On sale Friday, 7/24 at 10am !
$30 ADV | $35 DOOR
Doors 7 pm | Show 8 pm
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
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In the halcyon days of the '90s San Francisco Bay Area's cultural milieu, no other musical group embodied the swagger and the local creative community quite like the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. They were the mothership of an extended underground musical family featuring some of the Bay Area's most legendary musical vanguards. Now, marking a truly special event for San Francisco, TFUL 282 will grace the stage at the Great American Music Hall for the first time in over 20 years—a venue the band played some of their most legendary shows at during their reign over the Bay Area.
TFUL 282 tore through the US in the 1990s playing from coast to coast and sharing stages with labelmates Pavement and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, kindred spirits Sun City Girls, Fly Ashtray, and a host of regional bands who stood in awe at the overwhelming spectacle and furious sonic and visual onslaught that this band could generate on a nightly basis.
One of the earliest bands signed to Matador Records, TFUL 282’s catalog has been the subject of a recent, critically acclaimed reissue series by archival label, Bulbous Monocle, which has been “excavating, illuminating and re-introducing to the world the odd and offbeat San Francisco musical underground of the late 1980s and 1990s."
TFUL 282 played two ecstatically received shows in Portland in 2024 — their first in 13 years — in support of the reissues and are now returning to San Francisco with a lineup featuring OG members Brian Hageman, Mark Davies, Hugh Swarts, and Jay Paget, with assistance from Darrell Bourque and Kate Horn.
This is a momentous occasion that cannot be missed!
"A sleek maelstrom of crackpot dissonance, noise-rock power balladry, schizo-telepathic improv and some of the finest underground music of the era." - Bulbous Monocle
"Thinking Fellers Union Local 282...one of the most original, interesting collaborative groups of musicians in rock, locating and exploring the common ground between Can, Captain Beefheart and the Carpenters.” - Trouser Press
“A band with ideas to burn and pockets full of matches.’ - Magnet
"Surrealism is a part of it. Pranks. Noise. Free improvisation. More interest in structure and sweetness than you might think at first, when all you notice are the smash cuts from one strange musical scene to the next. Soundtracks to imaginary pulp films, or religious rituals. Five singers, three guitars, bass, drums, banjo, mandolin, Optigan, taking turns or all going at once. Aching beauty, childhood regression, grotesque desire. Sort of like a lullaby that carries you into a nightmare from which you awake laughing. This was Thinking Fellers Union Local 282’s idea of a commercial record.” - Pitchfork Sunday Review 9.2 review of “Strangers of the Universe” (2025)
"Even in a catalog that bristles with pinnacles, Strangers From the Universe remains pinnaclier than most. Somehow harnessing influences from Bali to Cinecittà to Memphis to the wobbly Sunday morning organ at Oakland’s Rose of Sharon Missionary Baptist Church without feeling contrived or showoffy, Strangers is possibly and/or indisputably the most successful shotgun marriage of the Fellers’ disparate pop sensibilities with their outlandish song structures, their acre-feet of tape snippets with their hydra-headed arrangements, and their individual compositional and instrumental skills with their congenitally peculiar joint sensorium." - Nuf Sed
Bill Orcutt
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As one of experimental music's most influential guitarists, Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a "powerful musician...a go-for-broke guitar improviser," and described his sound as "articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance.”
Orcutt originally appeared on the underground scene as a co-founder of Harry Pussy, whose explosive music combined ‘70s no wave, the ferocity of ‘80s hardcore, and the acrobatic intricacy of Cecil Taylor. Seemingly single-handedly, and over the course of dozens of releases, Harry Pussy built the prototype for noise-rock in the ‘90s and beyond. Throughout, Orcutt (aided occasionally by a second guitarist) wove incandescent, treble-heavy lines through the maelstrom of Adris Hoyos’ percussion. They toured extensively, performing or traveling with bands like Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, The Dead C, and Guided by Voices, before screeching to a halt in 1997. Writing about a 2008 compilation of their work, Pitchfork described Harry Pussy as "just about the most abrasive band America has ever seen."
After a hiatus of over a decade, Orcutt reemerged as a solo artist, at first performing solely on acoustic guitar. Drawing influences from Cecil Taylor (again), Dylan’s Basement Tapes, and the recursive voice of Gertrude Stein, Orcutt began exploring the invisible threads linking free improvisation to the forgotten crevices of the American songbook, from blues to minstrelsy.
In recent years, Orcutt has resumed his paint-peeling electric guitar attack, best represented by his collaborations with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller (in the Orcutt Shelley Miller power trio), drummers (Chris Corsano or Jacob Felix Heule), guitarists (Loren Connors and Sir Richard Bishop), and others (including cellist Okkyung Lee and vocalist Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux). His newest work continues the guitarist's signature interrogation of his instrument, yet signals a new phase of cautiously-employed conventional melody and song structure. With each recording and performance, Bill Orcutt continues to invent a sonic vernacular built around raw and tortured tones, ragged minimalism, and seemingly inexhaustible improvisational stamina.
Famous Mammals
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Featuring members of Naked Roommate and The World (among others), Famous Mammals are a fully pollinated orchard of hybridized post punk that seemingly harkens back to the halcyon days when Rough Trade called 202 Kensington Park Road home. Their album "Instant Pop Expressionism Now!" is an ultramodern polyglot of smatterings that at once sound familiar, but you can't quite place it. Swell Maps? Happy Refugees? Monochrome Set? Maybe. Kinda. It's in the stitching, but the design & thrust is all Famous Mammals.
