Beats Antique
Axel Thesleff
$35.00 – General Admission Floor
$35.00 – Reserved Balcony
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets are also available service charge free at The Fox Theater’s Box Office (located on the 19th street side of the theater) on show dates and on Fridays from noon – 7:00pm.
For an additional $50.00, you can opt in to upgrade your experience to include access to the exclusive Telegraph Room before, during and after the show!
Join us at The Den one hour before doors for food & drinks!
All doors & show times subject to change
You can’t know Beats Antique until you’ve been a part of its journey, and experienced the act as an entity with a life of its own. A stage show that demands more music; music that needs costumes, ships and masks and shadow dances; an audience that comes for art, and takes away stories to feed their imagination.
When Beats Antique first drew breath, there was no pressure to become anything. The first album was just Zoe, David, and Tommy’s one-off experimental project for entertainment executive Miles Copeland, when Zoe performed with his Bellydance Superstars. From that creative freedom, a family formed, and in a good family each member wears many hats. Tommy steering percussion, piano, and music production. Zoe producing music, choosing themes and commanding a circus of travelling set designs, creating costuming, and, of course, dancing like nothing you’ve ever seen. David as the multi-instrumentalist, captain of banjo, songwriting, and production. These diverse skills are the muscle of the monster, how the creature moves through them, making itself real.
Some music evolved organically from the decades of experience each collaborator brings to the project. Other pieces were written for the show. In deeply vulnerable interplay, every song is woven into a tapestry of danced and drummed story. Commitment to the full performance art form is how Beats Antique fuses musical worlds, pulling on global sounds for experiments on the fringes of cinematic cabaret, informed by electronic mash-ups and inspirations who have joined them on the journey such as Les Claypool, Bassnectar, Alam Khan, The Glitch Mob, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
Each album and stage show has built upon the last, with highlights such as: emergence from the bellydance and bass underground in the San Francisco Bay; performing to a massive crowd at Red Rocks Amphitheater; Thievery Corporation and their management discovering Beats Antique one fateful night at Burning Man; artist friends painting set pieces, or donning masks for the finale; performing in Egypt on the day some said the world would end; and playing a hometown show at The Fox on the night Occupy Oakland was evicted and merged with their fans to light bonfires in the street and leap over the flames.
Beats Antique is lifted in each step by loyal fans who are included in their definition of chosen family. Whether they’ve been music producers or appreciators, acrobats, illustrators, or students of Zoe’s, the multigenerational, welcoming faces in the crowd are the fire that keeps Beats Antique warm, and ready to explore new depths for the sake of these many muses. They aim for a show anyone can enjoy, a circus that feeds the spirit.
In this place, where they can teach and create and converse with their creation like it’s a dragon come to life full of riddles and blustery demands, Beats Antique is weaving a unique story.
The moons of 2019 will rise on The Grand Bizarre, Beats Antique’s next musical and theatrical endeavor. It’s time to explore what is strange through the large culture collider that is their stage. The world is moving at a frantic pace, and to keep up, there’s nowhere to go but deep inside The Grand Bizarre. Open the door of perception and discover an expansive, rusty, nuclear truth — the only way out is into the strange. The only thing weirder than this world, is what’s happening in your head. What’s the difference, you might wonder? As soon as you join this freakshow, such confusion won’t matter. Find an event near you at BeatsAntique.com
Balkan Bump is the global electronic music project orchestrated by trumpet player, producer and ethnomusicologist Will Magid.
Balkan Bump’s music fuses heavy electronic production with global music influences including traditional Balkan brass melodies, Middle Eastern sounds and American hip hop. The Balkan Bump live show highlights Magid’s expertise as an orchestrator, ranging in size from a solo performer to a 12-piece band featuring a menagerie of global instruments including sitar, saz, oud, clarinet and trumpet. The live performance’s popularity has brought the project to global renown with performances at the world’s biggest music stages including Coachella, Bonnaroo and Lightning In A Bottle, as well as beloved jazz, blues and world music festivals including Harvest Music Festival and CA WorldFest, and numerous appearances at Colorado’s famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
Balkan Bump debuted with the single “Aymo” alongside famed Slovenian producer Gramatik and American hip hop royalty Talib Kweli. Gramatik quickly championed the new project, unveiling Balkan Bump’s live show on his Re:Coil Tour and releasing Balkan Bump’s debut EP on his Lowtemp label imprint. Since then the Balkan Bump project has gone on to collaborate with global and live music projects Beats Antique and Moon Hooch; international electronic music superstars CloZee, Fakear, & Manic Focus; and American hip hop icon The Gift Of Gab (Blackalicious). Balkan Bump has been featured in Billboard Magazine, NPR’s The World, The San Francisco Chronicle and Magnetic Magazine. In 2020 Magid curated a series of global music mixes for Los Angeles-based Dublab Radio under the Balkan Bump alias.
As a solo artist, Will Magid has collaborated and performed with artists including Bonobo, Erykah Badu, Pretty Lights, and soul music legend Solomon Burke. He has led numerous jazz and global music outfits including his eponymous soul-funk band’s seminal Alligator Spacewalk album in 2016, and the 2017 neoclassical exploration Lunar Conquest Suite. His music has been featured in campaigns for global brands including Warner Brothers, Uber, Porsche, HP, Vogue, GoPro and Ubisoft. Magid graduated from The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music with a degree in Ethnomusicology.
My musical life began roughly around the year 2000, when I started taking classical piano lessons. From early on I was very keen on developing my own melodies and little songs and got exited about new ideas. Being a slightly nerdish type growing up, I discovered the digital side of the musical realm pretty quickly and started to program my own tunes with MIDI-based software on the PC and the sequencer of my digital keyboard. During the years from about 2007 onward I taught myself Ableton Live, and really got more serious about audio engineering as I learned more and more about sound design. I kept making a ton of tracks, mostly influenced by post-rock bands like Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Back Emperor and IDM and Indie artists like Aphex Twin, Telefon Tel Aviv, Radiohead, Burial, Gold Panda etc. I kept developing my style and taste and as I discovered the online communities like SoundCloud I got introduced to a myriad of different electronic genres. My musical taste has always been quite far reaching and broad. I started listening to metal bands about at the same age as I started playing the piano. I then joined bands and quickly became a fan of progressive metal and rock because of their complexity and possibilities in self-expression and storytelling. And from there I found all the wonderful music of the 60s and 70s. Even today I’m a member of the prog band Octopie, which feeds that side of my musical hunger. When it comes to electronic music my taste is also very diverse, and I believe that can be heard in my music. From post-rock infused IDM I started getting into 2-step and future garage which eventually brought me to the dance floor. Well, that and the fact I turned 18. This was around 2011 and in the online world I started turning some heads when soundcloud featured my concept album inspired by T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land in their ”soundclouder of the day” series. During these times I also started studying Musicology at the University of Helsinki, where my main area of interest was sound design and electroacoustic music. From 2011 onward I released a couple of EP’s where I further developed my skills as a music producer as well as a composer. During these times I also performed my music live for the first times in local venues around the Helsinki area. In 2014 I experimented with some eastern vibes and samples from India, which lead to the smash hit ”Bad Karma” which ended up getting tens of millions of hits online and got me out of Finland to perform. I also continued my endeavors with mr. Eliot and released my musical interpretation of his poem ”The Hollow Men”. Today, I’m still exploring the same way I explored when I first started out as a ”bedroom producer”, and I’m constantly searching for the next thing that gets me inspired and excited. For me, music has never been about genres, it’s been all about self-expression and self-reflection, and I’m utilizing different avenues of music to get my inner world transformed into soundwaves. The most important thing to me is to grow as an artist and as a person. I’m keeping all the doors open to new possibilities and new experiences.