through college throwing raves, it is only through YouTubes, Discogs, and the recent resurgence of old-school dance music DJs and producers that we fully comprehend the breadth and scope of some of the major techno and house players. Case in point: Detroit’s MK, aka Marc Kinchen, who’s appearing this weekend on the roof of the W Hotel as part of As You like It’s second anniversary.

MK appeared here last year with his brother Scottie Deep, and they dug up some amazing, harder house sounds of the late 1990s on the Public Works dance floor. But it’s MK’s wizard early ’90s house dubs that have rightly enshrined him, along with Masters at Work, as the underground winner of that era. In the age before the Internet, when the only way to hear this music was on the dancefloor, you needed a clear and unique style to “brand” yourself instantly on listeners, and MK’s was one of the most recognizable. You just knew a new MK joint once it dropped — but only now, 20 years later, have I discovered just how many tunes of his I missed simply because I showed up at the club or the record store on the wrong day.

I heard MK kill it with a mix of all his own records at Movement: the Detroit Electronic Music festival this year, and afterwards at the KMS label’s 25th anniversary show (in the booth with Stacey Pullen, Kenny Larkin, and Terrance Parker — dreamy!!) he’ll likely bring that same warm intensity and catchy sensibility to the awesome-looking As You Like It party (don’t worry, despite the W location it won’t be douchy at all — the last one was quite wonderful with a great crowd). I wanted to share some of the memories I have of various MK joints below, in the context of growing up a gay Arab house-loving boy in Detroit and encountering his works one by one of some amazing dance floors.

1. LOVE CHANGES

I fell in love, broke up, fell back in love, broke up, got back together, and then spent a couple melancholy years alone to this track. Thing is — I couldn’t find it anywhere on vinyl. So basically I would sing myself to sleep with it, laugh and cry to it in the back of my head, and pester my poor DJ friends like D. Wynn and Butch to death to play it. And when they would I would explode with feeling. When I finally got my hands on the MK + Alana album (on cassette), which was lovely but definitely a play for mainstream respectability, thus the more slowed-down R&B tempos, I wore that shit out on my Walkman. When MK dropped this at the DEMF this year, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

2. CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?

Props for the silent Trollope pun and the absolutely brilliant lyrics, especially for a bookish queer boy obsessed with all things British (if anyone else has so skillfully deployed the phrase “cricket pavillion” in a dance song, I know not who.) But MK’s mix of the pet Shop Boys b-side is what propels this tune into my top 10 songs of all time. It’s a dub masterpiece of propulsive rhythms and surrealistic touches — and possibly one of the greatest mixes of all time.

3. BURNING

One of the theme songs of what I would call Detroit’s greatest club, DJ Ken Collier’s Heaven, an all-night gay club (“black gay club” in the homo-segregationist language of the time) out near Six Mile and Woodward, “Burning” revealed how very poor the Madonna pablum of the “white” gay clubs was at the time, and also introduced a new generation to house music. (By then enough kids had come through the rave scene without hearing proper house music to constitute a mini-epidemic.) This mix probably introduced the same crowd to dimished 7th chord structures as well. When I ran into MK outside the KMS 25th anniversary party at St Andrew’s Hall this past May, legendary radio DJ Alan Oldham dropped “Burning” from the third floor — MK cocked his ear as he posed for a photo and said, “I smell something burning.” What a kidder!

4. 4 YOU

My own theme song right here. Put out under MK’s 4th Measure Men guise, it pairs well with MK’s greatest hit from a year earlier. We all though the sample said “all hands” so we would all raise our hands when it played at Times Square.

5.GET IT RIGHT

Er, I regret limiting myself to 5 MKs here — and really I’ve only skimmed some of the hits — I’d love to include this one that sealed the New Jack Swing movement with a kiss, or this one that shows that MK is still alive and kicking, or this one, which will always hold a place in my heart. But this one, this one — I never even knew who did this one, but it followed me around during my formative house years and wouldn’t let go. I hadn’t heard it in 20 years until I started looking up MK’s works, and I could still remember every lyric (or at least every lyric I made up). I remember getting down to this joint at Menjo’s on Sunday nights in Detroit especially.

6. FINE, ONE MORE

7. GAAAH ONE MORE


Giving you L1fe

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Giving you L1fe

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Summer has been carrying a look. A killer neon queer hip-hop wave is splashing across better dance floors, raiding classic i-D magazine spreads, relaunched Boy of London lines, and cheeky RHLS lookbooks (or anything coming out of former SF club kid Frankie Sharp’s insane Tuesday night Westgay party in Manhattan or our own Future| Perfect, Stay Gold, or Swagger Like Us), and soundtracked by ghetto gothic vogue beats and freaky Internet-pastiche rappers. Who knew vogue dramatics and a retro-MS Paint aesthetic would save hip-hop? Somehow a rupture opened in the forcefield and a way ahead appeared.

“I’m totally coming from the Internet, I can be honest about it,” emblematic star Le1f tells me over the phone from his home in NYC, when I ask him about his look and feel. (He’s performing at the Lights Down Low party Sat/11, 10pm-4am, $10–$18 at Monarch, 101 Sixth St., SF, www.monarchsf.com) “It is what it it is, and very natural to me. I’m very much about digital mystique, completely inspired by open source culture. I wanted to be an avatar when I grew up.”

The whip-smart MC has indeed become an avatar of a kind. On the strength of his bass-a-holic, fiercely gay mixtape Dark York, which dropped last April and tapped bleeding-edge producers Ngunguzungu, Booody, Cybergiga, and Morris, and especially track “Wut?,” produced by SF’s 5kinandbone5, with its brilliant accompanying video, Le1f has been branded as the face of the “new queer hip-hop,” if that’s even a thing. In a post-Frank Ocean world, it’s been hilarious watching larger media awkwardly trying to address this whole gay thing. In some cases, critics have been surprised that a gay rapper’s voice can be so low. (Le1f often sounds exactly like 80 percent of the black gay men I know, which is what’s so completely refreshing about him blowing up.)

“I’ve seen the comments, and although I can’t directly address anyone’s personal audio-homophobia, I will say that I do play with different voices and characters — and maybe people are bugging when I’m in my erotic creepy zone. I’m only getting deeper and darker, though.”

I guess why not let new queer hip-hop be a thing, when Le1f is lightening our loafers and intriguing fellow DIY homo-cosmic rappers like Zebra Katz, House of Ladosha, and Mykki Blanco are getting second looks. (Maybe some of the media shine will rub off on our own totally worthy Micah Tron.) Still, there are no outright political statements here — “Conscious rap is not my favorite type of rap,” Le1f has said — nor is there a desire to work in the still-lively, decades-old homo-hop tradition. The new queer hip-hop deal is more about doing your own hyperreal thing, posting alien emoticons from another dimension to killer abstract beats and feeling sexy about it.

Le1f studied dance for most of his life and received advanced training at Wesleyan University (he’s responsible for the beats behind fellow Wesleyan rappers Das Racist’s “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”), yet told me, “I always wanted to be a rapper. I mean, I was a gay kid at a boarding school, it was the furthest escape I could think of. ” He cites influences from Missy Elliot to seminal vogue DJ MikeQ, but when it comes to traditional hip-hop audiences and their reactions to all the awesome weird that seems to be flooding into the scene lately, Le1f says, “I really have no connections whatsoever to those crowds or those types of performers. I’m sure they have a scene, and that’s great for them — just like my scene is vibrant and right for me.”

The current popularity of Dark York, which took three years to record, and even some of Le1f’s media spotlighting as a “gay rapper” are all part of a painstaking masterplan. “If people are freaking out now, wait until they see my next video, for ‘Mind/Body.’ I’m an alien transsexual being writhing in a trance rave cosmos.” You need to take us there, Le1f.

 

#Y3K | URL IN IRL

“I generally feel like 18 and over parties pander and talk down to their audience,” mega-wicked promoter Marco de la Vega tells me. “So I’m trying to focus on the opposite.”

Um, talk about respect — here’s the dark, dreamy, bass-crazy lineup of his first monthly youthful assay: Gatekeeper, Teengirl Fantasy, Nguzunguzu, 5kinandbone5 with secret spec1al guest, and the Tenderlions. Good thing I turned 18 last month, see you there.

Fri/10, 10pm-4am, $10–$18. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.dnalounge.com

Eternal return

Andrew Lam
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1
Eternal return

marke@sfbg.com

MUSIC Those were days of mystery, when a rare album would come to you like a message from alien shores, a spectral cryptogram, the crackle of the plastic wrap as you tore it open subbing in for ghostly static. Especially if that album found its serendipitous way to you (breathtakingly arty gay older coworker, amazing cool girl from another high school who lived in her parents’ patchouli-scented basement, astronomical sum plunked down at unerring record store clerk’s slightly condescending suggestion) from willfully obfusc label 4AD, its releases so calculated to transcend earthly bonds that you could barely figure out the lyrics, let alone what possessed angelic being those mouthfuls of gothly warbled vowels belonged to. The label was notoriously recalcitrant about exposing its artists to mundane promotional hoo-haw. Pre-Internet, this often insurmountable unknowing became almost erotic.

And more than any other act on 4AD’s roster in the 1980s — more than Cocteau Twins or Throwing Muses, more than the vague amalgamated entity known as This Mortal Coil — Dead Can Dance (appearing Sun/12 at the Greek Theatre) embodied and perpetuated this exquisitely agonizing inscrutability. You knew they were an Australian-British duo that traded in deep musico-anthropological investigations worked up into stately, chthonic pop, you knew their names, you even saw a picture or two. But that was a close as you’d get to any kind of intimacy. The music (and of course the iconic cover art — I still dream of the imagery for albums Spleen and Ideal and Within the Realm of a Dying Sun) had to stand for everything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2Z6WnZqGY

So it was a bit unsettling for me to be on the other end of the phone from DCD’s high priestess of eerie glossolalia, Lisa Gerrard, as she dished about her tumultuous relationship with her musical partner, Brendan Perry.

“Oh, we had such fights, such awful fights — wrecking things, really, in the studio, and often we’d just have to separate ourselves,” she told me, her wonderfully animated voice ringing clear with a certain pastoral mysticism.

“But you see, darling, it was all in service of the music, this powerful force that we tap into together, that comes through us into the world. We had to learn that we just can’t force it, the power must emerge when it’s ready. You must be very patient and wait for the unlocking to begin — the great unlocking that connects all literature and art, and shines through in our shared humanity.

“We can’t weave the specific threads of this underlying magnificence if the loom isn’t there. You must have the loom. Now, we feel we’ve found it again.”

Specifically, Gerrard was referring to the fact that solidly pleasurable and Middle Eastern-tinged return to form, Anastasia, to be released on August 12, is the first Dead Can Dance album in 16 years. The pair has kept themselves very busy in the meantime. Gerrard produces highly acclaimed soundtracks for movies like Gladiator and The Insider and Perry, the more somberly bucolic of the pair, has converted a mid-19th century church in central Ireland into a studio, Quivvy, where Anastasia and several of his solo albums were recorded.

After a focused but exhausting reunion tour in 2005, the pair found it wasn’t the right time to reconnect in the studio and headed back to separate lives in different hemispheres. (Prominent in the pair’s press materials is the fact that their physical relationship ended in the early ’90s.) But a couple years ago, Perry commented on his online forum that the two were talking, and sure enough Anastasis, the Greek word for resurrection, was born.

The album weaves Platonic and Ayurvedic philosophical sentiments into esoteric folk-derived rhythms and eerie chant-like vocals — although they’ve left 4AD for the more, er, familiarly named Play It Again Sam label, they’ve retained the occultish fabric of the 4AD DCD sound, with its usual deliciously shivery rewards.

“Working on the album, we relished the opportunity to work with new instruments like the hang [a UFO-shaped Swiss instrument that crosses a steel drum with a gamelan gong] and a host of other percussion that we’ll be talking on the road with us,” Gerrard said about the tour, “as well as another fantastic singer who we’ve trained to double my vocals so we can really bring out the sounds of our older catalogue. I can’t wait to uncork those songs for everyone at the beautiful Greek Theatre in Berkeley. They’re just the right vintage now, they’re so ripe for the ears, if you will.

“And our new ones, we’re working in 6/8, 9/5 time signatures in these lovely Sufi and Eastern traditions. It really is going to be a show — but we’re putting so much practice into it, it’s not just feeding everything into a digital machine.”

About that digital machine: how does Dead Can Dance feel in a world of instant access — and a lot less mystery when it comes to musical artistry?

“Connection is both the key and the mystery, darling — it depends where its coming from. We try to locate ourselves within the connective tissue of an ur-culture that can free us from the suffocating membrane of mediocrity.”

DEAD CAN DANCE

Sun/12, 7:30pm, $39.50

Greek Theatre

2001 Gayley Rd, Berk.

www.apeconcerts.com

www.deadcandance.com

 

Eternal return

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1
Eternal return

marke@sfbg.com

MUSIC Those were days of mystery, when a rare album would come to you like a message from alien shores, a spectral cryptogram, the crackle of the plastic wrap as you tore it open subbing in for ghostly static. Especially if that album found its serendipitous way to you (breathtakingly arty gay older coworker, amazing cool girl from another high school who lived in her parents’ patchouli-scented basement, astronomical sum plunked down at unerring record store clerk’s slightly condescending suggestion) from willfully obfusc label 4AD, its releases so calculated to transcend earthly bonds that you could barely figure out the lyrics, let alone what possessed angelic being those mouthfuls of gothly warbled vowels belonged to. The label was notoriously recalcitrant about exposing its artists to mundane promotional hoo-haw. Pre-Internet, this often insurmountable unknowing became almost erotic.

And more than any other act on 4AD’s roster in the 1980s — more than Cocteau Twins or Throwing Muses, more than the vague amalgamated entity known as This Mortal Coil — Dead Can Dance embodied and perpetuated this exquisitely agonizing inscrutability. You knew they were an Australian-British duo that traded in deep musico-anthropological investigations worked up into stately, chthonic pop, you knew their names, you even saw a picture or two. But that was a close as you’d get to any kind of intimacy. The music (and of course the iconic cover art — I still dream of the imagery for albums Spleen and Ideal and Within the Realm of a Dying Sun) had to stand for everything.

So it was a bit unsettling for me to be on the other end of the phone from DCD’s high priestess of eerie glossolalia, Lisa Gerrard, as she dished about her tumultuous relationship with her musical partner, Brendan Perry.

“Oh, we had such fights, such awful fights — wrecking things, really, in the studio, and often we’d just have to separate ourselves,” she told me, her wonderfully animated voice ringing clear with a certain pastoral mysticism.

“But you see, darling, it was all in service of the music, this powerful force that we tap into together, that comes through us into the world. We had to learn that we just can’t force it, the power must emerge when it’s ready. You must be very patient and wait for the unlocking to begin — the great unlocking that connects all literature and art, and shines through in our shared humanity.

“We can’t weave the specific threads of this underlying magnificence if the loom isn’t there. You must have the loom. Now, we feel we’ve found it again.”

Specifically, Gerrard was referring to the fact that solidly pleasurable and Middle Eastern-tinged return to form, Anastasia, to be released on August 12, is the first Dead Can Dance album in 16 years. The pair has kept themselves very busy in the meantime. Gerrard produces highly acclaimed soundtracks for movies like Gladiator and The Insider and Perry, the more somberly bucolic of the pair, has converted a mid-19th century church in central Ireland into a studio, Quivvy, where Anastasia and several of his solo albums were recorded.

After a focused but exhausting reunion tour in 2005, the pair found it wasn’t the right time to reconnect in the studio and headed back to separate lives in different hemispheres. (Prominent in the pair’s press materials is the fact that their physical relationship ended in the early ’90s.) But a couple years ago, Perry commented on his online forum that the two were talking, and sure enough Anastasis, the Greek word for resurrection, was born.

The album weaves Platonic and Ayurvedic philosophical sentiments into esoteric folk-derived rhythms and eerie chant-like vocals — although they’ve left 4AD for the more, er, familiarly named Play It Again Sam label, they’ve retained the occultish fabric of the 4AD DCD sound, with its usual deliciously shivery rewards.

“Working on the album, we relished the opportunity to work with new instruments like the hang [a UFO-shaped Swiss instrument that crosses a steel drum with a gamelan gong] and a host of other percussion that we’ll be talking on the road with us,” Gerrard said about the tour, “as well as another fantastic singer who we’ve trained to double my vocals so we can really bring out the sounds of our older catalogue. I can’t wait to uncork those songs for everyone at the beautiful Greek Theatre in Berkeley. They’re just the right vintage now, they’re so ripe for the ears, if you will.

“And our new ones, we’re working in 6/8, 9/5 time signatures in these lovely Sufi and Eastern traditions. It really is going to be a show — but we’re putting so much practice into it, it’s not just feeding everything into a digital machine.”

About that digital machine: how does Dead Can Dance feel in a world of instant access — and a lot less mystery when it comes to musical artistry?

“Connection is both the key and the mystery, darling — it depends where its coming from. We try to locate ourselves within the connective tissue of an ur-culture that can free us from the suffocating membrane of mediocrity.”

DEAD CAN DANCE

Sun/12, 7:30pm, $39.50

Greek Theatre

2001 Gayley Rd, Berk.

www.apeconcerts.com

www.deadcandance.com

 

Party Radar: House of Aviance, John Talabot, Scuba, Rewind, Mykki Blanco, more

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Party Radar: House of Aviance, John Talabot, Scuba, Rewind, Mykki Blanco, more

Tons of great dance music and fab haps on tap this weekend — so much, in fact that I’m giving weeeekend another couple of “e”s, OKeee? Your sountrack choices this week? Perfect summer edits party jams, wiggy contemporary ecstacy techno, clap-your-hands disco-funk loveliness, or hyper-poetic rejection bass. Wut? Do let’s begin — and for more crazy great thingies, including Squarepusher, Erol Alkan, Buraka Som Sistema, and The Pharcyde — hit up our This Week’s Picks section.

 

>>JOHN TALABOT

The Spaniard delivered pretty much the dance album of the year so far with Fin — further exploring the psychedelic-Balearic release epitomized in his previous work. He’ll be appearing, intimately, in t he public Works Odd Job Loft, bringing some sunshine to the Icee Hot party.Also, this is so far the cognescenti club hit of the summer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuJg4WcIO7Q

Thu/2, 9pm-3am, $5 before 11, $10. public Works, 161 erie, SF. www.publicsf.com


>>LEGENDARY

This ought to be insane  — NYC’s House of Aviance descends on San Francisco for some vogue ball realness (more like a showacse, really, as a commenter below points out). Mother Juan Aviance, Nita Aviance, Kevin Aviance, Gehno Aviance, plus DJs Juanita More, Jason Kendig, and capoeiraista Antonio Contreras. It’ll be a bonkers extravaganza for all, queens and admirers both. Get ready to drop! (And Lady Bunny says she’s coming? Ummmm)

Fri/3, 9pm-3am, $15-$25. Beatbox, 314 11th St., SF. www.beatboxsf.com

 

>>MYKKI BLANCO

Dark and fierce queer rapper from the future rides a fresh wave of hype to the spooky-neat 120 Minutes party, with Physical Therapy and a performance by the eye-popping Boy Child.

Fri/3, 10pm, $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

 

>>REWIND

The Holy Cow continues to shed its reputation as a somewhat, er, screechy meat market, welcoming in this new Friday underground-vibes techno monthly, kicking off with local faves Nikita, Adnan Sharif, Lt. D, Joseph Lee, and special guest from Vancouver Kota Shibata. 

Fri/3, 10pm, $10. Holy Cow, 1535 Folsom, SF. 

 

>>SCUBA

The super-hot (like, for me, panties-throwing hot — but also hot in the audial way) British Hotflush label honcho is perfectly schizophrenic, giving us atmospheric dubby-deep bass genius and cerebellum-tickling techno in the harder vein. We like it when both sides come out to play — and why wouldn’t they at this As You like It party, with an amazing sound system and support from the also fascinating Olivier Deutschmann, Epcot (he’s back!), and Mossmoss.

Fri/3, 9pm-4am, $10 before 11pm, $20 after. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

>>G.A.W.K.

And now for something completely different — it’s OG club kid (and supposed progenitor of queer hip-hop) Jon Sugar’s birthday, and he’s having the party at his raucous regular Gay Artists and Writers Kollective showcase, with bands 5 Pines and Happy Idiots, fantasy solo performances, and an ever-lively crowd of the open-minded. 

Sun/5, 7pm, free. Tikka Masala, 1668 Haight, SF. Email gawksf@yahoo.com for more details. Or just go! 

 

 

 

Nazi doctors, walrus anus, incest dances, Kinderdeutsch! (Gezundheit)

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Nazi doctors, walrus anus, incest dances, Kinderdeutsch! (Gezundheit)

Berlin’s darkly comedic, pan-theatrical experimental performance troupe Kinderdeutsch Projekts is briefly in town, Fri/27-August 4, with new show Arctic Hysteria. 

And you should go not just for the “parallel universe King Lear in a psychotic snowscape”-sounding plot, or the promise of “Nazi doctors, war-torn sets buried in ash, dance numbers of disembowelment and incest” — but also because it looks pretty dang cool in an icy home-apocalypse way.

Lively alternative arts space Bindlestiff Studio, recently remodeled, hosts the company, which is renowned for its heady multimedia fables (intense surround sound effects!), like this one, “set in a land of artificial snow and imagined Eskimos” which “follows three ungrateful daughters as they unwillingly inherit a frozen kingdom from their warlord mother — in the process descending into madness and taking the play with them.”

Fear no pure abstraction though (although there will be thrilling glimpses of that) – the play is billed as “part musical, part B-grade incest porn, part disastrous sparkle pop music video.”

Sorry I’m quoting so much of the press release here — it’s not just lazy journalism, although I am hungover, it’s because you never know what to expect with Kinderdeutsch, except a gratifyingly wiggy experience and an audience of fellow madcap adventurers. The show is produced locally by SNAP: Some New Arts Project. 

Here’s a very tiny taste, captured by videographer Stephen Quinones at a recent rehearsal — “How to dive into a walrus anus and die: preparation.”

Oh, do let’s.

ARCTIC HYSTERIA

July 27-29, August 2-4 (preview July 26 at 8pm) 

$10-$25, 8pm (also 2pm on August 4)

Bindlestiff Studio

185 Sixth St., SF.

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/252113

 

Summer Sounds: Exclusive bass-heavy tropical Surya Dub mix (and more)

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Summer Sounds: Exclusive bass-heavy tropical Surya Dub mix (and more)

Ahoy, sunshine! In this week’s Super Ego nightlife column, I get all hot an bothered about the upcoming re-appearance of the Surya Dub global dread bass DJ crew at the Non Stop Bhangra monthly party on Sat/14. This installment of this ever-awesome and refreshingly diverse shindig is billed as “Indian-Caribbean tropical summer madness.” Well, what the heck does that sound like? (Answers below.)

The super-productive producer and DJ Kush Arora is letting us drop this exclusive Surya Dub Summer Rewind mix — he had a hand in a few of the tunes himself — to let us hear where his crew is at lately, globalwise. It is a serious jam I highly recommend listening to somewhere you can bounce around. And below the Kush mix track list is a special “Asian dub bass mix” that Maneesh the Twister did for UK website NadaBrahama.co.uk that gets a little more ethereal. And below that? The sounds of Non Stop Bhangra itself, from DJ Jimmy Love. Great stuff, which will sound even better live. Also: catch Kush and Maneesh on the airwaves with their new radio show “The Surya Dub Takeover” Mon 7.23 10pm on KPFA 94.1FM.

TRACKLIST
1. Kush Arora and Mega Banton – Shake Sitten (China White Remix)
2. Violet – Black River
3. Solo Banton – Make you Groove
4. Bongo Chilli -Can’t Touch My Style
5. Dre Skull – Loudspeaker Riddim
6. Popcaan – The System
7. Natalie Storm – Rock The Runway
8. Ghislain Porier – Alert Riddim
9. Ghislain Porier Feat. Natalie Storm – Gal U Good
10. WILDLIFE feat. J Wow – DNO
11. Urban Knightz Feat. Blackout JA- Step On Dem
12. Dinherio Negro (Bumps Bailehall Mix)
13. Rishi Bass – Latin Futura

14. Mak and Pasteman – Jungle Juice ( Pale Remix)
15. LV feat. Okmalumkoolkat – Boomslang
16. Partysquad feat. Baskerville – Gunshot
17. Spoeke Mathambo and Cerebral Vortex – Drunk Like That
17. Mr. Vegas – Bruck it Down ( Kush Arora Remix)
18. Buraka Som Sistema – Rita O Pe (Rob Howle Remix)
19. Astronomar and Wick – WYWD
20. Busy Signal – Doggy Style ( So Shifty Remix)
21. Natalie Storm – Lick it Good
22. Cardopusher – Goldo
23. Maga Bo – Piloto de Fuga feat. Funkero and BNegaeo
24. Zuzuka Poderosa and Kush Arora – Pisicodelia
25. Nego Mozambique – SurfistadoPavaofinal

Now, Monsoon

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Now, Monsoon

>>LISTEN TO AN EXCLUSIVE KUSH ARORA MIX (AND MORE) HERE

SUPER EGO Hurray, it is not 115 degrees here! I just got a skype from my heatwaved homegirl Googie Santorum in Canton, Ohio, and she said all her wigs had melted into Dynel helmets and that she lost two pairs of kitten heels in the asphalt puddle outside Heggy’s Nut Shop on West Tuskawaras Street. I thought we cured global warming 10 years ago when we sat through that Al Gore movie and quit using Aqua Net? Well, apparently not.

I felt a little guilty reveling in our temperate clime while the rest of America fried — but that all changed when I started instead feeling a little guilty for passing out on the Fourth with two lit sparklers in my hair and a crotchful of spilled PBR. Goddess bless America. And all her bald spots and blackout complications.

In club terms, however, summer’s really steaming up our tails. I especially felt the mercury rising when it was announced that our hometown heroes of “dread bass,” the Surya Dub DJ crew, would be returning to the scene, taking over the second dance floor of the bangin’ Non Stop Bhangra monthly party on Sat/14 (9pm-3am, $10–$15. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com). Bassheads, get ready for a low pressure system no amount of my overheated metaphors can properly describe.

The mega-affair is being billed as “Indian-Caribbean summer tropical bass madness,” and you get mad amounts of hot tropicalia: a main room headlining slot from Portland’s DJ Anjuli and The Incredible Kid, founders of the longest-running bhangra party on the West Coast; guest spots for our main moombahton man, DJ Theory, and Matt Haze of wicked broken bass collective Slayers Club; bhangra dance lessons from the amazing Dholrhythms dance troupe; live drumming ….

And on top of it, Surya Dub’s ever-evolving, deep-global sound, finally back in the spotlight. SF’s musico-cultural cross-currents certainly haven’t flagged in the three years since the South Asian-flavored crew ruled the local bass scene with an irresistible mix of dub floor-droppers, future-bass bangers, ruff riddims, global breaks, and hip-hop bhangra. But when the crew members went on to various projects (including bringing Surya Dub to India and producing some great records), the scene lacked their singular fire.

“We never really went away,” Maneesh the Twister told me on a conference call with fellow Dubbers Kush Arora and Jimmy Love. “But it seemed like the music was changing in the clubs here. We wanted to evolve, to update the dread bass sound, in response to all the dubstep, electronic bass music, UK funky, and bashment that’s come to the fore.”

“We started feeling a wider variety of both New World and traditional sounds,” Kush told me. “African beats like kuduro — Buraka Som Sistema is great — to more post-dubstep tropical sounds. All of these rhythms that are talking to each other around the world. And of course we work in what’s been going on in bhangra as it develops.”

Jimmy, who also runs the Non Stop Bhangra party itself, was the catalyst for the “reunion.”

“We’re don’t just play traditional-sounding Bollywood or bhangra at the NSB parties,” he said. “I love dub reggae and Afrolicious-like funk, and our die-hard Indian crowd has loved when we play more tropical tracks. We always want to stretch the definition, and walking upstairs to Surya’s room will be a seamless experience of global sounds.

“It’s all about bringing communities together on the dance floor. And then heating everything up.”

 

COSMETICS

Soigné dark synthpop Canadian duo Cosmetics travel musically from Moroder to Siouxsie, charmingly, icily, and will be joined by Portland’s Soft Metals and our own Breakdown Valentine — two more chamber synth duos whose tunes seem intimately crafted just for you — for a catchy Friday the 13th affair. Justin of the Soft Moon, Rachel of the Conversion, and Omar DJ.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPz2bME4Phg

Fri/13, 9pm, $11–$15. Monarch, 101 Sixth St., SF. www.monarchsf.com

 

CUBCAKE

The whole gay bear thing kinda lost my interest once many of the hot fat country lumberjacks got replaced by entitled circuity gymrats constantly checking their Scruff apps on the dance floor. YOU’RE NOT A BEAR — YOU’RE JUST MIDDLE-AGED, I cried. (Middle age is a new thing for us post-AIDS era gay men; we’re working it out.) But that was, what, 2010? Time to reappraise. I’ve been hitting up this too-cute pan-musical dance party at Lonestar the past two months, brimming with sexy-goofy young hairies on the hoof and a few zesty chubs, too. Bear Trek: the Next Generation looks pretty damn good.

Fri/13, 9pm, free. Lone Star, 1354 Harrison, SF. www.lonestarsf.com

 

LEMONADE

The once-local (now Brooklynite) trio sanded off some of its esoteric angles in favor of wistful, Fairlight synth era-referencing pop on new album Diver, but it still retains those breezy percussive touches that made it one of the leaders of the nu-tropicalism underground dance movement a few years ago. With killer DJ and DMC champion Kid Fresh from Hong Kong at the always balmy nu-cumbia Tormenta Tropical monthly.

Sat/14, 10pm, $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

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