#grassroots-music-discovery

#grassroots-music-discovery

The Great Recession, and then the pandemic, did in some of the last holdouts. But not Berkeley's Back Room, which celebrates its 10-year anniversary this month. The Back Room's survival is due to the passion of its founder, Sam Rudin, the musicians who love it and come back time after time to play there, and the commitment of audience members who know the experiences they have there are truly memorable.

The Neverender Festival will take place at the Observatory Festival Grounds in Santa Ana, California, featuring a lineup that includes Circa Survive, Sunny Day Real Estate, and more. Coheed and Cambria will perform their albums The Afterman: Ascension and The Afterman: Descension in full during both the festival and the Neverender Rocks concert.

The Seattle Punk Rock Flea Market is part renegade art gallery, part unfathomable yard sale and part curated vintage mall, showcasing a blend of creativity and commerce.

In 2025, Dmae Lo Roberts embarked on a statewide storytelling experience focusing on personal stories from both artists and community members. These stories are a form of living oral history.

The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s.

Win two tickets to OMSI's newest exhibition, TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition, opening March 21! Explore more than 100 real artifacts recovered from the ocean floor, and learn about life aboard the Titanic and the deeply human stories behind one of history's most enduring legends.

Brighton was rarely described as a scene, despite being home to Nick Cave and Paul McCartney and hothousing a surge of remarkable young talent that's still thriving more than 20 years later.

Chris Thomas, a notable composer, has created music that resonates with the styles of John Williams and Danny Elfman, particularly in his theme park compositions.

You could go anywhere in America and argue with some success for the cultural impact wrought by most of the once-subcultural stars of Lizzy Goodman's oral history of New York's post-9/11 rock scene, 'Meet Me In The Bathroom.' Or, for God's sake, Jeff Chang's history of hip-hop, 'Can't Stop Won't Stop.' But to explain this era to someone who hasn't devoted their psyche or youth to 'indie rock,' you'd need to spend a whole dinner, and maybe a few drinks afterwards, justifying why the tentpole events that 'Us v. Them' returns to multiple times in its 300-page run mean anything.

Gangstagrass occupies a lane that sounds unlikely on paper and surprisingly natural in practice. The collective blends bluegrass instrumentation with hip-hop rhythms, pairing banjo rolls and fiddle runs with sharp lyricism and boom-bap backbone.

When Norman Sylvester was 12, long before he garnered the nickname "The Boogie Cat" or shared a stage with B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana and headed west, toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon. He'd lived all his life in the rural South, eating wild muscadine grapes from his family's farm, fishing in the bayou and churning butter at the kitchen table to the tune of his grandmother's gospel singing.

In frightening times, it makes a huge difference not to feel alone. Creating art with others in community enhances agency and strengthens self. Creativity requires an open heart; love enhances hope and diminishes fear.

R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine.

A band called Ad Nauseam is dead set on keeping grunge alive in Portland, but no local venue will return their calls to play a show. Like the most iconic grunge acts, Ad Nauseam has deep PNW roots. They deliver sludgy, whining guitar licks and haunting, sandpapery vocals. They've even got an angsty tune called "Scab Pimple" for goodness sake. So why can't they land a gig? Well, it might be because all four band members are between the ages of 10 and 16.

While shoegaze bands are often known for their wall-of-sound volume tactics, there's a clever amount of distance employed in Softcult's style. When a Flower Doesn't Grow, the duo's long-awaited debut album, relishes in the contrast between delivering harsh truths about trauma, oppression, and growth and cloaking those ideas in a pillowy-soft exterior; throughout its 11 tracks, the album channels windswept beauty and fierce intensity, containing Mercedes and Phoenix's most illuminating meditations on personal and systemic injustice yet.

Since its founding in 2008, Bandcamp has become an invaluable resource for musicians, from bedroom producers to pop stars, as a host for the streaming and buying of their work. With artists and labels selling a wide range of physical products in addition to every major digital format, Bandcamp is the closest thing to a globe-spanning independent record store. In 2022, founder Ethan Diamond sold Bandcamp to Epic Games, who