Ask The Staff: What do you want your First Concert After to be?
(Ceremony and Perfume Genius: Estefany Gonzalez. Lizzo: Ian Young.) As chroniclers of the Bay Area's live music scene, we are obviously so, so excited for concerts to come back. Well, kind of — some of us have some trepidation about the speed at which live events are announcing their return, considering that, though case numbers have fallen dramatically, we're still in an active pandemic. But that doesn't mean a number of us haven't been daydreaming about what the perfect first concert to see after this is all over (or at least mostly over) would be. So we asked the staff: [...]
Outside Lands is back for 2021…but is it too early?
Outside Lands is back for 2021 but is it too early? Our writer Ashley Bulayo has some thoughts about this year's Outside Lands, the first major Bay Area fest to return after live music's COVID-induced freeze. It was the music announcement heard all around the Bay Area: Outside Lands is back for 2021. It's bringing all its glory back to Golden Gate Park during Halloween weekend (October 29 - 31, 2021). Hey Bay Area, let's chat. I, along with so many of you, miss concerts just as much as the next person. I lived and breathed live events. [...]
Katie Knipp goes back to ‘The Well’
(photos: Phil Kampel) Words by Carolyn McCoy By now, most of us have a serious case of the Lockdown Blues. But there is hope! Almost like a homeopathic dose of the blues to cure the blues, Katie Knipp’s latest release, The Well, is just the antidote for the overall hell we are experiencing right now. Last year at this time, Knipp was climbing the Billboard Blues charts, in which she shared honored space with other masters like Buddy Guy and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. She was also flying high on a nod from the Grammy Association by almost acquiring a nomination [...]
How the Bay Area can do better for Black musicians
Author Adam Hudson plays an open mic in Benicia. Words by Adam Hudson While the San Francisco Bay Area prides itself on liberal multiculturalism and progressive politics, racism and segregation in the region are more real than people like to admit. And you can see that even in the music community. For seven years, I played in an all-nonwhite alternative rock band called Sunata; two of us were African-American (myself, the drummer, and the bassist) and one was Indo-Fijian (guitarist/vocalist). We stuck out in the Bay Area rock scene. Even though rock music originated in the Black community, rock music [...]
Our best stories from the worst year
photo illustration by Makaila Heifner I don't think any of us are going to be sad to see that clock flip over to 12:00 tonight. However — despite the unmitigated disaster that was 2020, The Bay Bridged, all things considered, had a pretty damn good year. Thanks to the inventiveness of the artists we share the scene with, we managed to put together some really special content. Join us on a journey down Local Music Memory Lane, won't you? We published what's likely our sweariest interview ever with PSDSP.We introduced you to your new favorite heavy-rock band.We also introduced you to [...]
“Music is Magic”: PSDSP go analog with ‘Luddite’
By William Wayland and Carolyn McCoy PSDSP is a band with an uneasy relationship to technology. Ask singer and guitarist Eli Carlton-Pearson how he feels about digital technology and he doesn’t hold back. “Fuck the internet, fuck tech, fuck Google, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Instagram. Fuck all the greedy-ass shady-ass businesses commodifying our minds, replacing innate wisdom and intuition with cheap skills, replacing cultures with trends, shortening our attention span to the point that the greater issues, the heritage of our problems, of our solutions, is incomprehensible because it’s too many characters long or too many seconds long.” However indifferent their [...]
Harry the Nightgown on debut album, cringy influences and analog purists
Photo: Courtney Melahn LA/San Francisco-based Harry the Nightgown is the creative union between Spencer Harting and Cherry Glazerr bassist Sami Perez. Both producer-musicians worked at San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone— it’s no surprise that their technical skill as producers are immediately obvious. Even across the three singles, there’s a ton of variation in the sonic palette and plenty of interesting production choices for the listener to pick through. In a feat that speaks to their talent as both producers and musicians, Perez and Harting are able to draw from all kinds of sounds and styles and still end up [...]
Ultra Q’s Jakob Armstrong talks ‘In a Cave in a Video Game’ long distance recording, inspirations
Photo by Andrew Diaz Oakland’s own Ultra Q are back with a quick 15-minute EP, entitled In a Cave in a Video Game. The band, featuring Jakob Armstrong on guitar and vocals, Enzo Malaspina on guitar, Kevin Judd on bass, and Chris Malaspina on drums, picks up where their debut EP We’re Starting to Get Along (2019) left off. With their hyper-compressed drums and riff-driven guitar leads, the band captures a lot of the same deadpan, contrarian energy from the early 2000's post punk revival movement and injects it with speed and moshability. Malaspina and Armstrong’s guitars are [...]
A pandemic is the perfect time to listen to Daxma
Words by Adam Hudson When philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote “On the Concept of History”/“Theses on the Philosophy of History” (which inspired Daxma’s latest album) in Paris in 1940, he had already fled Nazi Germany. As the Nazis were defeating the French Army and taking over Western Europe, Benjamin planned to go to the United States. He made it to the French-Spanish border in Catalonia, but since the Franco government in Spain had ordered police to return those seeking visas to France, Benjamin killed himself by overdosing on morphine tablets, fearing if he returned to France, he’d be in Nazi hands. [...]
Supporting BFF.fm keeps the music coming and shines a silver lining
We’ve all been hearing stories of resilience, boundary pushing (in a good way), and communities coming together in new ways. One of our biggest sources of togetherness during the times of shutdown has been livestreaming and radio. “Radio stations are considered an essential business,” says Amanda Guest, founder and director of Best Frequencies Forever, better known as BFF.fm. “So we could have just kept doing things the way we were doing them, but we were concerned as a community, because we have a very diverse group of 125 DJs — that’s a lot of people coming in and out of [...]