General Admission Standing Room Only

DEERHOOF

For a band that seems to thrive on collapse, it’s simply amazing that this US/Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t seen them live—the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom. This music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, carrying an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom. Deerhoof is defined by such paradoxes.

Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify

ASHER WHITE

Asher White’s auteurish pop vision is vulgar and transcendent, marrying skittering noise with swooping strings, hushed reveries with doom metal, dissonant flutes with elegant bossa nova. Since the early 2010s she has developed a sprawling discography that spans experimental drone, tropicalia, noise rock, and folk. Her latest record, Home Constellation Study, was released June 2024 on Ba Da Bing! Records (Cassandra Jenkins, Sharon Van Etten). On stage, she pares her songs down to their most elemental and powerful forms to be torn through by her garage rock trio.

Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify