An interview with Spellling
Spellling (note the third 'l') released her first LP this past summer, titled Pantheon of Me. That Tia Cabral's stage name is in the present tense doesn't seem like a coincidence: Her music sounds like music in the act. Pantheon of Me is a billowing and shapeless work: Airy synth patches, oddly mic-ed drums, pit-of-your-stomach guitar feedback, and Tia's voice, looped and effected and looped again. It's uplifting and brutal and all the spaces in between, eluding genre in a way that seem less like a protest of genre and more like a culmination of her expressive needs. I spoke [...]
‘Evaluate What You Tolerate’: new comp collects Bay Area political punk
Evaluate What You Tolerate is the name of a new, two-part compilation raising money for the Anti-Police Violence Project, a Bay Area coalition striving to reduce state-led violence against black, brown, and poor people. <a href="http://evaluatewhatyoutolerate.bandcamp.com/album/evaluate-what-you-tolerate-volume-1">Evaluate What You Tolerate! Volume 1 by Evaluate What You Tolerate: A Bay Area comp against white supremacy, racism and hate</a> The comp is a 49-song barrage of Bay Area punk, featuring artists including Mall Walk, Otzi, Super Unison, and several dozen more. It offers a loud and fast message to the spectators, actors, and victims who have been impacted by these systems in recent [...]
Madeline Kenney founds Copper Mouth Records
"I don’t want it to be over-glorified, if that makes sense. This is a new thing for me, like a 2017 experiment. I really hope it goes well, and I’ll need the artists to help me and teach me the whole time," Madeline Kenney says about embarking on Copper Mouth Records. "With what's going on in the world — this week has terrified me so much — we need to keep making art; it's the most important thing to me." Madeline Kenney is a musician who lives in Oakland. She is starting Copper Mouth Records as, more than anything, a [...]
Premiere: Jordannah Elizabeth, ‘The Warmest Low’
Jordannah Elizabeth has lived in and out of the Bay Area for a couple years now. She currently lives in Baltimore, is in San Francisco as I write, and will back in Baltimore shortly after this is published — she's here to play two shows, give a lecture, then back again. And amid the shuffle she's released two songs, "The Requiem/The Water" and "Didn't Play It feat. Dave Heumann." The Warmest Low (Single One) is her newest release and earliest glimpse at her forthcoming album, The Warmest Low, a project she also plans to release in the form of a chapter book, a nonfiction [...]
Review: Oakland Interfaith Community Choir 3rd Annual Concert
Thirty years ago the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir branched out of Oakland’s Jazz Camp. OIGC performed and even traveled the world, and eventually, spawned two similarly minded choirs, the Oakland Interfaith Youth Choir and the Oakland Interfaith Community Choir. The youth choir is for youth, and the community choir is a no-audition choir, meaning anyone can join if they like to and want to sing gospel music and can rehearse once a month. Saturday was their third annual performance at First Congregational Chuch in Oakland. They were joined by some special guests: Ja Ronn & F.L.O.W., Tamara Edwards, and preacher [...]
Capybara release first single, “Summertime”
Before Capybara*, Carmen Caruso played in another band, Odd Owl. They disbanded and she went to Costa Rica for three weeks, a trip she hoped would help clear her head and give her a more assured musical scope. On the trip, she listened to a new LP every day, like a daily ritual to all the albums she's never heard. She became drawn to psychedelic music more than any another genre. "Summertime," Capybara's first release, has been percolating for about two years now, and the song's sound is a rendered culmination of those few years, and her basement. After getting back [...]
Wymond Miles to release ‘Call By Night,’ play album release show
Wymond Miles is releasing Call By Night on July 8, his first full-length album in three years. For fans of only the Fresh & Onlys, Wymond Miles' other project, this new solo material might be unexpected. It's slower, bigger, and more grandiose in several hard-to-distinguish ways, but I think the clearest and most fruitful difference between this album and the Fresh & Onlys' catalog is the obvious: It's largely the result of one person's vision, making for a pretty direct line from idea to sound to song. When I hear the word "singer-songwriter," a handful of associations pop into my head, most [...]
Review: All Day I Dream in the Park
About two hours into All Day I Dream, in Hellman Hollow at Golden Gate Park this weekend, I noticed a family on the bank watching and listening to the scene above. The speakers blasted house music, but from where the family listened, they probably heard a sub-aquatic sounding bass and not much more. The family stood motionless in the distance watching the scene below, except one of the two little boys, who bobbed his entire body, like one of those elastic toys that collapses and snaps back into shape. He couldn't not dance. Sunday was All Day I Dream's first [...]
Woodsist Festival announces full lineup
Woodsist Festival in Big Sur seems like the counterpoint to festival culture and its funhouse associations: it’s not necessarily big, there’s not so much a headliner as there is a curatorial band (Woods), the dozen or so performers orbit a handful of interconnected genres, and there’s no Ferris wheel. Returning for its seventh year, Woodsist Festival is produced by (((folkYEAH!))) and Woods. I'm not sure if festivals are necessarily about anything, but Woodsist seems like it's about Big Sur. Instead of drawing attendees to a transformed enclosing[1], the festival rests modestly within what seems like the main event: the woods. It’s a profound distinction: When it comes to [...]
All Day I Dream in the Park lands in the Bay Area
All Day I Dream, dreamt up in Brooklyn in 2011, is a traveling house and techno event created by Lee Burridge and Matthew Dekay. The event is touching down in Golden Gate Park this Saturday, May 22. Performers include Lee Burridge, Hoj and an unannounced live set from a special guest. The event seems more like the sum of its parts than any one thing. Playing naturalistic, serene house (the kind of upbeat shimmer you'd imagine for a daytime set in the park) and donning draped fabric, fairy lights, and lanterns, according to their Facebook, I imagine All Day I [...]