Cat’s Cradle

This is a seated show The Road to Now explains the history behind important events and outstanding individuals of today’s world. Created in 2016 by Dr. Benjamin Sawyer and Bob Crawford, a founding member of the Grammy-nominated band The Avett Brothers, The Road to Now has brought historians, politicians, journalists and artists to the table for conversations that illuminate the map that brought us to where we are today. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Stitcher

It’s impossible not to hear freedom and excitement coursing through the veins of Marco Benevento’s new studio album, ‘Let It Slide.’ Produced by Leon Michels (The Arcs, Lee Fields), the record introduces a gritty, soulful edge to Benevento’s brand of high-octane keyboard wizardry-an uptempo, uplifting sound he playfully describes as “hot dance piano rock.” For all Benevento’s virtuosity on the keys though, the songs here are driven primarily by intoxicating grooves, with spare drums and minimalist bass lines underpinning infectious, intentionally lo-fi vocal hooks. The resulting vibe is a timeless one, filtering elements of vintage R&B and soul through modern indie rock and pop sensibilities and peppering it with the kind of adventurous improvisation that Benevento’s come to be celebrated for worldwide. Acceptance is a recurring theme on the record, and Benevento’s songs often find themselves recognizing that contentment can come only once you’ve freed yourself from the chains of desire and regret. Upon close listen, one can find Benevento’s own personal philosophies subconsciously bubbling up throughout the songs. “You’ll feel better, I’ll just say / When you finally let it go,” he sings on the funky “Say It’s All The Same,” which features vocal contributions from bandmate Karina Rykman. The hazy “Solid Gold” celebrates the simple joy of being in the moment with someone you love, while the Lennon-esque “Lorraine” (co-written with Simone Felice) grapples with loss and change, and the anthemic “Send It On A Rocket” contemplates loneliness and connection. Dubbed “one of the most talented keys players of our time” by CBS Radio, Benevento’s released six critically acclaimed solo albums over the last decade, performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall and Newport Jazz to Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, and worked in the studio and on the road with the likes of Richard Swift (The Shins, The Arcs), Jon Brion (Spoon, Aimee Mann), A.C. Newman (The New Pornographers), and Simone Felice (The Felice Brothers, The Lumineers) among others. “It’s safe to say that no one sees the keyboard quite like Marco Benevento’s genre-blind mashup of indie rock, jazz and skewed improvisation,” the LA Times raved, while NPR said he combines “the thrust of rock, the questing of jazz and the experimental ecstasy of jam,” and Rolling Stone praised “the textures and colors available in his keyboards and arsenal of manipulated pedals and effects,” along with his “deceptively rich, catchy melodies and straight-ahead grooves.” Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

The curious thing about being a fan of brasshouse? You’re pretty much talking about being into one solitary but extremely unforgettable band: the amusingly monikered Too Many Zooz. The musical style was “branded” by drummer King of Sludge, who recognized that there was no worthy existing classification for the New York trio, whose other two members are the equally unclassifiable Leo P (saxophone) and Matt Doe (trumpet). “Brasshouse is a high energy musical conversation,” Matt insists. “Though I honestly don’t think there is a good way to describe it in words. It’s about many different feelings and sounds and emotions.” Or as KOS so decisively puts it, “I don’t really care about what’s happening in music — I just make art that I enjoy making.” It’s exactly this indifference to convention and trend that has garnered Too Many Zooz a fanbase that KOS describes as “wide-ranging and fanatical.” One of those fans? In 2016, Beyonce asked them to perform with her at the Billboard Music Awards…and it’s quite possible they got just as much attention as did she. After two years, a gazillion live performances and four EPs, their debut album Subway Gawdz (an unsubtle reference to their birth in the underground stations of NYC), was released to enthusiastic acclaim in 2016. Its sound was truly like nothing else, with inescapable grooves that take in dub, soul, funk and ska, utterly exhilarating horn blasts that shoot right up your spine, and, of course, equal doses of fun and attitude. And right now, TMZ are riding higher than ever, surely poised for the leap into genuinely widespread international recognition that was likley inevitable since they first set foot in an NYC subway station. Indeed, following a deal with Ministry of Sound, their single “Warriors” racked up major play on Radio One (if you think you haven’t heard it, when you hear it, you’ll quickly realize you already have), followed by high-profile remixes from the likes of Armand Van Helden and KDA. Then, UK sensation Jess Glynne penned lyrics and added vocals to morph the song into “So Real (Warriors),” which has been generating massive buzz while climbing the European charts. In the meanwhile, a live video for “Car Alarm” has furtively racked up more than 500K views in one week. But surely signaling their mainstream “arrival”? A Canadian KFC commercial featured the band and their songs — so don’t be surprised if listening to their music suddenly makes you hungry. Though they’ve also been up to more serious matters. Leo, in fact, was asked to play at the BBC Proms Charles Mingus tribute at a sold-out Royal Albert Hall in August 2017 — certainly no small honor. Yet for all this, the forward plan for Too Many Zooz, is, as ever, constant touring. The reason is simple: it’s their outrageous, electrifying live performances that consistently continue to add the numbers to their growing worldwide legion of fans. Autumn 2018 will take them coast to coast, from Seattle to Houston to Philadelphia, and across Europe, with stops in Krakow, Strasbourg and Marseille, amongst others. “I don’t think there’s any recording that can do a live performance justice,” reckons Matt. “You’ll see people of all different colors, creeds, genders, ages, sexuality at our shows. I really can’t find a constant between them…besides liking our music — haha.” But for everything that’s happened in the last couple of years, the trio aren’t actually all that surprised by their success. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | SoundCloud | Spotify

Cracker’s tenth and most recent studio effort, the double-album, Berkeley To Bakersfield, finds this uniquely American band traversing two different sides of the California landscape — the northern Bay area and further down-state in Bakersfield. Despite being less than a five-hour drive from city to city, musically, these two regions couldn’t be further apart from one another. In the late ’70s and ’80s a harder-edged style of rock music emerged from the Bay area, while Bakersfield is renowned for its own iconic twangy country music popularized, most famously, by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard in the ’60s and ’70s. Yet despite these differences, they are both elements that Cracker’s two cofounders, David Lowery and Johnny Hickman, have embraced to some degree on nearly every one of their studio albums over the last two decades. On Berkeley To Bakersfield, however, instead of integrating these two genres together within one disc, they’ve neatly compartmentalized them onto their own respective regionally-titled LPs. As Lowery explains, “On the Berkeley disc the band is the original Cracker lineup — Davey Faragher, Michael Urbano, Johnny and myself. This is the first time this lineup has recorded together in almost 20 years. We began recording this album at East Bay Recorders in Berkeley, CA. For this reason we chose to stylistically focus this disc on the music we most associate with the East Bay: Punk and Garage with some funky undertones. To further match our sense of place we often took an overtly political tone in the lyrics.” “This Bakersfield disc represents the ‘California country’ side of the band. Throughout the band’s 24-year history we’ve dabbled in Country and Americana but this time we wanted to pay homage to the particular strain of Country and Country-Rock music that emerges from the inland valleys of California.” Cracker has been described as a lot of things over the years: alt-rock, Americana, insurgent-country, and have even had the terms punk and classic-rock thrown at them. But more than anything Cracker are survivors. Cofounders Lowery and Hickman have been at it for a quarter of a century — amassing ten studio albums, multiple gold records, thousands of live performances, hit songs that are still in current radio rotation around the globe (“Low,” “Euro-Trash Girl,” “Get Off This” and “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out With Me” to name just a few), and a worldwide fan base — that despite the major sea-changes within the music industry — continues to grow each year. Links: Website | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube Camper Van Beethoven Links: Website | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

American Authors Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | SoundCloud | Spotify | YouTube Magic Giant Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

“Cosmic Charlie really is a great band – these guys do this music the way it should be done: having the conversation in their own voices.” -David Gans, Grateful Dead archivist ———————– Cosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band swiftly cemented its reputation as a band that puts a unique and personal twist on the Grateful Dead catalogue, a Dead cover band for folks that are ambivalent about Dead cover bands. Rather than mimicking the Dead exactly, Cosmic Charlie chooses to tap into the Dead’s energy and style as a foundation on which to build. The result is healthy balance of creativity and tradition, and both the band and its audience are taken to that familiar edge with the sense that, music is actually being MADE here tonight. Moving and shaking even the most skeptical of Deadheads, Cosmic Charlie storms into a town and plays with an energy that eludes other bands, an energy that sometimes eluded the Dead themselves. Those precious moments during Dead jams when the synchronicity is there and all is right with the world, these are moments that Cosmic Charlie relishes and feverishly welcomes with open arms. Clearly, Cosmic Charlie’s audiences are also eager to arrive at those moments, and together with the band, they have indulged in many memorable evenings. Links: Website | Facebook

La Dispute has never been a band prone to settling. The five-piece from Grand Rapids, Michigan, is responsible for some of the most uncompromising, experimental hardcore music of the last decade. From their 2008 debut (in their current formation) Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair, to 2011’s Wildlife, to 2015’s Rooms of the House, La Dispute have continually pushed themselves to find new ways to portray some of the most difficult and universally affecting subject matters. Casting a wide stylistic net that includes – but isn’t limited to – jazz, blues, spoken word, screamo and prog rock, La Dispute have developed a sound that, while constantly evolving, is unmistakably theirs. A lot of structural change has taken place around the band since Rooms of the House that has forced them to adapt. La Dispute has always kept a tight grip on their own reins. Their first two records came out on Californian independent label No Sleep – trusted home to many of the bands they cut their teeth alongside – while Rooms of the House was released through their own label, a subsidiary of Vagrant records. After Vagrant was bought out by BMG in 2014, the band found themselves looking for a new home, ultimately finding one in Epitaph. Their fourth full-length, Panorama, is the first fruit of this new relationship. Recorded between November 2017 and August 2018, Panorama is in many ways a continuation on a theme. It’s a highly ambitious and deeply affecting body of work that filters narrative storytelling through a personal lens, like a set of Joan Didion essays set to music. It’s heavier and weirder than previous efforts, taking the intensity of Wildlife and the patience of Rooms of the House and using them as pillars upon which to build something new. And, in doing so, they have broken through their own ceiling and set a new one. Panorama has not been without its challenges, both creatively and practically. Only three members were living in Michigan when they started writing, with drummer Bradley Vander Lugt now living in Australia. Out of necessity, the incubation period for ideas began with back and forth over the internet, but the bulk of the writing had to be done together in their hometown of Grand Rapids. So, finding a time when Brad could make the trip with his family, they blocked three months off to write and rented a studio space to work 9-5 through the week. For over two months, they worked in separate rooms on individual tracks based on a rough concept and outline that Jordan had put together. They had around seven tracks finished when they came to the decision that no one was happy with them. With only the weeks before Brad was due to fly back to Australia left to work with, they scrapped everything and started all over again. “In general, I think working apart when we were all there together was a waste, but I think we had it in our heads that there was a direction we should be going. That we needed to pick up where the last record left off and push further in the direction of quieter, more structured songs, but that never felt right,” Jordan says in retrospect. “Feels a bit silly to say, but when we started over we all more or less just went by instinct. What happened felt right, and that’s really where the record started.” Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

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Office Hours is a dance party and live video performance from a collective of disc-jockeys, wave technicians and visual artists at UNC-Chapel Hill. 10% of proceeds will benefit the Compass Center. Starting as the final assignment for an independent study within UNC’s Media and Journalism school, this experimental audio-visual performance was the brainchild of producer Nicholas Byrne. Bridging his early musical background with professional experience as a video editor for record labels, Nicholas envisioned a live show in which musical and visual elements were crafted side-by-side, complementing and reacting to each other for a more holistic sensory experience. Artists Scott Diekema, Elinor Walker, and Webb Hinton joined Nicholas to develop Office Hours’ unique visual style. Scott, Nicholas, and fellow VJs John Vance and Maxwell Bryn use video synthesizers to mix and distort the show’s live camera feeds with VHS and digital animations. Audio reactive analog visuals are painted onto a network of CRT televisions that invite audience participation. The team’s expertise in animation, live video software, and stage design allow for Office Hours to experiment with emerging and legacy technologies simultaneously. Collaborators include Elinor Walker, Amy Vaughn, Roi Plotkin, James Creissen, Michael Gu, Maxwell Bryn, John Vance, Austin Robichaud, Gentry Fitch, Karma, J Dasani, and Funeral. By blurring audio-visual boundaries, Office Hours aims to create a fun and immersive concert experience. If you have any questions, just come to Office Hours. Line-up: 9:30-10:15: DJ New Camper 10:15-11:00: Pixel Princess 11:00-11:45: DJ Tex 11:45-12:30: Amy Daytona + DJ River Rat 12:30-1:15: ARTS+CRAFTS 1:15-2:00: DJ Chooch Instagram: @officehours.tv

AdHoc Presents Crumb is the collaboration of Brooklyn-based musicians Lila Ramani (guitar, vocals), Brian Aronow (synth, keys, sax), Jesse Brotter (bass), and Jonathan Gilad (drums). The friends came together in 2016 with the goal of developing and recording a collection of songs Ramani had written in high school and college, the work ultimately resulting in the band’s first two EPs, 2016’s “Crumb” and 2017’s “Locket.” Encouraged by the warm reception online and at shows, the band evolved into a full time touring and recording project. In June 2019, Crumb will release Jinx, their first full-length album and best distillation to date of their singular blend of psych-rock and jazz. On Jinx, Ramani continues to helm the songwriting, with Aronow, Brotter, and Gilad each bringing distinctive ideas to match her ethereal, intimate vocals and luminous guitar lines. Informed by two years of nearly non-stop touring, the songs sweep and swell to capture the beguiling live spirit of Crumb shows, while taking listeners one step further down the band’s dizzying, hypnotic path. Crumb has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from each ticket sold will go to Partners In Health and their work saving lives, revitalizing communities, and transforming global health, and to the Florence Project and their work providing direct legal and social services for detained adults and children under threat of deportation. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram