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Listings are
in the opposite order of appearance: headliner is listed at the top,
next is the support band(s),
and the last band listed is the opener.
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Friday March 8
2024  8:30PM doors -- music at 9:00PM ••• ALL AGES $13 in advance / $17 at the door Trestles [co-headlining] www.trestlesband.com indie, garage rock and surf punk The Thing [co-headlining] thingthething.com rock & roll White China instagram.com/white_china_ Alt-Pop, Electronic Trestles -Santa Cruz, CA -Just 4 people who want to bring back the excitement of live local music as well as original rock The band is comprised of Hunter Kelly (vocals/guitar), Jackson Jones (guitar/vocals), Sophia Wall (bass/vocals), and Malena Clark (drums/vocals). Formed out of the ashes of Jones and Kelly’s garage rock project Speedwalker, Trestles developed a fun surf inspired indie rock sound with the release of their debut single Dwell. In 2021, the band began a rampant series of D.I.Y. shows in the Santa Cruz circuit becoming a common name at UCSC parties and house shows. In 2022, Trestles started releasing new music with the full band leading up to the release of their first LP. The single Rip Curl Sweatshirt, became their biggest hit through Spotify playlist features. Through this the band built a loyal local following. Described as "one of the most exciting things to come from the scene," the band has become a Santa Cruz mainstay at venues like The Catalyst and Urbani’s Cellar. Trestles first full length album Halfway Up The Hill was released in December of 2022. The 10 track debut release consists of self produced tracks about “being young and dumb.” The band then grew their following through playing support sets for Destroy Boys, Scowl, and Movements. In 2023, the band took the album on the road touring college towns in California. The band has since taken a break from performing to write more material they hope to release in the form of a follow-up LP in the coming year. -from New York, NY -The Thing is a four piece from New York City. The band originated in High School when Michael Carter, Jack Bradley, and Zane Acord bonded over a shared love for rock & roll. Over the years they honed their craft, self recording and writing songs influenced by 60’s pioneers such as the Kinks, Grand Funk Railroad, and artists of The Nuggets Compilation. As they progressed in skill and knowledge the band started to envision a career inspired by the likes of Brian Jonestown Massacre, King Gizzard, and The Black Keys. The Thing started playing shows and creating a buzz around New York City in the Winter of 2022. Shortly after, the band embarked on small tours up and down the east coast. Their energetic live performances earned the attention of honest music lovers. Their debut record “Here’s The Thing” was released in April 2023. The record is a compilation of songs written throughout the early years of the band. It was self recorded and produced deep in the hills of Sharon, CT, continued in their Crown Heights apartment, then finished in the band’s East Williamsburg studio, Onion Records. While each environment was set up with humble equipment, the band's commitment for authentic recording and their passion for rock & roll is what makes the album unique. With the album out in the wild and the addition of Lucas Ebeling on the kit, The Thing is relentlessly touring, recording new music, and breaching the modern world of rock & roll. LONG LIVE THE THING White China -from Los Angeles, CA -Gianluca Buccellati is the Song Whisperer. As a producer, co-writer and collaborator, he’s worked with great talents on great records. He was there in the studio in Los Angeles on Lana Del Rey’s already canonical Lust For Life, ending up working across half a dozen songs. He worked with Biig Piig on the Irish singer’s acclaimed EP The Sky Is Bleeding. And in 2018 the then twentysomething New Yorker came to London to meet an unknown 17-year-old and help on her first single. The result was both 2018’s remarkable Cola and a creative relationship with Arlo Parks that deepened and flourished on Collapsed In Sunbeams – a pandemic-born debut that went all the way, winning the Mercury Music Prize, landing Album of the Year nominations at the Brits and the Grammys, and securing for Buccellati an Ivor Novello nod for Best Song Musically and Lyrically for the track Black Dog. “Collapsed In Sunbeams changed my life,” he reflects. “Once we won all those accolades, everything changed completely. I went from trying to make a living to actually making a living.” Suddenly a hugely in-demand producer, Buccellati fielded offers from all over. He went to Hawaii to work with aloha soul artist Eli Smart. High in the Alps, he recorded an album for Swiss dream pop band Soft Loft. A band from Scotland, Declan Welsh and the Decadent West, tapped him to work on their upcoming debut album. “More and more people wanted to collaborate with me. That is an amazing feeling,” he acknowledges. “But also: weekends disappeared. So did evenings. And even when I would go places, it would be: land, go to the studio, finish the project, fly somewhere else, land, go to the studio…” For a multi-instrumentalist musician who had his own on/off artist project, White China, that schedule also meant that he had to keep a lid on his brimming ideas for songs. “As a result of Collapsed..., I became increasingly busy – I was just always working with artists, every single day. And it was unhealthily busy, and I kind of lost momentum.” Something had to give. Unfortunately, that something was Buccellati’s car. Driving in LA, another car side-swiped his. The first car was totalled and the musician was lucky to escape relatively unscathed. But it was, he now recognises “a wake-up call, really. Slow down – because this could have been the end. I needed to change the narrative of how I was living. “That put a lot of perspective on how I wanted to live my life. So I decided to leave the country for a little while and just get back to knowing myself and think about how I wanted to present my ideas to the world. Did I want to be this guy who is defined by his associations? Or do I want to make something that resonates with people? And that resonates with me? “So much of what I make is received as coming from other people. So I wanted to have a chance to really present my ideas as a songwriter and as an artist in the forefront of the project.” The result is Hang Up The Lights, the magical, lambent, light-filled third album from White China. It’s a record that roams far and wide and intimately. The evocative, skittery minimalism of Desire, Momentum recalls Amnesic-era Radiohead. Hex is Lynchian Californian blues. Closing ballad Hoxton, an autumnal reflection on a relationship, cocoons like a comforting lullaby. And lead single Purple Candy Glow is a psych-pop masterpiece that evokes nothing less than the maestros of the form, Buccellati’s feather-light, pitch-perfect voice shape-shifting and swimming in and out of a dreamy collage of sounds. “I wanted to strike a balance there. A lot of my favourite music, there's a lot of personality in the voices. The Beatles is a great reference for that track. I love the way John Lennon would sing something and then Paul McCartney would add something in the back or to the side. A different character on the song, singing about the same thing, but with a different voice and a different perspective on it. That's what I was really trying to accomplish there, multiple characters in the song.” To get to that point, doing what he had to do to escape the constant requests for his skills and to give himself the focus his songwriting ideas required, he hit the road. “I went to Greece, Amsterdam, England and Italy over the course of two months last year. And I just let those environments dictate what I was writing. I was trying to let my life experience come out through the songs and my perspectives. Just trying to get as much as me into the songs as possible.” On the one literal level, it’s job done: apart from some studio input from another producer on the metronomic electronic soul of Like Flowers, the entirety of the album – the writing, musicianship, engineering, producing, mixing, mastering – is the work of Buccellati. That glorious and purposeful autonomy and freedom even extends to the release: he’s formed his own label, Temple Records, to release Hang Up The Lights. “All that means a lot to me,” states an artist well-used working around other artist’s expectations. “I really wanted to be close to every aspect of it. And having the experience of being a producer and working with so many labels, I feel like the best person to service this thing is probably myself at this point.” The results are 12 meditations on life and love, the roving Buccellati casting his eyes outwards and inwards, panning for the gold and the grit of relationships. He mentions Sleeping Through It All, a sub-two-minute spartan wonder with the barest of acoustic guitar and percussion. “That’s asking: are we living or are we just going through the motions? There's a lot about what love means to me and what love means, generally. But are you just going through the motions of the way you've been programmed to live your life? Or are you really living it? And what does it mean to live your life? How do you give your love, and how do you receive love?” Switching things up are the motorik-type Pressure (his winking take on a diss track) and Like Flowers. They demonstrate another element of Buccellati’s tastes and abilities, a vibe that’s dancefloor adjacent – but judiciously so. “I write a lot of songs like this,” he says. “For White China, the timbre that I want to achieve means there's always going to be a delicacy. These two songs do have an essence of aggression, but I wanted them to be in the same palette of colour and sound as some of the other songs. Aggression in music is something that is so fulfilling, but there's a time and a place for it. “I want this album to be something where it just washes over you,” he continues, “so I don't want anyone turned off by the more aggressive tunes.” Holding all this together, and amplifying that seamless “wash”, is Buccellati’s voice – a limber thing that goes from croon to rasp to mellow soul, and one road-tested in the most demanding environments. “I love doing karaoke!” he explains with a laugh. “That would be my outlet a lot of the time. My birthday parties are normally karaoke parties at this Thai restaurant in LA. I really, really love singing, but I'm always around amazing singers who are presenting their ideas in such a cool way. So the challenge was producing myself. Because in the earlier records I buried my voice – I drowned it in reverb and created more of a cool vibe. So to come out and put myself front and centre vocally was really tough. I'm quite hard on myself, but I really love singing!” It all marks a new focus for Buccellati. What might (or might not be) his day job remains as busy as ever. “I've just finished Declan McKenna's new album, which was pretty much him and I at the helm of all of it. That was an amazing experience.” But equally, he’s hoping that his new White China release will feed back into the production work. More broadly, though, “I would love this to be a catalyst for me to go and start really doing the artist thing. I enjoy helping people with their records, and I will continue to do that. But I'm just really grateful to get this off my chest, this album. I put a lot of heart and soul into it. Being the sole person behind something, believing in my vision... I knew I was gonna do this my way, and I’ve stuck to my guns the whole way." He is Gianluca Buccellati and he is the Song Whisperer. But now, with Hang Up The Lights, he’s stepping forward and speaking up – wholeheartedly, mesmerisingly, illuminatingly, beautifully. |
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