In the mid-1980s I witnessed avant-garde saxophonist, instrumentalist and composer John Zorn literally clear a room at St. Mark’s Church in NY’s East Village during an annual New Year’s Day poetry/performance marathon. At the time, it was not surprising to be assaulted by Zorn’s confrontational, post-No Wave style: loads of honks and screeches produced from […]
Music
Coverage of the music scene in Humboldt County with upcoming shows from locals and out-of-town acts, reviews, interviews and more.
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Snoop Dogg/Stephen Marley
The first of two big summer shows at Eureka’s Redwood Acres Fairgrounds brought the much-anticipated return of Snoop Dogg to Humboldt County. This past Wednesday (probably two Wednesdays ago by the time you read this), our North Coast hip hop devotees donned their hippest duds and headed to the Fair. Stephen Marley shared the bill […]
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Dust on Vinyl
You won’t see NY-based DJ Jonathan Toubin carrying around crates of 12" singles or LPs to a gig. You won’t even see him scratch the needle back and forth. Toubin carries around 45s, 7" singles, nearly 150 of them to each gig. And for the past several years, Toubin has averaged over 25 DJ gigs […]
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Q+A with DJ Jonathan Toubin
How did you find that the format of using 45 RPM/7" records was your bag? Was it the genres of music (and the format limited to 45’s) that attracted you? Good question Mark. I’ve always loved the sound, feel, and look of 7" records, but I didn’t really become an exclusively 45 DJ until the […]
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Wilco (The Album)
Jeff Tweedy, bandleader and voice of Wilco, is a man for all seasons. Literally. After the split with Uncle Tupelo — in which the other songwriter, Jay Farrar, formed Son Volt — Tweedy has amassed an interesting catalog that spans from 1995, with the Wilco debut, AM. Wilco’s seventh studio release, Wilco (The Album), falls […]
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Afro-electronica
It was 1993 when I first interviewed Chris "Toosa" Berry in an Arcata garage where he was building the traditional Zimbabwean thumb pianos known as mbiras. He’d actually discovered the instrument while attending Humboldt State in the late ’80s. "The first time I heard the mbira was in the HSU Library," he told me in […]
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*Northern California Jesus Movement *
The pop music machine thrives on timeliness, which is a shame. With the glut of new records that comes out every week, by the time the wheat has been separated from the chaff it’s far too late in blog-years to start a conversation. Still, some older albums demand ink, and the series of albums released […]
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Bitte Orca
Brooklyn singer/songwriter David Longstreth is a deconstructionist. He gained a divisive reputation with his project/band Dirty Projectors and its 2007 release, Rise Above, a dismembering of songs from Black Flag’s Damaged. The rearranging of the originals was so extreme that it bordered on kitsch. But, from a laptop art school perspective, it was also very […]
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Reggae Dreaming
The core members of local reggae band Woven Roots live way out in the hills above Willow Creek on a pair of homesteads where there is no cell phone reception. Connecting meant scheduling a time when the band’s guitarist, Gueren, could get to a hotspot on Friday Ridge. Gueren discovered this remote area when he […]
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Delivrance
Former Neutral Milk Hotel drummer/percussionist Jeremy Barnes and his partner violinist/violist Heather Trost are true travelers, nomads. The duo, the core members of A Hawk and A Hacksaw, have carved out a circular route from their point of origin, Albuquerque, N.M., to Devon, England, and on to Budapest, Hungary. Yet this doesn’t seem to really […]
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Independence and Connections
It was July 4th, 2001, a typical New York summer day, hot, muggy and sticky. I was working at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, just south of Delancy Street, during the week. On my days off, I sometimes went down to the heart of the Financial District in the lower depths of Manhattan. Wall […]
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Humboldt Crabs vs. Fairfield Indians
The 2009 Humboldt Crabs showcased a lot of pep and potential in their opening day victory against the Fairfield Indians. The Crabs are a summer ball league, made up of promising university students who commit to play baseball and represent this community. The Crabs had active bats and hustle on the offensive side. It is […]