DJ BLAKE MILLER @ Echo

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8:30PM / $8adv; $10dos / 18+

Lemonade || Watch
Lemonade played their first show with roughly 2 weeks of preparation in late 2005. The idea formed a month or so earlier when Alex Pasternak and Callan Clendenin were in Barcelona enjoying their time listening to Rai and Khaliji CDs they had bought at the Raval record shop “Nasifon”, laying on the beach drinking sodas, and going to squat raves until well after the sun came up. Collaborating with Ben Steidel upon their return, they mingled together crude technologies, battered percussion, live instruments, and limitless disparate influence, including: grime, early house and techno, samba, dancehall, island musics, and scary psychedelic noise. The show was mostly improvised, and ultimately a success with throngs of dancers mesmerized by their pulsing beats and clamorous crescendos.

Since that first show, Lemonade became a fixture in San Francisco’s underground, playing everything from basement shows to warehouses, dance clubs to DIY venues, art galleries and rooftops. Their eruptive and exhilarating live experience can be at times unnerving and chaotic, as well as transporting and blissful, but still manages to unify diverse crowds in rapturous euphoria.

In October of 2008, their self-titled debut album/ep, recorded by Chris Coady (TV on the Radio, Blonde Redhead, etc.) was released on True Panther Sounds. Days later they moved to Brooklyn.

Mary Anne Hobbs of BBC1 referred to them as “pure, agile, hedonistic pop music,” and Pitchfork rated their debut at an 8.3. Over the course of their career they have toured with such acts as Tussle, El Guincho, and Glasser, as well as provided local support to Modeselektor, Crystal Castles, Buraka Som Sistema, Andrew W.K., Gang Gang Dance, and many more.

Bachelorette || Listen || Watch
We visualize the music of Bachelorette beaming through distant star systems, gliding and bouncing through a matrix of coolly illuminated neural pathways. Yet, all the songs on her new album were written on Earth: Radley, UK; Tripoli, Libya; Millwood, VA; Brooklyn, NYC and back home in Auckland, NZ. Annabel Alpers (the heart behind Bachelorette’s machine) is no sky-bound jet-trash. Her new, self-titled album has a corporeal, sensual tangibility. If you were a fan of the wildly under-heard Isolation Loops and My Electric Family, you will be touched and torched once again by her deep-space solitude and the soulful ache that radiates from her best songs.

Annabel Alpers dreams the trappings of her electro psych pop — her melodies, her minimal lines of synth and harmony vocal — and then brings the complex shades of this vision into our world through her music. Changing geography doesn’t actually change the conditions that we live in. Wherever you go, there you are, right? However, everywhere is somewhere, and all the traveling done in the last year or so of Bachelorette’s life has to seep somehow into her rich-toned amalgamation of sounds. When organic waves enter her work — as cathedral chimes did in Oxford — they return swathed in a lunar halo.

Bachelorette is epic from its very genesis. Hovering over a fluttering blanket of voices, a ghostly vision of the future is distilled with the same seductive inevitability of a Greek oracle in “Grow Old With Me.” With the controls to her destiny thus programmed, Annabel gestures toward an alien visitation — or is it an all-too-human introspection? Her metaphors are a strong tonic, entertaining with their surfaces while the sounds race to your heart. BacheloretteBachelorette’s great triumph is that her abundant pop melodies displace any heroic presumption associated with such a complex undertaking. Whether wandering through the labyrinth of your own consciousness or embarking on a journey through some segment of this terra, you will feel a kinship.

Recorded around the world and mixed by Nicholas Vernhes at Rare Book Room (Animal Collective, Baby Dee, Dirty Projectors, et cetera) in Brooklyn, the tracks of Bachelorette are built on buzzing synth grooves, folky guitar strums, and the occasional snap of drums and percussion – aided and abeed by a whimsical, searching sense of instrumental color. We are guided through the darkness of infinite space by Bachelorette’s luminescent lead vocal. Sing along!

DJ Blake Miller