SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
SOU’WESTER ARTS WEEK: the Sou’wester will be given over to artists and art collectives for a week of residency work and a weekend of open houses and public performances.
The goal of this event is to highlight the creative process and the experiential nature of the Sou’wester Residency Program. Walking into an active creative process reveals valuable intersections among artists as well as with the public. Experience these living artifacts at the open studios and weekend performances. Visit HERE for more information.
Owen Ashworth’s albums have always been about the human condition, and his latest is no exception. That may sound strange, given that it’s called Animal Companionship, but it’s as human as anything he’s done before.
After hearing problems forced the end of his electronic pop project Casiotone for the Painfully Alone in 2010, Ashworth started making quieter music as Advance Base, releasing A Shut-In’s Prayer in 2012, Nephew In The Wild in 2015 and a slew of tapes and 7” EPs in between. After releasing a 2016 live album, In Bloomington, the prodigious songwriter shifted his focus to his label, Orindal Records, and put his efforts into helping other artists release their music.
This break from songwriting gave him time to explore not just how he makes music, but why he’s driven to do so. “I spent a lot of time thinking about why I write songs and what I get out of writing songs,” he said. “It took a while to get back to writing for myself, unselfconsciously.
“The reason I’ve always made music is because it’s therapeutic for me,” he said. “It’s a way of processing my feelings and understanding my subconscious. I love the ritual of writing a song and performing it over and over again until its meaning reveals itself. It’s the closest I get to meditation.”
The meditative nature of Ashworth’s new songwriting process can be heard in Animal Companionship’s spacious arrangements. Blissful drones and lush synthesizer textures envelop soft electric piano arpeggiations and spare drum programming, creating an almost hypnotic backdrop for Ashworth’s lyrical narratives. And the lyrics themselves have found a new focus: dogs.
“There was a while last year when a bunch of different friends of mine were having problems with their dogs,” said Ashworth, “and even though I don’t have a dog, suddenly I was giving all of this dog advice. I was just thinking and worrying about these friends and their dogs all of the time, and dogs just started showing up in my songs.
“When you explain the relationship you have with a pet, it can sound crazy. We all tend to anthropomorphize the animals we love, talking about them as if they’re children, siblings, even spouses,” said Ashworth. “I wrote these songs to help myself understand what pets mean to their owners, how those animal relationships affect our human relationships, and vice versa.”
Unlike the previous Advance Base albums, which were made at home on Ashworth’s trusty 4-track tape machine, Animal Companionship was mostly recorded at Palmetto Studios in Los Angeles with Ashworth’s old friend and former Casiotone for the Painfully Alone collaborator Jason Quever. Animal Companionship still sounds like Ashworth, but Quever’s production adds more depth and clarity than you’ve ever heard from an Advance Base or Casiotone album. The album opener, “True Love Death Dream,” is full of warm synthesizer textures and lush drum machine tones, the kind that sink deep into your soul and take root there. It shows how much time and consideration Ashworth put into Animal Companionship, and how Quever knew exactly how to capture it. From the pedal steel atmospherics of “Dolores & Kimberly” to the densely layered oscillations of “Rabbits,” every movement beautifully frames each song’s narrative. Animal Companionship’s production is expansive but always deliberate, allowing Ashworth to speak volumes through subtle, emotional gestures.
Taken as a whole, Animal Companionship is not just a step forward for Advance Base—it’s the culmination of everything Ashworth has been building for the past two decades. It’s a record that’s gentle in approach and endearing in practice, the kind of thing that only Ashworth could create.
Animal Companionship was co-released by Run For Cover Records & Orindal Records on September 21, 2018
Advance Base: http://www.advancebasemusic.com
Claire Cronin: http://www.overandthrough.com/
Ruth Garbus: https://ruthgarbus.bandcamp.com/
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public!
“It’s not as if Tommy disrespects genre lines. It’s as if he doesn’t know (or care) that they exist. They’re not pertinent to his survival. He’s a cross between poet, arena rocker, and dive bar star. His voice plunges deeply, then rises high, and the band follows him faithfully through tempo changes, and wall of sound string movements, adding electric guitar and in-pocket backbeat to his work. The songs cruise through switchbacks from earnest folk to early new-age-rock histrionics.
– Sean Jewell at American Standard Time
Photo by by Boramie Sao
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public!!
Tickets now available for this special show!!!
https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4520384
Sonny & the Sunsets are a beautiful west coast thing. Birthed from the sand, the surf, and twilight campfires down in Ocean Beach, Sonny & the Sunsets busted beach-pop songs spark recollections of doo wop’s otherworldly despair, a dose of goofball humor from the Michael Hurley school, and positive possibilities exuded by Jonathan Richman.
https://sonnyandthesunsets.bandcamp.com/
*
The Gonks is an indie rock band made up of Sami of The Shes and Sonny & Ava of Sonny & The Sunsets. As Smith says, In the shortest description it has a kind of Shangri Las meets Tronics thing. Voila, and were sold. Im A Lonely Night Driver is a sweet showcase of Lynchs vocals and track My Glamorous Mother has a solid Kinks feel were digging on pretty hard.
https://rockshead.bandcamp.com/album/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-gonks
Photo by Arvel Hernandez
This event is an all ages show!
Drinks are served in our Library Bar, open every Saturday night for shows.
J. Graves is Portland’s most passionate post-punk trio. For fans of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sleater-Kinney, and Joy Division, this highly charged and agonizing garage rock lures listeners towards angular guitar work, skittering disco beats, and thudding bass. Front woman Jessa Graves, who takes her cues from Karen O, Corin Tucker, and Kathleen Hanna, is joined by Aaron MacDonald on the drums and Kelly Clifton on the bass. Their debut LP, Marathon, is out in the world for all to hear as a new fall release fast approaches.
Photo by Sleeper Studios
https://www.jgraves.xyz/
*
Jason McCue is an alternative folk musician based out of Seattle.
“He had filled up the entirety of the Sky Church with a banquet of characters and emotions and, I believe, the soft buzz that emanates from a group of people trying to hold onto a moment.” – Seattle Weekly
His intricate finger-picking and soaring hypnotizing vocals were undeniable, reverberating throughout the hushed room.” – KEXP Blog
https://jasonmccue1.bandcamp.com
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public!
Drinks are served in our Library Bar, open every Saturday night for shows.
The Cowtown Serenaders create collage-like performances blending song, story, and performance art, using puppets, props, accordion, musical saw, and more. The current show, called “A Trip to Cowtown,” features their Incredible Collapsible Magical Marionette Music Box, and was first performed as part of the Eureka Fringe Festival in 2019. It tells the story of Peggy Pilgrim and Toe-Tapping Tommy, two wandering spirits who become friends in a world where all travel and spontaneity has been banned by the Good Government.
Daniel Nickerson and Tayloranne Finch create work as the Cowtown Serenaders to combine their interests in music, art, storytelling and performance. Their recordings and shows are characterized by acoustic sounds, natural materials, and fable-like stories, woven together to create a living tapestry of alternative Americana. Based in Arcata, CA, the group produces their work at the Sanctuary, a community art studio and residency.
https://www.thecowtownserenaders.com/
http://thesanctuaryarcata.org/
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public!
Drinks are available during the show in our Library Bar.
Join us at the Sou’wester for a special multi-media release show for Nick Jaina’s first-ever novel, Hitomi.
Nick Jaina was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award for his memoir Get It While You Can.
Now he has returned with a disarming work of fiction exploring the world of music and love and failure.
His live show mixes looped electric guitar and melodic solos using these as a backdrop for his captivating readings. It’s like if Thom Yorke and Jonathan Safran Foer were to compose a podcast right in front of you. The shows are hilarious, thrilling, and emotionally honest. Hitomi is a novel about a band touring the country while trying to understand what the point of it all is, and if they are ever going to find the elusive whale, or if there even is a whale.
Can you grieve someone without confirmation of loss? Can you love someone without possessing them?
All will be explored in this one-of-a-kind show on Easter Sunday.
Nick will be joined by drummer Daniel Charles Hunt who will play an opening set of improvised percussion before accompanying Nick on his songs.
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public!
Drinks are available during the show in our Library Bar.
Portland OR based cosmic-americana-folk duo Dead Lee formed in 2017 when Brian Adrian Koch (current and founding member of Portland indie-rock band Blitzen Trapper) and partner, singer-songwriter Kara Harris, first started singing together for each other in their apartment. They soon branched to playing for friends at parties, special events and tribute nights before deciding to take their love of singing and playing together more seriously. For the last year and a half they’ve been playing all over the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana), Ireland and recently returned from a month long tour of Europe.
www.facebook.com/deadleeduo
www.instagram.com/dead_lee_duo
www.deadlee.bandcamp.com
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public!
Drinks are available during the show in our Library Bar, open every Saturday night.
Hailing from the Sierra town of Placerville, CA, Ms. Nelson wound her way down the hills and through the valley to land in San Francisco, spending the mid-2000s finding that the middle ground between electric folk and California pop is in fact a windswept urban hilltop with her five-piece ensemble Prairiedog, who released two albums in their time together.
Since moving on under her own name in 2014, Ms. Nelson has released two full-length albums on Burger Records, Fast-Moving Clouds (2015) and Oh, Evolution (2017). She has also earned a MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and subsequently published Illuminate The Ruins in late 2018, a collection of poetry written throughout the previous year.
Her third with Burger, Weird Glow, released June 28, 2019. It’s a new approach for Ms. Nelson, foregoing the full band of the previous two records, and approaching this body of work with just one longtime-collaborator and an engineer/producer.
The result is a record that is more sprawling sonically and lyrically. The dreams are desert dreams, the longing almost tangible, but gone are the feelings of being trapped and the need to escape that we heard in 2015’s Fast-Moving Clouds. The riffs are heavier, the fuzz is thicker, the push/pull of a deep groove against a lilting lyric, more salient. There’s a hard-won comfort in the new record, a discovery of something that was maybe there all along but couldn’t be seen. Bright light, in Weird Glow, has burned through the fog.
—Christopher Wind
There is a pulsing radiance resonating from Sarah Bethe Nelson’s aptly titled third studio album, Weird Glow. You can hear it right from the first cut. “Desert Song” opens with instantly catchy electric guitar riffs – the ragged old amp distortion almost seems to be growling alongside her gauzy vocals in a beauty-and-beast contrast. There are other passages where her breathy singing recalls moments of bygone 1990s indie rock. The transcendent and catchy “Too Rich” invokes memories of the British C86 sound crosspollinated with the ethereal dream-pop of the same era. But Weird Glow is hardly an Anglophile’s affair.
Throughout this alluring album, Sarah Bethe’s native California roots vine upward and out toward the sunshine. With its subtle guitar jangle, delicately descending melodies, and romantic lyrics, the title-track taps into veins of yesteryear’s West Coast canyon-rock sound. “Sunspots” is a gorgeous and haunting standout with slowly building layers of sonic textures – it’s a bewitching and romantic dirge that begs to be placed in the love scene of a soundtrack to a cool independent film or new streaming series. If the plot of Stranger Things ever moves into the early ‘90s, this one would feel right at home.
Throughout Weird Glow, Sarah Bethe never succumbs to full blown retrospection, but manages to invite musical ghosts into her recordings for a sublime, spectral sound of warm familiarity. Van Morrison’s “Everyone” haunts “To Be Continued,” while traces of Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone” can be heard wafting from “Paralyzed Waltz.”
Where her former recordings involved a larger ensemble, Weird Glow takes a different approach with the sole accompaniment of multi-instrumentalist and longtime bandmate Rusty Miller, making for a more cohesive listen that dodges predictability. There’s an uncanny chemistry between them. In a live setting, they play together with an extra sensory perception in their communication that sounds like they’re reading each other’s musical minds. Miller’s parts garnish Sarah Bethe’s thoughtfully crafted songs with an extra dimension not heard in the tunes of her contemporaries. With this natural confluence, the slow burning groove of “Natural Disaster” somehow manages to balance naked vulnerability with armored confidence, all the while being catchy enough to put on a make-out playlist. She bookends Weird Glow with a smoldering epic – “8th and Hooper” plays for nearly nine minutes, taking the listener on a journey that stretches and winds through the sonic topographies of her musical soul. Vestiges of her former band Prairiedog surface here, laced with lovely guitar leads that dare to braid Ennio Morricone’s classic spaghetti western soundtracks with Galaxie 500’s hypnotic mantras of timeless guitar tones.
— Eric Shea
Photo by Jennifer Lewis
*
*
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public!
Drinks are served in our Library Bar, open every Saturday night for shows.
Outdoor Concert with J Graves presented by Sou’wester Arts
J. Graves is passionate dance-punk. Tense relationship rock, sanguine lyricism, guitar music, chord changes that sound like secret longing, a rhythm section that thuds, skitters, and melts over the determined voice of Jessa Graves. The heat of the cataclysm gives off a vapor known to galvanize meatspace into writhing, dancing heaps, creating rabid, loyal fans.
Recently J. Graves has been featured in NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest who said of their song “Eleven”, “Pairs well with: dancing away from your mistakes…”, Vortex Music Magazine celebrated J. Graves as an “Artist To Watch”, and the band celebrated the end of a successful 2019 at the vaunted Portland venue Mississippi Studios. Against all odds, J. Graves is back in 2020, with a crushing new EP Deathbed, and a record label Illumin, that seeks to leverage community and technology to advocate for womxn and gender non-conforming artists.
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public.
photo by Sleeper Studios