See Moir Music: September 2024
Hello folks! It's been a year since I last appeared in your inboxes!
When I left off, I said "If anyone can tell me whether or not I like techno, please do let me know." Don't worry, I know the answer to that now.
Now that I'm back, here's a few notes:
- I'm now emailing you from Buttondown instead of Substack
- You can always reply to and forward my emails
- I plan to list fewer shows than I have in the past.
This newsletter got to the point where it felt like a chore to sift through my inbox and tell you about all the shows that were happening that I thought you could maybe consider going to. I'll still send you show recommendations, but the list will be less exhaustingly exhaustive.
What's next for me?
- Saturday, September 14 — Oppidan at a ~ Secret Underground Location ~
- Thursday, September 26 — Joy Orbison, Skream, Bambii, and others for Boiler Room at SVN West
- Saturday, September 28 & Sunday September 29 — Portola! My planned itinerary is below.
- Sunday, September 29 — Disclosure, DJ Heartstring, Mall Grab, Interplanetary Criminal at the Midway
- Friday, October 25 — CRi (dj set) at ~ Secret Undergound Location ~
- Tuesday, November 12 — Caribou at the Fox Theater
- Thursday, November 14 — Ketboi69 (Kettama b2b Partiboi69) at 1015 Folsom
Portola
Saturday:
Sunday:
Other shows going on
This is where I put any shows I'd recommend or am considering going to, but am not actually going to.
September
-
Saturday, September 14 & Sunday, September 15 — Soul Coughing at the Fillmore
- Fun fact I saw Mike Doughty at the Indy back in the day and would love to go to this show, but Saturday is sold out and Sunday shows are tough.
- Tuesday, September 17 — Two Door Cinema Club at the Masonic
- Friday, September 20 — I.Jordan at Public Works
- Friday, September 20 — Pendulum DJ set at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, September 27 — Soulwax and Marie Davidson at the Regency Ballroom
-
Friday, September 27 — 2manydjs at Audio
- Soulwax going b2b on Friday before they play Portola on Saturday, eesh
- Sunday, September 29 — Empress Of at the Chapel
- Sunday, September 29 — DJ Seinfeld at Monarch
October
- Friday, October 4 — Jyoty at 1015 Folsom
- Saturday, October 5 — Duskus at Monarch
- Saturday, October 5 — Eelke Kleijn and Goldcap at Public Works
- 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 18 — A-Trak at Public Works
- Saturday, October 19 — Rinzen (open to close) at Audio
November
- Saturday, November 2 — Yung Bae at Monarch
- Friday, November 8 — Skin on Skin at the Regency Ballroom
- Friday, November 8 — Prospa at Public Works
- Saturday, November 23 — Will Clarke at Public Works
- Friday, November 29 — TOKiMONSTA at the Fox Theater
The distant future
- Friday, December 20 — MK at 1015 Folsom
- Tuesday, February 4 — The Vaccines at the Fillmore
- Saturday, February 15 — Hessle Audio at Great Northern
It's too early to consider NYE events, but the pitch to go to NYE at 1015 is compellingly hilarious:
enjoy NYE in a nice warm club, indoors with friends and family
Other SF events
DJ Nina Sol is playing Rooftop Radio at SFMoMA on Thursday, September 12. The ticketing looks complicated but the event sounds fun!
Gray Area Festival details have been announced, running Thursday, September 12 – Sunday, September 15. I like going to the workshops, and the Critical Image Synthesis: Glitching the AI Imaginary and Introduction to Shaders and Practical Applications workshops both sound intriguing.
This has nothing to do with music, but the Roxie is showing movies on a boat now and I think that is hella cool.
Favorite music lately
You can always follow me on Bandcamp to find out the latest music I've decided to buy...
I've been let down by Instagram's music library so I feel compelled to share some Bandcamp-only (or less common on streaming) tracks here…
I reach for this track so often and it's not on streaming that I've found: YTP - Move Ya Body
Pop edits so good they might ruin the original for you:
Charli XCX - 360 (Tom VR edit)
Caroline Polachek - Pretty in Possible (Tom VR edit)
(And if you want more Charli edits, Baron Von Trax has you covered)
There's a reason I diligently Shazam tracks I enjoy at DJ sets and it's so that I can discover bangers like these: [HONEY/OLD SKOOL by Arma
I've been digging the hell out of SWIM's live sets on YouTube lately, and his HÖR set had a lot of unreleased bangers.
Lucky for me, he's just started releasing the IDs he's been playing out for awhile San Francisco set when tho?
Sometimes tho the tracks aren't actually unreleased and they're just ripped from DJ sets and I can only live off the bootleg until and if an approved remix gets released...
Narciss' version of Painkiller by Armand van Helden vs Butter Rush is that for me (for now). Catch it as the opener in Malugi's Boiler Room set...
I discovered TC4 in another Shazam session (Sammy Virji's set at 1015) and they go for volume (as in quantity), with the occasional banger thrown in. Their discography was cheap so I went all in. Joy dub and Hurt you are standout tracks.
NOTION was in town earlier this year supporting Hamdi and I couldn't summon up the energy to make it out, but if I had I would've begged him to play his track MS DY-NA-MI-TEE DUB.
Another track of unknown origin, almost certainly another DJ set ID, but gosh what a banger: Nothing's Perfect by Once Twice.
Prozak's track Hotsteppa deserves to be in some TikTok dance videos or something.
And now for the truly epic mashups, PSY JUST CANT GET U OUTTA MY HED and TAKE ME 2 MY (B)E(ACH) are catchier bangers than they have any right to be. You might start listening and go "what the fuck" and then you will keep listening and then it will stick in your brain and then you will join me on this (B)E(ACH) of chaos.
Other notes
I saw the film Eno last week, about Brian Eno, featuring algorithmically ordered and selected vignettes. It's interesting to hear his perspectives on art, music, and sound (and beetles) and even more incredible to watch brilliant musicians like Bono or David Bowie work in the studio.
I couldn't get into the Beatles studio sessions that Peter Jackson directed for Apple TV, but I'd like some studio sessions for U2 and other bands please.
I've also been more on top of planning for my annual "Spotify vs Last.fm" comparison post that I make around Spotify Wrapped every year, and while I have some dreams of more data analysis using the Spotify API, in the meantime I wanted to share the absolute chaos that is my top 10 artists, tracks, and albums so far this year.
I mean.
I am aghast at myself. There's at least 5 completely different genres on this list. Let's see what Spotify says about the genre distribution:
TC4 is barely categorized:
[
"ukg revival"
]
Poor SWIM and DJ Heartstring are languishing as empty arrays. Please, someone teach Spotify what rave and techno are. I know I just learned, but still!
[]
Beyonce has basic genres — too big for the microgenre approach? Not necessary to boost her in obscure algorithmically generated playlists?
[
"pop",
"r&b"
]
Tourist proves hard to categorize, unsurprisingly:
[
"chillwave",
"future garage",
"indietronica",
"vapor soul"
]
Bicep is also vaguely hard to categorize, or perhaps undercategorized?
[
"ambient house",
"electronica"
]
The Chappell Roan hype has not quite caught up with her genre definitions, or maybe it has, given the Gen-Z-level of a genre called "pov: indie":
[
"indie pop",
"pov: indie"
]
I suppose maybe perhaps some Bombay Bicycle Club songs could be categorized as "shimmer pop"? Maybe the one they did with Chaka Khan...
[
"british indie rock",
"chamber pop",
"indie rock",
"indietronica",
"modern rock",
"shimmer pop"
]
What did triple j do to you, Spotify? If you didn't know, now you know, Mall Grab is Australian:
[
"aussietronica",
"australian house",
"lo-fi house"
]
Charli XCX writes one song about an apple, is "candy pop" now...
[
"art pop",
"candy pop",
"metropopolis",
"pop",
"uk pop"
]
The top 10 songs are even more chaotic tho!
This tells me a few things... I did a lot of "listen to a full album multiple times to decide if I liked it" and then if I liked it, I bought it and listened to it a lot.
I got into Chappell Roan by watching this live set of her Bonnaroo performance that someone ripped from the livestream and posted on YouTube.
I dated a guy many years ago that said his favorite way to listen to music was by listening to or watching concert recordings that were posted on YouTube, and I thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard in my life. And now here I am, many years later, doing just that. Sorry for judging you, dude.
I also have no idea how I've listened to that Bicep track so many times, I'm not even sure I could pick it out from a list.
This year I did a chaotic thing of "put a bunch of tracks I like in a playlist and keep adding to it" instead of making a new one every month or so like usual, so I might have more intensity of track listens than usual this year. We'll see!
Finally, the even more chaotic evidence: the top 10 albums so far:
Some takeaways here:
- Beyonce's country album up there killing it.
- SWIM's album might overtake it by the end of the year, we'll see.
- Tourist's first album in a few years holding strong.
- Chappell's actual album attempting to hold off the popularity of her Bonnaroo set.
- My attempt to discern if the latest Taylor Swift album would be something I'd like, and the answer is a firm no despite my attempts of listening (I'll have to pull up the sparkline for that one).
- DJ Poolboi is also ending up in the "do I actually like these tracks?" evaluation territory, boosted by the fact that I purchased that album because I like a few of the tracks, but I can't quite remember which.
- DJ Heartstring breaking into the album chart with a three song EP.
- salute's album probably deserves a revisit— I enjoyed it but not as obsessively as SWIM's album.
- Novo Amor's latest was enjoyable but tough to fit in with the Hot Vibes of the rest of this list tbh.
- Tinashe's album is a late addition (as of like, a week ago? a few days ago?) but with short songs it's easy to break onto this list. I bought it because it's that good, but Apple Music keeps playing the tracks out of order for some reason. Sad.
Who knew I'd become such an album listener?! Oh how the turntables have turned.
Anyway, this has been a long one, this is not typical, welcome back (or hello, if you’re new here)!