Mission Mission

They were mostly drummers, but there was other great instrumentation as well. They sounded sometimes like the Black Orpheus soundtrack and sometimes like Basement Jaxx. I tried looking them up, but the Carnaval website didn’t have a listing for the 19th and Harrison stage.

Also good was the the ad hoc tertiary percussion section energetically drumming along off to the side:

Balkan Brass & Eastern Groove is a siiick dance party. Sooo much incredible music from a wide variety of places and styles, but it all fits together perfectly thanks to the efforts of DJ Baron von East-Infection. We’ll interview him in a second, but hit play on this jam (my favorite discovery from last month’s party) first:

Where’d you get your name?
Baron von East-Infection just fit. Friends in Kyiv, Ukraine suggested my DJ moniker be my last name with the word baron, as my last name sounded similar to a Dutch military officer. The east’s music is infectious, the music has a fury, Baron von East-Infection is chief officer spreading the infection!

How did you become interested in Balkan Brass and Eastern European music?
I used to be really into punk and at some point of growing more normal and listening to new things, Balkan Brass intrigued me. It has an energy, intensity and soul that is like nothing else. I liken the intensity to punk, it translated over seamlessly. In 2008, I was traveling in Eastern Europe and found myself at a music festival in Hungary where I saw Leningrad, Goran Bregovic and Kocani Orkestar. I was converted. The music was so deeply authentic, it had a romance that was contagious, infectious. In 2010 I moved to Ukraine to seek out this romanticism I had acquired, not to say that I found what I thought I was looking for, but I was wholly not disappointed.

What was your experience there like?
It was incredible. I got hit on by this punk-looking guy during my first week there, I didn’t know anyone, within five minutes we had bonded over Black Sabbath, Slavoj Zizek and Ukrainian Girls. I moved in with him the next day for $125 a month and we shared a his flat for six months. I dated a super hot model and got a job teaching English. I got really lucky when I tapped into the underground scene there. It’s nuts, they party harder than anyone else I’ve ever seen. There’s a kind of nihilism towards the new democracy, it’s super corrupt, everything’s sort of fucked “so lets just drink a lot of vodka; пей, даваи!”  I fell in love.

And what brought you back to San Francisco?
After two years of living the dream, my liver and lungs felt broken, I craved stability and security; cops that would yell at me in a language I understood. I was always broke, there were visa issues, once I got kicked out. In short: superficial bullshit.

How do you pitch your show to the uninitiated?
The best part of every show is when someone approaches me and says “This shit is incredible! And I’ve never heard any of it.” Expect to hear exotic sounds that will move you. Get super drunk on a weeknight, lower you inhibitions and let the music guide you on an far-out journey of an evening. People, mostly commonly white people don’t have much know-how in how to groove to this stuff so they usually pogo and flail their arms like apes, that behavior is welcome folks! Just drink a bunch and have a good time is all we request.

Your flyers are always awesome. Can you tell us more about this month’s?
The flyer for the show at the Elbo Room is one of my favorites. It’s a collage of a bunch of pictures I took while traveling in Eastern Europe and some others I gathered. There’s some dirty things written in russian like “first time, you’re not a faggot…” There’s a pair of tits pasted on a teenage boy, and his friends dancing, a photo I took in Baia Mare, Romania. There’s a man on a haystack on a horse, a picture I took while hitch hiking in Transylvania, Romania. There’s some Romanian villagers near a horse, a babushka drinking vodka, an insistent russian man telling you to drink. We love all people in all forms, it’s a celebration of life, “c’mon to dance, baby!”

The show is called “Balkan Brass & Eastern Groove.” The first part seems self-explanatory but what exactly do you mean by Eastern Groove?
The first part covers the main theme, but I didn’t want to just play high-energy Brass music from the Balkans. The Eastern Groove allows for an eclectic mix of weird ‘eastern’ stuff that includes but is not limited to: Soviet new-wave, Turkish Psyche & Disko, Bollywood jazz & funk, Eastern European Rap & Hip Hop, Russian Ska, Blatnaya Pesnya, Punk & a bunch of weird music from the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union.  Hell, I might even just play a Wu Tang song for fun.

Thanks! See you Tuesday!
Yes, come say hi/ привет, если ты можете! I’ll be the one with the flamboyant dance moves in the tracksuit, slaying the Balkan fury and DJing. If you like it, I’d like to meet you, see you there!

RSVP and invite your friends!

Just blast some Black Orpheus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwOxd5TuYVQ

And tonight’s show at Cafe du Nord features a rare appearance by one of my favorite bands to dance to ever, Still Flyin’!!!

They’re playing along with Sea Lions, Permanent Collection, Colleen Green, and Burnt Palms, so be sure to check it out after you ace your song and win a round at Singin’ and Pingin’ beforehand!  Check out all the details for the rest of the weekend below:

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Some motorbike cops rolled up at one point, one of the organizers ran up and shook their hands and had a chat, and they left. The crowd wasn’t huge, but they were having a blast. And there was a dancing robot.

Now let’s rock:

I’d probably go to a watching-paint-dry party as long as it was held at Z Space, but dude, this party sounds even better:

You’ve demanded it for nearly a year now! This month, SINGIN’ & PINGIN’ makes a triumphant return to its original venue, Z Space, the grand performing arts theater in the heart of the northeastern Mission!

DJ PURPLE (http://djpurple.com/) has gained notoriety and momentum since last we appeared here, so the DANCE KARAOKE show will be even tighter and more awesome than ever. And there will be FOUR TABLES for maximum BERLIN-STYLE PING PONG ACTION!

Full bar and lots of dance floor! And FREE BEER and FREE HARD CIDER for the first hour! Plus, for some reason, “The Endless Slope” indoor snowboarding machine, courtesy of Adventurous Sports (http://adventurous.com/).

Can’t wait! RSVP and invite your friends!

Photos from last year’s event here.

Here’s some more info, courtesy of The Eagle on Facebook:

Enter Torche, the four-pronged Floridian Riff Colossus that has steamrolled its way across the international underground. Led by vocalist/guitarist Steve Brooks (formerly of doom dropouts Floor) and featuring the myriad talents of drummer Rick Smith, bassist Jonathan Nuñez and guitarist Juan Montoya, Torche unfurled their self-titled debut in 2005 via Richmond, Virginia’s Robotic Empire. The glorious half-hour of blissed-out power-grooves, triumphant vocal harmonies and cosmic resonance within was variously hailed as “stoner pop,” “thunder rock,” and “doom pop,” but a consensus was quickly reached within the Fourth Estate: Both the underground and mainstream press had their hands halfway down their pants just thinking about listening to Torche. The band was immediately lauded as giants among men, leaders among sheep, and powerbrokers of a deadly new sonic idiom founded upon Brooks’ signature “bomb-string” detonation-detune.

RSVP and invite your friends!

It’s Sunday morning and I don’t know about you, but I often need the right song to get my Sunday started. I’ve done my best to provide you with some options for what song best fits your Sunday morning experience, which can vary greatly. Please choose one or add better selections in the comments.

I woke up with this song in my head, it’s good if you’re keeping it sleepy, maybe staying in bed and looking out the window a bit before getting up.

Dear Nora – “Here We Come Around”

But what if you really need to get pumped up, get the blood flowing for a rollicking Sunday. Maybe this will help.

Kanye West & Jay Z – “No Church in the Wild”

Okay, so those might not do it for you today. What if you’re really hungover and can’t really think or read or see anything and you kind of feel really emotional right now guys and just want to wallow a little and feel nostalgic?

Radiohead – “Creep”

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He also tells the story about the first time he ever met Jay:

I first met Jay when he was 17 years old. He booked us a gig at Barristers, the line up was The Spaceshits, Deadly Snakes and Reatards. When we showed up in Memphis it looked like a ghost town. Skid Marks (drummer of the spaceshits) has always  been a magnet for scum bags and immediately befriended a one armed man who had just come out of prison. They disappeared in search for some weed.

When Jay showed up he told me that he had just gotten engaged to be married. He also apologized about the lack of people at the show in advance, the reason was simple… “everyone hates us in this town.”  There were 4 people in the audience that night, Greg Oblivian and the dudes from Impala. But the show went on and it was great fun. Later that night everyone went to Greg’s house to hang and listen to records and Carson Binks (Legend of San Fran), Skid Marks and I decided to go for a Memphis adventure with Jay.

We drove around crazy ghettos in search of drugs. All we wanted was a little weed, none of us wanted any of the countless crack offers not even Jay. We parked at a gas station for some cigarettes and when we were getting back into the car i remember all these crack heads coming out of nowhere asking me for a smoke. They were crawling towards us like true zombies and even continued to follow the car in slow motion as we drove away. It really felt like George A. Romero was somewhere around the corner. Jay spoke of these crackheads with a sense of pride which was followed by pure hatred. He was really into showing us the nitty gritty of his city.

Read on!

[Photo via Pork Magazine]

Rebecca, formerly of My First Earthquake, has always been great at promotional clips. Check it out:

Happy Fangs performs with all those other bands, tonight at Elbo Room. RSVP and invite your friends!