New Music, Emerging from your Local Scene
San Francisco’s Birds & Batteries will be making their way over to the East Bay this Friday to play at Berkeley’s Starry Plough. They will be joined by East Bayer’s Winter’s Fall, Waste Band, and Forest Floor which should make the evening a fun mixture of synth pop, indie rock, and a touch of folk.
Birds & Batteries, Winter’s Fall, Waste Band and Forest Floor
@ The Starry Plough, Berkeley
Friday, January 8th
Starry Plough is located at 3101 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley
Cover is $8
On January 26th Pit Er Pat and Thrill Jockey will team up once again to break down some musical walls. As Butchy and Fay of Pit Er Pat put it, “It has been just 10,992 hours since the last album”, but it is what remarkable is what they have accomplished in that time. Their new lp is called The Flexible Entertainer, and as I listen through the layers of sound I can see just how fitting that title is. These two are flexible in how they develop songs and sounds and in the structure and instrumentation they utilize. In their words they “freak you hard with banging mpc”, but the album has more depth than that statement may allude to. A mixture of instrumental jam sessions and vocal tracks, it the diversity of sounds that make it such an enjoyable listen. The duo is calling it a “brave new sound” and in a way it is. There is really no classification, it’s danceable, it has guitar, it has drum machines, it has mpc, but really what is it?
Aside from this wonderfully dense and complex collection of tunes Pit Er Pat have hard at work collaborating with the like of Soft Circle, Hecuba, These Are Powers, Rainbow Arabia, and others. These are two talented and creative musicians and other bands are seeing this and wanting to work with them in some capacity. There is no word yet, but hopefully their will be a tour this Spring to support this impressive album.
Where have all the musical flowers gone? Probably Brooklyn. At least that’s where local folk/jazz/indy great Miss Tess has taken her “modern vintage” style as of New Year’s Day. She left with a bang.
“We had a fantastic New Year’s Eve, perhaps the best ever,” exclaimed Tess in a dispatch to her mailing list. “We played at Symphony Hall in Boston, got to watch the Boston Pops play with Amanda Palmer [formerly of the Dresden Dolls], saw lots of balloons drop from the ceiling as we all sang "We Are The Champions" at the stroke of midnight, and then I moved to Brooklyn on New Years Day. Hello New York!” (video above)
Miss Tess, whom Palmer had requested as one of her opening acts for New Years, has been a fixture of the Cambridge/Somerville scene for four years. Mingling jazz standards with original tunes, Tess assembled a changing line-up of first-rate jazz musicians, often culled from the New England Conservatory of Music, to serve as her “Bon Ton Parade.”
“I will miss some of my favorite local performers and places like Toad,
Lizard Lounge and Atwoods, where I could go and run into a bunch of friends,” said Tess in an email interview. “I will not miss Boston weather.”
While she might not find much warmer climes in Brooklyn, it feels like the right move for the time and she is excited about the change.
“There’s a lot going on in Brooklyn as far as creative arts go—many places to play, and creative opportunities beyond solely performing. Also, my band moved there a couple months ago.”
Tess is in fact setting up camp with Sweet and Low-Down band mate (and formidable jazz vocalist in her own right) Rachel Price, as well as Mike Calabrese, the current Bon Ton drummer. While weekly stands at the beloved pub venues of the Boston folk scene are behind her now, Miss Tess, is wasting no time before starting another tour and will be back in town as early as January 21. She will play Club Passim in Cambridge for one of local folk great, Alastair Moock’s, “Pastures of Plenty” round robins and then the following night, will play a set of vintage dance tunes at Boston Swing Central. Her latest CD, released at the Lizard Lounge in December, is Darling, Oh Darling.
Destiny and Autry from Midnight Masses met while living in Atlanta, where they started a band called Shock Cinema. Destiny and Autry knew Miyuki from when he toured with his old band The’ Rogers Sisters. They knew Danny and Jason from Trail Of Dead, and reconnected’ with them when Destiny and Autry moved to New York. Destiny met Eric through his’ roommate who was in Dragons of Zynth. They all met through bands or in bars. – Read Gina Alioto’s interview with the band here.
New York City’s most revered art collective centered around a man by the name of Andy Warhol. Set in a drug-infused laboratory — his 1960s dream studio The Factory — and culminating in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events, Warhol and his ilk transformed the subcultural landscape in ways still difficult to comprehend. But if Warhol was the general of this amphetamine army, his front line soldiers were The Velvet Underground and Nico. – Read Joe Coscarelli’s article about Indie Rock and Contemporary art in NYC here. – In the picture, Titus Andronicus at the Whitney Museum (from brooklynvegan, photo by Leia Jospe)
Hard to pick just a handful out of the wild array of Austin bands out there tonight playing for the cuddly price of No Money Whatsoever, but here’s what’s making our feet tap today: Mohawk has a terrific lineup both inside and out, including Brazos, TV Torso, Great Nostalgic (that trio outside – worth braving the chill), Ume, Many Birthdays, and more. Strange Attractors play Red 7, the enigmatic Zookeeper graces the Parish along with Suzanna Choffel and the consistently underestimated Wiretree, Emo’s features what will be one of the last sets by Haunting Oboe Music (pictured above and soon calling it quits) + one of our recent Open Contest winners, The Eastern Sea. And you will soon be able to vote in our mega-mega Year End Poll. That’s quite a Thursday…there is also some sort of sporting contest happening tonight, which, whatever the result, works as a nice lead-in to an evening of free music. Get on out there.
The goal of the poll is to involve local scenemakers (the jury), local music fans (the readers) and Deli writers in choosing the best emerging artists of 2009 of the various local scenes covered by The Deli.
There will be prizes for the winners of The Readers Poll and the Jury Poll, and likely also for some of the runner-ups. Please make your vote today. The poll will be open until January 16th.
The “scenemakers” that helped select the bands are as follows: Brent from Avant/Chicago, The Chicago Independent Music Review, Phil from Double Door, Michael from Ear It Now, Tankboy, Billy from The Whistler, Brian from Chicago Snacks, Bill Valenta, Matt from Schubas, Brian from Gallery of Carpet, Frank from Windy City Rock, and Farrai from Stop Being Famous.
SF Bay Area Deli readers,
We apologize for being a little slow lately with all things related to our Best of SF 2009 poll for emerging indie artists. Our NYC Readers’ Poll (which we recommend you to check out here) has brought an unexpected amount of traffic to our site, which has caused our server to crash several times yesterday, making us waste a lot of time. Because of this we decided to postpone slightly the beginning of some of the other cities’ readers’ polls, SF included.
Anyhoo… we just finished collecting the nominations from our knowledgeable and attractive panel of jurors and we are now ready to hit you all with an impressive list of awesome local, emerging and 100% independent artists. If you’d like to learn more about our voting process, please check out the rules here.
While we are organizing the list of nominees for the readers’ poll, we wanted to announce the winners of our SF Open Contest. For those unaware, this Contest is the part of our Best of SF Poll that nominates artists through an open submission system – while the majority of our finalists are freely selected by a jury of local bloggers, promoters and scenemakers. We’d like to thank all the artists who participated in our Open Contest, the ones who submitted directly, and the ones who qualified throughout 2009 by winning our monthly polls. Choosing the winners was not an easy decision to make for The Deli writers, which is a testament to our amazing music scene. We are happy to announce that the following artists qualified for the next phase of the poll:
Man/Miracle
James & Evander
Baby Dino
Orchestra of Antlers
The Music Lovers
Special congratulations to Man/Miracle (in the picture, playing in someone’s house with bad lighting) who were the overall winners of our Open Contest!
The SF Best of 2009 Readers’ has officially started… vote away!
The Deli SF staff
Brighton MA, Coach House Sounds, The Deli, and Schubas have all combined to put together a contest to end all contests. It all started when BMA announced their two night stay at Schubas this month (Jan. 22nd and 23rd), but more on the show and the fine supporting bands on the ticket. You need to enter this contest today. One lucky winner will win a pair of tickets to one of the upcoming Brighton, MA performances at Schubas, and also admission for two to come and watch Brighton, MA’s upcoming Coach House Sounds session* on Sunday 1/10 at 1:30 pm!
To enter contest, please send email to: coachhousesounds@gmail.com with Subject: BMA SESSION
Winners announced Friday @ Noon!
If dreamy Alt-Folk (as we call it) and rabbit ears are your cup of tea, you’ll have to go to Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg on January 22 to check out Sticklips, led by a smooth voiced young lady who goes under the pseudonym Little Girl Blue. The band’s sound blends acoustic, sometimes jazzy lullabies a la Suzanne Vega with dreamy atmospheric background noises. Exactly what we need after two stressfull days spent dealing with the chaos generated by our server giving up on us. If you go to the show, please DEMAND the rabbit ears, they are like part of the package at this point.
You listened to them, you love them, then you submitted them — here are The Deli LA’s top 5 contenders in our Open Contest, now eligible to be on our Best of 2009 poll! Congrats to Light FM, Mississippi Man, My Imaginary Friends, Spindrift, and Warpaint. Come back tomorrow to start voting for the best LA artists of 2009 in our massive poll put together by bloggers, industry heads, DJs, print journalists and, of course, you. Good luck to all participating artists and thanks to everyone in the community who’s helped put this behemoth poll together for the third year in a row!