Under the Stars: Can’t Stop Music with Pamela Z, The Residents, Sis, more

Under The Stars is back from the backcountry for 2022. Happy New Year! It’s good to get together with all of you, virtually, once again. It’s true people. This week our near-weekly column featuring new music releases, upcoming shows, and a number of other adjoining articles bids a sad farewell to a beloved outpost of quality food and suspension,Universal coffee. And an enthusiastic hello to the new Breadcrumbs / Ink Bleeds EP our favorite ambassadors of fuzz, reverb and delay, Seablite!

What a musical year… We started 2021 by writing about the fearlessness of bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger in creating an American songbook of jazz and pop tunes while they were trapped in lockdown. Self-recorded as the country erupted over the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and countless other blacks, their weekly mic performance from 2020 turned into a recording that rose again. morale and lowered people’s blood pressure.

Several months later we were fortunate enough to attend Outside Lands, applauding for live music, but still disheartened by how the city of San Francisco left the Tenderloin to fend for itself. Riddled with crime, the open-air melee distribution was exposed to all visiting tourists, including the obvious roaming.

Toilets and clean water immediately popped up at a music festival in Golden Gate Park, used mostly by people from outside. But for many lost San Francisco residents, forced to live in tents on the streets, the benefits of the pot of porto have not been extended. Raw sewage therefore flooded these areas with squatters with bitumen. The Mayor of London Breed seems to be getting down to it these days. Around the same time, tourists returned to The City By The Bay for vacation. But these travelers had a new story to make: a major theft in Union Square, patrol cars turning the holiday district into a militarized stretch of real estate decorated with Christmas lights.

We had the opportunity to witness the thriving indie band scene, live and in the moment, here at Ess Eff. At the historic Balboa Theater, on a Sunday evening in mid-December, eccentric culture ambassadors performed very loudly and quirky in front of their DIY constituency. A movement that reached a certain tipping point over the summer. The Balboa, over the past two years, has become something of an incubator, providing a haven for this essential segment of nightlife.

But coming out of the lockdown, it was a centralizing force, propelling this evolution with opportunity. Normally, a city’s nightlife serves as a selling point for tourism. Shouldn’t the city of San Francisco protect and support this culture, providing nightclubs and places in difficulty with the same economic protection and the same resources as those of the so precious Union Square?

Life moves stealthily fast. In some cases, discreet stealth. From the side too. It seems the city has a soul-searching to do. Enough talk above my salary. Let’s move on to IT!

THE RESIDENTS, A PLEASURE FOR THE EYES 50th ANNIVERSARY BOOK (VOLUME 1)

The lonely, mythical and hugely influential experimental art collective The Residents celebrates 50 years of existence, well, The Residents, with a new historical and introspective book, A Show for Sore Eyes, Vol 1. According to the group’s website, Melodic Virtue gained unprecedented access to The Cryptic Corporation’s archives, documenting everything from their San Mateo debut to The Mole Show.

The book contains an unreleased 7 ″ black vinyl record Unavailable– The era track “Nobody’s Nos” and an introduction by Les Claypool of Primus, as well as impressions and accolades from Danny Elfman, Paul Reubens, John Linnell (They Could Be Giants), “Weird Al” Yankovic, Andy Partridge (XTC), Penn Jillette, Eric Drew Feldman (Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band), Paul Leary (Butthole Surfers), Aaron Freeman (Ween), James McNew (Yo La Tengo), Zach Hill (Death Grips), Eric André, David J (Bauhaus)), Cedric Bixler-Zavala (La Mars Volta), Josh Freese (Les Vandales), Rob Crow (Pinback), Dan Deacon, Don Preston (The Mothers of Invention), Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) , JG Thirlwell, Blaine L. Reininger (Tuxedomoon), Sam Coomes (Quasi), David Janssen and Brian Poole (Renaldo and the Loaf), and others. Phew.

You can pre-order the book here, it starts shipping around Fri / 7.

Pamela Z, Echolocation (Freedom to spend)

Experimenting with voice, electronics, communication and linguistics since the 1980s, Pamela Z, the San Francisco-based singer-songwriter and media artist, deserves to have at least a week of many band-like performances. hot metal around these parts made before the holidays, based on his tireless exploration of the human condition. OG, as the kids say, combines innovative vocal techniques, lyrical bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow it to manipulate sound with physical gestures.

Put simply, it’s DIY, punk ingenuity, an extended experiment with bangs that has given seeds to many contemporary artists – tUnE-yArDs and Lyra Pramuk to name a few.

Echolocation, the artist’s debut album, born and raised in Buffalo, New York, released in 1988 on tape, explores when Pamela Z beta-tested these voice-generated studies. Now he receives a digital and vinyl reissue on Freedom To Spend, a branch of RVNG Intl, so we can revisit those corporate days accompanied by the spectral sounds mentioned above.

sister, EP Gnani (Native cat records)

Sis is the project of multi-instrumentalist Jenny Gillespie Mason, founder of Native Cat Recordings, based in Bay Area. The imprint has released albums from Luke Temple, Brijean, John Vanderslice and now a new EP called Mason’s Gnani is coming Friday / 7. “Wooie”, the recent Danski Tang animated video, delivers the eerie earworm of a bop with mind-altering morph colors, and figures that wave and wiggle with proggy-synthy groove.

Jenny gave a few words about the significance of the new single:

“’Wooie’, the place I wanted to strive for, when the confused and shriveled reality of 2021 around me sank deeper and deeper into a sort of made-up city where Edenic hustle and bustle met community life. Seek out the ‘woo’ in astrology, tarot, Jungian dream analysis, the writings of Rudolf Steiner – which to others may sound like escape jibber-jabber, but to me, it is. gave a sense of magic, horizon and depth. And oh, that beat I had done on Ableton Push – I just had to have it throughout, pushing me forward to this real awesome place – and I just had to get Brijean to play congas – and she did it !

According to Mason, the EP is the culmination of a lifelong journey as a musician, working with collaborators near and far in studios across the country, although most of Gnani was recorded in the home studio. of Mason in Berkeley, California.

You should pre-order it here.

Juke Bounce Werk presents JBDUBZ Vol. 9

Los Angeles label and collective Juke Bounce Werk have released their ninth compilation, JBDUBZ, which features 43 tracks that showcase the commonalities of jungle, acid, house, and classic footwork. JBDUBZ Vol. 9, a name your price purchase, features tracks from Bay Area artists Bored Lord and Tomu DJ.

Two syllables book eighteen (First words recorded)

Critical praise for the releases of Yazmin Lacey, Kaidi Tatham and Children of Zeus made underground and mainstream heads around the world recognize First Word Records in 2018. For nearly two decades, this London-based imprint has steadily held its own. provided and updated where urban music is located. at. If that means bass heavy rhythms meet jazz, soul and hip-hop in the starkest way of British club culture, then this is it. Talent always changes trends. Ask for the first word. This is how they were named Label of the Year by the very influential Gilles Peterson Worldwide Awards in 2019.

Two syllables book eighteen, filled with 13 assorted tracks that maintain a new soul line, from the ambient reflections of Sarah Williams White to the boogie boogie gusto of Kaidi Tatham. It’s a full account of what this imprint remains steadfast on: new ideas that grow with the original bearing. As we move forward into this new year, find out where First Word has touched over the past 12 months, in anticipation of its next cycle.

You can upload the name of your own price compilation here.