Sam Farthing & Jimmy Grant Guitar Workshop

Open to all instruments and levels, though the focus will be on guitar. Sam Farthing and Jimmy Grant are two of the brightest stars of the US Gypsy Jazz scene. Come learn from the very best up close and personal. WEBSITES: www.samfarthingmusic.com www.jimmygrant.net learngypsyjazz.com

Paulus Schaefer (Netherlands) Guitar Workshop

Paulus Schaefer is a Dutch Master musician who grew up immersed in the Sinti Jazz style of his family and friends. He is also an accomplished teacher, and hosts his own annual Sinti Jazz Guitar Camp with Stochelo Rosenberg in his hometown of Gerwen, Netherlands. Mini Documentary about Paulus’s camp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJRlGPi36uk Rhythms Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKg6KdraOuc Open to all instruments and levels, though the focus is on guitar.

Camping in Alaska

Camping in Alaska is a post-emo band based in Huntsville, AL. Austin Davis and Jacob Stewart started writing music together at age 15, drawing from influences of childhood-favorite bands such as Jawbreaker, Modest Mouse, and Knapsack. They started their careers in Austin’s mom’s garage and soon began playing DIY shows all around North Alabama with the addition of Ben Cape and Jacob Hill. Their breakout album about being in high school and hanging out in parking lots, please be nice, was recorded in 2013 and quickly took underground internet forums by storm after the popular YouTube channel jommeez uploaded the album, their most popular song, “c u in da ballpit,” holding 1.9 million views to date. After Ben left the band, BATHE was recorded in 2014 and picked up by Broken World Media for a cassette release in 2015. The band took a hiatus for a couple of years after recording WELCOME HOME SON in 2016, a darker, more serious album about addiction and loss. With the addition of Dani Fandre, the band made a strong comeback in 2022, releasing an EP of acoustic demos recorded through 2017 and 2018 called Lost & Found and selling out both of their come-back shows. In September 2023 they released Hollow Eyes, a precursor to their next full length, drawing influence from Jawbox and The Weakerthans and grappling with more mature subject matter pertaining to addiction, homelessness and finding a way out. After the success of an almost all-sold-out Midwest and East Coast please be nice Ten Year Anniversary tour, Camping in Alaska plans to go back to the studio to record their long-awaited full length Eggbeater Jesus and hit the road again on the West Coast in 2024. Instagram | Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp

The Braymores, echo plum

Carrboro Bluegrass Festival Presents Bluegrass In The Backroom

This is a seated show.

Sluice

When Justin Morris moved to New York City in 2019 after a lifetime in North Carolina, he was planning to do the opposite of what people usually move to the city to do: give up on his dream. Since childhood, that dream had been simple—write songs, play in bands, live inside “indie rock.” But a run selling merch for one of the era’s biggest indie stars unsettled that conviction. From his vantage point on the bus, the everyday grind of touring felt out of step with the spellbinding shows; encores gave way to a working reality that showed him the job-like side of something he’d only ever romanticized and left him wondering where the glow had gone. To his green worldview, the gap between the fantasy of “making it” and its reality was jarring. If this was “the dream,” he thought, maybe it needed to be reconsidered. New York was meant to be a clean slate, maybe even the place he’d learn another trade and leave music behind. Then, less than a day into his Bushwick sublet, a man with a gun kicked in his bedroom door, forced him to the floor, and tied his hands with TV cables. In the days after the robbery, unable to make sense of anything except through song, he started writing again. Those songs became the beginning of a new project he called Sluice. Sluice, now a four-piece band from Durham, North Carolina—with Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle—return with Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut. It follows 2023’s Radial Gate, the quietly beloved record Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking songs at Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s while working carpentry jobs and wondering, as he sings on “What The Fuck?,” if he should do something else like “go back to school.” Radial Gate caught him halfway out the door of music, steeped in a hermit-like loneliness of rivers, dams, and floodgates. Instead, its release brought the dream back, but it looked different than it did to the “kid reading in a bunk” on a tour bus, crying and asking, “what happened to it all feeling so good?” that he sings about in “Vegas.” Companion begins where that disenchanted loneliness leaves off. Recorded with producer/engineer Alli Rogers at Betty’s in the winter of 2024 and slowly tended over two years, it sounds like someone deciding there may yet be a dream of music worth struggling for—and that the point of that dream isn’t stardom or escape, but companionship. That struggle is written into the songs themselves. “Vegas” returns to the era he was on tour with Angel Olsen, whose music he loved, watching the indie machine from the loading dock and feeling, as a younger musician, quietly overwhelmed by it, before fast-forwarding to the full-circle twist when Olsen later asked Sluice to open shows for her. “Now I’m at the 40 Watt with my old friends,” he sings, as if the old dream and the new dream finally collide in a joyous scream-along. Elsewhere, songs like “Torpor” and “What The Fuck” reach back to the robbery and that period of spiritual whiplash, now re-recorded after years of being played live to show how time can turn personal crisis into determination. Instagram

Be My Angel: WXYC Valentine’s Dance

Calling all lovers to the dance floor <333 On February 12th, find your angel at WXYC’s Valentine’s dance💘🪽 Whether you’re single, coupled up, or something in between… 😉 Join us at Cat’s Cradle and dance yourself into the night while our DJs mix 10PM-2AM💌🏹 DJ Lineup TBADoors: 9:30PMMusic: 10PM-2AM$5 w/ UNC Onecard, $8 General Admission📍Cat’s Cradle Backroom Instagram

The Still Not Okay Tour

The Still Not Okay Tour Featuring Turtle Smash: Performing as My Chemical Romance – Playing ‘The Black Parare’ in its entirety + hits Fake Happy: A Tribute to Paramore The Dirty Little Rejects: A Tribute to The All-American Rejects 2000s Era Emo After Party – A hit packed super set featuring members from all bands. Website

Dogpark

Dogpark got their start performing at University of Richmond (their alma-mater), before launching into sell-out shows across the country. The band consists of Eamon Moore (lead vocals), Chris Conte (drums), Declan Harris (lead guitar), Billy Apostolou (bass/guitar), and Will Harford (vocals/bass/guitar). Infectious stage presence and an homage to the indie-rock of the 90s have kick-started their career from a backyard band to a mainstage group. The band’s EP, ‘Breaking in Brooklyn,’ proves that they are here to make a mark, and with the release of their upcoming full-length album, this is only the beginning. Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Cass McCombs

Over the past twenty plus years, Cass McCombs has journeyed a singular path as an uncompromising song-carver, guitarist and singer. Along with the finest squadron of collaborators and bandmates, his music travels gracefully over seemingly contradictory terrain, from infectious guitar riffage to intensely personal lyricism. In August 2025, Cass released his newest album “Interior Live Oak” to rave reviews including 5 stars from the Guardian, an 8.1 from Pitchfork who said “16 songs and not a throwaway among them…,” a 9/10 from Uncut Magazine, and a rave from Mojo magazine who said “…this is the kind of record it’s impossible to be casual about.” Interior Live Oak is his most personal album to date, and, more than any previous record, shows his vast range as a lyricist and musician. It draws from everything Cass has created over two decades of experimentation to cut through with a direct and clarifying light. Cass McCombs will embark on his “Interior Live Oak Live” tour over 2026. He lives in New York City. Website | Facebook | Instagram | Soundcloud | Spotify

Genre: Miscellaneous