Outsound Presents: May, 2023

Next month will have a slightly different plan for the Outsound Presents performances involving both content and ordering. There will be the usual two series as follows:

1. The LSG (Luggage Store Gallery) Creative Music Series events take place on Wednesday evenings at 8 p.m.; and the venue is located at 1007 Market Street, just off the corner of Sixth Street and across from the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street. Admission is on a sliding scale between $10 and $20. However, no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
2. The SIMM (Static Illusion Methodical Madness) Series of concerts is a monthly event taking place on Sunday evenings at 7:30 p.m. The venue is the Musicians Union Hall, located at 116 9th Street, near the corner of Mission Street. General admission will be $20 with a $15 senior rate for those age 62 or older.

As in the usual past, the month will offer two LSG concerts and one in the SIMM Series. This month the SIMM program will be the last of the three. However, the first LSG event will involve more than just the performance of music. Specific details in chronological order are as follows:

Wednesday, May 3: The first LSG program will be a full-evening performance organized around the viewing of a new documentary film. Beat scholar and poet Thomas Antonic will make his debut as a film director with the screening of a feature-length documentary entitled ruth weiss: One More Step West is The Sea. I first encountered Weiss (better known for her lowercase spelling) when the Outsound New Music Summit in the summer of 2018 included a program entitled PoetryFreqs in which she read her poems accompanied by electronic sonorities.

The following November Outsound Presents offered a special program organized around weiss reading her poems. This time she was accompanied by jazz improvised by Doug Lynner on a Mystery Serge synthesizer, Rent Romus on saxophones and flutes, Doug O’Connor on bass, and Hal Davis playing a log. 2018 was the year of her 90th birthday, and she would die two summers later on July 31, 2020.

The screening of Antonic’s documentary will be preceded by opening sets of poetry readings by Jeff Kaliss and Jessica Loos. These will be given improvised accompaniment by the ruth weiss players. That group will consist of three of the four musicians that accompanied Weiss in November of 2018: Romus, Lynner, and O’Connor.

Wednesday, May 17: This will be a two-set evening. However, as of this writing, the first set has not yet been finalized. The second set will be taken by vocalist Dina Emerson, a native of Santa Barbara, who was based in New York City for roughly the last decade of the last century. Her earliest influences were recordings made by Meredith Monk and Robert Ashley. She will give a duo performance with Philip Everett who works with electronic gear under the performing name of Skullkrusher. This will be the rescheduling of a program originally planned for the SIMM Series this past February 12.

Sunday, May 21: The SIMM program will offer two one-hour sets. The first set will be taken by Sharkiface, which is the project of experimental artist Angela Edwards, who is based here in the Bay Area. Edwards’ latest album, Climax in a Process, was released on a Bandcamp Web page at the beginning of this past March. The second set will be taken by Nine Dog Dick, which calls itself “a collaborative psycho-spazz extreme composed original music quartet.” The performers are saxophonist Tom Weeks playing with a rhythm section of Matt Chandler on bass, Doug Katelus on organ, and Jay Korber on drums. They also have a Bandcamp Web page for their debut album, also released last month. The album has only two tracks, the first of which is Miles Davis’ “Rated X,” followed by Larry Young’s “Mother Ship.”