$14.00 – General Admission (Advance)
$17.00 – General Admission (Door)
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All doors & show times subject to change.
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Y La Bamba
To declare one thematic narrative from Lucha, Y La Bamba’s seventh album, would be to chisel away a story within a story within a story into the illusion of something singular.
“Lucha is a symbol of how hard it is for me to tackle healing, live life, and be present,” Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos, lead vocalist and producer of Y La Bamba, says of the title behind the album which translates from Spanish to English as ‘fight’ and is also a nickname for Luz, which means light. The album explores multiplicity—love, queerness, Mexican American and Chicanx identity, family, intimacy, yearning, loneliness—and chronicles a period of struggle and growth for Mendoza Ramos as a person and artist.
Lucha was born out of isolation at the advent of COVID-19 lockdowns, beginning with a cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and following Mendoza Ramos as she moved from Portland, Oregon to Mexico City, returning to her parents’ home country while revisiting a lineage marred by violence and silence, and simultaneously reaching towards deeper relationships with loved ones and herself. The album reflects “another tier of facing vulnerability,” as Mendoza Ramos explains, and is a battle cry to fight in order to be seen and to be accepted, if not celebrated, in every form—anger and compassion, externally and internally, individually and societally. As much as la lucha is about inner work, fighting is borne from survival stemming from social structures designed to uplift dominant groups at the hands of suffering amongst the marginalized.
While peeling back layers of the past to better understand the present has been integral to this period of growth for Mendoza Ramos, time, trauma, and history can feel like interconnected, abysmal loops and music has remained a trusted space for Mendoza Ramos to process, experiment, and channel her learnings into a creative practice. In this way, Lucha has become cyclical, documenting the parallel trust Mendoza Ramos has built with herself to allow the songs to guide how they should be sung, or even sound.
“I’ve been wanting to let whatever feels natural—with rhythm and musical instruments like congas and singing—to just let it be, in the way that I’m trying to invoke in myself.” Lucha reflects on, “the continuing process of learning how to exercise my producing skills,” explains Mendoza Ramos. “I have so many words, ideas to work with all the time, and the hardest part for me has been learning to trust my gut. And figuring out how I work best, and with who.”
The result is a collection as sonically sprawling and bold as its subject matter. On “La Lluvia de Guadalajara,” Y La Bamba leans into a minimal, avant-garde soundscape as Mendoza Ramos recites a spoken word poem. Later, rhythms veer into bossa nova territory on “Hues ft. Devendra Banhart,” a full-circle collaboration for Mendoza Ramos as she reminisces on the significance of finding Banhart’s work nearly two decades earlier: “He was the first young Spanish-speaking musician that wasn’t playing traditional Mexican music I heard when I was 21. There was nothing like it around that time.”
“Nunca” is a warm, wind-rich track dedicated to her mother, Maria Elena Ramos whose poetry is published alongside the Lucha lyrics booklet. “I decided to put my mom’s poem, which is a poem that she wrote to me, letting me know how she felt, exploring her heart in new ways she’s never imagined. Sharing it on the record is me paying attention that she’s expressing herself.
While each song holds personal significance to Mendoza Ramos, part of growing into her identity as an artist has been allowing space for protection and boundaries, and choosing to withhold some of that meaning from the public. Lucha is her own story of the complexity of trauma and nonlinear healing and growth processes, but she imagines it is also the continuation of her ancestors’ stories and might also be a mirror to the story of others. “Even though I’m trying to fight, I never want to demonize suffering, because that’s part of growing. And it’s hard, because we’re living in times where that [stigma] is what’s happening. So if this—me talking about my mental health and finding healing in my queerness—is a risk, I hope that I find a community that protects it and protects me, because they know I have their back. I am also trying to be my mom’s community.”
Rituals of Mine
Rituals of Mine is the emotionally dense electronic recording project of Los Angeles-based songwriter Terra Lopez and live percussionist Adam Pierce. Inspired by ‘90s trip-hop, footwork, and downtempo R&B, Rituals of Mine has crafted a uniquely heavy sound that fuels its cathartic and uplifting performances. For the past decade that Lopez has been actively crafting music, multimedia art, and poetry, she has always seen her creative output as a necessary therapy. “For a long time I didn’t go to therapy, and I used music as a release.” explains Lopez. “I’m able to convey on stage what I can’t off stage, and these songs that we’ve written and performed—I’ve clung to them as a means of survival almost.” What began as a notebook of poems Lopez kept during her youth in South Sacramento, has evolved into a lush and genre-defying body of work.
After two close deaths and a period of reflection in 2016, Lopez felt she needed to reassess her life and her musical project, Sister Crayon. The project was reinvented through Rituals of Mine, and with the new moniker Lopez began writing the most honest and personal songs she had ever written. After years of obscuring her story and emotions through metaphorical lyrics, Lopez felt a sudden confidence to write more directly about her experiences as a queer woman of color. Lopez began fleshing out the songs with her long time collaborator and producer Wes Jones, who helped turn Lopez’s heartfelt writing about trauma and personal growth into urgent and powerful electronic tracks. Lopez then enlisted Adam Pierce to play drums, knowing that their background in metal percussion would provide an intensity that could match her own.
Since releasing their debut, Devoted, in 2016, Rituals of Mine has been praised within the indie music community, and Lopez’s interactive art exhibit that simulates female-identifying people’s experiences with street harassment, THIS IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE, has reached over 200,000 participants. Rituals of Mine has shared its music and message around the world, touring with acts like Garbage, Tricky, Built to Spill, DEFTONES, and Le Butcherettes. The band is excited to release their new EP, SLEEPER HOLD, this fall through Carpark Records. With these new songs and their upcoming live shows, Lopez hopes to continue to inspire audiences in her local community and around the country to overcome their own struggles and indulge their cathartic outpour.
Mahawam
Incubated in the early 20’s dissociations of Oakland based songwriter and producer Malik Mays, Mahawam is an antagonist. But only if you believe you’re the good guy. “I like to think of Mahawam not as the person I am when I put on or take off a mask, but the lingering feeling of awareness of the action. The not-so-objective, often unimpressed observer in and of the whole of my experience. Maha makes it make sense.” Black and queer, among many things, Mays’ work explores the borders of self and other, subject and object, agency and powerlessness, and the forces that disallow the Black and the queer to decide those boundaries for themselves. “Mahawam allows me to investigate what it means, has meant, and will mean to be me. In that way, Mahawam is how I experience time. It’s my fourth dimension.”
That euclidean ability to abstract the self bears itself both in Mahawam’s lyricism and musical output. Sobering punchlines, meticulously worded flows, and propellant, genre-defying productions combine in frequently unusual ways to form a mercurial hip-hop sound all their own. Mahawam translates this atmosphere to the stage with understated confidence, presenting a raw and immersive experience during their energetic live shows. As a remixer Mahawam employs an if-you-squint approach to production, taking recent releases from fellow Bay Area acts Emily Afton and NRVS LVRS into unforeseen territory.
Mahawam is currently developing a new collection of songs alongside co-producer and mix engineer Aki Ehara, tentatively titled “Foils.” Mahawam’s debut EP “Is An Island,” is available everywhere via Molly House Records.