Jonas Reinhart
"Reinhart's tracks have much in common with Cluster's warm European electro, mixing krautrock with dark waves of Goblin-inspired giallo music. There's been a resurgence of arty ambient music on the West Coast lately, with groups like Arp, White Rainbow, and Lucky Dragons foregrounding pastoral synths and loops; with his forthcoming album on Kranky, Reinhart is the latest contender in this loose movement." - Max Goldberg, Flavorpill

Death Commando

Amber Asylum
"Amber Asylum continues to explore the realms of dark, post-classical, post-gothic music creating dark, melancholy visions out of cellos, violins, bass, percussion, and Nico-like, cold-soul vocal deliveries. Substituting stringed instruments for guitars places Amber Asylum at the intersection of high art and underground culture."

Trees
"Epic monolithic, blackened doom metal with a twisted, noise-damaged approach and a dank basement vibe. Trees craft glacial abstract riffs and rivers of ashen amplifier goo that fans of feedback-laden heaviosity will find highly satisfying, a kind of grinding, slow-motion black hole psychedelia that has a similiar hypnotic death-ritual quality as artists like Bloody Panda and Khanate, but with their own unique trance state of swirling guitar textures, horrific jet black dronescapes and ghoulish, excoriating vocals. Features members of the PDX psych-sludge outfit Tecumseh (Important Records). (bio)

Drain the Sky

Liquorball & Steve Mackay (of The Stooges)
Interplanetary champions of psychotic acid rock featuring from Grady Runyan (Monoshock, The Bad Trips), Marlon Kasberg, and a known-associate superhuman drummer du jour. Wasted, sludgey, ugly slop'n'space improvisation that picks up where the instrumental BLACK FLAG left off, and careens into uncharted territories of moaning guitar feedback, ear-shattering organ drones, and mindless rock beats.

Tonight, Liquorball will be joined by Steve Mackay of The Stooges' Fun House and recent Stooges reunion shows infamy.

One set, no intermission. Total brain fry.

KUSF Happy Hour Deejays in the main bar
DJ Schmeejay vs. DJ Chris Cook!

Emily Jane White
"Emily Jane White makes musically simple but lyrically complex folk songs that ruminate on myths and mystics."

Loretta Lynch
"If Loretta Lynch sounds a bit off, it's supposed to; if it doesn't, you're not listening hard enough. Nothing's sacred in modern music, and while this San Francisco quartet holds outlaw country in high esteem, it's not entirely loyal. Loretta Lynch plays the sort of California country-lover's country that has no past, as if it rolled in on a wave one day and set up shop. Buttery vocal harmonies and wary rhythms convey timeless tales about heartbreak, coming home, and growing old that still manage to sound utterly modern." - East Bay Express

The Vultures
"Berkeley's premier purveyors of hokum and old time string band folly and mischief. Our songs range from the sweet and heartfelt to the filthy and frivolous. Mostly the latter, actually."

Mute Socialite
Mute Socialite is drummer Moe! Staiano (Moe!kestra!, ex-Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), guitarist Ava Mendoza, bassist Alee Karim (The Atomic Bomb Audition), drummer Shayna Dunkelman, and trumpeter/electronicist Liz Allbee (ex-Le Flange Du Mal). The music is a convergence of Moe!'s driving post-punk drumming and percussion guitar, Ava's free jazz sensibility and mangled country and black metal riffage, Alee's sub-bass, grinding harmonic interplay, Shayna's prismatic sense of percussive dynamics, and Liz's warped melodicism and seasick textures. Jolting, hocketing rhythms, atonal surf riffs, and blackened salsa grooves combine to create a singular brutal, polyrhythmic spasmathon. A primordial beastie unleashed on the world in fury and love!

Wah Wah Exit Wound
"The quartet's monster guitars, attack-drums, and dramatic tempo changes are mysteriously heavy, darkly psychedelic, and you can actually hear how long the bass player's hair is. The result gratifies audience and musician alike in long, rock-operatic songs like 'Failed Spiraling Majesty.'" -- San Francisco Weekly

"Seattle's Wah Wah Exit Wound are all about bashing their heads on the prog rock, as they liberally grab from the techincal precision of King Crimson and the unfiltered chaos of Japan's Green Milk from the Planet Orange. If prog is your steez, you couldn't pick two better bands to be influenced by." --Portland Mercury

Times of Desperation

Neutralboy

Jack Saints

Punk Rock Sideshow w/DJ Tragic & the Duchess of Hazard, every Monday

Heavy Winged
"...a vast blank wall of a monolithic windowless tower block, seemingly featureless from a distance, but so rough up close that it tears skin from flesh and flesh from bone." - The Wire

Barn Owl
"Unlike Brian Eno's electronics-based tone poems, Barn Owl's West Coast drone is distinctly earthy. It's Metal Machine Music from the organic aisle, with smoky landscapes of guitar and vocals hovering in heated sustain. Though layered effects overlap, the overall sound still bears the imprint of guitar strings, in keeping with predecessors like Charlambides, as well as heavier hitters like Om.

The duo is obviously interested in space, but they also have a natural sense of drama, something left over, perhaps, from their metal days. When a loose drum beat emerges after three hazy tracks of their handsomely designed LP, From Our Mouths a Perpetual Light (vinyl on Not Not Fun; CD forthcoming from Digitalis), there's a sudden focusing effect; when a gigantic guitar chord thunders from out of nowhere a few seconds later, it's seismic. A clear-eyed frieze of acoustic guitar takes on extra potency within the duo's minimalist architecture." - Max Goldberg, SF Bay Guardian