Burnstitch Collective has been attached to many of the murmurs I hear about simple and great ideas around here, and I am going long this week to write about them because it’s both overdue and perfectly timely. They are putting on an all-ages DIY punk festival called Against All Odds at RampArt Skate Park this Saturday, so I emailed its director Ridley Landau, who plainly laid out its true scope.
“The name Against All Odds is a call to persevere in the face of hopelessness,” she wrote. “This fest is a way of connecting transition-age-youths (16-25) with resources they need to safely enter adulthood. The music just gets them to the event, where local organizations will be offering free assistance with job training, medical care, housing, nutrition and mental health resources. There will also be several alternative art vendors and crafting stations.”
Putting on an all-ages festival is no easy feat in any circumstance but doing it with a positive ethos and attention to community in the age of Trump — a mafia era defined by septic grifters dismantling society for billionaire Nazi perverts — seems impossible. Doing so under the umbrella of a small collective named and designed around the eternal concept of rebuilding after catastrophe seems a step further into the abyss. Thankfully, there are others who are far more pragmatic and grounded than myself. Landau is such a person, someone who articulates the troubles of the past with an emphasis on the future.
“The most important thing for me personally is to be the kind of adult that I needed when I was young” she wrote. “I had so many friends growing up who are not alive today because their circumstances made living impossible. They fell into depression, isolation, addiction, poverty, houselessness. And it’s heartbreaking to see so many kids today in Humboldt facing the same challenges. I want to instill a sense of agency and encourage young people to create a world they actually want to live in.”
This notion resonates with what first compelled me to write about the collective and Against All Odds to begin with. Although I have reported on Burnstitch gigs in the past, what really caught my attention in the last year was a series of shows called “Safety Meetings,” which had an emphasis on inclusivity and de-escalation to prevent bigotry or violence from infecting the scene. As someone who first went to punk shows as a child in the ’90s, I know this approach is both desperately needed and historically tough to pull off.
Landau’s explanation behind the movement was clear and direct: “Punk scenes are notoriously full of gatekeepers who think they can determine who is ‘punk enough’ to be included. It’s really just a form of bullying. That being said, I believe we have a duty to protect vulnerable young people in these spaces. It’s not right to invite queer and BIPOC teens, while also allowing predators, racists and homophobes.”
There it is. Loud music is often mistaken as a channel through which one can lose all accountability and feast on an orgy of violence that only ever favors the most atavistically strong and brutally careless. For the worst among us, the amplification of sound means a similar expansion of the stupid cruelty that enforces the primal violence that defines the shrinking frontiers of our vicious society. Pantomimes of the globetrotting American killing floor that we all know exists but pretend doesn’t for fear of getting caught, slit and bled out in a gushing red trough that is never filled. That is not what heavy music is about. We speak and shriek of these horrors to expose them, because the first step towards victory and emancipation is identifying the enemy. We protect the tender beauty of our dreams just as we care for each other, we try to stay united in that care, against all odds.
Take care of each other this week; make everything a little more favorable.
Thursday
The Rumba Madre may have started in Nashville, but the group is anything but another commercial country beerfart. The fellas play a hodge podge of punk, cumbia, reggaeton and dirty South trap bangers with a fluid beauty that must be heard to be understood. Returning to HumCo after not too long from their last show is a wise move, too, and with the students back in town, it’s a perfect night for any members of the youth of today to enjoy a fantastic show. Pile on local openers Brain Dead Rejects, Something Wicked and Lovefest, and you have something transformative for the all-ages crowd who choose the good path and roll through Moss Oak Commons tonight at 6 p.m. ($10).
Friday
Being that this is the last full moon of the summer of 2026, I am going to suggest something put on by Playhouse Arts that has all the makings of a perfect Arcata experience. Come to Carlson Park at 8 p.m. and meet up with the good folks behind IllumiNature, a guided immersive adventure full of theater, puppetry, live music and more. Free to all comers, this late-summer lantern-lit delight is a chance for the people behind the Arcata Playhouse to celebrate its 20 years with our community in the open environment of our community, under the twilight gateway to the Milky Way.
Saturday
As I mentioned above, today is the day for Against All Odds at RampArt Skate Park from 3 to 10 p.m. Here’s the simple rundown: This is an all-ages event that only costs $10 and is free for kids 12 and under who are accompanied by an adult, and that adult or any other with a valid I.D. can enjoy adult beverages provided by Humboldt Roller Derby. There will be community resources and information available from the non-profit and mutual aid groups HACHR, Youth Ability, Black Humboldt, Queer Humboldt, Building Bridges, Centro del Pueblo, Our Space and AHHA. There will be scads of art vendors as well, but most germane to this live music column, there will be a ton of rad bands, who I will list in full now. The road runners today will be Buffed from Maryland, Reno’s Reeking Slug, and then some Lake County and Oakland/Bay Area/Vallejo bands I will run down in order of provenance. ARPH, Braintooth, Scam Likely, Canaille, Ratfuck and Blood Compact, who are celebrating their one-year anniversary as a band by playing on our home turf, which is the furthest they have played from their own home so far. Speaking of home turf, we have some mighty locals in the line-up too. Executive Order, Brain Dead Rejects — a personal favorite on the strength of their newest recordings — and Radical A.P.E. Viva.
Sunday
MaMuse is a folk and soul revival act that began as a collaboration between musicians Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker in the deep end of 20 years ago in the rambling corridors of our home state that are leafier than they are paved. The two have since grown to a quartet, and are currently touring on their seventh album This is the Venue, which was released last week and is available on Bandcamp and elsewhere. If you are unfamiliar with the group and are looking for some harmonic healing via the airflow and vibrations that meet between the human voice and acoustic instruments when they are pushed to the same poetic purpose, come over to the Arcata Theatre Lounge at 6 p.m. It’s a seated type of show and, depending on your devotion to a VIP spot for the experience, tickets will run you from $45 to $65.
Monday
It’s not every day around here you get the chance to check out a retro punk and garage band from Paris, and almost never on a Monday. But this is the last Monday of August, and things get a little weird in these parts when the locals brace themselves into a phalanx to handle the annual student invasion. Dérapage is the band, and the Siren’s Song Tavern is the place, and the bill is stacked with the perfect local bands to make this into a proper rock and roll crash-out needed to handle transition. Clean Girl and the Dirty Dishes are absolute trash heroes in this column and there’s a fair chance that Breaking Marble Jars may one day enter the pantheon as well. Come through at 8 p.m. with $5-$10 for the door to see what I mean.
Tuesday
Taco Tuesday at Richards’ Goat is always a safe bet for a good time, but there’s really nothing finer than when the attached Miniplex has an early show to enjoy for after. Tonight has Norwegian-born, Berlin-based duo Soft as Snow, who take the format of DJ and MC and turn it into something else entirely different and quite unexpected. I really think you should go into this one blind and allow yourself to taste some of the fruits of a society that invests in its arts without creative limitations. DPSD is the solo project of Los Angeles sound collagist Danny Perez, who is really completing a perfect circle of angelic oddness with his presence. Try not to miss this one. It’s at 7 p.m. and is only $10. And the tacos start cooking not long after the 5 p.m. opening time.
Wednesday
I have read a lot of film reviews over the years, and one of my favorites more or less started with the line “Relax, it’s just another Ken Russell movie.” I probably fucked that line up, but it doesn’t matter because I can’t remember the author and Russell has been dead for 15 years. But the message remains evergreen because Russell made films that upset a lot of people, from his native England and beyond. Try finding a copy of his masterpiece The Devils and you will see what I mean. I have written before about my appreciation for truly transgressive cinema, and he is on the shortlist of filmmakers I always reference in that regard. However, I don’t usually celebrate videos that are nasty for no reason, and while I don’t need a purpose, some presence of mind is required. In that spirit, one of my favorite flicks is Altered States, a vehicle for a young William Hurt from 1980 that uses bespoke psychedelic imagery, updated Universal Monster action and a dull academic backdrop to create a spectacle that forces everyone on both sides of the screen to choose the tender truth of love to serve as a desperate lifeline to draw us from the horrendous void of nihilism that surrounds the evolution of all conscious beings. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Head over to the Arcata Theatre Lounge between 6 and 7 p.m., pay $6 to get in or $10 to leave with a poster, and figure it out for yourself.
Collin Yeo (he/him) has no kids but still wants a better future, mostly out of disgust and embarrassment.
This article appears in Corkscrew Trees and a Crooked Trail.