Zongo Junction // Makeunder
Saturday, January 2, 2016
The Chapel - 777 Valencia St. San Francisco, CA
Doors at 8:00pm
All Ages
$18 adv // $20 at the door
Tickets: http://tinyurl.com/ZJMUchapel
This show will get packed, so get your tickets now and come get sweaty!
Listen to Zongo Junction's newest single "BIG SIR" here: www.zongojunction.bandcamp.com
www.mkndr.com
ZONGO JUNCTION
Exploding from the center of Brooklyn's vibrant afrobeat scene, Zongo Junction electrifies dance floors wherever they perform. Packed with four horns, and a five-piece rhythm section, audiences can’t help but move no matter where the band is playing. If the Talking Heads produced a Fela Kuti record of Sun Ra’s music, the product would probably sound something like this psychedelic afrobeat outfit.
In an industry where it has become commonplace to watch bands perform with laptops & backing tracks instead of live musicians, Zongo Junction takes the stage 9 strong. The Village Voice describes their live show as “Sheer energy with the force of a tractor-trailer that roars with power and noise” while the SF Chronicle says that "Zongo Junction plays its own fractured version of Afro-beat and generates an unstoppable groove when it takes the stage."
MAKEUNDER
Makeunder is a polyglot pop band from Oakland, CA, led by singer and instrumentalist Hamilton Ulmer. Like many bands, it began as a solo recording project. The first EP, Radiate, Satellite, featured only a violin, a saxophone, a very tired voice, and a small hand drum, recorded entirely in Ulmer's childhood home on his laptop's internal microphone while his father recovered from chemotherapy. Since then Makeunder has slowly swallowed a handful of guitarists, horn players, singers, percussionists, and orchestral players to perform and record and evangelize.
The band's work depicts Ulmer's larger-than-life family of misfit artists, and their struggles, digressions, and triumphs in carving out a place in a world not designed for them. Makeunder tirelessly works blocks of stone into crystaline figures of expression using disparate musical resources, be it renaissance motet, art rock, 90's R&B, synth pop, soul, or modern orchestral music, to craft large, powerful pop songs about death & migration & loss.
ABOUT GREAT HEADLESS BLANK Makeunder's new EP recounts the troubled years after Hamilton's father died of lung cancer, leaving a wake of tragedy and instability. Each song encapsulates a ghost acquired during the period - people, homes, memories lost, youth wrested. The EP is full of confusing joy, unabashed grandiosity, and abrupt seismic shifts, as Ulmer patches together swarms of guitars, horns, strings, voices, synthesizers, and a plethora of found percussion to build a sonically rich landscape upon which he depicts a family suffocated by its verdant grief.