I Told Them to Get Louder with My Hands

This spring, no less than four new Bay Area publications launched or went public. This fresh crop of digital magazines, literary outfits, and subscription sites is a welcome development, but what explains the flood? Maybe writers are feeling buoyed by the sustained success of other local co-ops and the long tail of the newsletter boom. Maybe, amidst the unabating global and national horrors, some alt weekly-style color provides a reassuring grasp of the struggles close to home. Maybe the total collapse of outbound traffic from search and social platforms dispels any illusions about metrics, the only imperative left being fuck it, we ball.

The pub I’m partial to is Bay Area Current, operated by the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America chapter I joined in the similarly dark days of November 2016. It’s free to read but highly deserving of your hard-earned subscription dollar – I’ve enjoyed their coverage of local labor strikes, civic rot, and Bay-specific vibe checks.

I pitched the Current on a sorely-needed profile of the Free Key Choir, the hottest ticket in Oakland for the last three years. Composed of trained vocalists, indie scene players, and outright non-musicians, the choir performs original songs written by the members, often adaptations of the bedroom folk, dancefloor pop, ambient jazz, and baggy pants emo they perform in local DIY projects. The Free Key ranks have included roughly two dozen friends of mine, but any homer favoritism is outmatched by time, age, and disposition – no amount of social obligation will get me to a second gig if I don’t like the project. I’ve seen the choir perform no less than five times because it is spectacular: each season's programming is richly arranged, balancing familiar choral forms with ambitious and abstract techniques. The sold out churches indicate it’s clearly making devotees of people otherwise inclined to assume choirs are lame.

The piece praises Free Key on these merits, but I also wrote it with the greater hope that the choir might inspire others as a viable new formation. Spotify stock trades for nearly ten times the value it did in 2023 and pays independent artists the same penny fraction per stream. Whatever pitiful federal arts dollars were doled out to grant winners have been reallocated to goon squads and crypto reserves. Moving forward, we’re going to need grassroots cultural institutions with greater fortitude, as well as methods of discovery and canon-shaping outside the algorithm. I see a meaningful and necessary escalation in this amateur project that unites people not just through creative affinity, but pooled resources and shared stakes. More than one person I interviewed said the rewards of casual DIY scene participation were unsatisfying compared to those of singing in the choir, which felt like a heightened creative and social incubator. In an era when creative independence often manifests as atomization, old devotional mass practices present a new utility: instead of one lone singer trying fruitlessly to hit the jackpot of platform capital, we might instead gather 100 voices toward very different ends.

Pleased to report that Waves & Gazes went neglected for nice reasons: I got a job in the communications department of a labor union which has me busy doing things, some of which bring grounding solace. My position itself is represented by a staff union, and said position’s excellent union CBA meant I finally had the means to move in with my girlfriend and actually think about what should go in my apartment besides ground scores and punk house hand-me-downs.

But I did make it to some shows, so here’s the notebook.

billy woods & Kenny Segal, Cavalier @ Neck of the Woods (Sept 26, 2024)

billy woods, Quelle Chris @ Neck of the Woods (June 1, 2025)

Cav has become a sleeper hit for me, but the fact is I underestimated him. There are times when I hear craftsmanship before content, and because he rides such measured and melodically concise flows (never taking curtain calls or over-selling his load-bearing bars), I had totally missed the second- and third-order cleverness of his pen. I should have known he punches way above his weight since he’s been brought to town as an opener for several top-shelf stylists, but his even-keeled traditionalism was easy to nod along to without truly reading. Those sets also had a deferential quality–not at all an appeasing desperation, but a sense of looking up at the audience in making his case. All that mileage has paid dividends: he came through this time with hard-won assurance, complete stage ownership and mad jokes–and I was finally ready to appreciate it.

Kenny Segal’s production vocabulary is very similar to other producers in the jazz-reverent L.A. beat scene–why do these common elements (vibey vibraphone, wheezing synth, submerged piano) sound so much better in his hands? Among other things, I credit first his unwavering faith in his drums, once said to sound like dropping desks. In an otherwise spacious and simple beat, he will employ just a single crooked instance of ankle-breaking Dilla swing that does all the work establishing a bountiful pocket and easing the demands on the instruments. He also finesses some pretty aggressive drum hits in an independent rap lane so devoted to subtlety and the sonic opposite of glossy mainstream excess that it often foregoes drums entirely. 

He and woods were touring the five-year anniversary of their masterful Hiding Places–the album featuring at least three of woods’ crown jewel scream-along rhymes–as well as their newest collab, the widely-lauded travelogue Maps. In essence, it was a double victory lap. woods was unrepentant in delivering an 80-minute I-told-them-so riot act; Segal’s mile-wide guitar riffs and lab-perfected distortion gave him enough tarmac to land a Lockheed.

Nine months later, five into a newly-emboldened MAGA regime, QC took the stage in a keffiyeh, readily acknowledging the world was weighing him down, in need of the battered hope of “Alive Ain’t Always Living” as much as anyone there. woods rolled up on the back foot long after soundcheck, saying his merch shipment didn’t arrive on time: “If you came here with the intention of flipping on eBay, I can save you the trouble.” He didn’t yet have his tour legs on this early date, utterly fumbling “Spongebob” which prompted him to go in twice as hard on “Remorseless”. He was supporting his sonically bleakest record yet, one that, most notably, samples a Golden-era Hollywood starlet repeatedly heaving with sobs; the new songs’ prolonged haze and hiss not yet calibrated for the stage, woods realized time was escaping him. “No more interludes!” he told DJ Mo Niklz. There was something strangely authentic (this busted word will have to do) about seeing a rough go from an artist with a catalog dedicated to metabolizing disappointment, everyday betrayal, and maddening geopolitical injustice. This is to say that all the disarray and disorientation felt apropos: it was the most poorly-executed woods show I’ve seen in four years and it just made me like him more.

Objekt, Breaka, Succubass @ f8 (Sept. 19, 2024)

Caught myself longing for the mid-2010s. I loved Objekt’s crafty dubstep singles from that period, but his set at Monument two years ago was unrelenting harsh noise wall techno and this time he was choogling some really pedestrian electro. That’s range though. Succubass gave me what I was after: mean-spirited leads, slinky subdivision, and rapacious percussion. At first I was a little vibed out by the DJ name but that was no matter; however, I clearly prefer to get haunted with high end rather than low.

f8 is my favorite San Francisco club and its side room is probably my favorite 300-square feet in the city. Barely any traffic at the bar, often a place to sit, and DJs free to take on a lighter load. I saw Club Chai do half a dozen headlining sets during the first Trump administration, but a blithe 10pm side room sesh before their come-up had the duo quick-swapping through a mix of bhangra, gqom, and Middle Eastern rhythms. Breaka held it down smooth with wonky dub shuffling at a sturdy lateral sway, no need to overheat. Wish I was there right now.

Earthling: Matt Robidoux, Slowfoam @ Golden Gate Park (Oct 19, 2024)

It’s inaugural event the promising subject of this blog’s inaugural post, the Earthling series has kept it simmering at Golden Gate Park on a biannual basis. The formula works: consistently strong cast of homegrown and international talent, afternoon picnic staging, devout nondenominational chillness. I was delighted by every vista and glitchy detour in Slowfoam’s electro-acoustic ambient terrain. Local wizard Matt Robidoux’s got the colorful melodic architecture of foodman or Lucky Dragons with a presentation on the playful side of noise acts like Id m Theft Able, his signature instruments being two metal casts of corn cobs used as touch synths. Joy abounds: the finale had Matt cuing up a big loop of siren arps, hopping through the grass in a Bowser-y half-shell vest of foam horns, and somehow pulling fuzzy Marshall stack bass notes from a thick rubber band. I didn’t make it to the spring installment but I do know that Sudi Wachspress was peer-pressured by his ensemble mates, in the middle of their relaxed ambient trio improvisation, to drop a nuclear “Damn son, where did you find this?” sample. Won’t have to wait long to see what’s next at the park.

ML Buch, Joshua Chuquimamani-Condori @ Grey Area (Dec. 13, 2024)

Hate to say it but Joshua C-C’s solo electric guitar work was a bummer: thick distortions and loopy leads that, while sometimes intriguingly shapeless, didn’t actually escape the confines of conventional “rock” gestures (Los Thuthanaka record whips though).

This sort of thing is harder than it looks, which made ML Buch’s photo-negative grunge all the more astounding. All her riffs are breezily open-ended, the songs initially about as concrete as a daydream, but live it’s clear how carefully structured they are in sweeping up after themselves. Many of the vacuum-sealed elements of Suntub were faithfully reproduced–her accompanist played an electronic drum set with the absolute chintziest 2003 Guitar Center presets–but took on incredible life once let out of the terrarium. At the center was Buch’s perfectly round voice; on record an uncanny spectre, but here I could actually see (and feel) the determination behind her phrases, her weighty absences. Like many users, I enjoy posting low-quality concert footage to my Instagram story, but shame compels me not to tag the artist. I had six people reply to my discolored clip of “High speed calm air tonight” demanding to know who this woman was.

Grey Area is so funny, the occasional solid show but largely programmed for a tech contingent I literally can’t interface with. When I saw Joshua’s sibling perform here last year, I was knobbing around the gallery space looking at some kinda bad video art of a sexy Ganesha glimmering in the wet polygons of a PS3 or contemporary Las Vegas slot machine, when a woman, clearly mesmerized, started talking to me at length in passionate non-linear clouds about how the piece invoked a “cosmic download”. Having no idea what she said or meant, I replied with a cautiously agreeable bit of prattle that began with “I would certainly hope…,” which she found totally fucking revelatory. Zero coherent information exchanged, I was stumped by our corrupted download and had to politely decline when she asked if I wanted to hit a bud outside.