The Stranger

Money for Nothing

Rob Moura — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:14:00 -0800

These bands just got $10,000 richer for making good music. by Rob Moura

Chances are, by now, you’ve heard of Sonic Guild. Founded in Austin but with a beefy Seattle presence, the Guild has made it its mission to offer Northwest musicians validation, stages, and (in the case of a few lucky, hard-working individuals) $10,000 in grant money. Previous winners include Dean Johnson, Deep Sea Diver, Shaina Shepherd, Thunderpussy, Sol, and so many more.

Here's how it works: Every year, the Guild puts out a call for grant nominees. (This year, more than 630 names made the list!) Then Sonic Guild's donors, advisors, and previous grant winners cull through that list of names and whittle it down to 40. After one more round of voting, a final 10 are chosen to receive $10,000 each. And along with the cash, which they can use however they’d like, the artists are also invited to participate in Sonic Guild’s annual showcase, scheduled for February 21 at the Triple Door.

Sonic Guild has something to celebrate, too; it’s the Seattle chapter’s fifth anniversary, after having expanded to the Northwest by scene lifer Ben London in 2020. Since then, in his words, “The city’s creative energy has accelerated beyond anything we have seen in decades.” If these 10 artists are any indication, he’s right on the money.

Here are this year's chosen artists:

Acapulco Lips

Formed in 2012 and led by bassist/vocalist Maria-Elena Herrell, Acapulco Lips’ rise to local prominence has been steady and self-assured. Whether they’re taking the stage at one of Seattle’s many festivals or laying down grooves within the grooves of their latest LP Now, they blend surf, psych rock, and garage in ways that have made them a longtime local favorite. Go celebrate with them at their show on December 11 at Chop Suey, where they’ll be showcasing their live power as a newly beefed-up quintet.

Chinese American Bear

If you weren’t already aware, Chinese American Bear are absolutely killing it. In 2019, husband/wife duo Anne Tong and Bryce Barsten started releasing winsome multilingual indie pop, and six years later, they’ve parlayed that spirit into global recognition. Their art, which regularly sees them taking on pop/rock staples in addition to their uber-catchy originals, has netted them attention from VOGUE+ to the BBC and earned them spots at festivals across the country. Theirs is a burgeoning success story borne of the necessity to, in Tong’s words, keep things “fun and authentic and lighthearted.”

Coral Grief

This year was Coral Grief’s breakout year. With their first two EPs, the Seattle trio (Lena Farr-Morrissey, Sam Fason, and Cam Hancock) announced themselves as purveyors of krautrock rhythms and a chromium glisten, akin to bands like Stereolab and Seefeel. Those EPs sound embryonic compared to their debut LP Air Between Us, released in July of this year to high acclaim. Having just ended their West Coast tour with a massive show at the Paramount opening for Deep Sea Diver, the group has fully stolen Seattle’s hearts. Now it’s time to take on the rest of the country.

Emi Pop

Of the 10 grantees in this year’s batch, Emi Pop might be a relatively fresh face, but the artist behind the group is no rookie. A veteran of the underground punk scene of Puerto Rico, Emi planted her flag in our city’s rain-soaked city this year with the garage-pop earworm “Lo Sé,” and in November she followed it with No Te Voy a Extrañar, a debut record full of songs as catchy and true to the spirit of rocanrol as its lead single.

Gabriel Teodros

If you’ve even a passing familiarity with 21st-century Seattle hip-hop, you probably know of Gabriel Teodros. The globally-recognized South Seattle emcee has been a fixture in the city since his days spitting with Khingz as Abyssinian Creole two decades ago. Since then, he’s released six solo LPs (the latest being 2023’s medicinal From the Ashes of Our Homes and its remix album Embers) while also regularly guesting on records, DJing around town, and producing for local artists. Throughout his career, Teodros has also tirelessly advocated for the wellness and uplift of the desperate, not only in his art but through his actions: just last year, he co-founded the Palestine Will Live Forever festival to raise money for Gazans in need of aid.

Kate Dinsmore

Those who’ve heard Kate Dinsmore’s voice understand that it’s something to behold. Born and raised in the PNW, Dinsmore spent the early years of her adulthood honing her musical chops in the Oklahoma jazz-pop band Harumph before returning to Washington in 2019. Since then, she’s restlessly graced stage after stage, spreading word of her talents, both her voice and the way she uses it to slide effortlessly between Americana, jazz, and rock stylings.

Ollella

Ellie Barber first brought a bow to the cello at the age of nine, and today she’s an expert, acclaimed for her string work by everyone from Bob Boilen to Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner. In 2020, Barber started releasing her own songs as Ollella; her solo work, including this year’s Antifragile, demonstrates that she has a knack for taking something as potentially stuffy as cello-led indie folk and making it approachable. Early next year, she’ll be decamping to DC to film her first Tiny Desk Concert, a check off the bucket list for someone still at the start of their musical journey.

Sea Lemon

To say Natalie Lew “does dream pop” is an understatement. Diving for a Prize, her debut album as Sea Lemon, is by any measure exemplary of where the genre is now—a heavy late ’90s rock pulse, waves of shoegaze textures, and Lew’s crystalline vocals floating like seafoam over it all. The fact that the record also features Ben Gibbard supports that Lew is continuing a genre that his band the Postal Service helped popularize. You can catch her at Neumos on December 19, opening for fellow soundscaper Jay Som.

Warren Dunes

Chances are you’ve caught Warren Dunes playing around the city over the last few years, and you’d know it if you did. The sight of singer Julia Massey sandwiched in between two keyboards isn’t so easily forgotten. The self-described “beach music family band” makes stirring, dense pop tunes, but the people behind it harbor no pretense about their music—they just want people to enjoy it. They also endeavor to use their powers for good, hence their annual holiday show (this year it’s December 19), where they raise money to fund childcare for touring musician parents with kids.

Zookraught

Formed as an eccentric four-piece punk band during COVID, Zookraught was reshaped into a searing dance-punk trio featuring original drummer Baylee Harper and bassist Stephanie Mills, along with guitarist Sami Frederick. By now, Zookraught have earned a reputation as one of Seattle’s most electrifying live acts—one of the hardest things you can do is get a crowd here to dance, but they accomplish that challenge handily thanks to blistering tempos, serrated textures, and call-to-action vocals. If you need proof, catch them at the Sunset Tavern this New Year’s Eve. There, you can kickstart your new exercise regimen among all the moshers.

Encore, Encore

Rob Moura — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 15:35:00 -0700

“You don’t get second chances all the time.” by Rob Moura

“Bzzzzt!” The sharp squeal of a screw being driven into wood punctures the air, splitting our ears like amp feedback.

In a dusty backroom, Joel Myers is hard at work securing plywood sheets to a frame and tracing hand-drawn cartoon skeletons over them. After a few blasts of sound, Geoff Joynes pulls down his sawdust mask and calls out, “Hey! Pipe down, will ya?” He’s jesting, but Myers obliges and drops the drilling.

Though the noise is indeed disrupting the conversation, everyone in the room is anxious about the time crunch. It’s mid-October and those skeletons need to be propped outside by Halloween, when Re-Animated Music is scheduled to hold their soft opening. The shop, which will specialize in refurbished instrument retail and repair, is the collective brainchild of musicians who all worked as managers at the Trading Musician, which closed in May 2024 after serving Seattle’s musical community for over three decades. The team’s passion for reviving the old shop’s spirit is evident as they hustle to get the new store ready for business.

Joynes, who was bedridden with a respiratory illness two days prior, is already back to work; face shielded, he guides me around the guts of the old Cowen Park Grocery, whose owners leased the building to the gang in early January. Later, as we’re sitting, the group—Keegan Metcalf and Sam Smallidge alongside Joynes and Myers—lays out the myriad obstacles of starting up the new shop, and how much they’ve learned about why so few similar small businesses survive in Seattle.

Much of their effort has gone towards bringing the building up to a strict code that was only recently established. Where some businesses enjoy an expedited version of the process, Re-Animated was unlucky enough to be assigned a full review, forcing them to make granular revisions to the building’s plumbing, electrical, and egress, among others. They found only a scarce pool of resources available to help them, including some terrible loan offerings from the city’s Office of Economic Development.

“The City doesn’t make it easy for small businesses,” says Smallidge. “Everything in the city is facilitating their closure rather than helping them flourish.”

“It’s like they don’t want these places to exist,” says Joynes, “and it’s very obvious that the community wants these places to exist. But the cool thing is that every person we’ve involved has rallied around this place. They see it as a necessity for the city.”

Joynes is talking about the skilled family members and friends the Reanimated team recruited, many of them more than happy to assist. Most of their fathers flexed their contracting muscles, installing the necessary sheetrock and making the bathrooms ADA-compliant; the benevolent accountant of Capitol Hill’s Cha Cha Lounge is helping out with the books at a reduced rate. Re-Animated’s announcement was also accompanied by a GoFundMe page asking for $40,000 to help pay off the rest of the debt. Donations flooded in immediately; just nine days later, the group achieved half of their goal.

That groundswell of support shows the intense communal desire to fill the hole left by Trading Musician’s sudden closure last year, a decision that ultimately fell to owner Robin Bartlett-Smith. It wasn’t for lack of sales. Smith, who had started the Trading Musician with her ex-husband Mike Smith in 1991, had found herself ready to retire after three decades of ownership. After failing to find a buyer interested in continuing the business, Smith decided to shutter its doors. Speaking to the Seattle Times, Smith acknowledged the loss her shop’s closure left on the city’s music community. “My hope is that maybe somebody will come along and open up a store like mine in the future,” she said.

Though her employees accepted her decision, the shuttering left them understandably frustrated. They collectively considered themselves the root source of the shop’s beloved spirit. Joynes, for example, had spent nearly half his life in Trading’s orbit, having originally met Metcalf, Myers, and Smallidge as a teen truant who would take the 48 from Ballard to play the guitars instead of attending school. Over a decade of loitering, manager John Herman approached him with four different job offers; eventually, Joynes obliged and became one of the shop’s most vocal champions.

Smith learned about Joynes’s history with the shop via the Seattle Times. “She was impressed,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You skipped school to come and hang out?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. That’s how much this place means to me. To a lot of people.’”

His story is a commonality among Re-Animated’s staff, all of whom were encouraged by Herman (and subsequently, as managers, encouraged others) to contribute to Trading Musician’s unique community-oriented environment. Plenty of music shops allow people to demo the instruments they sell, but Trading was a rarity; its full-throated insistence on putting the “musician” first had become baked into the shop’s ethos. “[Herman] would always say to customers, ‘Hey, I don’t care if you go and play every guitar in the store,’” recalls Joynes. “‘I get paid the same amount.’” Many of Re-Animated’s supporters had come to rely on Trading’s relatively affordable prices and its welcoming space. Those who came to Seattle a little too late are left with only its legend—until now.

The staff at Re-Animated aren’t just aiming to revive Trading’s model of music shop; they want to improve upon it. Their end goal is to run it like a co-op, owned and operated by its employees, as a way to counter what transpired at the previous shop. “Not a lot of us got to leave with that feeling of ownership over something that we felt like we took a lot of ownership of,” says Joynes. And for how effectively it fostered camaraderie among its patrons, the old shop carried some outdated values—it was still a relic of a time when guitar-based music, and musicianship in general, were prone to gatekeeping by purists (and prioritized a certain cisgender, masculine identity).

That’ll be gone, replaced instead by recurring events like guitar restringing clinics and audio interface classes, a dissemination of know-how from people who understand the value of accessible in-person tutelage. “We want to give that knowledge freely to anybody who wants it,” attests Joynes, “and give someone the same treatment regardless of who they are, and not make knowledge and instruments and parts any more scarce than they already are.”

Scarcity seems to be a motif. There are not enough resources; not enough places to commune without some barrier of entry; not enough elements of the Seattle that was once a petri dish of culture, rather than a vacuum for it. Re-Animated is hoping to bring all of that back, with interest.

“For all the talk of Seattle vanishing… I think that’s part of the reason why people are so excited about this,” sums up Smallidge. “For all the places that have gone by the wayside, there’s still so many people that live here that need these resources. There’s still so many musicians and artists that live in this city, and creative people need places like this.”

Metcalf adds, “You don’t get second chances all the time.”

Follow Re-Animated Music on Instagram at @reanimatedmusic.

This story has been updated since its original publication to correct the name of the co-founder of Trading Musician, Mike Smith.

Shoot to Thrill

Rob Moura — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 12:55:00 -0700

"We have these moments where things spike, and these photographers… God bless ya." by Rob Moura

Music scenes burble and blare in the margins all around us. It’s easy to forget because so much of our exposure to culture is now largely through pristine ultra-curated algorithmic feeds, but rest assured that little Petri dishes of humanity are exchanging ideas and spreading the joy of art (and community!) at a local venue near you. You just need to know where to look.

IYKYK, a photography exhibit hanging Saturday and Sunday at Bumbershoot, won’t give you detailed directions—as the title insists, if you know, you know—but it does provide a series of windows into four distinct music scenes outside of the average ticket-holder’s purview.

The idea for the exhibit, according to Bumbershoot’s creative director Greg Lundgren, started during a chat with Seattle music journalist Jonathan Zwickel. “We were having a conversation about Luciano Ratto,” Lundgren says. Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Ratto moved to Seattle at the peak of the pandemic and spent the years afterward shooting a specific sect of the DIY punk community at several house shows across the city lines. His talent immediately revealed itself in stunning digital black-and-white shots, which bear more than a little similarity to those of legendary Sub Pop photographer Charles Peterson. “He’s a phenomenal photographer. What he was pointing his camera at was breathtaking, and a lot of [his photos] are of the people in attendance,” Lundgren says.

Falling by Luciano Ratto. Luciano Ratto

Though Ratto had built an audience on Instagram, it was his decision to compile his photos into a limited physical compilation, Taste the Floor, that brought him notoriety outside the internet. “Once you take it outside of Instagram, it feels a lot more important by nature,” says Ratto. “Print matters.”

Zwickel, who is the Board Chair of the Vera Project, discovered Ratto’s prints, fell in love with the work, and snagged one of only a hundred copies. Lundgren was likewise converted into an acolyte. “I thought, this is a really great portrait of a music scene,” he recalls. “It documents the three pillars: the music, where it’s taking place, and the audience. Once you remove one of them, it becomes less powerful.”

Of grave importance, of course, was protecting the venues Ratto captures on film. “Most of these places are people’s backyards or illegal,” says Lundgren. “Our goal is not to send five thousand people to someone’s backyard. The goal is to say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of stuff happening underground.’ The most exciting things around are places that don’t have marketing budgets or don’t even want that visibility.”

Around the same time, a friend introduced Lundgren to another surreptitious musical community, this one outside of the city proper. At an undisclosed location, residents and non-residents alike have been playing music of all styles, from Dylan covers and third-wave folk to Cajun, for over 25 years. The night Lundgren caught the tail end of a show, the venue featured bluegrass and zydeco bands.

It also featured a bearded man named Peter Ray, who was in the crowd capturing gauzy shots of the performers. Like Ratto, Ray is a transplant to the area, having moved to Vashon Island from upstate New York in 1982 to manage a woodland nursery. During his two-and-a-half decades of managing the nursery he had only dabbled in photography. When he left the nursery, he took photography classes at the Seattle Film Institute and started pursuing a side of himself he’d yet to explore. That’s when, after first being invited to the venue’s shows, he became one of its dedicated documenters.

It’s easy to discern the difference between Ratto’s and Ray’s respective scenes. One is DIY punk music propped up by the Gen Z vanguard; the other is mostly acoustic music featuring the last of the Boomer fans. And yet the two scenes shared a purpose; providing an outlet for people in the vicinity to commune via music, and outside of the digital realm. “They’re connected by the same reasons for existing,” observes Lundgren. “It made me think: what are the other things I’m not paying attention to?”

The Culture Yard by Leleita McKill. Leleita McKill

Lundgren commissioned Ray as a contributor to the nascent exhibit and set about trawling for similarly subterranean scenes. That led him to the dub/reggae shows regularly held at Culture Yard. Dub and reggae have a small but devoted collective of disciples in Seattle, and according to scene photographer Leleita McKill, the shows they regularly host are both intimate and neighborly affairs.

McKill, unlike Ratto or Ray, wasn’t aware of Seattle’s dub/reggae scene until she was commissioned by Bumbershoot. But the pairing was kismet; McKill had spent much of her youth in reggae hotspots around Jamaica and Central America and was starving for a scene here. The three shows she documented for the exhibit—one at Culture Yard’s home base in Fremont, one at the High Dive, and one outdoors at Seward Park—blew her away. “I was like, ‘Was this happening the whole time?’” she recalls, remarking upon the hospitable aura of the events, the homemade food she was offered, and the permeating power of the sound system. “I can't say enough what a lovely vibe it is,” says McKill, who has since returned just to enjoy the shows without a camera in tow.

“One of the other scenes I wanted to explore was hip-hop,” Lundgred claims. (The words carry a bitter irony; how is today’s definitive soundtrack of America’s youth still a “hidden” scene in Seattle?) His search led him to Gary Campbell, a champion of local hiphop and electronic music for over a decade. Yet another transplant, the Toronto native moved to Seattle as an Amazon employee in the early 2010s and leveraged his tech wage into becoming a patron of sorts for the city’s hiphop acts. His small vinyl label, Crane City Music, released works of local legends like AJ Suede, Stas THEE Boss, Dave B, and Gifted Gab.

Campbell’s work is also featured in IYKYK in the form of NEWCOMER, a documentary comprised entirely of live show footage captured on Campbell’s iPhone, but Campbell’s other contribution to the exhibit was in pointing Lundgren to Damascus Purnell, a visual artist who had done some of Crane City’s record covers. Years before, Purnell had been in the scene himself, but now spends his time helping out his fellow artists with their promotional needs. “I try to uplift them because I felt like they had these great talents,” he says, “and they needed the skills I had to get that information out.”

Purnell spent many a night pre-pandemic at local hiphop venues, many of which—including Capitol Hill sports bar 95 Slide and mysterious Belltown hub 5312—no longer exist post-COVID. Some of the acts are similarly defunct (including Purnell’s own group Underworld Dust Funk), and that makes Purnell’s and Campbell’s entries to the exhibit an outlier: a requiem to a previous era, rather than an exploration of a current one.

That sentiment coincides with an accompanying essay by music journalist Martin Douglas, whose column Throwaway Style has been an integral part of KEXP’s written coverage since 2018. Douglas, like Purnell and Campbell, was a witness to the concussive blast of creativity that emerged from the area in the 2010s. His essay, fittingly, contextualizes the importance of that scene while also addressing the factors that caused it to dissipate: COVID, mostly, but also a continued sense of apathy from a town still anchored to its grunge past.

Then again, a memento mori isn’t the worst thing in a show about underground music scenes. As revelatory as the images from IYKYK might be for Bumbershoot’s festival-goers, it’s also a high-profile time capsule for the people featured in them.

“These scenes are so temporal,” concludes Lundgren. “When they go away, all you’ve got is the albums, and sometimes not even that; often all you have are images. It’s important to document these flares of creativity and community, whether they’re in the art world or film world. We have these moments where things spike, and these photographers… God bless ya.”

IYKYK will show at Bumbershoot Saturday, August 31 and Sunday, September 1 from 12:30-11 pm.

Rain, Witches, and Haunted Garage Punk: Sunday at Bumbershoot

Megan Seling — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 21:10:00 -0700

The music we heard, the art we saw, and the witches we met at Bumbershoot. by Megan Seling

We saw so much stuff at Bumbershoot this weekend we had to break it into two posts. If you haven't yet checked out our Saturday recap, click here! There are cute cats, a crying clown, and a goth singer being distracted by the Seattle Center's ejaculatory fountain.

Sunday's weather was Very Seattle—drizzly, a little chilly—but that didn't stop Stranger reporters from seeing True Loves, Beverly Crusher, Shannon and the Clams, Spirit Award, THEM, Temples, Descendents, and Jawbreaker, and also taking some time to hear some secrets from a few friendly witches.

Sunday True Loves CHRISTIAN PARROCO True Loves Christian Parroco True Loves Michael Jacobson/Bumbershoot

True Loves

The clouds hung low at the start of Sunday, and easing into a starting slot at a festival is tricky enough without the weather being a cockblock. No one typically goes to festivals to stare out at a slate-gray sky and brood. But this is Seattle! And maybe we do! Seems like something we would do! Regardless, Seattle’s funk and soul gold-standard True Loves isn’t a band deterred by a chill in the air. Not when Jimmy James could freeze lava with his guitar tone.

They were big and brassy and breathless, the crowd was relatively sober and moving semi-rhythmically in a way that some could say was dancing-adjacent (registers as a Class 3 Miracle in the Pacific Northwest), and True Loves ripped through a set that, if God was real, should have split the sky wide open. It occurs to me that we as a city, and probably as individual people, do not appreciate what we have when we have it. It’s not a new concept, I know. We, as a city, have a world-class group of musicians capable of and actively lighting a dismal dark afternoon’s ass on fire, and I don’t know if we’ve stopped and appreciated that? Just something to think about as we open another juice store. (KATHLEEN TARRANT)

King Youngblood Christian Parroco King Youngblood Christian Parroco

Beverly Crusher

Beverly Crusher are fast nearing their 10th anniversary as a punk band. Punk is a genre infamous for its ephemerality, so give it up for Cozell Wilson and the Stiles brothers, Max and Sam, for sticking around this long. Tenacity tends to be rewarded in time, and judging from the crowd size, Seattle knows by now about their chaotic, venomous approach to rock. In a Fast and Furious T-shirt and Dragon Ball socks, frontman Wilson slayed the hits, from the call-and-response of “Gimme the Power” to the siren scream of “Scared.” Drummer Sam played hypeman, yelping along with the ecstatic grin of a golden retriever as he thundered down on the toms, while bassist Max formed the safety net for Wilson’s death-defying leaps over the octaves. It takes a lot to get a 1:45 pm crowd on a cloudy day feeling loose, but by the last squealing notes—as Sam lept off his kit like Rodney Dangerfield for one last crash—they’d pulled it off. (ROB MOURA)

The Fashion District at Bumbershoot 2023 BRITTNE LUNNISS The Black Tones Michael Jacobson/BUMBERSHOOT

Shannon and the Clams

My friend pointed out that Shannon and the Clams has been a band since 2009, which according to Google was 14 years ago and not, as I was convinced, like a week ago maybe?

They’re relentlessly charming, always. You don’t get their balance of lo-fi garage scuzz and girl-group disco-ball-shine without dialing it in, and Shannon and the Clams are speed dialed-in. For an afternoon set, there were lots of Outfits happening and the subsequent documentation of those Outfits, which I personally love to see as part of a festival. People snapping photos and tapping feet, affirming each other’s hat choices (a lot of bold hat choices at Bumbershoot this year, yet another new feature from prior iterations). The outfits on stage were similarly fun and for their set they rode the line of sounding like if the Shangri-La’s were a little bit haunted but in a fun-not-murder way. This band is just forever fun, really. Apparently for 14 years. Fun for 14 years. I need to lie down. (KATHLEEN TARRANT)

Bumbershoot 2023 BRITTNE LUNNISS Pussy Riot CHRISTIAN PARROCO Pussy Riot CHRISTIAN PARROCO Spirit Award Christian ParRAco

Spirit Award

The thrum of distorted bass, the crack of 4/4 snare, and the smeared howl of Daniel Lyon's indecipherable vocals: on these elements, Spirit Award are recognizable from a mile away. Joined by Wild Powwers' Jordan Gomes on bass and Forest Ray's Nate Louis on drums, Lyon's long-running hypnotic rock project prepped for their upcoming European tour on Bumbershoot's Vera stage, and in top form. Louis's kit sounded massive from the pit, and it was kitted out with a few bells and whistles (like some sort of hanging electronic gong) that felt apropos to Lyon's battalion of guitar and vocal pedals. Effects-heavy krautrock is hard to mess up but equally difficult to get right, and Spirit Award have been in the game long enough to streamline the process. From a raucous cover of Suicide's "Ghost Rider" to a searing extended take on their new album's "Western Violence," the trio strummed and thrashed and undulated across the stage like they were performing a live reenactment of the sounds rippling off of their instruments. At its end, Lyon grabbed his microphone and swung it onto the crash cymbal, his guitar left screaming on its belly. (ROB MOURA)

Debby Friday BRITTNE LUNNISS Debby Friday BRITTNE LUNNISS SOL Brittne Lunniss

The Witches Temple

Bumbershoot this year asked the question: What if a music festival could tell you your future, read your fortune, and provide spiritual guidance? The Witches Temple featured a rotating team of local trans and queer witches reading tarot cards, astrological charts, bones, and doing energy work throughout each festival day. They brought their queering of spirituality to a mainstream audience.

Over 1,300 visited the Witches Temple on the first day of Bumbershoot, according to artists and “community witches” behind the multimedia art project “The Living Altar,” Ylva Mara Radziszewski and Kiki Robinson. Radziszewski said she only peed once during the whole day because she was so busy.

I tried to get a reading at the Witches Temple on Saturday, but everything was full up. I arrived when the temple opened on Sunday, signing up for a tarot reading since the bone reader was running late.

“The Temple is ready for you,” the text on my phone read minutes later.

I walked into the temple, another one of those geodesic dome tents. It smelled of freshly burned sage and incense. Small candles flickered on cocktail tables dotting the space. Various linens and fabrics covered each table. Some had flowers in the middle. The tent buzzed with conversation and shuffling cards. Bones clattered across one table—I guess the bone reader had arrived.

Meagan Angus read my cards. I asked things about my job, about my love life. We only had 15 minutes. I left feeling calmer, clearer. Everything she told me is private so I will not be telling you. Don't be nosy. (NATHALIE GRAHAM)

Benny the Butcher CHRISTIAN PARROCO Benny the Butcher Christian Parroco

THEM

“We played this at our high school graduation,” said Hudson (the second initial of THEM) before she and the rest of the band launched into a gorgeous cover of the Head and The Heart’s “Rivers and Roads” while a machine puffed a flurry of trichromatic, berry-colored bubbles over the heads of the crowd.

That high school graduation, of course, was three months ago. Not too long ago, the relative youth of the band would have implied novelty, but the fact that THEM started five years ago as a group of teenage girls is the interesting thing about them. On the Vera Stage, the West Seattle four-piece once again levied their power against a venue at capacity, a line of people out the door waiting to get in. Those who were lucky to be in the space were witness to simple, time-tested melodies graced with a dash of theatricality: perfectly executed three-part harmonies, constant instrument switching, intermittent slide guitar, and a heaping helping of confidence anchoring it all. (ROB MOURA)

Bomba Estéreo BRITTNE LUNNISS Descendents BRITTNE LUNNISS Descendents BRITTNE LUNNISS

Descendents

The enduring joy of Descendents is that vocalist Milo Aukerman is a dork and therefore has never been cool, which keeps someone’s inherent draw timeless. This is a feat for anyone, but definitely for a band that released its first EP in 1981.

Descendents energy is the same—matter-of-fact, loud, joyous, and sincere. Their songs, surprisingly because they all spit bratty teen bon mots, feel just as relevant being played by a bunch of aging dudes. I think it’s because they can be and should be sung from the Beginner’s Mind—from not knowing anything and wanting to know everything. From unfettered expression. They sing the parts of being young that never go away—am I different, am I okay, you’re annoying, what am I doing, what are any of us doing, I’m confused. It’s not hormonal, it’s insatiable. They remind all of us to touch that insatiable core, to forget about being a cool guy anymore (as if I ever was before).

Cool comes and goes, trends fade, but smash-banging your way through 30 2-minute songs in an hour while the world’s tiniest, happiest circle pit swirls in the middle of a rain-peppered crowd ranging in age from 15 to 55—that’s forever. Or at least it’s right now. And all we have is that. All we have is that and never wanting to grow up. As a bunch of the coolest dorks with the best songs yell at you if you want them to. (KATHLEEN TARRANT)

Bumbershoot 2023 BRITTNE LUNNISS Bumbershoot 2023 BRITTNE LUNNISS

Temples

Temples has been active since 2012, with Noel Gallagher once calling them “the best new band in Britain.” The last time they played Seattle was February 2020 at the old Crocodile, so they were due for a triumphant return.

At Bumbershoot, I overheard a man explaining to his friend, “They’re like neo-psychedelia-glam.” The crowd waiting for Temples includeed a silver-haired man in the front row getting high, and a young woman behind him in her 20s–if that’s not cross-generational appeal, I don’t know what is. Heck, I found Temples on their fourth album (Exotico, it came out this spring) and thought they sounded like a new band, which is impressive when they’ve been making music for over a decade. Their energy, their sound, is very now. When the band took the stage, they danced and sang and rocked out with an energy I wouldn’t expect from a group that’s been at it for so long. They’re excited: to play music, to be in this moment with us, to be alive.

At one point, frontman James Bagshaw remarked, “KEXP is like the best thing ever, even in England. Thanks for having us on this stage, and on your shows. We should do another live session.” (Their last was in 2017.) Between actually forgetting the names of their songs and jokes about doing so, the band reved up the crowd with the riffs of their 2020 single, “Paraphernalia,” which has actually never been on an album. They flow seamlessly into “Gamma Rays” off their most recent LP, and a mosh pit broke out near the front. It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, but the college kids rompped about as the older folks hold steady on the edges with bemused expressions. Even after two days of arts and music, this final set at the KEXP stage left the crowd feeling energized and wanting more. I'm looking forward to the return of both Temples and Bumbershoot for years to come. (SHANNON LUBETICH)

Bumbershoot 2023 Brittne Lunniss

Jawbreaker

Jawbreaker took the stage on the second night of Bumbershoot and vocalist and guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach said, “Hey what’s up everybody. We’re Jawbreaker, friends of the Northwest." Then they launched into an hour-long set of all the songs us aging punks in the audience were dying to sing along to one more time. Jawbreaker's history with our city goes all the way back to 1990, as the now-highly-influential band was just getting their start on self-promoted tours along the West Coast. In 1994, the band played the historic Capitol Theater in Olympia. That night must have made an impact on the band, as they returned to that very venue 23 years later for one of their first shows back after breaking up in 1996. Though you could never tell by how tight the band sounded live, apparently, they hadn’t practiced much lately. Could have fooled me. “This is great. We haven’t played in like a year,” Schwarzenbach said. “Welcome to Jawbreaker practice.” The Fisher Pavilion crowd damn near gasped as Jawbreaker busted out crowd favorites like “Jet Black” and “Kiss the Bottle” and then yelled the "Boxcar" lyrics in unison—“One, two, three, four / Who’s punk, what’s the score?” At one point I looked around me and saw moms and dads with their kids on their shoulders alongside middle-aged baldies like me circle pitting with youngsters. To the unfamiliar, Jawbreaker may seem like a fairly standard melodic punk band. I mean, that’s not entirely wrong. But dig a little deeper and what you’ll find are raw, honest lyrics, heavy-ass guitars, and a hell of a great hook. Jawbreaker absolutely killed it on Saturday night and proved why their catchy pop-punk songs have stood the test of time. (KEVIN DIERS)

Phantogram Brittne Lunniss Phantogram Brittne Lunniss Fat Boy Slim BRITTNE LUNNISS

Planet of the Tapes

Rob Moura — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 13:45:00 -0700

The label has been releasing local music since 2015. by Rob Moura

Being part of Seattle’s sprawling underground music scene can be fun and fulfilling, but it’s hard to be a DIY musician without the money to fund your art, or the people to lift you up and support your unconventional passions. That’s where people like Kay Redden come in.

As founder and head of local tape label Den Tapes, Redden’s been championing underground artists for almost a decade. The label, founded in 2015, has grown into a beloved, trustworthy source of solid Seattle-based music. This year alone they’ve done cassette runs for fantastic releases by emo-rock band Tourist Activities, dream-pop trio Coral Grief, heavy shoegaze brooders Fell Off, and country-rock act Lightweight Champion.

Redden, who also works at Sunset Tavern and Sonic Boom Records in Ballard, currently runs the entire operation herself after co-heads Willy Walker and Dan Spaulding departed in 2020. She discovers the bands, negotiates the cassette releases, and spreads the word to outlets who might be interested. Through and through, she’s an ardent supporter of the city's underground, and it's better for it.

<a href="https://dentapes.bandcamp.com/album/valley">Valley by Lightweight Champion</a>

Redden grew up in Garland, TX, a suburb of Dallas. "It’s what King of the Hill was based off of,” she said. “It was amazing. I know a lot of people would say, ‘Wow, I’m so sorry you grew up in Dallas,’ but, I mean, I turned out fine.”

Though she’s a proud Texan, her appreciation of PNW bands like Built to Spill and local labels including K Records, Kill Rock Stars, and Sub Pop led to a deep affinity for Seattle as a musical haven. After making her first trip as a teenager in 2010, she fell in love with the city immediately. “I was telling the person I was with that they should just get a plane ticket home and leave me. I loved it."

Eventually she moved to the area in 2012, working at a Whole Foods in Bellevue as she pursued her passion for music. "It was bigger bands at first,” she recalled of the first Northwest shows she attended. “Every local show that I went to, I felt very much like an outsider.” Nevertheless, she began to ingratiate herself with the local rock scene, at the time spearheaded by Capitol Hill bands like Chastity Belt and Tacocat. Though she juggled the idea of starting a tape label, the typical hurdles—money, effort, potential failure—kept her from taking the plunge.

Then, a couple of years later, her mom suddenly passed away. Redden said the catastrophic impact of the tragedy prompted her to start Den Tapes. “There was a direct correlation. I thought, ‘Fuck it, the most important person of my life is gone. Nothing can hurt me ever again.’ I still believe that, to this day.”

Some heroes wear tapes. Photo by Rob Moura; Graphic by Anthony Keo

The label began with an extremely small run of tapes for Invisible Hand’s I’m Here Right Now, along with a comedy EP by Albert Kirchner. Later, at a Wimps/Pony Time show, she ran into Walker and Spaulding of the garage punk band Porn Bloopers, and she agreed to release their first EP, Sex Tape. The pair soon agreed to help Redden with the label, and after Walker moved in with Redden, the operation quickly turned into an in-house project. Together, they’d handle the arduous process of duplicating the recorded music to individual cassettes, occasionally holding tape-making parties where the bands themselves would help.

From the beginning, Redden held three criteria for the acts she wanted to support: comedy, dumb party bands, and punk. (“I love the comedy scene so much,” said Redden, who used to perform stand-up herself, “and that’s a thing that can be crossed over to the music scene so easily.”)

The “comedy” part soon revealed itself in the “dumb party” bands (Smoker Dad, Uncleholic) and the punk acts (Happy Times Sad Times, Choke the Pope) that refused to take themselves seriously. Yet, as Den Tapes progressed, more serious acts began to find their way onto the label, including Don Piano’s tender acoustic guitar, Antonioni’s gorgeously poetic alternative, and Coach Phillips’ emotive rock.

Each of these acts gets tireless support from Redden, who’s also a constant presence at live shows. You’ll usually find her bespectacled self up front, camera in hand, urging on the crowd and instigating the mosh pit. She’s been keeping up the zeal for eight years now, and the effort has led to coverage of the label from both NPR and Bandcamp (whose staff declared Tourist Activities’ Off My Mind a 2019 standout).

<a href="https://dentapes.bandcamp.com/album/off-my-mind">Off My Mind by Tourist Activities</a>

The biggest challenge running the label? “Money,” she said, unsurprisingly. “It’s not easy. I hate crowdfunding—as a person who grew up poor, it’s hard for me to ask.” Redden hasn't ever made a profit from Den Tapes, and she doesn’t desire to. Whatever money she makes from sales gets funneled right back into the label’s future projects.

The point of the label, instead, is the community of artists and fans she can help build within it. Last year’s Den Fest, a packed two-day run of bands held in the now-defunct Victory Lounge, exemplifies that aim. Redden delights at the prospect of the label being a conduit for that community, as well as a rare place for artists to feel validated in their efforts.

To that end, she doesn’t see herself stopping anytime soon. “My favorite thing is when I see a band for the first time, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what your plan is for the future, but I’m fucking here for it.’"

Den Tapes' catalog is available on Bandcamp. You can follow the label on Instagram at @dentapes.