We are still Under The Stars, a quasi-weekly SF music column, still staying on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases, upcoming shows, and other adjacent items. We keep it moving, hustling with the changes, dodging AI slop channels, and wearing age-appropriate denim while thinking outside the margins.
We’ve been doing this for a while now… Thanks for spending some time with us…
REVIEW: ULRIKA SPACEK AT RICKSHAW STOP, APRIL 7
Sometimes you get a hot tip on a band, and you just go into a show randomly blind and get happily caught up in the undertow of what the future brings. London’s Ulrika Spacek has been steadily making that good noise—someplace between guitar rock and electronic music—for about a decade. Building up fans around the globe, but not enough yet to become full-time musicians. Well, with the new release EXPO, that day may come really soon.
It’s one thing to merge genre boundaries and slap that old “art-rock” tag on your press release. It’s another thing to fluently fuse odd-yet-matching sample-based, post-dub-step 2010 ideas with those aged rock stretches. With a powerful light show and intricate animation scrolling endlessly in the background, this quartet—who recorded their new release at Total Refreshment Centre, the London cultural institution at the epicenter of contemporary jazz—radiated amalgam blues throughout Rickshaw Stop to a pretty full house for a Tuesday night.
(At the same time, a sold-out FKA Twigs show fulfilled itself, in real time, right down the street at Bill Graham. This part of city felt very hip.)
During a break, lead vocalist Rhys Edwards graciously thanked the crowd and mentioned San Francisco as a city that always supported the band quite well. “From Bottom of the Hill and Thee Parkside, I guess they are both closing or something,” he mumbled off while adjusting a chord, and without missing a beat, a concertgoer shuddered back, “too soon.” Pick up EXPO here.
SF BAY POPFEST, AUG 20-23 AT BOTTOM OF THE HILL (TICKETS ON SALE FRI/10)
Catch your fave local indie music festival long after the big ones have stomped off into the twilight. Oakland Weekender has teamed up with San Francisco Bay Area record labels Speakeasy Studios SF and Slumberland Records to bring SF Bay Popfest. With 16, count ’em, stellar indie pop bands and DJs from across the land will make Bottom of the Hill, SF Bay Pop Festival headquarters for four exciting shows August 20th-23rd.
Here are the line-ups:
Thursday 8/20: Tony Molina, Galore, Paper Jam, Monster Treasure plus DJ Kid Frostbite.
Friday 8/21: The Aislers Set, Kids On A Crime Spree, Lightheaded, Wifey plus DJ Jessica B
Saturday 8/22: Dear Nora, Jeanines, The Kitchenettes, Pillow Fight plus DJ Poindexter
Sunday 8/23 (matinee): The Umbrellas, Artsick, WUT, Remedy & Wren plus DJ Wam Bam Ashleyanne
Weekend passes include entry to all four shows, plus a tribute CD featuring covers of Teenage Fanclub songs by all the bands playing. More info here.
STERN GROVE FESTIVAL RETURNS
Generally, when a person or a thang hits geriatric age, they mellow. San Francisco’s Stern Grove Festival, the longest-running free music festival in America, has not. Listen, keeping the free,…free? Ain’t cheap these days.
Now in its 89th year, festival organizers have booked a wealth of talent that’s talented—it’s a far cry from watching paint dry. By getting what was once “the world’s most dangerous band” and a world-renowned Reverend on the same weekend, organizers have read the clock on the wall and chosen wisely what the people need.
In this era when festivals are being cancelled, and concert tickets are succumbing to inflated costs, Stern Grove Festival marches on: Bringing the masses, tens of thousands of people, together for free to see Public Enemy, who are the Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and the dang Rolling Stones of hip-hop, to show everybody in that aromatic, foggy patch of green, why America still needs Flavor Flav and Chuck D to tell the truth. And then have The Reverend Al Green close out the season the following day.
Golf clap, people. No notes.
The San Francisco tradition returns June 14 through August 16 with that dynamic lineup featuring Patti LaBelle, Major Lazer, the fantastic Tune-Yards, Japanese Breakfast, Suki Waterhouse, Charley Crockett, Goapele, and more. For a full listing and RSVP instructions, go here.
LITTLE ROOMS, BIG TALENT: ETCETERA WINE BAR & LITTLE HILL LOUNGE
With Thee Parkside gone, outta here on July 5, and Bottom of the Hill looking to close at the end of the year, we mourn these losses as best we can. San Francisco and the Bay Area in general have always been and shall continue to be a vibrant music community. Meaning the talent is here. Where are some new-to-you or me spots that we can catch who are rising through the ranks next?
As I stated previously; The talent is here. One glance at this year’s very successful Noise Pop Music Festival solidifies that point. So we’d like to introduce and mention two spots, or unorthodox venues that have been and seem to be consistent with providing that local talent that only the Bay Area can provide. Let’s celebrate the fact that in SF and the East Bay, we have spots like Etcetera Wine Bar and Little Hill Lounge that prove you don’t need a big, honking venue to showcase some of the best talent the Bay Area has to offer. I look forward to seeing you all at these very special, influential little rooms.
Little Hill Lounge, about a 20-minute walk from El Cerrito BART Station in the East Bay, came to my attention because of the sharp curation of shows by up-and-coming artists who have performed there in the recent past. Listen, I am not breaking any news here; there have been multiple articles in East Bay Express and Richmondside, previous to my writing about this neighborhood bar with the unpretentious vibe. But obviously, something very good is going on in that establishment.
And that is where symmetry slides in. Singer Eli Knowles from the Richmond-based fusion quartet Pateka (and yes, they are really freakin good) told em earlier this year that he and another band member work at Little Hill Lounge, and Pateka had a bit of a residency there for a little over a year. It’s easy to assume that block of shows increased attention on the little neighborhood bar and made people think “hmm, they’re booking Pateka there, a band who got name checked in JazzTimes? At my corner bar. Let’s check it out.”
Lauren Matsui from Seablite and Neutrals, who released a new one-woman synth-pop project, Rhymies, last year, recently, as in January, played a show at that same spot. Songwriter and guitarist Christina Busler of the Oakland-based band Christina’s Trip, who describes their music as alternative ’90s rock-inspired with elements of distortion and pop, recently headlined the very active 4 Star Theater in SF. Hailing from Moraga, Busler and bandmates JB Lenar, Christina Miyagi, and Alec Moore have also performed at Little Hill Lounge.
As I wrote in our BIG WEEK feature a while back, Radio Sofia is an instrumental musical collaboration between David Boyce, of Broun Fellini’s fame, on looped saxophones through dizzying effects; Michael Cavaseno on guitar, shot through similar time-traveling mechanisms; and Zori Marinova holding it down on percussion, by way of congas, bongos, and whatever else shows up at the gig. According to their website, “the trio’s sound can be described as a groovy, soulful mix of jazz, pop, R&B, and world music,” but that’s not descriptive enough.
On a Noise Pop night several years ago, waiting in line to see Lætitia Sadier at The Chapel, from the corner of Valencia, Boyce’s meditative flow dragged several other Noise Pop badge holders over to the window of Etcetera Wine Bar at 795 Valencia Street, where Radio Sofia plays every Saturday Night, and was at that moment twisting up a minimal version of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man.”
Etcetera Wine Bar features music every night, but on this one in particular, Radio Sofia was setting and sending mature grown-folk vibes throughout hipster funland’s cool nighttime fog. Cutting through the street noise and creating energy. Authentic buzz, not of the manufactured weekend shenanigans type. Inside, a Saturday night coalition of wine enthusiasts is thoroughly digging into the loose, transcendent global accents of the show Boyce and Co. was putting on.
Nobody was making a request, not one Shazamed tune. This is that vaunted “organic thing.” And everybody inside on this Saturday night knows it. Keen music lovers, or folks getting their date night on, connected with whoever was sitting across from them, locked in and trusting everything these artists rolled out. Sometimes, it’s the smaller shows, those intimate venues on the edges of hipster thoroughfares, that are the big city win.
SLAKE, LET’S GET MARRIED (CHERUB DREAM RECORDS)
So the algorithm brought me here. But the genre term “lesbian doom folk” made me stick around for a second, and I’m glad I did. Slake is a Bay Area indie band fronted by Mary Claire, and as much as the artist claims this is dark, heavy dread, lyrical despair, it works in some dreaminess—a post-apocalyptic yet lush quality. Full, and forever taking its time with each pause. Framing with those whirring, background, echoed voices.
In the press, they’ve stated their live set “has transformed over the years into something more clairvoyant, something with a crunch, something soft with teeth—like a walk through fall leaves with a long-distance lover.” Mixed by Melina Duterte, aka Jay Som, this project has all the appropriate heft, indicating we will be hearing from Slake in the near future; this much talent, lesbian doom folk or not, is undeniable. Pick up Let’s Get Married here.
MORTIFIED AT ASHKENAZ MUSIC & DANCE COMMUNITY CENTER, BERKELEY, APRIL 11
Did I ever tell you about how I accidentally took acid for the first and last time, mind you, while preparing Thanksgiving dinner? These are the types of stories you can expect at Mortified, the “cultural phenomenon” where grown folks confront their past with firsthand tales, always the embarrassing ones, from professional performers to total amateurs, in the good-humored spirit of self-deprecation in front of strangers.
So the laughs, or the weird heebie-jeebie “awws,” remain authentic. As for the LSD, it seeped through my pores because I used an unmarked pan in a house where I was renting a room, and my drug-dealing housemate at the time, now deceased (RIP Nigel), used to cut his acid. Well, after sitting outside for 12 hours at an Oakland BBQ on Thanksgiving Day, wearing shades and contemplating life, and repeating the mantra “I need to make some changes” in my head, after the walls decided to stop moving, I survived to talk about it. It was an experience, a true Bay Area/SF special experience, much like the many you’ll hear about by attending Mortified. More info here.
VINYL WILLIAMS AT KILOWATT, MAY 19
I hold space in my head and heart for the one they call Vinyl Williams. It’s been 10 years (jeez) since the LA-based artist released his modern classic Brunei on Chaz Bundick’s Company Records. In many ways, it’s just a bit ahead of the curve for all this now-trending “psychedelic mood music” that’s taken over in the past decade or so.
Williams refers to his arrangements as “celestial pop.” Brunei still bumps; The nervous Talking Heads-type funk of “Feedback Delicates,” the warm swath of keyboard melodics in “L’Quasar” and “Celestial Gold,” the modal tweaks and aggressive atmospherics in “Emerald Isle,” or the meditative punch drive of “Voidless,” which Bundick, aka Toro y Moi, plays on. Williams, still to this day, with various and numerous releases since, remains a constant, prolific arranger, bass player, and bandleader, remaining ever-present in pushing new material that always sounds right on time in a live music presentation.
He’s humble with it, too. Name-checking in the past, the Bay Area’s now-defunct outfit, Once & Future Band, along with Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai and The Free Design, as influences built into his own compositional style.
As much as I wish he were performing at a larger venue here in SF, it gives the true Vinyl Williams heads a prime opportunity to get that “celestial pop” warmth up close and harmonious in the smaller venue, Kilowatt. And that’s a plus. He’s releasing a new album, Star Harmony, which sounds like Williams writing in top form; just get a whiff of those chord changes on the single “Crystal Helix.” But as a fan who has caught him many times performing in the Bay Area, he gets into the older stuff in his sets, too. The size of the venue doesn’t matter; a Vinyl Williams show always delivers.
Pre-order Star Harmony here and grab tickets to the Kilowatt show here.
