Max Diez

Join Sex 14s on Wednesday, October 9th at 1pm when he speaks with acclaimed violinist and composer, Jenny Scheinman.

Scheinman will be playing multiple nights (October 10th, 11th, and 12th) at Mr. Tipples in SF. All ages are welcome.

For years, Scheinman nursed the idea of a musical homage to Humboldt, in particular the area known as the Lost Coast, a remote, earthquake- and mudslide-prone region of coastal northern California, where she was raised. She considered the project from many angles. She wrote a song cycle based on the “crusty characters” from her hometown and sketched out a surrealist multimedia project based on the county’s namesake, Alexander Von Humboldt.

She collaborated with filmmaker Ai Aiwane on a video installation about the Mattole River (Cojo Come Home) and immersed herself in the sounds and cultural history of the region, with hopes of conjuring, in music, the extraordinary diversity of life, past and present, in the Pacific Northwest. Her epic new release, All Species Parade, is the result of these meditations.

The all-original program is brought to life over the course of a double album, by pianist Carmen Staaf, guitar icons Bill Frisell, Nels Cline and Julian Lage, and the revered rhythm team of bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen. It was recorded by Eli Crews at The Bunker in Brooklyn, NY and mixed by Grammy Award-nominated engineer Tucker Martine and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.

Photo: Kory Thibeault

Canadian musician, author, producer, and composer, Alex Henry Foster, is headed to Oakland on October 11th to play The New Parish.  Figureskater recently spent some time with Foster to discuss his latest album, A Measure of Shapes and Sounds, and learn more about what we can expect with his upcoming live show.

Tune in on Tuesday, October 8th at 9pm to hear the interview.

A Measure of Shape and Sounds, is an intimate journey of its own, representing a profound personal breathe-in made of several layers of guitar loops, reverberations, resonances, and oscillations juxtaposed together to create a sonic multi-directional contemplative maelstrom. Purposely recorded live to capture as direct a flow as possible, the songs embodied at that exact moment carried their human disposition not only to abandon oneself to the motion but to become one with it.

Instrumental by choice and minimalist by design, it was capital for Foster that A Measure of Shape and Sounds stood as its own living organism, not as a faire-valoir or add-on to the growing entity that Voyage à la Mer was becoming.

Formerly the frontman for Juno Awards nominee Your Favorite Enemies, Alex Henry Foster released his first solo album Windows in the Sky in 2018. The album is a “dreamy blast of post-rock” (NME) that “brings to mind artists like Hammock and Asche & Spencer with heaping helpings of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky”. His second album consists of a live reinterpretation of his solo material, recorded at a sold-out performance at the 40th Festival de Jazz de Montreal.

Velvet Einstein recently sat down with Grammy-winning producer, Ian Brennan, to discuss Ian’s most recent book Missing Music: Voices From Where the Dirt Roads End, recording Our Ancestors Swam to Shore, the importance of capturing unique voices around the world, and the dangers of the streaming world.

Tune in on Tuesday, October 8th at 11:30am to hear Dokkaebi’s recent conversation with trop-pop outfit, Summer Salt, ahead of their upcoming show at The Fillmore in SF on October 9th.

Formed around the duo of singer/guitarist Matthew Terry and drummer, multi-instrumentalist Eugene Chung, Summer Salt recently released their fifth LP, Electrolytes, produced by Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, Ziggy Marley, The Linda Lindas).

Electrolytes follows 2023’s Campanita, the band’s breezy, blissful, and intimate monument to love, family, and everything in between. Electrolytes is another bold step forward in Summer Salt’s skyward career arc, marking the band’s first LP created with touring members Winston Triolo and Anthony Barnett. This all began a decade ago, when Chung and Terry moved to Austin to start on this journey, and years of hard work and an increasingly dedicated cult fan community have combined to bring Summer Salt to this moment.

The new record is packed with short, to-the-point pop goodness. Crackling with presence and confidence, the 7 tracks sway and stroll through different moods and expressions. While so much of our time and energy is spent wondering how to achieve happiness and find our perfect place, Electrolytes suggests that maybe we’re already living in it. “Electrolytes is an admiration of our lives, as-is,” say Terry and Chung. “Each song is a theme in our adult lives and how we navigate the realness of it these days, just trying to be our best.”

 

On Saturday, October 5th at 4:15pm, Frontal Lobe will host a live conversation with Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada ahead of his 8pm performance later that night at San Francisco’s The Lab.

Originally from New York, as a young person Wada was steeped in experimental music and art by virtue of his father Yoshi Wada’s connection to and participation in the interdisciplinary Fluxus ethos of creation. Wada often utilizes alternative, intentionally-wrought tuning schemas in his work, and his projects frequently culminate in collaboration with other artists. He also helms the Saltern label, distributing new pressings and re-releases of visionary, often abstract projects from around the world.

What Is Not Strange? (Plancha, 2024) is the first full-length solo album by Wada, comprising his most far-reaching and impassioned music to date, recorded with Julia Holter, Ezra Buchla, and Corey Fogel. Created over a four-year period that encompassed the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, the album sees Wada reflecting inward to explore broad narratives—being alive, mortality, finding one’s place in the world—through new modes of ecstatic, song-based expression.

Some of Wada’s previous works include FRKWYS Vol. 14 – Nue ( RVNG, 2018), The Duets  (Saltern, 2014), Alignment (Yik Yak, 2010) and Gradient 7″ (De Stijl, 2012).