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!
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/
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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
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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
The Hackles: Outdoor Concert presented by Sou’wester Arts
The Hackles are guitar/banjo duo Luke Ydstie & Kati Claborn from Astoria, Oregon. They met at a band practice in 2008, and have played together most days since.
“Highly refined songwriting and awe-inspiring harmonization.”
– Rough Trade
About as authentic PNW folk as you can get.”
– Susan Varnes-Newland Seattle Wave Radio
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public.
Tommy Alexander, Kassi Valazza & Taylor Kingman: Outdoor Concert presented by Sou’wester Arts
This show is going to be live-streamed from out outdoor stage. Check our IG feed! It is no longer a performance that is open to the public. It may be audible to folks staying here.
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.
Making it as a musician today can require a heavy helping of DIY spirit, and Tommy Alexander has that in spades. It carried the California born musician all the way to Burlington, Vermont, where he founded Jenke Arts, a nonprofit artists’ collective and record label, and eventually all the way back west, where he found a new artistic home (at least for the moment) in Portland, Oregon. Once in Portland, Alexander connected with producer Mike Coykendall, who has worked with a slew of indie darlings, including M. Ward, She and Him Bright Eyes and Blitzen Trapper. Alexander’s creates a unique, infectious indie rock style all his own. His honest and heartfelt lyricism come to life in his songs which will strike a chord with you the very first listen.
“A phenomenal talent.”
Michael McDonald
(Legend)
“Thought provoking music in an age of glib imitation.”
No Depression
“Wicked Indie rock.”
Brett Lanier (Barr Brothers)
“Kassi Valazza has a viscous, light gold voice. It swirls around in your head like whiskey in a snifter; vaporous, and intoxicating. For most of Dear Dead Days pedal steel and electric guitar lope along at half time, the in pocket rhythm section booming from deep in the low end. Its frequencies penetrate your flesh. The songs reverberate off your bones. Her lyrics drip down the inside of your skull. Kassi will be your peyote coyote; a guide through these psychedelic vistas. Here she’s found a way to trap the world of cheaters, drifters, lovers and leavers in amber. Wander from your own woes, and come walk with Valazza’s.” -Sean Jewell American Standard Time
Taylor Kingman makes music that resets the clocks. You know the feeling of standing beneath a trestle on a hard day, a can of cheap beer, flicking a lighter and dreaming up wild ideas until a heavy train comes thundering overhead and you scream and scream until your voice gives out and you feel lighter? That’s the thing that lives deep in Taylor’s songs. There’s something so rubbed-raw honest and drunken-truth about them. You can’t help but be transfixed and transformed.
Born in Portland, OR and raised in Marion County, Taylor picked up a guitar and started writing at 12. In high school, he formed The Hill Dogs, a raucous, powerful band that hit hard beneath his explosive lyrics. After graduating, he wrote like a madman, played out heavily with the band, and taught guitar on the side.
In 2015, Taylor packed up and headed to Portland where he played anywhere and everywhere with The Hill Dogs until he blew out his voice and had to halt the band. The restrictions of his healing vocal chords gave way to a deluge of new writing. Taylor joined multiple projects around the city with some of Portland’s finest and recorded his debut solo album Wannabe at the great Mike Coykendall’s studio, due out November 17th on Mama Bird Recording Co. He recently formed ‘TK and the Holy Know Nothings’ with Lewi Longmire, Jay Cobb Anderson, Tyler Thompson, and Josh Simon as a vehicle for a growing ocean of new material.
Of writing songs, Taylor says, “Each word is a world waiting to swallow me whole. I get drunk off the pitter patter poetry of lines that root me to the cold, unforgiving ground, all at once, drowning me in the violent beautiful futility of humanity, yet, also, set fire to my eyes, sending me swirling and whirling, floating blind and thoughtless through the maze of the mind. I want the words to explode bloody in all their truth, for better or worse. Vivid images dripping with feeling bursting like lightbulbs in the back of the head.” Enough said. Train thundering. Sparks raining down.
This show is going to be live-streamed from out outdoor stage. Check our IG feed! It is no longer a performance that is open to the public. It may be audible to folks staying here.
DJ Papi Fimbres: Outdoor Concert presented by Sou’wester Arts
Join us for DJ PAPI FIMBRES * cumbia / afro funk / boogie
David “Papi” Fimbres creates sound out of thin air that feels familiar at first, but at a second thought, is nothing you’ve ever heard before. As a percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Fimbres wields an arc of pure infectious energy, and a rare and cosmic control over the rhythmic and melodic spectrum.Born & raised in the Pacific West Coast, his Latino culture is immersed in not only his music, but his way of life as he sees it. Everything is here for a reason, and within that, everything has a sound that can be curated and understood.
This event is free, all ages, and open to the public.
