We are Under The Stars people. You know the drill, lovers of music and culture. This quasi-weekly column stays on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases and upcoming shows, hustling with the changes, and thinking outside the margins. Hop in. And thanks for spending some time with us. Let’s go…
NATE MERCEREAU, FANTASTIC THOUGHTS (LEAVING RECORDS)
Musician Nate Mercereau has made a successful and uncanny career out of crafting ideas and shaping sounds that appear to be pulled out of thin air, or wherever he happens to be existing at that moment.
Let me get specific: Mercereau has a patient and detail-oriented ear, evidenced by his release that featured the Golden Gate Bridge’s famously eerie humming sounds alongside Nate’s improvised guitar work. It was the world’s first human-bridge duet album. He does that kind of work.
He’s gotten numerous kudos for his work alongside André 3000 on New Blue Sun, the Atlanta artist’s first record without the Outkast title attached. It featured no lyrics, only wordplay in song titles, and Three Stacks himself, the archetypal hip-hop MC, playing the flute. Mercereau and Carlos Niño, along with Surya Botofasina on synths, drummer Deantoni Parks, Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid on “mycelial electronics,” V.C.R. on violin and effects, Diego Gaeta on piano, Jesse Peterson on bass, and vocalist Mia Doi Todd, provided the ground for Three Stacks to meander about for this new chapter in his career.
But Mercereau has his own dynamic solo project on the horizon. Fantastic Thoughts, set for official release in September, is a triumph of new-age fusion, modal alchemy, and a record as a whole where he gets to push the acceleration a bit. In the liner notes, he correctly states, “I am playing the guitar as the center of the universe.”
It feels like a career’s culmination of work coming to fruition. Understand this. Leaving Records is one of the most forward-thinking and moving imprints that doesn’t focus on genre labels. Just quality, original work. From what I’ve heard off the record, it’s a kismet moment. Stay tuned here.
SPACEMOTH, INWARD EYE (GREENWAY RECORDS)
Maryam Qudus has always been a kid making weird loops with a guitar and a pedal in her bedroom. Now a professional musician and in-demand producer and engineer at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone Recording, Qudus has convinced award-winning artists from all corners of the music world that… well, maybe those weird loops are, in fact, eccentrically vital. They’ve tapped into a frequency, a color, an idea, or a certain ambience or vibration flowing through life. The weird has become wondrous. Ask emotive indie band Sour Widows or psych-rock band La Luz—Qudus has produced successful projects for both bands.
But we knew this truth back in 2022, when 48 Hills named Qudus, a first-generation Afghan American child of working-class immigrant parents, a Best of the Bay 2022 Editors’ Pick. She told us, “One of the things I enjoy most in the world is holing up in the studio and playing with synthesizers.”
Well, fast-forward to 2026, where her sophomore record Inward Eye got its start with Qudus ensconced in the back of the van, sketching out ideas with a tiny synthesizer while touring with La Luz, gazing out the window, piecing together and composing a soundtrack to accompany this journey.
As she told Tape Op in May, the future and the past can be mobile for recording purposes: “One of the beauties of recording music in the modern era is that you can take ‘the studio’ with you anywhere you go, and thankfully, I was able to turn mundane moments on the road into something highly creative and beautiful.”
Catch Spacemoth at Rickshaw Stop on July 24 and pick up Inward Eye here.
ERIC ANDRÉ: WHAT’S IN MY BAG? AMOEBA RECORDS
The comedian’s new BLARF album, Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist, is a project that pays homage to cinema’s greatest composers. It was recorded in Budapest and Los Angeles with full orchestras, and scored to 16mm films that exist only in Eric André’s mind. He studied at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, majoring in double bass (upright bass), and graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor of Music degree, a four-year program he finished in three. From horror-themed hip-hop records to the sounds of KPM, the British production music library, this long dive in the bins at the record store is packed with off-the-cuff treats, quick-witted jokes, and love for Wesley Snipes’ VHS run in the ’90s.
KOOL KEITH WITH DJ SHORTKUT AT THE FREIGHT, JULY 25
The timeless and exemplary rapper and producer from the Bronx, New York, who first gained fame as a member of the pioneering hip-hop group Ultramagnetic MCs, referred to by fans forever as “Ultramag”? Yes, when Kool Keith, wordsmith extraordinaire, pulls up to The Freight for a special performance featuring world-renowned DJ Shortkut of the always incredible Invisibl Skratch Piklz doing a special video mixing set?
Be ready for all Keith’s wild, horny, and hallucinatory aliases to make their cameos: Black Elvis, Dr. Dooom, and the forever entertaining Dr. Octagon. It’s a chairs-removed, dancefloor-open type of show.
This concert is part of The Freight’s “Hip-Hop is Folk Music” initiative, which seeks to illuminate connections between hip-hop and other folk and roots music traditions, ones that’ve never seen the dexterity, sense of humor, and bawdy wordplay of Dr. Octagon. The extraterrestrial surgeon from Jupiter uses space technology and primitive tools to perform medical procedures on his patients, some of whom die as he conducts his rounds, while others are murdered by his careless, barbaric acts. That Dr. Octagon record was made in Dan The Automator’s studio, at the time in the basement of his parents’ San Francisco home—it was that legit. Expect this show to sell out. Grab tickets here.
ISSA RAE’S “INSECURE: 10TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR” AT THE FOX THEATER, SEPTEMBER 26
When the first episode of “Insecure” (titled “Insecure as F*ck”) officially premiered on HBO in the fall of 2016, America finally had a show where young Black women were seen going through their day, grabbing dinner at their favorite Ethiopian restaurant, and spending their evenings in South Los Angeles.
Inglewood, Crenshaw, Leimert Park, View Park, Windsor Hills, and West Adams—not typical Hollywood—were the featured locations. Show creator Issa Rae packed the soundtrack with songs that reflected this part of Los Angeles, a feat rarely seen on any television show. When the fictional Issa Dee and her Los Angeles circle of peers, primarily Black women in their late 20s and early 30s, had brunch wearing Michael Jackson and Prince T-shirts, the show’s soundtrack properly calibrated these vignettes into real young Black life, featuring a soundtrack booming with selections from Kendrick Lamar, Raphael Saadiq, and DāM FunK.
Rae is hitting the road to celebrate a decade since the show premiered. (Yes, already.) Featuring a live conversation between Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny, it will revisit iconic moments from the hit show, and fans can hear untold behind-the-scenes stories and learn more about how the show has shifted the culture in the years since. Some of the other cast members might pop up, too. Adding to the excitement, cast members Yvonne Orji, Jay Ellis, and Natasha Rothwell are slated to make appearances on select dates of the tour. Get tickets here.
RAMONES, SUMMER IN THE CITY, LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO (RHINO RECORDS)
This double LP (in pink!) was released on Record Store Day back in April, and mint copies are beginning to surface at not un-reasonable prices, so snap ’em up if you can. Originally broadcast live on KSAN-FM in partnership with BAM Magazine as part of the Summer In The City music festival, The Ramones played a 22-song set for free to thousands in front of City Hall on June 8, 1979. They were the only band needed. No opener required. It’s The Ramones, the punk band that inspired legendary UK bands like The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Damned.
That classic “1, 2, 3, 4” gets interspersed between the hit-it-and-quit punk anthems amplified before City Hall. Featuring the classic Ramones lineup of Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Marky, the show exuded a cut-to-tape sonic delivery. It’s a no-frills approach that Green Day, Metallica, and U2 directly cite as a foundational influence. This particular recording sounds spirited and yet business as usual, with casual snipes at the disco craze; this widely bootlegged concert got formally released as a double-vinyl album this spring.
Since the performance hit the airwaves directly from the mixing desk (with no multitrack recording available for later remixing), this record gives music historians and fans alike a real-time document of what the Ramones could deal out as the ’80s approached. A no-glitz, all-wonderful, high-test live recording serves as a reasonable assessment of the band’s feral intensity.
