See Moir Music: October 2024
Trying to send one every month, continuing to resist the urge to provide exhaustive show updates...
Quick recap on the last few shows...
Saturday, September 14 — Oppidan at a ~ Secret Underground Location ~
- I ended up skipping this set! I often buy tickets to shows hoping that I'll have the energy to go (or that I'll convince one or more folks to go with me) but when the day arrives, I'd rather preserve my weekend routine than go out.
Thursday, September 26 — Joy Orbison, Skream, Bambii, and others for Boiler Room at SVN West
- This show was really fun! It was my first time at SVN West and I always love exploring a new spot. Felt like a cross between the Midway (lots of places to explore) and Bill Graham (cavernous) with the sweatiness of Gray Area. Maybe it's in the contract for Boiler Room that the venue needs to be as hot as possible. My body gave out on me due to the heat and a lingering injury, so I skipped out toward the end of Joy O's set, but Soft Launch, Bambii, and Joy all had excellent sets. Excited for the playback.
Saturday, September 28 & Sunday September 29 — Portola Music Festival
- Review down below!
Sunday, September 29 — Disclosure, DJ Heartstring, Mall Grab, Interplanetary Criminal at the Midway
- After the Boiler Room set I opted to sell my ticket to this afters... a killer lineup, but not one that my body would have been in good enough shape to appreciate. Alas. If you went, plz send me your favorite IDs!
What's next for me?
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Friday, October 25 — CRi (dj set) at ~ Secret Undergound Location ~
- Low key Miracles was one of my favorite albums last year.
- Thursday, October 31 — SWIM at Monarch
- I feel like I manifested this set, super psyched.
- Tuesday, November 12 — Caribou at the Fox Theater
- Psyched to do it again.
- Thursday, November 14 — Ketboi69 (Kettama b2b Partiboi69) at 1015 Folsom
- Hoping I keep my energy up to make it to this!
Other shows going on
What I'm not going to, but might if I had unlimited energy...
October
- Wednesday, October 2 — Lauv at Greek Theatre
- Friday, October 4 — Jyoty at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, October 4 — Hot Chip (DJ set) at ~ Secret Underground Location ~
- Friday, October 4 — Yolanda Be Cool at Halcyon
- Friday, October 4 — Novo Amor at the Regency Ballroom
- Saturday, October 5 — Duskus at Monarch
- Saturday, October 5 — Eelke Kleijn and Goldcap at Public Works
- Saturday, October 5 — Deadmau5 block party + TESTPILOT after party at the Midway
- Sunday, October 6 — Griff at the Regency Ballroom
- Thursday, October 10 — Sam Binga at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, October 11 — salute at the Regency Ballroom
- Friday, October 11 — Mark Knight at Audio
- Friday, October 11 — DJ Stingray (Club Called Rhonda x squish) at Great Northern
- Saturday, October 12 — TIBASKO (Garage Access) at Monarch
- Saturday, October 12 — Rival Consoles at Gray Area
- Friday, October 18 — A-Trak at Public Works
- Saturday, October 19 — Rinzen (open to close) at Audio
- Sunday, October 20 — Thundercat in the Robin Williams Meadow in GG Park
- Thursday, October 24 — dj poolboi, sunflwr, dj houseplants at Public Works
- Saturday, October 26 — Monolink in Golden Gate Park
November
- Friday, November 1 — Maceo Plex at SVN West
- Friday, November 1 — HAAi, Farsight, Adra b2b Max Gardner, and others at Public Works
- Saturday, November 2 — Yung Bae at Monarch
- Friday, November 8 — Skin on Skin at the Regency Ballroom
- Friday, November 8 — Prospa at Public Works
- Friday, November 8 — Reptant x Adam Pits (squish x Vitamin 1K) at F8
- Friday, November 8 — Sofi Tukker at Billy G
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Saturday, November 9 — Hayden James, Laurence Guy, and Kormak at the Midway
- I wish I could go to this just to see Laurence Guy.
- Saturday, November 16 — Orbital at the Midway
- Friday, November 22 — Nero at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, November 22 — Session Victim at Public Works
- Friday, November 22 — Max Cooper (3D/AV Live) at the Midway
- Saturday, November 23 — Will Clarke at Public Works
- Saturday, November 30 — Defected World Tour (Dennis Ferrer, Eats Everything, and more) at the Midway
December
- Saturday, December 7 — Sammy Virji at Cow Palace
- Friday, December 13 — Sébastien Léger at Madarae
- Friday, December 20 — MK at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, December 27 & Saturday, December 28 — Flight Facilities at Regency Ballroom, with Sofia Kourtesis joining for Saturday's show.
The distant future
Some of these shows are so far off it feels like they're sending a save the date to a wedding...
- Saturday, January 25 — Jamie xx at Cow Palace
- Tuesday, February 4 — The Vaccines at the Fillmore
- Saturday, February 15 — Hessle Audio at Great Northern
- 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
Saturday, October 19 — KQED fest with lots of live podcasts, pop-up performances, live music, food and more!
Saturday October 19 — Shipwreck Week Lands End History Walk with the Western Neighborhoods Project
Litquake starts Thursday, October 10th...these panels sound great:
- Saturday, October 12 — Irregular Feedback: Writers on Music
- Saturday, October 12 — SF Neo-Futurists Present: The Infinite Wrench, Litquake Edition (for the comedy fans)
- Wednesday, October 16 — KQED Forum presents I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
- Friday, October 18 — Alta Presents the California Book Club
- Saturday, October 19 — Poetry World Series: Litquake Edition (this comes highly recommended from a friend who has attended in past years!)
- Monday, October 21 — SWOLE: The Meaning of Muscle Panel + Party
- Saturday, October 26 — LitCrawl!
Music lately
You can always follow me on bandcamp to see what I've bought lately...
Jamie xx released his new album, In Waves, which is pretty good. This time around his style of mixing and producing more disjointed, evolutionary songs didn't quite work for me. It has all the glossy production value of Beyonce's electronic music album, and the guests, but the tracks felt more like a collection of disparate experiences rather than a cohesive narrative. Maybe that's just life now. There were a bunch of fun tracks but nothing that really made me go "whoa", especially given that nearly half the album was released as singles.
I enjoyed most of TSHA's album Sad Girl but haven't listened to it much. Currently waiting for the new Caribou album, Cameo Blush EP, and Marlon Hoffstadt's Daddycation.
Last week I mentioned YTP's track Move Ya Body and Nothing's Perfect by Once Twice, but other contenders for song of the year are Club Angel's track Cry, Silva Bumpa's When I'm With You, and Upper90 with I am Ready.
Other notes
I saw a documentary film "Bleedin Audio" on the pop-punk band The Matches, which the Roxie was showing before their sold out show at the Fillmore that night. It followed the arc of the band, but also included a big reveal—namely that the band had put out 3 albums but as of 2008 (after all the albums had been released) only 4 tracks had been registered with BMI, a publishing rights organization. (If you don't know much about music royalties, read this Congressional Research Service report). That means that despite being songwriters who had retained their publishing rights, they were only making money on radio play of 4 tracks out of 39+ — and those royalties can't be retrieved after the fact.
I'd bet that nowadays, with streaming services and digital distribution, this is actually automated. The dominance that Spotify and streaming services have over the music industry is so pervasive that it's almost hard to remember the days where I was discovering music primarily by listening to the radio and reading music blogs. Algorithmic discovery took over for awhile, but nowadays I'm maybe back to something closer than where I was at before.
Discovering tracks at DJ sets by shazamming or tracking down IDs with the help of online communities (like the 👑youtube commenters that post tracklists), then exploring the artists of those tracks further on streaming services like Spotify, SoundCloud, and YouTube. I also discover music from friends and folks in online communities (like the Cloudcore Discord), discovering more and more new-to-me music.
I'm trying to build a strong bandcamp-to-offline-listening pipeline, letting me spend more time sitting with the music I buy rather than falling fully into the "discover → like → discover" pipeline that I described in 2019. Maybe it's time to write a new blog post...
Portola recap
Y'all I'm not built for festivals with more than two stages. Logistics stress me out, I want to see everyone, I don't like huge crowds of people. There's too much to optimize but none of it can be done well and I can get overwhelmed and fail to lose myself in the moment.
My biggest takeaways from this Portola are that my efforts to prioritize comfort over style were not enough (compression socks, anyone?) and that the crew matters more than the performers. I spent both evenings alone — Saturday I lost my crew after Jamie xx and Sunday I lost it halfway through Sammy Virji. I chose to stick to my music itinerary instead of following the people, and never caught back up.
All that said, it's nice to see the fest getting fleshed out in terms of a theme and art pieces... we've come a long way since the days of solo disco chicken. Shoutout to the medical tent for making it easy to pick up some spare tylenol, and security for never opening any bags so I got to eat fresh fruit as snacks (you smuggle in alcohol, I smuggle in apples and bananas; we are not the same).
You might notice Mall Grab is missing from this list despite my plans to see him, and that's because he was late to his set (stuck in a Waymo?) and I'd bounced to Joy Orbison's set before he came on. Maybe I should have abandoned the outskirts of the ship tent to go back to the warehouse to check it out, but I'd already seen him so I stuck with Joy O at the understaged location. Don't underestimate the fred effect on flight fm, I guess.
I wonder if birth4000 and flight fm came out much further apart if they'd both be smoking their way through sets? As it is, they were released 2 months apart; birth4000 before the holidays and flight fm after the holidays, and I feel like they maybe have pretty similar energy but flight fm is the one that is dominating. Maybe because it's bassier, maybe timing, maybe due to who was playing it out at the time. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks these songs are similar.
Disclosure's live set also blew me away because they had a LIVE BRASS BAND. Reminded me of MEUTE and also Odesza and their drumline. If you want to live it (or relive it), someone ripped the stream of their Primavera Sound set and it's basically the same (crowd commands included). It's always a bit odd to listen to a recorded set from a different festival and realize/be reminded that the artist is traveling from city to city, festival to festival, playing the same live set every time.
Indoor sound was always better than outdoor sound. Location was crucial and maybe I should've worn my 15dB filters instead of my 20dB in my earplugs, but I wanted everything to be so loud I felt wrecked by sound alone, and that simply did not happen except for nearly BICEP's set. Maybe I was too far back, but I don't feel like it's too much to ask for an electronic music festival. I guess they had to attempt to spare Alameda.
I drew this bad diagram to try to explain why I thought sound sounds better in a club. (relatedly, if you know of any great articles about how speakers are tuned for ideal sound in a club, please send them my way!)
That's all for now (and it's quite a bit).