Kishi Bashi: Sonderlust 10th Anniversary Tour
Kishi Bashi is the pseudonym of Emmy-nominated singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Kaoru Ishibashi. A Berklee-trained virtuoso violinist, Kishi Bashi is acclaimed for his uplifting, high-energy concerts and his distinctive loop-based violin style. He has also earned recognition for his groundbreaking collaborations with major symphonies—including the National Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, and Oregon Symphony—where he blends classical and pop influences in captivating performances. Beyond the orchestral stage, he has toured internationally with Regina Spektor and of Montreal, and released five acclaimed albums—beginning with his NPR-praised debut 151a (2012), followed by Sonderlust (2016), the documentary project Omoiyari (2019), and most recently Kantos (2024), a kaleidoscopic fusion of funk, jazz, and orchestral pop. Known for his cinematic storytelling and genre-bending sound, Kishi Bashi continues to push creative boundaries while captivating audiences worldwide. Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Matt Pryor
Kansas City, Missouri native, Matt Pryor, is a household name for anyone who was attuned to the second and third waves of emo. His genre-defining band, The Get Up Kids, were among a small and legendary group that has shaped the musical landscape for years. However, after growing tired of the boundaries it so needlessly applied, the internationally recognized frontrunners eventually transcended the genre with their later albums and found themselves at home with a more indie sound. Most recently, on his latest album under his given name, Matt Pryor has presented the world with The Salton Sea, and it is abundantly clear that this is the continuation of a decades-long love affair with music and being outright obsessed with songwriting. Steadfast fans of Pryor’s prolific career will also find themselves treated to a style that is more reminiscent of the works of Paul Westerberg and Red House Painters, that is of course laden with Pryor’s signature style, whose DNA is deeply rooted in artists like Elvis Costello and The Afghan Whigs. It should be noted that the chosen title for the album is not one that was picked arbitrarily, and while not a concept album, the period of time when the songs were written were some of the darkest days of Pryor’s life. After spending six months in a downward spiral in what he sarcastically refers to as the penultimate moments of his “drinking career”, Pryor finally hit rock bottom. A casual habit that became a full-on addiction had officially come to a head, and in the blurry moments when 2022 became 2023, Pryor found himself with a choice that so many people before him have been forced to reckon with: Keep going on this path and face certain tragedy—or— Clean up, get sober, and stay on the right side of the dirt. Thankfully, Pryor decided on the latter, and the beautiful composite left on the shoreline for all of us to enjoy is the album now known as The Salton Sea. For those unfamiliar, The Salton Sea is what’s known as a “terminal” lake—meaning that new water never flows into it, and its salinity increases incrementally due to evaporation and pollution… The once high-spirited desert oasis was a tourist attraction for celebrities and the upper crust in the 1950s and 60s, and it is now a bona fide wasteland. It’s not difficult to imagine that while in the throes of addiction, Pryor saw himself as this once lush and vibrant body of water that years ago was referred to as a “California desert oasis”—but it is now an uninhabitable veritable shadow of its former self. Pryor’s latest songs have a timeless quality that makes you instantly nostalgic for strangers’ memories that unfold as narrative stories, and as a listener, you’re left wondering what these moments are all about—how will they unfold? This is undoubtedly due to the fact that along with sobriety, Pryor has found solace in writing for the sake of writing , a practice that he keeps up with daily—usually before dawn. If there’s a silver lining to all of this, one can glean that nothing bad will come from finding more creative outlets to calm the devil that sits on your shoulder, especially when that person has been writing the soundtrack of so many people’s lives for the last thirty years. Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
The Floozies + Too Many Zooz: Too Many Flooz Tour
Brothers Matt and Mark Hill are the sonic visionaries behind electronic-funk powerhouse The Floozies. Certified heavyweights in the world of jam and future-groove, the Kansas City-based tandem champion authentic funk in the digital age. Familiar with sold-out shows across the country including their annual hometown Funk Street festival, prominent festival appearances at Bonnaroo, Electric Forest, High Sierra, Summercamp, Wakarusa, Camp Bisco, Summerset, Bumbershoot, and headlining Red Rocks shows, their formidable sound is continuously celebrated from coast to coast. Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok Self-described “Brass House” trio Too Many Zooz make manically kinetic instrumental music that combines avant-garde jazz, EDM, punk rock, and sundry other traditions into their own distinctive brand of high-energy dance music. A viral sensation since they first emerged as New York subway buskers in 2013, Too Many Zooz have evolved into a globally recognized phenomenon who tour often and produce YouTube videos that have garnered millions of views. Formed in 2013 in New York City, Too Many Zooz features the talents of baritone saxophonist Leo “Leo P” Pellegrino, trumpeter Matt “Doe” Muirhead, and drummer David “King of Sludge” Parks. Pellegrino and Muirhead initially met while students at the Manhattan School of Music where they studied jazz. They eventually joined forces with percussionist Parks, whom Pellegrino had played with in a separate busking outfit. They began playing live at various New York subway stations and quickly attracted crowds with their aggressive instrumental sound and Pellegrino’s ability to dance and hype the audience like a DJ while playing. In 2014, a video of the band went viral and helped set the stage for the group’s meteoric rise. In 2016, the trio released their debut full-length album, Subway Gawdz, which featured guest spots from Kreayshawn, Armani White, members of Galactic, and Beats Antique. That same year they were featured on Beyonce’s Lemonade album, and performed with Beyonce and The Dixie Chicks at the CMA’s. Over the course of the next several years, Too Many Zooz continued to release EP’s and singles – including ZombiEP (2019), a concept album about a fictional band playing a music festival during a zombie outbreak, plus collaborations and remixes with The Floozies, Beats Antique, Spencer Ludwig, Moon Hooch, Dot Cromwell, Nitty Scott, Lester London, and RoRo. All of that set the stage for the band’s 2024 sophomore album Retail Therapy – a 13-song chronicle of auditory subway cinema that features appearances from Moon Hooch, Thumpasaurus, Lucky Chops, and Too Many T’s. Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok
Briscoe
If Briscoe’s debut album was a coming-of-age soundtrack set against the backdrop of the Texas Hill Country, then its follow-up, Heat of July, is the sound of a fully-formed duo chasing down a broader horizon. Inspired by marriage, landscapes, and the cross-country tours that took the band across America, these new songs were written on the road, as eclectic and evocative as the terrain that unfolded just outside the van’s windshield. Once again, Briscoe teamed up with Grammy-nominated producer Brad Cook to bring the songs to life, collaboratively creating a record that expands Briscoe’s folk-rock sound in all directions. There are bigger arrangements, sharper vocal harmonies, and enough top-tier guest musicians — including members of Houndmouth, Hiss Golden Messenger, Bon Iver, Mipso, and Watchhouse — to form their own supergroup. The result is a cinematic, widescreen version of American roots music, created by two lifelong friends who’ve learned to distill the thrill of the open road — and the challenges of growing up — into an ever-evolving soundtrack. Website | Facebook | Instagram | Threads | YouTube | TikTok
Skullcrusher
And Your Song is Like a Circle, the second album from New York-based artist Skullcrusher, a.k.a. Helen Ballentine, winds its way into an everchanging, unstable core. Recorded piecemeal over a period of years following the release of her celebrated 2022 debut, Quiet the Room, And Your Song is Like a Circle does not capture experience – it gestures toward the imprint of an experience that is uncapturable. Swaying between vaporous folk and crystalline electronics, landing somewhere in the snowfields shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, Circle probes the ways that grief turns itself inside out. Loss itself becomes as real and substantial as what’s been lost. Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she’d called home for nearly a decade. She ended up returning upstate to New York’s Hudson Valley, where she was born and raised. Several years of intense isolation followed, and Ballentine immersed herself in films, books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative aftershocks. Throughout the record, the line between human and machine blurs. On “Maelstrom,” voices crash between echoing drumbeats like water through a cavern. The vocal filigrees on “Exhale” fan out into a haze of synthesizers and strings. “Dragon” lets piano echo over tight, gritted percussion. If Skullcrusher’s first album rendered the detailed intimacies of domestic space, Circle finds itself vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It skirts an event horizon in long, slow strokes. These are songs that vibrate with the fervency of an attempt to capture a moment, to draw a circle around it. “I like thinking about my work as a collection,” Ballentine says. “Eventually it might form a circle. Each time I make something, I’m putting another line around the body of work. It feels like I’ll be trying to trace it for my whole life.” Website | Facebook | TikTok | Instagram
Susto Stringband, Oliver Hazard
Chatham County Line Holiday Tour 2025
Launched a little more than twenty years ago in Raleigh, North Carolina, Chatham County Line built a devoted local following on the strength of their genre-bending live show—an intoxicating blend of bluegrass, folk, country, and rock and roll—before breaking out internationally with their 2003 self-titled debut. In the years to come, the band would go on to release eight more critically acclaimed studio albums, top the Billboard Bluegrass Chart four times, collaborate with the likes of Judy Collins, Sharon Van Etten, and Norwegian star Jonas Fjeld, earn two gold records in Norway (where they were also twice nominated for the Spellemannprisen, Norway’s equivalent of a Grammy), and share bills with everyone from Guy Clark and Lyle Lovett to Steve Martin & Martin Short and The Avett Brothers. NPR hailed the group as “a bridge between bluegrass traditions and a fresh interpretation of those influences,” while Uncut lauded their “powerful melodies and gorgeous harmonies,” and Pitchfork dubbed their music “timeless.” The band’s latest release, Hiyo, marks the band’s first release since the departure of their longtime banjo player and serves as something of a reintroduction to the roots stalwarts, complete with new sounds, new collaborators, and a whole new lease on life. Recorded at Asheville’s Echo Mountain studio with co-producer/engineer Rachael Moore (Kacey Musgraves, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss), the collection finds the trio—Dave Wilson (lead singer/guitarist), John Teer (fiddle/mandolin) and Greg Readling (bass/pedal steel), embracing change at every turn, experimenting with fresh sonic palettes and innovative approaches to their core instrumentation. The songwriting remains classic Chatham County Line here—rich, evocative tales of love and heartbreak, joy and sorrow, righteousness and revenge—but the settings have evolved to incorporate synthesizers, drum machines, and more electric guitar and percussion than ever before. Given the group’s string band roots and decades spent singing around a single microphone, the results are nothing short of revelatory, taking an enduring sound and injecting it with a thrilling new spirit of discovery and vitality. Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
Idol Talk, Cold Choir, DJ VamPoison, DJ Valefor
Wyatt Easterling
This is a seated show. What folks are saying about Wyatt’s new release: From Where I Stand “Wyatt’s New Project From Where I Stand is a fine example of his world class singing and songwriting chops. He plays these songs with a lot of heart and soul. It’ s a great album, so check it out”- Paul Thorn “Another collection of thoughtfully crafted, honest songs from the heart of Wyatt Easterling”- Robby Hecht, Nashville ” An album of searing honesty and lithe beauty whose songs amplify the emotions and experiences of so many of us—reassessed relationships, self-reflection, and the ultimate search for hope. Its intentions are pure, as are those of Wyatt on this set of ten tunes of loss, resilience and devotion, with determination in the lyrics and buoyancy in the music.” – Alan Cackett , UK “Easterling’s vocal is heartfelt and intimate, the songs are thoughtful and compelling “- Americana UK Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Spotify
Magic City Hippies
We can all take solace in the simple pleasures awarded us through our senses. Imagine, the memorable clink of ice hitting a rocks glass, the scent of muddled limes and mint, the faint crackle as the tipple is poured, the effervescent fizz of soda about to broach the rim, the straw insertion and swirl, the first sip of vacation…Life would be miserable without these gifts, and life would most certainly suck without the perfect soundtrack to the first cocktail of some much needed time off. Pop the cork on some Magic City Hippies.MCH initially floated onto the scene as Robby Hunter Band, yet once their album titled Magic City Hippies dropped, it became clear they had accidentally found their identity through an album title. Renamed in 2015 as Magic City Hippies, the Miami boys tasked themselves with marrying the funk sweat of a mid- afternoon sail with the syncopated shoulder shimmy of a late night out. They quickly gathered steam and took to gracing stages across the planet, from packed night clubs, to sold out concert halls, to earning performances at Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, and Lollapalooza, Magic City Hippies cater to those simply looking to escape with a welcoming, never-haughty, yet delightfully naughty, thwap.Their Hippie Castle EP (2015) was just the tip of the proverbial ice cube in a cocktail glass of hippie sass. It mixed pool-side melodies and three day weekend grooves with a soulful, upbeat, vacation-heavy inflection of what can only be described as their own brand of musically casual psych-pop. Modern Animal (2019) brought MCH beachside, adding even more sultry swank to an already damp pair of chinos. A few years later, Water Your Garden (2022) brought the world out of a socially isolated pandemic, with a brilliantly shimmering and joyous celebration of dancing on our own, yet now together.While the studio albums have each received both fan and critical acclaim, their engaging and unapologetically energetic live show takes even the most dance-stubborn attendee and persuades a sort of hypnotically voluntary participation. Seeing first timers become lifelong fans is a galdarn tradition when it comes to a live Magic City Hippies experience.Whether this sunshine funk is all up inside your alley, or even if pink neon signs flashing the words SENSUAL AUDIBLE MASSAGE just have you curious, Magic City Hippies deliver a rare blend of musical talent and touring tenacity, with an uniquely cool and pastel fashion sense offering up funky sweaty smiles aplenty.Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
