Combo Chimbita

with guests TBA

$18 adv/ $23 dos

Chimbita formed in 2016 as a loose combination of friends and bandmates, many of whom had played together in other groups, all of whom were products of the Colombian diaspora who ended up as first generation New Yorkers making their way in the city’s fertile music scene. Through a year-long residency at Brooklyn’s iconic venue Barbès, an incubator for countless musical talents, the group’s sound evolved, mutated, and gradually came into focus. What had once been a casual jam session now clearly showed signs of real synergy, the kind of thing that demanded a dedicated approach to reveal where it would go. El Corredor Del Jaguar, an EP recorded in the infamous hangout known as El Bunker, was the result, and it showed the roots of all that would come ahead: the crackling rhythms of Dilemastronauta, Niño Lento’s razor sharp guitar, Prince of Queen’s cosmic synths, and above it all the mesmerizing vocals and propulsive guacharaca of Carolina Oliveros. 2017’s full length Abya Yala followed, with successive LPs dropping bi-annually after that (2019’s Ahomale and 2021’s Ire). Throughout it all, the band has toured relentlessly, developing a live show that is impossible to ignore. Whether it is the individual musicianship of the band, an evolving and intricate interplay of instrumentation that manages to be both tight and laser-focused as well as expansive and psychedelic, often in the space of a single song — or the shamanic intensity of Oliveros’s performance, always theatrical and fierce to the utmost, Combo Chimbita is forging their own unique musical path, one that is well worth following.

Mary x Lip Critic

Doors at 7pm, all ages

In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion writes about documenting the everyday, unexceptional occurrences that make up a life. The point is to remember, in her words: “How it felt to be me.” Notice that, in Didion’s view, a notebook doesn’t chronicle how it feels, but rather how it felt, and this distinction matters, because time passes, feelings change, our memories solidify or they slip away if we’re not paying attention.

Ask the Brooklyn-based Hello Mary what their eponymous debut album is about, and they’ll pause for a long while before responding, not because they’re unsure, but because the answer seems so ordinary, so mundane. “This might sound vague,” drummer/vocalist Stella Wave warns, “but to me, this album is about accepting the state of things as they are at a given moment, whether it’s your relationship to another person or the world around you.” Pinpointing an individual thought pattern, or resounding theme, risks flattening the trio, who write music and lyrics in tandem, knotting their perspectives together into a singular consciousness. “We collaborate on everything,” bassist Mikaela Oppenheimer says, “from our lyrics to guitar parts and even bass and drums sometimes.”

Hello Mary – which was produced by Bryce Goggin (Pavement /Luna) – references alternative rock of the nineties alongside Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley as influences, heard most vividly on the album’s simmering closer “Burn it Out,” but their contemporaries are bands like Palberta, Spirit of the Beehive, and Palehound, artists who don’t shy from unusual time signatures, careening feedback, and unconventional harmonies, all for the sake of surprising a listener. The album’s “Looking Right Into the Sun,” a song most honestly described as “delightful,” is driven by a tight and dynamic rhythm section that gives way to Straight’s crystalline and confident falsetto.

Astrid Sonne at Current Space

with special guest, TBA

Astrid Sonne is a Danish, London based composer and viola player. Throughout her acclaimed discography, Astrid Sonne has been carefully crafting different moods through electronic and acoustic instrumental endeavours.
On her most recent album “Great Doubt” (January 2024) this skill is refined, now with the distinct addition of the composer’s own vocal in the fore. The tone of each track is unmistakably Sonne’s, structured around contrasts through an impeccable sense of timing. Lyrics on the album are sparse, merely highlighting different scenes or emotional states of being, leaving the music to fill in the blanks. Yet they also form a pattern of ambiguity, consolidated through the album title, searching for answers through looking at how and what you are asking, questions for the world, questions of love.

The viola, a trusted companion since Astrid Sonne’s youth, appears effortlessly throughout the album, fully integrated into the sonic universe; through a pizzicato driven arrangement in the poignant track “Almost” or along with booms and claps in mutated cinematic stabs during “Give my all”, paraphrasing Mariah Carey’s 1997 ballad. Yet the string section also gives way to explorations of woodwinds, counterbalancing the bowed movements with digital brass and airy flutes. Finally,
beats and detuned piano are fresh additions to the soundscape, cementing how Sonne’s practice is always evolving into new territories.

Fievel Is Glauque is an international band led by bandleader and pianist Zach Phillips (US), singer Ma Clément (Belgium), and a rotating cast of musicians spread across the globe. Their sophomore album and label debut on Fat Possum comes out October 25th. It is a live album recorded as an octet consisting of three live takes (no click track) collaged together.

Lifeguard at Songbyrd

with guests TBA

a co-pro with Red Brick presents

Ripped and Torn, the debut album by Chicago three-piece Lifeguard, may or may not take its title from the legendary Scottish punk fanzine of the same name. Or perhaps it references the torn t-shirts that rock writer Lester Bangs claimed the late Pere Ubu founder Peter Laughner died for “in the battle fires of his ripped emotions.” Or maybe it points to the trio’s ferociously destabilising take on melodic post-punk and high velocity hardcore, signposting their debt to the kind of year zero aesthetics that would reignite wild improvisational songforms with muzzy garage Messthetics in a way rarely extrapolated this side of Dredd Foole & The Din.

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Either way, Lifeguard stake their music on the kind of absolute sincerity of the first wave of garage bands, garage bands that took rock at its word, while simultaneously cutting it up with parallel traditions of freak. The half-chanted, half-sung vocals are hypnotic. Songs aren’t so much explicated as they are exorcised, as though the melodies are plucked straight from the air through the repeat-semaphoring of Asher Case on bass, the machine gun percussion that Isaac Lowenstien plays almost like a lead instrument, and that flame-thrower guitar that Kai Slater sprays all over the ever-circling rhythm section. Indeed, the trio play around an implied centre of gravity with all of the brain-razzing appeal of classic minimalism, taking three-minute hooks into the zone of eternal music by jamming in – and out – of time. And then there are the more experimental pieces – “Music for Three Drums” (which surely references Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians), “Charlie’s Vox” – that reveal the breadth of Lifeguard’s vision, incorporating a kind of collaged DIY music that fully embraces the bastardised avant garde of margin walkers like The Dead C, Chrome, and Swell Maps.

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But all this would be mere hubris without the quality of the songs. The title track “Ripped & Torn” suggests yet another take on the title, which is the evisceration of the heart. Here we have a beautifully brokedown garage ballad, with the band coming together to lay emotional waste to a song sung like a transmission from a lonely ghost. “Like You’ll Lose” goes even deeper into combining dreamy automatic vocals with steely fuzz on top of a massive dub/dirge hybrid. “It Will Get Worse” is pure unarmoured pop-punk crush while “Under Your Reach” almost channels the UK DIY of The Television Personalities circa “Part Time Punks” but with a militant interrogation of sonics that would align them more with This Heat. Plus the production, by Randy Randall of No Age, is moody as fuck.  Are they really singing “words like tonality come to me” on “T.L.A.”?! If so, it would suggest that Lifeguard are one of those rare groups who can sing about singing, who can play about playing, and who, despite the amount of references I’m inspired to throw around due to the voracity of their approach, are capable of making a music that points to nothing outside of the interaction of the player’s themselves.

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And sure, there’s a naivety to even believing you could possibly do that. But perhaps that’s what I have been chasing across this entire piece, the quality of openness that Lifeguard bring to their music. You can tell these three have been playing together since junior high/high school: the music feels youthful, unburdened, true to itself, even as it eats up comparisons. Lifeguard play underground rock like it might just be as serious as your life, but with enough playful ardour to convince you that youth is a quality of music, and not just of age. With a sound that is fully caught up in the battle fires of their own ripped emotions, Lifeguard make me wanna believe, all over again.

Zap Outdoorz is a festival that bings together top electronic and punk acts from the DMV plus out-of-region favorites for a weekend campout in Appalachia. Our mission is to bridge worlds and move bodies, embrace our raw edges as humans, and ignite our collective energy. Organic by nature and intimate by design, we are at once a reverie and a homecoming, an annual celebration of what has been, what is, and what ought to be.

Momma 'Welcome To My Blue Sky Tour'

with villagerrr

Momma is the musical project of Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman. After moving to New York from Los Angeles, the two brought on bassist and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch, and drummer Preston Fulks, to flesh out their sound. Produced by Kobayashi Ritch, Momma's new album, Welcome to My Blue Sky, lays bare all of the precious and all of the ugly experiences of falling in and out of love, and the art of keeping secrets. Welcome to My Blue Sky comes out April 4th, 2025.