See Moir Music: Early December
Where I’ll Be
Thu 12/5 — Franc Moody at Rickshaw Stop (sold out)
First heard of him thanks to his remix of Amber Mark’s track Lose My Cool, dug a little deeper into their tracks and it’s a good soulful groovy time.
Thu 12/19 — SebastiAn at GAMH
Last saw him play after Justice at NYE at the Armory as 2016 turned into 2017. Worth staying up til 3am for, looking forward to seeing him in a smaller space.
Fri 12/20 — Tourist at Mezzanine
Seeing Tourist live might be the theme of 2019. Spoiled by the fact that he’ll make 3 appearances in SF this year. I barely knew who he was before this year, and now here we are. Matthew Dear is cool too.
Mon 12/30 — Deadmau5 at Billy G (sold out)
I’ve never seen Deadmau5 live but I did correctly identify his song Strobe at music trivia once so that feels like a good fan benchmark to justify going to this. Qrion and Justin Martin are opening, very excited about that.
Tue 12/31 — Bonobo and friends at The Midway
Who else will be there?! Only time will tell. I figured cheap NYE plans aren’t always easy to come by, and this seemed like it would be fun. Still waiting to see who will join him…
Conflicts and considerations
Fri 12/6 — Phantogram at Mezzanine
Huge get for a small spot, nice to see them touring after their cancelled tour with Bob Moses. I had tickets to the show they had with Bob Moses but not feeling super inclined to see them on their own. Was fun to listen to them awhile back on Song Exploder.
Sat 12/7 — Angel Olsen at Fox Theater
I’ve only ever listened to Shut Up Kiss Me but it’s so good okay.
Sat 12/7 — Viceroy at Audio
Fun beach disco vibes, but I have conflicting plans. Missed him last time he was in town too, maybe it’s just not meant to be!
Fri 12/20 — Chromeo, Justin Jay, and Juan MacLean at 1015 Folsom
Missed Justin Jay when he was in town this past summer, and saw Chromeo at the Fox within the last year or so, but would’ve been cool to catch them DJing. Their live set was almost too kitschy for me.
12/26 — Poolside at The Fillmore
Kinda wish I’d gotten tickets to this just for the poster, but I don’t need to see them again. Was surprised they’re still touring until I realized they put out some more music.
12/27 — Flosstradamus at 1015 Folsom
Not my bag, but might be yours.
12/27 — Alice Glass DJ set at Public Works
$5 off tickets plus a chance to see the Crystal Castles powerhouse drop some sure-to-be great tracks? I won’t make it but maybe you will.
NYE shows
Wed 1/1 —
Do I want to do back to back shows possibly without sleeping? Not really. I’ll probably sleep instead of going to either of these shows, but I’m keeping an eye on the lineups… Phase 2 has been announced for both of them...
Fresh Start, featuring Claptone, Elax (from Boys Noize), Eli+Fur, Jeremy Olander, ++ at The Midway
It’s a New Day + Breakfast of Champions Block Party, featuring Rodriguez Jr, Groovewell, and a bunch of people I haven’t listened to at The Great Northern
Just Announced
Sun 1/19 — Leon Vynehall and Oona Dahl at 1015 Folsom
A friend posted this and I was enamored with the poster. Then I actually listened to Leon Vynehall and I was enamored with the music. Impulse $12 ticket purchase (that has since expired).
Fri 5/8 — Nicola Cruz at 1015 Folsom
One of those DJs that I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of but not sure I’ve actually heard.
1015 Folsom is having buy 1 get 1 half off tickets for Cyber Monday. Too late for me; I already bought all the tickets that make sense for me for their upcoming shows. I’ve been there a bunch of times in the last couple months and it’s been quite nice, actually.
Deep House Yoga is strangely tempting?
Other notes
Recent great releases
Ben Böhmer put out his debut album, Breathing. Still working my way through it.
This track dropped by The Blaze on Friday isn’t on Spotify but thank goodness for YouTube so you can enjoy the goodie-goodies too.
Shazamming while Dancing
Bloc Party was fun. LPX was a strange spectacle of an opener. Bloc Party played well and put on a fun show. Never expected to see a mosh pit at a Bloc Party show, that’s for sure. Glad I finally got to see them, and visit the Masonic for the first time.
Elderbrook was impressive. A live set from a music producer/DJ, with him just up there alone, singing and playing everything was unexpectedly great. Despite that, a small part of me still wished I’d gone to see Manchester Orchestra that night, just to get out some latent teenage anger.
The Blaze were a delight. Well worth getting home from my flight, changing, and heading directly back out to 1015 Folsom to groove to a night of dancing. 🔥
Catching Flies was odd. The opener, Yugi Boi, played to a near-deserted dancefloor for most of his set, remixing hip hop (I appreciated this Kelela remix). Catching Flies came out at 10:30 and played until 11:15. Turns out Frontier Airlines had lost some of his gear so he wasn’t sure how the night was gonna go. Fun set, but strange to walk away after less than 2 hours at the venue. Here’s as much of the setlist as I could grab (not sure what song he played first, but might’ve been Daymarks).
Read Moir Music
Catching Flies’ set inspired me to write more about software and music. Shazam at one point picked up one of his tracks as “G#/Ab Pad by Drone Pads”, which despite being on Spotify, is pretty clearly stock sounds that could be purchased or that come with a set of pads, like Ableton Push. Artists can use these default sounds live to keep a set flowing continuously, or use software to enhance a performance in other ways. Notably, Ólafur Arnalds composes and performs music with the aid of software-generated harmonies, specially crafted after nerve damage left him struggling to play the piano.
Beyond using software to play music live, artists are also using software to write their music. I’ve mentioned using software and default sounds to write music before (in early October and I’m sure I’ll bring them up again). Since then I read/watched this future of music feature on The Verge about how the producers behind Despacito made it. In it, Steve Martocci, the CEO of Splice, a sample marketplace (and more) mentions “software is the primary instrument” that artists are using to write music and get popular—without having to break into the industry itself.
What this means for artists is that they don’t necessarily need all the same connections and skills that they needed in the past to “make it big”. Andrés and Mauricio, the producers of Despacito, point out: “you can sit down with your guitar and start thinking about chords and all that or you can download something and you don’t even know what chords are they and it doesn’t matter, but you start singing to it.”
Amy X. Wang at Rolling Stone called it the “ease-of-access revolution” in her article about Garageband, also pointing out that the simplicity with which someone can make a song these days “is as discomforting as it is amazing, in some ways.”
I’m carefully pointing out that the proliferation of software in music creation means that the same skills aren’t needed as before, but of course new skills are. Much like the rise of the self-checkout means that we’re now scanning and bagging our own groceries, software-based music creation and production lets artists skip studios and record labels before making it big, but they then must take on the promotion and audience-ready quality assessments all on their own.
Indeed, the easier it is to make music, it’s likely that there are more artists making music than ever before (if anyone has an article about whether or not this is true, let me know). With more music available to us (thanks to software on so many levels), breaking through to a listening audience becomes a tougher signal-to-noise problem for artists. Some journalists say that streaming and competition for limited ear holes is even making songs shorter, while Jeff Ihaza at The Outline credits not just the distribution mechanism and the audience, but also the creation methods for the reduced length of tracks.
To make it even more obvious how easy it is to make music with software, Ableton has a tutorial site for making music, and Beepbox (via Navneet Alang) is an easy-to-use interface for composing brief snippets of music. I also clicked on a youtube ad to bring you the information that you can buy a Masterclass online course and learn electronic music production from deadmau5. So there’s that.
The next level of software-based music composition is probably something like what Burial, a well-known electronic and ambient artist, did by using the software SoundForge to compose his album “Untrue” using waveforms. All-in commitment to software. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here trying to keep straight lines straight with diagramming software.