See Moir Music: December 2024
Welcome to December, I can't believe we're already here.
Quick recap
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Tuesday, November 12 — Caribou at the Fox Theater
- Psyched to do it again. Their set was fantastic, as expected. If you have envy, their Boiler Room set provided decent next day nostalgia.
- Thursday, November 14 — Ketboi69 (Kettama b2b Partiboi69) at 1015 Folsom
- I did not, in fact, keep my energy up to make it to this. I ended up only being home for 5 days in between planned trips so this did not make the cut, especially 2 days after Caribou. More concert-time DJ sets plz (Logic1000 in her latest therapy mail newsletter agrees)
What's next for me?
- A lil break until DJ Seinfeld and Jasper Tygner in January and NOTION in February. December/January is often pretty quiet for shows, aside from NYE…
Other shows going on
What I'm not going to, but might if I had unlimited energy…
December
- Saturday, December 7 — Sammy Virji at Cow Palace
- Saturday, December 7 — AceMo at Monarch
- Friday, December 13 — Sébastien Léger at Madarae
- Friday, December 13 — TAAHLIAH + Maara + OK Williams (squish) at Club Six
- Friday, December 13 — Rochelle Jordan with Sango at Regency Ballroom
- Thursday, December 19 — The Faint (DJ set) (for Popscene) at Rickshaw Stop
- Friday, December 20 — MK at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, December 27 — The Mix Up at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, December 27 & Saturday, December 28 — Flight Facilities at Regency Ballroom, with Sofia Kourtesis joining for Saturday's show.
- Saturday, December 28 — Chromeo (day party DJ set) at Audio
NYE/NYD
- My NYE/NYD recommendation is for It's A New Day + Breakfast Of Champions Block Party 2025 at the Great Northern, with the best lineup of local (and other) talent on the bill.
- Fresh Start at the Midway has bigger names announced (like usual) but they're familiar ones too.
- You could also check out Sacha Robotti at Halcyon if you want an acid house new year.
January
- Friday, January 10 — SIDEPIECE at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, January 17 — DJ Seinfeld, Jasper Tygner, DJ Dials at the Regency Ballroom
- Saturday, January 18 — Qrion at Audio
- Saturday, January 25 — Jamie xx at Cow Palace
February
- Tuesday, February 4 — The Vaccines at the Fillmore
- Friday, February 7 — NOTION at 1015 Folsom
- Saturday, February 15 — Hessle Audio at Great Northern
- Thursday, February 20 – Sunday, March 2 — Noise Pop Fest featuring American Football, Soccer Mommy, Parra for Cuva, Geographer, and more TBA
- Saturday, February 23 — Folamour at Audio
- Wednesday, February 26 — Phantogram at the Masonic
The distant future
Some of these shows are so far off it feels like they're sending a save the date to a wedding…
- Tuesday, March 4 — Confidence Man at the Regency Ballroom
- Saturday, March 8 — Lane 8 at Cow Palace
- Saturday, April 26 — Barry Can't Swim (Live) at the Warfield
- Sunday, April 27 — Barry Can't Swim (Live) at the Fox Theater
Other SF events
- Wednesday, December 4 — Refusing Silicon Valley public talk by Shaping SF at 518 Valencia.
- Thursday, December 5 — Rebecca Black will be DJing at downtown first thursdays.
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Thursday, December 5 — Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird at the Roxie Theater
- Documentary profile of Omar and Cedric of At the Drive In and the Mars Volta fame.
- Thursday, December 5 — Downtown SF Neon Walking Tour
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Thursday, December 5 & Friday, December 6 & Saturday, December 7 & Tuesday, December 10 — Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat at the Roxie Theater
"United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup."
- Sunday, December 8 — Letterform Archive are hosting a Rare Book Sale.
- Monday, December 9 — Salad Days: A Decade Of Punk In Washington, DC (1980-90) at the Roxie Theater
- Monday, December 9 & Tuesday, December 10 — LOST LANDSCAPES 02024 Streets, People and Play: The Drama of Daily Life at the Herbst Theatre
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Thursday, December 12 & Friday, December 13 & Saturday, December 14 & Sunday, December 15 — Daft Punk & Leiji Matsumoto: Interstella 5555 at the Roxie Theater
"Originally released in May 2003, Daft Punk & Leiji Matsumoto’s Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem was written by Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Cédric Hervet, directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi and supervised by the legendary Leiji Matsumoto."
- Saturday, December 14 — Chinatown SF Neon Walking Tour
Music lately
You can always follow me on bandcamp to see what I've bought lately…
Some great releases that I'd been waiting on came out:
- DJ Heartstring & SWIM - Alone Again
- Malugi - Knees Break
- Soul Mass Transit System - GSC003 (EP)
- Silva Bumpa - Automatic
Some other finds that I'm still going "wow" about:
- Jeigo - Fig (EP) — I'd never heard of this artist and gave this EP a listen and wow I love it?!
- Fatima Yamaha - What's A Girl To Do (IsGwan Edit)
- Tom VR - You're Making My Teeth Grow Longer (EP)
- Otik - Miracles (EP)
- Bushbaby - Roll to the Rhythm (EP)
I didn't like salute & Jessie Ware's track Heaven in Your Arms much at first but it really grew on me.
I got really into listening to U2's album Joshua Tree and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours over the past month. Something about early November made listening to "Running to Stand Still" on repeat really hit. Last night I had a brief deep dive into brass bands, listening to some of my favorite MEUTE tracks and digging into incredibly talented saxophonist Leo P (this won't last, but boy howdy are brass musicians talented).
Other notes
I've been writing up a post about my evolving music discovery pipeline and it's almost ready. A sneak preview:
Spotify Wrapped is likely to drop very soon (this week) if it's on track with previous years. I'll be writing and publishing a blog post comparing my music listening habits year-to-date to Spotify Wrapped, so stay tuned! (I do this every year).
For those of you with Apple Music, Apple Music Replay already dropped, and SoundCloud also dropped their Playback (feel free to check out my playback for 2024).
The oddest part of SoundCloud's Playback was the moods section, mostly because one of mine is "Quirky". Unfortunately they're not giving out API keys so I've never been able to dig deeper into their API to discover much about how they label their music metadata. A short summary of interesting things from my SoundCloud playback...
My top 5 moods and associated minutes listened were:
- Energetic, with 4625 minutes listened
- Powerful, with 489 minutes listened
- Relaxed, with 500 minutes listened
- Quirky, with 223 minutes listened
- Exciting, with 218 minutes listened
Here you can see some of the cracks in the calculations. It's likely that this is a sum of track durations, rather than literal time spent listening (but maybe I'm wrong! I'm curious what level of user session details SoundCloud keeps and is reusing here) based on the fact that the third-most-listened-to mood has more minutes than the second-most-listened-to mood.
I haven't dug very deep into the SoundCloud metadata history so I'm not sure how they derive their mood-based tagging either, but it's probably similar to the other digital service/streaming providers (DSPs). I'd speculate that they use a combination of track comments, tags, and playlist titles, as well as quantitative metadata like bpm, if available. Given the nature of the music uploaded to SoundCloud (lots of DJ sets and remixes), I wonder how different the metadatasets that they derive might or might not be from Spotify and the like. (I did a deep dive into metadatasets that Pandora and Spotify derive as part of this blog post).
As I was writing this I also listened to this sample breakdown video in the background and wow, the full painting with sounds from other tracks is impressive. Is using samples from Splice or something instead a sad shortcut? I don't think so, but damn there is something about reusing snippets from another song that feels like another level.
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