An Evening with Geordie Greep, live at Baltimore Soundstage

Evicshen

with guests, TBA

Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based
in San Francisco. Shen’s sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its
relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin
records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of
extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls “chaotic sound” to oppose
signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning.
Her personal identity; her body; is the space her work utilizes to restructure sonic meaning. In
her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning
through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids
interrogate the ways we perceive value within aural experiences. The appendage-like
instruments and objects she makes, exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her
interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass
produced, the practical and the absurd.

Maria Somerville (4AD)-- live at Ottobar

 with Colle (Chanel Beads)

doors at 7pm, all ages

By the time Irish musician Maria Somerville started writing Luster, her landmark label debut for 4AD, she had lived away from her native Connemara for quite some time. Having grown up amongst the wild, mountainous terrain of Galway’s rural west coast, she later relocated to Dublin, where she patiently developed an atmospheric dream pop signature inspired by the landscape of her youth – a spellbinding soundworld of gusting ambient electronics, ethereal guitar strums, sparse percussion, and hushed lyrical vignettes. In 2019, this culminated in All My People, a self-released LP steeped in reverb, nostalgia and a yearning for home that won praise from discerning press and listeners alike. 

It was upon returning to Connemara, in a house near where she was raised overlooking one of the country’s largest lakes, Lough Corrib, that work commenced on the songs that would eventually become Luster, an album that illuminates Somerville’s music anew, pushing it forward in both sound and spirit. Where All My People conveyed memories and melancholic longing with misty slowcore balladry, these 12 tracks show us an artist who’s more assured in the path her life has taken, and the person she’s become in the process. As she sings in ‘Trip’ – “I can see more clearly than I could before. I know now what's true for me.” 

Invigorated by her surroundings and emboldened by her community, Somerville found a renewed sense of creative energy upon returning to home soil. It provided “fertile ground” for free-flowing recording sessions in her small living room studio, where she stitched together demos that were then fleshed out with friends and collaborators, and later mixed by the renowned New York-based engineer Gabriel Schuman. Contributors included producers J. Colleran, Brendan Jenkinson and Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft), as well as Lankum’s Ian Lynch, whose uilleann pipe drones you can hear in ‘Violet’, and Margie Jean Lewis, whose violin bows reverberate through the ambient haze of ‘Flutter’. Sessions with musicians Henry Earnest and Finn Carraher McDonald (aka Nashpaints) helped “tie it all together”, while contributions from friends Roisin Berkley and Olan Monk enshrined the companionship they’ve shared since Somerville returned to Connemara. 

Listeners have had a window into Somerville’s world every Monday and Tuesday morning since 2021 via her beloved Early Bird Show on NTS Radio, where her dawn chorus selections range from blissful ambient and shoegaze to traditional Irish folk songs. Since signing to 4AD that same year, Somerville has toured with her label mates Dry Cleaning, and released two covers for the label’s 40th anniversary celebrations – taking on Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Kinky Love’ and Air Miami’s ‘Sea Bird’. With the release of Luster, she has signaled the arrival of a new era that will see her play around the world in 2025 accompanied by a live band. Rest assured though, no matter where Somerville goes, she’ll take a piece of home with her – a living, breathing, timeless essence you can sense in every note, as clear as the air by the Corrib.

Ryan Davis + The Roadhouse Band with Rosali

Doors at 7pm, all ages

New Threats from the Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimally, and vice versa (the trick can only work both ways). Everything in our universe is essentially flotsam or jetsam, rubbish heaps of fragments and shards. We, especially, are jerry-rigs of bubblegum and driftwood, inconsistencies and incoherencies, dead dreams and necrophagous hopes. The record functions in parallel with Kafka’s winking dictum that there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, just not for us. New Threats suggests that maybe, just maybe, something like redemption is possible, but only once we’re entirely emptied out and hawked in toto down at Walden Pawn.

“New Threats from the Soul [is] a beautiful and wildly smart record about making do in an upside-down world.” — Amanda Petsurich, The New Yorker

“If you don’t know it yet, it’s my privilege to tell you that Ryan Davis is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.” — Nathan Salsberg

Lala Lala

with TBA

Doors at 7pm, all ages

Lillie West has always made her music in response to an itchiness to always be moving, but as she developed a burgeoning desire to settle, she found the surprise realization that steadiness can beget creativity. That evolutionary tension is what fuels much of her new album as Lala Lala, Heaven 2.

For many years, West lived in Chicago, where she established her project Lala Lala as part of that city’s indie scene, releasing several records on the Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art. Those albums, The Lamb and I Want the Door to Open, were powerful statements from a curious artist: catchy guitar-pop songs about being stuck in the ups and downs of life, the struggle to stay sober, to leave town, to blow up your life.

West left Chicago to search for more and, in the process, wrote her new album, Heaven 2. On her journey, she landed in New Mexico, where she lived off the grid in Taos. “It was very challenging, freezing, infested with poisonous animals. But it’s still the most beautiful and magical place I’ve ever been and I dream about it all the time,” West says. “I worked on organic vegetable farms and hiked in the mountains a lot, looked for staurolites, and sometimes rode horses. Cut off the top of my thumb at work. Those are just some things that happened.” She then made her way to Iceland, where she lived for two years on and off, with the off being in London, where she grew up. In Iceland, she was in “a residency at LunGa school in a tiny town called Seydisfjordur, where the sun never rose in the winter.” Eventually, she made her way to Reykjavik and settled in with the music community and released an instrumental album (If I Were A Real Man I Would Be Able To Break The Neck Of A Suffering Bird) before heading to Los Angeles, where she has, almost surprisingly, fallen in love and found herself settled. It’s been a good place to live, not specifically because she likes L.A. or because she doesn’t like L.A., but because she’s discovered that, “wherever you go, there you are,” she says. “I wish there was a cooler way to say that.”

Fortunately, there is, and, again and again, on Heaven 2, she says it. On the single, “Even Mountains Erode,” West sings, “There are symbols and signs, you're missing your life,” which West says is about learning to slow down. To stop and smell the flowers. There are flowers wherever you live. She produced that song and the album, with Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, who provides a strong punchiness as a bed for West’s warm, rounded vocals. West says the relationship between the two of them was telepathic. It created a bold and confident album that West says would be perfectly appropriate to box to. Duterte and West performed almost all of the album’s instruments, with a few crucial guests, like Sen Morimoto on saxophone on the opening track, “Car Anymore,” and a bridge written by Porches’ Aaron Maine on the title track, “Heaven 2.” That song “is very melodramatic,” says West. “I was definitely feeling very doomed and defeated when I wrote it.” And the song does start with a bit of gloom. But it is lush, with West’s vocal building and building like a cloud swelling before a storm. The synths sweep across the song, the drums patter like raindrops on a car roof. And then the whole sky opens up, with a massive instrumental outro that feels like all your sins are being washed away.

Catharsis is not only about the pain, but the escape that happens when you free yourself of it. And so there are moments of bold joy on the album, too. “Arrow,” which samples the French electro pop band La Femme, moves fast, and its swiftness and pleasure feel like running towards something, not away. “None of this was supposed to happen,” West sings, as the song races away from her. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. “It’s such a basic spiritual thing,” West says, “Resistance is the root of all suffering, and I did not know that. I thought that I could dictate the course of my life.” Of course, like everyone else, she could not. Wherever you go, there you are.

blair / polo perks / doris & Lefty Bey at Otto upstairs

Doors at 6, over by 9

all ages, $15

The Belair Lip Bombs might be Australia’s best-kept secret. But it won’t stay that way for long.

Hailing from the coastal town of Frankston, the close-knit indie-rock four-piece have been building a loyal local following since they first formed eight years ago; fans across the band’s hometown of Melbourne and beyond have been magnetized to the group’s earnestness and ultra-sticky power-pop song structures.

Now, the four close friends — lead singer/guitarist Maisie Everett, Mike Bradvica (guitar), Jimmy Droughton (bass), and Daniel “Dev” Devlin (drums) — are about to embrace a new chapter with their signing to Jack White’s Third Man Records (the first Australian release on the international label) and the unveiling of their endlessly listenable sophomore album, Again, which echoes the album’s joyous opening track (“Again and Again”) and winkingly symbolizes the band’s reintroduction to a global audience.

---

Formed against the backdrop of the pandemic in 2020, the project of Awabakal land / Newcastle-based dual guitarist-vocalists Gabriel Stove and Justin Teale, bassist Liam Smith, guitarist and saxophonist Adam Ridgway, and drummer Kye Cherry, dust offer an invigorating new take on Australian post-punk: progressive, catchy, and irresistible. Just as artistically motivated by the fragmented, free-genre steps of Yung Lean and Burial, merging experimental jazz and electronica into immediate post-punk, this idiosyncratic joining of the fringes comes together much like dust’s roots in Newcastle. Since first emerging with their iteration of Australian post-punk on debut EP et cetera, etc, the group have continued to dominate. dust’s industrially shaped rock, endemic to their steel city origins, has taken them out of this world: major continental tours across Australia, the UK and US supporting formative influences Slowdive, Interpol, Bloc Party, Protomartyr, and Militarie Gun, to stages with Hockey Dad, The Belair Lip Bombs, Armlock, Shady Nasty, and more. Industry alike clammer, word of mouth fever following them across un/official showcases at BIGSOUND, SXSW Austin and Sydney, The Great Escape to landing appearances at Laneway, Pitchfork Music Festival, London Calling – as Monster Children firmly put it, once you experience dust, you “will never be the same.”

Mei Semones

Doors at 7pm, all ages

No second-guessing, no overthinking. The way I want to live my life is by doing the things that are important to me, and I think everyone should live that way,” says Mei Semones of her strengthened self-assurance. Through continuously honing in on her signature fusion of indie rock, bossa nova, jazz and chamber pop in a way that highlights her technical prowess on guitar, the 24-year-old Brooklyn-based songwriter and guitarist is quickly establishing herself as an innovative musical force. Since the release of her acclaimed 2024 Kabutomushi EP, a series of lushly orchestrated reflections on love in its many stages, Mei has gone on to tour extensively across the US, cultivate a dedicated following, and write and record her highly anticipated debut album, Animaru. Inspired by the Japanese pronunciation of the word “animal” in Japanese, Animaru is the embodiment of Mei’s deeper trust in her instincts – a collection of musically impressive tracks that see Mei sounding more adventurous, more vulnerable and more confident than ever before.

++ doors for this show are at 4pm ++

Snail Mail

Swirlies

Sharp Pins

& more

OUTSIDE at Union Collective

Doors at 4pm

On Ricochet, her third album as Snail Mail, Lindsey Jordan returns to assert herself as a generational songwriter, clear-eyed and honest as ever. Time has passed, but she remains a sensitive soul, and here her incisive introspection is tethered to newly expansive and hypnotic melodies and ornate string arrangements. While writing Ricochet, Jordan found herself fixating on concerns she’d previously pushed out of her mind, namely death and what happens after.These 11 songs are colored by the anxiety of watching life slip through your fingers, as well as the vulnerability of loving. deeply rather than frenetically. Ultimately, Ricochet is an album about realizing— and accepting—that the world still turns no matter what is going on in your tiny life

Pallbearer, performing "Foundations of Burden" in Full

Doors at 7pm, all ages

Pallbearer’s Foundations of Burden (2025 Redux) is a meticulous sonic reconstruction of their transformative, landmark 2014 album. “During the writing and preparation for Foundations, everything was ephemeral and we were practically feral,” recalls bassist/vocalist Joseph D. Rowland. “We had no real practice space, we barely had a single working computer between the four of us. Our demos of the record consisted of something barely discernible from white noise. Nevertheless, we knew we were working towards building a set of songs we were deeply enthusiastic about.

Once in the thick of recording, the feeling went from dream to dreamlike very quickly, as we found ourselves in what felt like an endless churn of repetition. We slept at the studio on whatever soft surfaces we could find, waking each day to discover that some of the previous day’s work had been corrupted overnight. This resulted in some parts of the album being recorded many times over. The guitars in particular mutated into something Sisyphean.”

Rowland continues, “Since the time that we finally committed the original version of Foundations to print, we knew it would be a sonic space we would eventually revisit. Its form did not unfold according to the original version as the numerous file corruptions, delays, and exhausted studio budget compounded into a final feverish push to finish the mix. We were relieved to get those massive and difficult mixes turned into finished songs just in time, but not without a nagging thought; we had to sacrifice much of the nuance we had spent so much time crafting.” More than a decade later, Pallbearer seized the opportunity to revisit the record from the ground up. Over the past year, the band meticulously reconstructed the album from the original sessions.

“In the time since then, we have played most of the songs from Foundations more times than we can count, and they remain some of our favorites,” Rowland continues. “The songs have grown with us. And while we hold a deep love and attachment to what we created in 2014, we also gained a fuller understanding of how we would want to re-present them if we had a chance. After years of discussion, listening and learning, we found ourselves in the position to fulfill that vision.”

In celebration of the 2025 Redux edition of their landmark album Pallbearer will be playing select shows performing Foundations of Burden in full.

Commitment (PHL/mem Soul Glo)

HIRS
++

at Ottobar (floor show)

Doors at 7pm, all ages

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart ++ at 2640 Space ++

Doors at 6pm, all ages

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more. BODY SOUND, their debut album, will be released by International Anthem on March 20, 2026

Poison Ruin

with the Serfs

and Seclusion 

Doors at 7pm, all ages

Gia Margaret

is on tour s i n g i n g

May 3rd at Current Space

Doors at 6pm, all ages

Every artist has to discover their voice. Gia Margaret didn’t find herself until she lost hers. With a vocal injury that kept her from singing for years, she developed other musical languages, mastering the grammar of an intricate, homey form of ambient music pioneered by Ernest Hood and perfected by The Books. Now, her physical voice healed and her artistic voice honed, she comes full circle with Singing, her first vocal album since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer. Led by soft piano lines that fall like breath on glass, the music on Singing evidences the same jeweler’s sensitivity to detail that she developed in her silence.

“There was a time when I really didn’t know if I would sing again. So once I healed, there was a lot of internal pressure to come back strong,” Margaret says. “I didn’t know who I was anymore. So it felt like beginning again, and reconnecting with these very old, old parts of myself.” This feeling of intermixed alienation and rediscovery is palpable across the album. In opener “Everyone Around Me Dancing,” she watches a party from the wings, aware of how her body keeps her from communal joy while also providing new modes of self-knowledge. Shut out from the scene, she is “closer to the ground, the
planet.” In “Alive Inside,” she’s so far away from the source that she’s praying to whoever might hear (“a god, a friend that’s gone, a spirit”). As her voice rises, it seems to be trapped in a web of distortion; it’s as
if in her pursuit, she’s pushing at the very boundaries of what can be said.

The process of making Singing was one of learning how to trust each of those feelings. The album was partially recorded in London with Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth, who helped Margaret unify the spree of ideas she had for “Good Friend,” an album highlight that includes Gregorian chant by ILĀ and turntable scratches, among many other things. David Bazan and Amy Millan also make appearances, as do Kurt Vile and Sean Carey, while Margaret’s longtime collaborator Doug Saltzman plays on and co-produces much of the record. Deb Talan, previously of The Weepies, lends her voice, piano, and guitar to the album’s closing—and definitive—statement, “E-Motion.”Gia Margaret is always singing. Every note of this album sings a warm requiem to her past selves; every layer sings her future self into being. Across the album, she applies the lessons of speechlessness—the quasirational ways we communicate without communicating, the way formless sound can cut to the heart of things like a scalpel—to her own artistic voice.

Gelli Haha exists somewhere between Studio 54 and Area 51, where dancefloors become playgrounds and cheeky aesthetics ignite imagination. A shapeshifter, a sonic acrobat, a performer with one foot in the cosmos and the other in a slapstick routine, Gelli Haha is a space for pure creative chaos.

For her opening trick, Gelli Haha presents Switcheroo, the debut album via Innovative Leisure, to be released in June 2025. With a shared taste for off-kilter pop and vintage gear, producer Sean Guerin (of De Lux) joined Gelli in turning freshly-formed demos into a high-voltage experiment, abandoning meticulous structure for something freer and more electrifying. Every song on Switcheroo makes use of a myriad of recording toys; wacky analog effects, such as the Eventide Harmonizer, MXR Pitch Transposer, and various Electrix units, fashion an intentionally flawed and strictly silly texture throughout the album.

Gelli Haha’s music thrives on duality: playful but profound, tongue-in-cheek but sincere. “Bounce House” is the child-like innocence; “Spit” is the S-words-only underground-club grit. “Piss Artist” revels in tequila-fueled storytelling about an infamous party moment (involving a jar — don’t ask, just dance), while “Normalize” feels like you’re stuck in Play-Doh.

It’s a practice in play - recording vocals mid-jump, translating drum fills into mouth sounds, granting your best friend’s wish for a song about them. A bear attack crashes through the happy-go-lucky “Dynamite”, “Funny Music” ends with a sudden “BONK!”— because why not?

The emotional rainbow stretches beyond the positive — Gelli pouts and wails on "Tiramisu", demanding to know and feel everything, while "Pluto is not a planet it’s a restaurant" closes the album in a darker, heart-throbbing track with the repeated cry: "I’m afraid."

Switcheroo is the soundtrack to the Gelliverse, a sensory adventure sphere created by Gelli. This live revue is an invitation into a world of dolphin balloons, flutes, mini trampolines, and a stage bathed in the project’s primary color, red - bold and full of mischief.

Gelli Haha isn’t foolproof. It’s by design. Switcheroo is an exercise in letting go, an inside joke turned theatrical spectacle. Participation is encouraged. Surrender is required.

CSR turns 20!

With Home Front, Bootlicker, WarxGames and more

All ages, doors at 7pm

Jjjjjerome Ellis

with Daoure Diongue & Kaz

at Current Space

Doors at 6pm, all ages

Vesper Sparrow opens with a declaration: “A stutter c-c-can be a musical instrument.” This was an epiphany for the Grenadian-Jamaican-American composer and artist JJJJJerome Ellis, and became the guiding principle of their work. At an early age, Ellis found liberation in the fluid sounds of the saxophone; speaking, by contrast, caused shame and discomfort. Ellis’ stutter manifests as a glottal block, an involuntary pause in their speech. Eventually, Ellis learned to see these pauses as a source of possibility. In a social context, a block can lead to confusion or embarrassment, but in a musical setting that same pause can dilate time, create moments of intimacy, and open avenues for improvisation. Now, Ellis follows their stutter like a path through the wilderness, trusting it like true intuition.

Ellis calls their glottal blocks “clearings,” as in a suddenly open space in the middle of a forest path. Historically, clearings were places where enslaved African Americans could congregate and pray. Ellis explored the complex relationships between Blackness, speech dysfluency, and music on their excellent 2021 debut The Clearing (and in a research paper of the same name). That album—didactic yet inventive, intensely emotional while remaining rigorously intellectual—was like a manuscript bursting with ideas, brought to life with hip-hop, R&B, and jazz. Vesper Sparrow, Ellis’ follow-up, is more focused but just as deep, a prose poem rather than a dissertation. Their focus now is on time: how a stutter can suspend time for both speaker and listener, and how bridging that gap can forge new connections. — Matthew Blackwell, Pitchfork (8.0)

SLUICE

with Hiding Places

Saturday May 16, 2026

Doors at 7:00 PM, Show at 8:00 PM