This is the doorbell at the Luggage Store Gallery in downtown San Francisco. Every Thursday night there are multiple sets of music, generally experimental, often electronic, usually local. That’s the Luggage Store Gallery Music Series in a nutshell. If you attend concerts there even just every few months, you start to recognize people, and easily feel at home. Parenthood and a heap of projects keep me from going to as many concerts as I once did, but I try to make time for the Luggage Store when I can. Sometimes I just go because it’s a Thursday night and I’m free: I don’t know what to expect, and I’m never disappointed.
This past Thursday I attended the final concert of the year at the Luggage Store, featuring Toaster (aka Todd Elliott), whom I know through the Disquiet Junto, and the trio of Sheila Bosco (electronics), Matt Davignon (electronics — he helps organize and run the series), and Suki O’Kane (percussion). This doorbell shown here is one I’ve never had reason to ring (except perhaps back in 2012, when I organized a Junto concert there), but always marveled at. It hints at the glorious Luggage Store staircase, a glimpse of which is seen to the side. The entry is festooned with graffiti and stickers in a manner that serves as a litmus test for attendees. It is either welcoming or off-putting, glorious or garish, vibrant or decrepit. I’m firmly in the welcoming/glorious/vibrant camp, myself. Toaster played a beat-driven set on synthesizer, using Monome patches of his own devising. In between sections of his performance, as he swapped out the software, he piped in recordings off a tape cassette player, which was processed through a bitcrusher, rendering sonic pixel noise. It was an ingenious means to give the impression of a continuous performance, and yet give him, the performer, room to breathe. The trio played a downtempo series of flowingly rhythmic sequences, with Bosco and Davignon both using sampler loopers, and O’Kane on trap set. At one point O’Kane played a snare with her breath. At another she swept the air with a brush, and the place was quiet enough, even with Bosco and Davignon playing, for it to make its own sonic impression. An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.