E-40 and Too $hort cruise through space with Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube as MOUNT WESTMORE
New interview with SF ambient artist Shipwreck Detective, Oakland producer Space Ghost assembles a set for Mixmag, and it's always summer with Gilberto Rodriguez
Only a couple weeks left…
Taking place in a small, shaded backyard in West Oakland, FALL MASS will be our first live ambient music showcase, featuring three incredible local artists: Shipwreck Detective, Joel St. Julien, and Leila Abdul-Rauf.
Ahead of the event—and following interviews with both Joel and Leila—Shipwreck Detective (aka Dev Bhat) spoke with us about some of his favorite new music (including a video game soundtrack), the good and the bad in being a Bay Area musician, and how live ambient can be a little punk rock. Read the interview here.
Peace,
ronny
THAT NEW NEW
If MOUNT WESTMORE ain’t the best thing (half) from the Bay this week, then I don’t know what is. Featuring hip hop legends from both LA (Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube) and the Bay (E-40, Too $hort), “Big Subwoofer” is catchy, goofy, horny, ruthless, and downright irresistible. (Shout out to my band’s drummer Brian for making us watch this at practice last night. Hip hop and punk rock go together like ouzo and ice.)
“Taking inspiration from devotionals and ’60s British folk, Sean Conrad's eleventh Channelers LP is ambient-acoustic at its most meditative.” As featured on Bandcamp’s New & Notable, Another Entrance is the newest album from Channelers aka Sean Conrad, who also runs the Oakland label Inner Islands. For more ambient new age goodness, check out two more new releases from the label: Gems and Minerals by Golden Brown and Universal Compassion by Nimbudala (aka Steve Targo).
“Think of all the beauty, positivity and love that gets deemed ugly, negative and hateful by the self-proclaimed guardians of ‘common sense.’ We'd hardly be destroying society by dismantling their colonial economics and prisons and gender roles and aesthetics. We’d be creating it!” Formed in SF nearly 30 years ago, pop rock band Deerhoof is back with a new full-length album: Actually, You Can.
Retro rock & roller Greg Hoy released “Highway 101” b/w “Spouses of the Lowly” as a two-song sampler. The tracks originally appeared on the Cacophony 2 EP, released by 30 Peak Recording Company in May.
Central American DJ and producer JUANNY DEPP released a four-track EP of clubby dembow entitled LOST IN THOT. You can catch the artist celebrating the three-year anniversary of their DJ and design collective Amor Digital with Yuca Frita and Madre Guia on Fri Oct 29 at Brix581 in Oakland.
Using the alias Geronimo, Oakland experimental beatmaker Pacific Yew (aka Jeremy Williams) released The Fly in His Eye, a concept album of a beat tape that tracks the story of “a young Jeronimo [who] gets a fly caught in his eye and spends the week at home” and has to deal with the slow extraction of fly parts from his eye, limb by limb.
IDHAZ and rose cherami—two of the artists recently featured on LIGHT BEINGS #3 by SMARTBOMB, LOWER GRAND RADIO, and NOSEI—have released “you'll see why” b/w “i wrote it down” under their collaborative project pieces indigo. The artists will be sharing a “special audiovisual performance // prayer film” tomorrow as part of SMARTBOMB VIDEO HOME SYSTEM EPISODE 5 alongside Cinque Mubarak, Jada Imani, and many other local artists.
Have a spare $500 to drop on Vallejo vaporwave? The cassette release for COLORFUL YOU by SELA. has already sold out, but you can still purchase the “hour of individually selected loops and samples” for that amount on Bandcamp. The artist says it will never be repressed.
“I really just want to play house music.” If you love groundbreaking techno from the 1980s, the newest dance music released in the past year, or anything in between, you absolutely must listen to Dance Planet, the latest album by Space Ghost. And then check this feature on Mixmag, featuring an interview with and mix by the Oakland producer. (h/t First Floor)
Influenced by Gram Parsons, Jimmie Rodgers, Kris Kristofferson, and Fred Neil, At The Time I Didn't Care is the new country rock album from SF painter and singer-songwriter Virgil Shaw—out now on Rocks In Your Head Records.
“This is a purely electronic work with rather intimate sounds.” Lena Platonos, a leading Athens-based electronic music composer since the 1980s, returns to Dark Entries Records with Balancers, featuring previously unreleased material recorded between 1982-1985. Read more on Bandcamp, where it was named Album of the Day.
“An homage to 80’s sleaze metal.” San Ramon’s Ripple Music released “No Good to Me” by Austin heavy metal band War Cloud.
Oakland’s Sentient Ruin Laboratories announced it will be releasing a compilation by Philadelphia black metal artist Uranium that includes their debut EP The Glorious Void (released earlier this year) along with the upcoming new EP Wormboiler. From the same label, be sure to check out Abominion by Abstracter, which was just featured on Bandcamp’s New & Notable.
“A flex; multidimensional; batshit; uncompromising.” Brought to you by SF’s Silva Electronics, The Damage Has Been Done is a new five-track EP of thick, noisy house and techno by Portland producer Golden Donna.
MAYBE MISSED
Flexing muscles, long gorgeous locks, and a whole lot of juicy fruit, SF’s Gilberto Rodriguez y Los Intocables signals what you’re in for when listening to Sabor Maracuyá Desnuda (“Naked Passionfruit Flavor”). Inspired by the “heat of a backyard rumba,” the 2018 album is a perfect synthesis of polished Afro-Latin jazz rhythms and the improvisational, free-spirited feeling of a family jam. The sound is full and rich, featuring percussion, keys, trumpets, guitars, and guest vocals. And it’s in no rush, with several songs approaching the 10-minute mark and the last (“Totonita Encantadora”) slipping into a simple delightful groove for 13 minutes. It may finally be raining in the Bay Area, but it will always be summer when you play this album.
IN THE NEWS
Ex-SF garage rock god Ty Segall recently picked his Bandcamp favorites, and alongside all the cool people’s favorite band SAULT, he included the self-titled album by W-X (who may or may not have been based in SF in 2015) and Chewing Hides the Sound by Residents collaborator Snakefinger (who definitely was based in SF in 1979).
SHUFFLE ON
Listen to the Lower Grand Radio mix - Recorded Oct 7.