Miya Folick – Showbams

Noise Pop 2018: A Bay Area indie culture celebration

Noise Pop //
Bay Area venues – San Francisco & Oakland
February 19th-25th, 2018 //

While it seems as if the rest of the world slept soundly over the holidays, putting their work aside to relax and unwind, the people at Noise Pop stayed wide awake, producing the most eclectic and unique celebration of Bay Area independent culture.

Starting next week, the 26th edition of Noise Pop invades all corners of the Bay (including the addition of shows in surrounding cities like San Jose, Santa Cruz and Sacramento this year) to honor everything we love about SF, Oakland and the greater Northern California region.

As a festival, Noise Pop is one in which you can jump from show to show while seeing plenty of big-name acts — tUnE-yArDs, Ty Dolla $ign and Built to Spill to name a few this year — on one night, then catch some of today’s most emerging artists, whether it’s Japanese Breakfast, Sudan Archives, Mount Eerie or another.

Throughout the week, make sure to explore everything that Noise Pop has to offer. Between film screenings, art galleries, happy hours and concerts happening all over SF and the East Bay, you’ll find that Noise Pop knows how to transform the area into your own playground.

Last year for its 25th anniversary, Noise Pop saw its largest attendance numbers, with nearly every show reaching capacity. In fact, more than 28,000 people came together for a week of events to commemorate what makes the Bay Area so damn special.

Names on the 2018 lineup are strong and not to be slept on. Between local shining star Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, well-known acts such as Bahamas and Geographer, besties Jay Som and Japanese Breakfast, and former Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam, the Noise Pop bill (which was announced in three phases) is stacked to the brim, making it tough to choose who to see each night.

However, there are only two ways to get in on the action: buy a badge and gain access to every show, or individually buy tickets to the ones that you’d like to attend.

The choice is yours, friend.

Download the Noise Pop mobile app to get special updates, including details on Noise Pop After Hours performances, and create your own customized schedule here. Super Fan Badges are still available for purchase here.

Photos by Norm de Veyra // Written by Timothy Francis Alva-Melville //

Yeasayer with Young Magic, Miya Folick //
The Fillmore – San Francisco
May 31st, 2016 //

Walking into The Fillmore, the venue Brooklyn experimental rockers Yeasayer booked for the Bay Area stop on their recent U.S. tour, you could feel the deep synth bass, jerky snare-drum hits and the marching tom toms from opening act Young Magic.

Gliding through Isaac Emmanuel’s percussion was the ethereal, superimposed vocals and guitar work from Melati Malay. Young Magic added another piece to their already full sound with cellist Kelsey Lu — and to say the least, it was powerful. The group’s slightly dark and layered electronic sound still has an underlying groove that kept the audience in a state of mesmerized body shaking.

For this writer, it was my first experience seeing Yeasayer, but hopefully not my last. Their performance was filled with spacey, lush sounds as well as wonderful falsetto harmonies, walking synthesizers and an organized chaos of instrumentation from a band on top of its game at the moment.

Many audience members were eating up every word, which was to be expected from a band as unique and entrenched in the indie seen as Yeasayer are. While I did overhear some fans say they wished Yeasayer played a few more older tunes, it was understandable that they wanted to showcase material from their recently released record Amen & Goodbye. Though you can’t please everyone, they certainly tried.

The show was energetic, and from what I could tell, the band seemed to be having a whole lot of fun performing live. Yeasayer packed a lot in, and hopefully their newest album title isn’t as much a foreboding message as it is a poetic concept so that we can see what else they have in store down the road.