Well, hello lovers of music and culture. We are Under the Stars, a quasi-weekly column that stays on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases, upcoming shows, and other adjacent items. We keep it moving, hustling with the changes, thinking outside the margins. We’ve been doing this for five years… Spend some time with us…
Fri/5 marks the final Bandcamp Friday of 2025. This initiative started in March 2020 during the peak of the COVID pandemic, when the closure of venues significantly impacted artists’ touring income. Since then, Bandcamp Fridays have allowed the platform to forgo its revenue share, directing all funds straight to artists and labels. As a result, millions of fans have contributed more than $120 million directly to the musicians and labels they support.
We’ve got some recommendations, obviously. But first, we decided to turn to an insider for his assessment of the scene right now—Michael Schulman, the founder of Slumberland Records. His Bay Area label has been on fire in recent years, signing local bands and helping them thrive first on the West Coast and then globally. Some of the bands that have gained recognition include Lunchbox, The Reds, Pinks and Purples, The Umbrellas, Chime School, Torrey, and Neutrals.
I asked Schulman why the Bay Area has seen such an uptick in shoegaze and jangle-pop bands since the pandemic. “You know, I don’t think I have a good answer to this,” he replied. “I think indiepop always just kind of keeps chugging along, and it’s the interest in it from outside the immediate scene that is more cyclical.
“That said, I’ve noticed that a larger portion of our roster is from the Bay Area right now than at any time since the mid-’90s, and I’m psyched about it. It’s been feeling like a real pop community here in the bay for the last six or eight years, and I’m definitely here for it. It’s always more fun at the peak of the cycle than in the trough.”
Besides supporting Slumberland’s roster, here are some of our own recommendations for Bandcamp Friday support:
The Cords: This Scottish sister duo of Grace and Eva is the latest Slumberland signing to take jangle-pop around the world.
Bar Part Time: Natural wine bar with a Danley sound system and an intimate dance floor that also releases music
Veotis Latchison: Hailing from Oakland, this electrifying vocalist, songwriter, and producer, whose soulful sound is making waves across the Bay Area and beyond, will play the Noise Pop festival on March 1 at SFJAZZ.
Pateka: This Richmond-based experimental quartet has a wide-eyed palette for sound and the unrelenting fearlessness to share not one but all the dang ideas.
Cahl Sel‘s debut album Traces casts our ears and hearts into wiry-wavey synth patterns and flickering tempos that never get pushed to cut-and-paste banality.
Bored Lord‘s Coast 2 Coast is “a love letter to club music and the city of Oakland.”
Late Aster’s debut full-length album, City Livin’, is said by the group to be “a nod to lo-fi ambient and hip-hop,” but I hear freestyle, bedroom dance-pop, and groove-based synth jammers that give an off-woozy type atmosphere: headnodding for days.
SLOPE114: San Francisco-based live house music duo makes tracks that swell up in your soul.
bastiengoat’s SAFE dips into juke, bounce, South African gqom, breakbeat, and other Black dance styles, real cool, slick, and house-like, with that boom-bap bass business right there at the foundation.
For further listening pleasure:
TORTOISE, TOUCH (INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM, NONESUCH)
Artistically speaking, musicians on the Third Coast prefer to explore the connections of genres rather than limit them. It’s about the work. Tortoise, the Chicago post-rock band and veterans of the city’s influential DIY scene, is a dynamic, ever-evolving entity that mirrors its city’s musicians’ workmanlike credo.
Blending the rigids, much like fusion cuisine, is an apt description for the restriction-free approach they subscribe to. Those sounds, created decades ago, can now be heard on niche music festival stages, big-box Coachella biters, and, most certainly, the alt-jazz spaces that have swelled with fans due to a new wave of UK and American artists reviving the genre with beats, soundsystem influence, and our modern digital literacy.
With Touch, their first album in a decade, there are tracks you could hear at a rave, like “Elka,” or classical choral chaos mixed with lyrical guitar lines on “Rated OG.” But the “James Bond goes beat-diggin for blue-note breakbeats” feel of “Oganesson,” that spy-like element upfront, and those jazzy figures in the back, explores ideas about instrumental music being environmental, groove-like, and conversational. Until, that is, we reach the end and sense this ominous, droning substance lurking beneath. That’s Tortoise for you, presenting one thing and then getting all David “Lynchian”, turning things on its head as we focus real close before fading out.
During their nine-year hiatus, the prolific guitarist Jeff Parker, who held a fall 2018 residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, has released numerous solo albums and EPs, contributed to several Maya McCraven projects, appeared on a resilient, funk-adjacent Dougie Stu project in 2020, and various other projects—dude’s been busy. Has that workload helped shape a specific branch of….well? To quote Flea directly: “fucking funky as fuck, dude” music.
That’s right, it has. That type of fusiony-jazz, business. But Parker’s heater of releases has aided in establishing an intriguing and dynamic roster of artists who also produce genre-bending records on the versatile Chicago indie label, International Anthem. Tortoise has been eclectically advanced for so long, hip writers, who constantly try to catch up haven’t yet coined the proper trendy gentrification names for their sound.
We’re stuck, like dried egg, with the schlubby post-rock label for now.
Listen, Jeff Parker, John Herndon, Dan Bitney, and John McEntire, who make up the band, have always been ahead of the game. So much so that taking nine years off gave the world, and their very fluid genre, time to catch up and get experimentally weird. So if their four years in the making of the album Touch sounds like a crown jewel in this alt-jazz renaissance, an inflection point to all this hip-hop, rock, soundtrack, classical, dub-business? You are not wrong.
It’s the world that rotated, not Tortoise.
Purchase here.
THE BEATLES, ANTHOLOGY 4 (UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP)
It’s pretty damn hard not to think of Dangermouse, Jay-Z, Beck, director Wes Anderson, and the psychedelic version of Prince when the final minute or so of “Strawberry Fields Forever (Take 26)” just unfolds into a variegated chaos of drums that come in and out of rhythm, strings, horns, and strange rumbling beneath the grand coda. By this time, we’ve already encountered the backward-turning breakbeat and George Martin’s clever move of combining two takes: one slowed down and the other sped up, which altered John Lennon’s voice, making it sound higher, slower, and hollower in parts. Hence hallucinatory. It’s on the time-bending collection Anthology 4, the companion album to the long-awaited new edition of the ultimate Beatles documentary.
Anthology 1 achieved unprecedented initial CD sales for a double-album at the time of its release in November 1995. The Anthology documentary series is finally getting its new version, restored and expanded, which debuted on Disney+ on November 26. Word is, it’s got a powderkeg episode nine, focusing on footage of the three surviving Beatles coming together in 1994 and 1995. The Anthology albums were packed with unreleased tunes, outtakes, demos, and studio banter.
Anthology 4 provides a sense of gravity in this 21st century, the forever binge-watching generation will have an old-new obsession. One that offers a solid understanding of what many artists are still pursuing and being influenced by. I don’t know if Wes Anderson would have a distinct aesthetic without The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Kinks. The innovative studio techniques, which transform the studio into an actual instrument, may have started with Brian Wilson, but it’s The Beatles who mainstreamed that art after giving up touring.
Anthology 4 features Take 19 of “I Am The Walrus,” complete with strings, brass, and clarinet overdubs. Just imagine the joy Lee “Scratch” Perry would have found in that! This collection is a worthy 36-song standalone box set, available as either a triple-vinyl or a two-CD compilation. It allows us to see how The Beatles continue to push our ears, eyes, and minds forward.
Grab it here.
HITOMI ‘PENNY’ TOHYAMA, TOKYO FUNK DIVA (WEWANTSOUNDS)
Listen. I didn’t realize until all these Japanese comps and reissues from the ’80s started flying around in the past half-decade that back in the day, Japan, too, had its phasers set on planet Funk Funk. Like Black radio… during the Jheri Curls bouncin’, swaying to the beat phase, back in the day. One quick listen to all the rubbery basslines, saccharine sweet synth washes, and diva-like vocal enunciations—the trajectory of voice overrides language barriers—from Hitomi “Penny” Tohyama. You understand real quick, Japan was all about that boogie-funk action. Who do you think was making the musical equipment fueling this musical genre?
Companies like Yamaha, Roland, Korg, and Casio were at the heart of the digital music revolution, creating highly influential and affordable gear that shaped the sound of popular music genres worldwide in the ’80s. If you have insider knowledge of technology, shouldn’t you be an influential force using it? Hitomi “Penny” Tohyama seems right at home singing songs that borrow intros from famous songs by The Whispers or electro-funk takes on certain sections of Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust.” There’s even a dedication song titled “SFO/OAKLAND,” as if these fools knew a party called Sweater Funk was going to happen far in the future.
Penny Tohyama wanted in on the rise of this culture, and by way of embracing Japan’s emerging funk and boogie movement, this musician, born in Okinawa and partly raised in California, developed a unique vocal style. Her approach suited a new version of soul that was slinky, made with instruments that had blinking lights, this enhanced by technology, still sought to maintain a human touch. With songs such as “Sexy Robot,” “Love is the Competition,” and “Instant Polaroid,” Penny kept Tokyo’s nightlife globally significant, focused on the Funk.
Grab it here.
SF JAZZ, CASTRO THEATRE PROGRAMMING 2026
As one year gradually ends, it makes way for a new one filled with modern and hopefully innovative ideas. Since both SF JAZZ and The Castro Theater have announced some outstanding lineups for the upcoming year, we wanted to share some of those dates and artists for you to view and consider.
(While downtown SF parties may ring in a supposed $28 million, you gotta ask. What is it that the City and local politicians are selling? Good times? Good vibes? Is that culture?)
SFJAZZ recently announced the exciting addition of composer, producer, and drummer Makaya McCraven to the 2025-26 Season of Resident Artistic Directors, which already includes Michael League, Omar Sosa, Immanuel Wilkins, and Meshell Ndegeocello. The SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director program is a unique initiative that gives forward-thinking musicians from around the globe the opportunity to present new and unique works and collaborate with other world-class artists in exclusive performances.
I witnessed a stellar performance from McCraven along with Ben LeMar-Gay and Theon Cross at NYC Winterfest this past January; SF Jazz is in for a rousing performance from this Chicago-based drummer, composer, and producer who is having a moment. His recent release, the four-EP communique from the wide-stretching double-album Off The Record, provides access points for non-jazz fans, hip-hop adjacent heads, and grand on-ramp thoroughfares for experimental jazz fiends and folks who have no problem delving into the deep waters of abstract soundscapes.
Grab more info on SFJAZZ’s upcoming season here.
The Castro Theatre, now called The Castro, announced a series of 2026 concert dates in November, showing that this new version of the venue aims to be more. It’s awesome that Frameline Film Festival is returning, and The Castro Theatre wants to become a destination for live music as well. With performance spaces closing, especially after the pandemic, it’s encouraging to see another live venue open its doors, which will hopefully also program a robust local slate of performers. For now, music: With names such as The Breeders, Lucy Dacus, and Santigold booked for next year, it would be great, too, if a more local rotation of artists could join this roster, adding more flavor to the new venue.
See The Castro’s lineup here.
