APAture 2013 Music Night

The 2013 APAture festival concluded with a diverse evening of music, ranging from avant-garde jazz to metal to rap. The event took place at SUB/Mission in San Francisco. Featured artist Karl Evangelista opened the evening with a group that included Francis Wong, Margaret Rei Scampavia, Cory Wright, and Jordan Glenn.

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[© 2013 Karen Ng/Kearny Street Workshop]

The music was a frenetic style of avant-garde jazz, which moved freely in and out of more conventionally harmonic sections. Many of the pieces were inspired by Evangelista’s own personal history and his Filipino heritage. It was also fun to see Francis Wong, whom I usually encounter in more rarefied venues, at punk club in the Mission.

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[© 2013 Karen Ng/Kearny Street Workshop]

The Evangelista group was followed by something completely different both sonically and visually. Bestiary, a solo project of Rai Yin Hsu featured experimental noise guitar and a rather unique black-and-white suit.

bestiary

There were a variety of long sounds processed through effects, with a few sharper elements as well.

Some of the evening’s entertainment happened in between the official musical acts, with our hosts Rupert Carangal Estanislao and Jennifer Chu keeping the crowd energized.

Jen and Rupert
[© 2013 Karen Ng/Kearny Street Workshop]

Next up was The Residuals, a self-described “hardworking, Do-It-Yourself metal band.”

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[© 2013 Karen Ng/Kearny Street Workshop]

As expected, they were quite loud, and Joshua Lykkeberg provided vocal fry. But the group, which also featured brothers Anand Jobanputra and Rohan Jobanputra was quite tight, with unisons and fast syncopations.

From metal we then moved to rap, with a set by Joal Vargas that focused on community issues as well as his experience as a teacher.

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[© 2013 Karen Ng/Kearny Street Workshop]

The diversity of the evening continued with a cabaret style performance by Bellows, featuring chanteuse Kyle Casey Chu and Rachel Waterhouse on keyboards.

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[© 2013 Karen Ng/Kearny Street Workshop]

After the fast energy of the previous two sets, the mellow and expressive style was welcome, and their stage presence was a lot of fun.

Bellows was followed by Little Sister, an East Bay rock trio featuring Erica Benton, MonBon and Nada Diaz.

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[© 2013 Karen Ng/Kearny Street Workshop]

They had a contemporary rock sound that was quite moody and a bit melancholy at times, but they still had a warm stage presence. Benton and MonBon traded off guitar and bass duties during the course of the performance.

There was still more music to come in this rather long event. I unfortunately had to depart after Little Sister, but glad I had the opportunity to be there for most of it and hear such a cross section of music in the Bay Area.

(For a review of the APAture opening-night event and gallery show, please visit this link.)

Robotspeak Modular Synth Meet

Last weekend, Robotspeak in San Francisco hosted a modular synth meet, with several manufacturers of synth modules on hand along with collectors and enthusiasts.

Eric Barbour of Metasonix was on hand, demonstrating his distinctive yellow tube-based modules, including a new spring reverb still in a pre-production phase.

Metasonix modular synth

I had the opportunity to try these out for myself. I particularly had fun with R-54 VCF, which I may have to get as a companion for my R-53.

AC at modular synth meetup
[Photo by Edward Sharp.]

Another favorite, Make Noise, was also present. I was particularly impressed with the Phonogene – I had heard it before, but this demonstration made the power of the module more apparent.

Make Noise modular synth

I also finally saw and understood what the Wogglebug module does.

Pittsburgh Modular’s offerings were more down-to-earth, workhorse modules. They make an entire basic range of oscillators, filters and modulators that can be obtained separately or in very accessible pre-packaged units like this one.

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The Pittsburg Modular demo was quite extensive, spanning several interconnected cases.

In the back room, there was a Buchla modular synth being demonstrated. It is a thing of beauty.

Buchla modular synth

In an interesting twist, the owners of the Buchla and the adjacent Arp 2600 decided to hook them up together. You can hear a little bit of the result in this video:

While Dave Smith does not build modulars, he is a San Francisco institution in the synth world, and was represented at the synth meet. We even got a sneak preview of the upcoming tabletop version of the Prophet 12.

Dave Smith Prophet 12 synth

It had the same luscious sound as the keyboard version, though in my opinion the QuNexus keyboard does not do it justice. This is probably a bias a trained keyboardist.

In all, it was a fun afternoon at what I have decided is one of the “most dangerous stores in San Francisco”.