Posted inMusic

Music Tonight: Saturday, Dec. 6

Making up for a canceled gig earlier this year due to illness, prog art rock supergroupThe Stick Men are back in Arcata tonight, this time at The Wild Hare Tavern. KingCrimson alums Pat Mastelotto and Tony Levin are joined with German composer andinstrumental master Markus Reuter for a night of inspired space jams. Opening up […]

Posted inMusic

Music Tonight: Friday, Dec. 5

Local cumbia superstars Makenu will be playing their last gig of 2025 tonight atHumbrews at 8:30 p.m. The headliner is, appropriately, Oakland’s ragin’ psychedelicCumbia outfit Bicicletas Por La Paz. Judging by the colossal turnout I witnessed thelast time Makenu played at the Basement, expect the dance floor to be packed thisevening in the spotlight of […]

Posted inThe Setlist

Hot Freaks

It’s Thanksgiving again, a complicated holiday for a lot of folks for many different reasons. I certainly have mine. Tradition is a funny thing and often gets expressed as a desperate attempt at the impossible: to sustain the existence of an immutable, geologically timeless structure on a human terrain defined by the changing whims and […]

Posted inThe Setlist

Message in a Bottle

I’m writing to you from the murky depths of last week, ahead of a quick retreat away from wi-fi and glowing things, so apologies if I have missed some massive earth-shattering event in the news cycle. What that could be is anyone’s guess, as we have all learned time and again that things that should […]

Posted inMusic

Music Tonight: Wednesday, Nov. 19

Tunisian singer-songwriter Nour Harkati is a master of the Guembri, an ancient three-stringed West African instrument similar to a lute and a banjo. Now living in New York City, the surprisingly young man has put together a fantastic band to showcase his unique sound, which mixes organic bass tones of his instrument with the frenetic […]

Posted inMusic

Music Tonight: Sunday, Nov. 16

Clan Dyken returns to town with its Beauty Way Benefit for the indigenous people of Big Mountain, Arizona, to give direct aid in their effort to resist incursion on their ancestral lands by the extractive death’s head of the U.S. government and its affiliate private industry demons. The doors open at the Arcata Playhouse at […]

Posted inMusic

Music Tonight: Saturday, Nov. 15

Moss Oak Commons is the place to be for another installment of Freq Night by Open Head Records. Tonight’s offering features the avant folk tunes of Olympia, Washington’s Wicking Game, along with local electroclash act Parking Structure, the lovely storytelling digital torch songs of God Z Dog and the drone folks of Mountain Mahogany. This […]

Posted inMusic

Music Tonight: Friday, Nov. 14

The Arcata Playhouse is hosting the Writer’s Roundup Songwriter Showcase with Ruby Ruth George, Polimana, James Zeller and Fo Fera. The setup is fashioned after the popular Nashville — and elsewhere — style of rotating performances and storytelling, featuring a whole slew of genres from progfolk to jazz and country. These are some of the […]

Gift this article