Events

Xray.fm presents Back Fence PDX: Gone But Not: All Souls/Day of the Dead stories (and other events). A fundraiser for The Dougy Center.

Live stories to commemorate those who we remember from past Back Fence PDX favorites, Actor and Artist, VIN SHAMBRY (PDX) and Emmy-Nominated Writer from the Ellen Degeneres Show/Moth Radio Hour performer, BRIAN FINKELSTEIN (LA); along with Oregon Book Award Winner MATTHEW DICKMAN (PDX), whose poems have appeared in the New Yorker and The London Review of Books; and KAREN FINNEYFROCK (SEA) who has traveled to Nepal as a Cultural Envoy, and of her book, The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door, Sherman Alexie said, “It is a hilarious, exciting and painful as anybody’s teenage years. Read it, please.”

HOSTED by B. Frayn Masters + Mindy Nettifee

DJ Blind Bartimaeus will be spinning Gospel and Soul, snacks to feast on from ALMA chocolate, Saint Cupcake, and Porque No, a flower altar provided by Spellbound Flowers, a raffle, plus XRAY.fm will be on hand to record your 1-3 minute story about a loved one. 

The Portland Mercury and XRAY FM Present: Late Night Action

Now in it's 5th season, Late Night Action is a live-on-stage talk show focused on the people who make Portland awesome. The next show is October 27th at 8pm at Mississippi Studios. More information about upcoming guests and tickets are available at LateNightAction.com

With guests: 

Author of The Kingkiller Chronicles: Patrick Rothfuss

KGW News Anchor Reggie Aqui

Stand-up comedian Kirsten Kuppenbender 

with music from The DoubleClicks

Join XRAY as we sponsor a screening of the British documentary Beautiful Noise, a film that explores shoegaze artists My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive, Ride, Chapterhouse, Lush, Curve, Swervedriver, and others. 

You can watch the trailer here.

DIRECTOR: ERIC GREEN

Beautiful Noise features interviews with many interesting characters including Billy Corgan, Wayne Coyne, Robert Smith, Trent Reznor, and several others.  

“An in-depth exploration of the dense, sensuous, and extremely loud movement 
in ‘80s/’90s U.K. rock tagged “shoegaze” by the British press. Tracing its influences back to the Cocteau Twins’ ethereal ambiance and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s brash guitar sound, the film explores how bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Lush fused these two disparate sounds together to create a distinctive, new musical style that furthered the genre’s ideals of sonic experimentation without the grandiose stage personas of traditional pop stars. First-time director Eric Green scores a coup by getting this notoriously press-shy bunch to open up about the class politics behind the genre’s poor treatment in the British press, MBV’s infamous falling-out with Creation Records, and how that band became sonic innovators whose music is only now truly receiving its  due respect.”—Seattle International Film Festival. (90 mins.)

More on the Reel Music Festival can be found here:  NW FIlm Center

Welcome to our 32nd edition of Reel Music. We’ve been on the lookout all year for new works—and timely classics— for this annual celebration of sound and image, music and culture, and the origins of sounds infused in our experience. Whether your passion is jazz, blues, rock, soul, folk, funk, or punk, we hope you find this mixture of old and new, familiar and strange, to be full of inspiration and discovery. As always, our special thanks go to Music Millennium, Willamette Week, Walker, Day & Koch LLP, Oregon Music News, KINK.fm, MusicFestNW, All Classical Portland, KIND Healthy Snacks, XRAY.FM, KMHD, PDX Pipeline, Yelp!, Vortex Magazine and Portland Radio Project.

Unless otherwise noted, all movies are shown at the Whitsell Auditorium, in the Portland Art Museum.

XRAY.FM PRESENTS SUDANESE ARTIST SINKANE, WHOSE MUSIC IS A MIX OF SUDANESE POP, KRAUTROCK AND EARLY '70S FUNK SINKANE  

You can listen to my new album “Mean Love” on NPR right now. 

DOORS: 8:00 PM / SHOW: 9:00 PM

Via NPR:  

"You know I love you, but you're mean."

Here's one of those eternal refrains. Nobody owns it; it's been in the air since forever. Maybe it was initially uttered by a songwriter toiling deep in the Brill Building, or first sung by a girl group.

Because it carries the essential DNA of the done-me-wrong song, such a familiar sentiment can be a test: Whomever is singing has to sell the slight, and the hurt, and the story behind it. Ahmed Gallab, Sinkane's singer and leader, understands this mission. In the title track of his suave and eclectic third record (his second under the Sinkane name), Gallab brings a slight quiver to the verses — and then, gathering all the resolve his thin and perfectly rounded voice can muster, he delivers the tagline as a straightforward declaration. It's like he's resigned to his plight and no longer cares about editorializing it by appearing too vulnerable. He sings about it plainly, with little in the way of garish ornamentation. His voice offset by weepy steel guitar, he repeats the line, sometimes adding the words "mean to me" as punctuation, and by this point any hint of contrivance is erased: To the Sudan-born, Ohio-raised, Brooklyn-based Gallab, this is less about singing a pop song than telling a truth.

It's an art, being believable in this way, and Gallab has it nailed: Whether riding the waves of a brisk African dance ("New Name") or working through a tightly woundCurtis Mayfield-conjuring funk vamp ("Hold Tight"), he infuses the vocals with unusual intimacy, the desire to be felt first and understood later. Even if, as happens throughout Mean Love, the refrains start out simple and veer toward the blunt. At first, this seems like lowballing, but there's wisdom in the approach: As on Sinkane's previous album Mars, the backdrops are a thick stew, with elements of both East and West African music, James Brown, free jazz and shoegaze. Gallab recognizes that Sinkane's broad range of influences can come across as busy — or, worse, muddled. So he places the focus on terse, easily repeated catchphrases, many written by his lyricist collaborator Greg Lofaro. These cut to the core message of the (often love-minded) narratives, and their simplicity contrasts with the oscillating, ever-changing mix-and-match accompaniment schemes in the background. The result is a formidable type of persuasion: Clear, earnest voice meets memorable hook over wickedly inventive groove.

This streamlined approach to songwriting is one of the ways Sinkane has grown since Mars first broke through. There are moments when Sinkane lunges in the direction of recent exotica-spiced hits by Bruno Mars, and moments when the glances are all in the rearview, toward the volcanic soul of the '60s and '70s. There are also more overt and confident evocations of African music — Gallab served as the musical director for a star-filled celebration of Nigerian iconoclast William Onyeabor earlier this year. The most gripping of these include the last song, "Omdurman," named for Gallab's hometown in Sudan. Unfolding with a calm, hymn-like grace, it expresses the universal frustration of the young and rootless with likes like, "Where, if I should settle down, will I finally settle?" But the refrain that's likely to get the most attention appears in "Son." It's a vow, sung with extraordinary resolve: "I will not forget where I came from." Gallab again doesn't do too much with it, and he doesn't have to: As happens frequently on Mean Love, the music around him echoes and affirms those words in quietly breathtaking ways.

Backfence and XRAY are excited to be a part of Design Week Portland! This show will feature all kinds of designers and others telling stories based off of an array of prompt, largely focused on design.

Storytellers include: The winner from our August show from 105.1 The Buzz, DARIA ELIUK (PDX), along with returning storytellers Write Bloody Publisher, DERRICK BROWN (AUS), New York Times Bestselling Author, BETH LISICK (NY), Owner and Chef at Noble Rot plus two time past Russian Roulette winner, LEATHER STORRS (PDX) Nationally Acclaimed Fashion Designer, ADAM ARNOLD (PDX) along with newcomers — the Designer Behind Much Adored betsy + iya Jewelery, BETSY CROSS (PDX), Graphic Designer + Songwriter, EMILY OVERSTREET (PDX), and Co-Founder of Buy Olympia + Curator of Land Gallery, PAT CASTALDO (PDX)!

Hosted by B. FRAYN MASTERS & MINDY NETTIFEE
Music by BOBBY from Sex Life DJs

SAINT CUPCAKES are back and will be served at intermission!

$15 ADVANCE | $18 DOOR

More about RUSSIAN ROULETTE…

How it works: each show begins with a full wheel of juicy story prompts. One of the 8 storytellers will be randomly drawn. They spin the wheel to decide the prompt for their story. They can play or pass. If they pass another teller can steal their prompt. Then the risky part…each storyteller has only 5 minutes to come up with a true 5-minute story based on that prompt! It’s like we invented a new game called truth AND dare.

At the end of the night, the audience will select a winner who will receive 50 bucks and some other cool prizes, like bragging rights for life. The winner will be invited to come back to the next show! And one lucky audience member will also win some prizes!

*Storytellers subject to change without notice. Stories may contain explicit language and/or subject matter.

Sat OCTOBER 11, 2014

DOORS 7:00PM | SHOW 8:00PM 21+

Back Fence PDX: RUSSIAN ROULETTE

DISJECTA
8371 N INTERSTATE AVE

XRAY is loving the amazing S (Jenn Ghetto)  brand new album, Cool Choices. 

S plays Valentine's with Raymond Byron (Castanets/White Freighter) x Satsuma. Come early to ensure entry! 

Seattle Weekly says:

Jenn Ghetto decided to name her band S long before Internet searching had become the dominant means of information-gathering. By the time she realized the simple name she’d chosen could be troublesome, it was too late. She’d unintentionally selected an un-Googleable band name. “You can’t even put S into iTunes,” she says with a laugh.

But a lot has changed since the late ’90s, and not just with the Internet. S, which started as a bedroom side project while Ghetto was fronting Seattle sadcore stalwarts Carissa’s Wierd, has become her main musical focus now that that group’s breakup is more than 10 years in the rearview. Cool Choices, out this week, is the first S record to feature a full band and the first to be produced outside her bedroom.

Though the songwriting for the album began after a breakup, Ghetto decided she wanted to make a big record. She started playing with a drummer and began e-mailing her old friend Chris Walla (of Death Cab for Cutie) to produce it. “I think I was in a manic state for a while,” she explains, which sparked her enthusiasm to collaborate, especially with Walla, whom she deemed the ideal candidate to keep things intimate while increasing the scope. She was right.

Crisp, clear guitar tones provide the perfect foundation for Ghetto’s vocals on Choices, with the rest of the band given plenty of room to breathe. Despite its overall somberness, the album is beautiful. “Pacific”—just Ghetto and a piano—is the kind of delicate heartbreaker Cat Power does so well, while “Vampires” is a jangly rocker that makes her melancholy downright danceable. Ghetto, it seems, relishes such dichotomies, like with the title Cool Choices. “You can say it in any circumstance,” she offers, “Good or bad. ‘You’re making a lot of cool choices there, I see.’ Or it could be like, ‘Oh, cool choices!’ ” Out now via Hardly Art Records, hardlyart.com.

It's DESIGN WEEK! Join XRAY.fm DJ Bobby D (Nightschool) and an evening of talks about Portland's architectural landscape.

What do the buildings we choose to construct, demolish, restore, and inhabit tell the world about us? How does Portland's character find voice in our buildings and the relationships between them?

What's our story? Where's it headed?

Words music pictures.

with

Joe Zehnder (chief planner, City of Portland) 
Tyler Robinson (art director, Portlandia) 
David Staczek (principal, ZGF Architects) 
Reiko Hillyer (historian, Lewis & Clark College) 
Peggy Moretti (executive director, Restore Oregon) 
Courtenay Hameister (head writer, Live Wire Radio) 
Dave Weich (founder, Sheepscot Creative)

With XRAY's DJ Bobby D. spinning songs about buildings and cities

http://www.designweekportland.com/events/portland-past-present-future-our-architectural-narrative

XRAY is proud to sponsor the Sonics show on Saturday October 4th at the Hawthorne Theater. 

Mike Thrasher Presents THE SONICS with the Suicide Notes, The Pynnacles and Thee Headliners

Listen to XRAY.fm to win tickets to see one of the best garage  bands of all time! 

Duck Club and XRAY Presents: MAGIC SWORD

The official Comic Con After-Party

SuperThank events bring together members of our community to share their stories about the people and organizations who are making us a better and stronger community. 

Some speakers prepare in advance, and there is an open mic session, too, so please bring your own stories if you'd like to share. The SuperThank series takes place in front of a live audience. All stories are captured by audio recording and some are adapted for use on SuperThank Radio on XRAY.FM.

It’s radical community gratitude … for stuff that matters.

The details: This event will take place on the lower level of EastBurn restaurant, in the Tap Room.

Tickets are available for a sliding scale donation ($7 is suggested), which can be made now or at the door.

Confirmed storyteller lineup so far: 
Dee Williams
Charles McGee
Shane Torres
Thacher Schmid
Kashea Kilson-Anderson
Gwenn Seemel
Jefferson Smith

Food and drinks will be available in the main restaurant upstairs starting at 5 p.m.
The event will take place downstairs in the Tap Room. Doors open at 6 p.m.
The show begins at 7 p.m.
PLEASE NOTE: This event is 21+

TICKETS: $7 suggested donation
Available at: http://superthankstorytelling.eventbrite.com/?aff=efbevent

The Dreamy, Krautrock-inspired slabs of 70's rock from Brooklyn Mississippi Studios will be playing.

General Admission: $12.00 Advance \ $14.00 Day of show

XRAY.FM presents masterful guitarist of what SPIN magazine hailed as "the most exciting live band in rock n roll" touring his punk- and jazz-influenced roc.

General admission: $10

Join XRAY, Montel Spinoza and PDX Pop Now! for the official http://pdxpopnow.com/ after party at Bunk Bar from Midnight to 2am. 

Playing all the jams all night long while you top the festival off with a few nightcaps. 

And find out everything you need to know about PDX Pop Now!  Here

Videos, Stand Up, Music, Raucous Readings, Weird Stuff.

Hosted by Dan Kennedy (Host/Performer with the Moth in NY)

Beth Lisick

Kevin Samsell

Amy Miller

Laura Gibson

Vin Shambry

Arthur Bradford

Mindy Netifee

Andrew Dickson

B. Frayn Masters

and then Deb Leopards

TIckets and more information can be found here: http://portland.strangertickets.com/events/15309816/entertainment-for-people-mainstage-show-with-dan-kennedy

XRAY is proud to sponsor the 2014 PDX Pop Now! It's the festival’s 11th year this July 18-20th. Join XRAY for a free and all ages music festival showcasing an array of genres representative of Portland, Oregon’s thriving and diverse musical talent. The three day event will feature 41 local bands, food carts, and a street fair, carrying on the tradition of being one of the most interactive and inclusive festival experiences.

This year’s festival will feature sets by Alameda, Barra Brown Quintet, Blouse, Brownish Black, The Bugs, Cambrian Explosion, Coma Serfs, The Cry!, The Estranged, Etbonz, Eyelids, Fringe Class, Grandparents, Gulls, Hustle and Drone, IllMacuLate, The Lonesome Billies, Lunch, Old Age, Orquestra Pacifico Tropical, Philip Grass, Portland Cello Project, Psychomagic, Purse Candy, The Resistance, Rio Grands, Sad Horse, Sama Dams, Souvenir Driver, Spellcaster, Stewart Villain, Summer Cannibals, Tezeta Bands, Thanks, Tre Redeau, Usnea, Vikesh Kapoor, Wampire, We Miss The Earth, Wishyunu, Zirakzigil.

More information and updates at  http://pdxpopnow.com/