We’re all familiar with Louis Vuitton. Despite its luxury status, the brand is everywhere. If you haven’t heard the name dropped on a hip hop track , then certainly you’ve seen the signature LV monogram on passing handbags. The authenticity of the bag doesn’t matter much. …

You may be familiar with Uber founder Travis Kalanick. In 2017, Kalanick was forced to resign as CEO after complaints of Uber’s toxic workplace culture surfaced, including claims of sexual harassment and discrimination. Nevertheless, this tick has found a new host. …

“No artist is pleased … There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” MARTHA GRAHAM, MODERN DANCE PIONEER “I’m a music producer because I’m such a music fan,” says Oakland-based musician Dax Pierson. “Since I like…

Prolaps’ Ultra Cycle Pt. 1: Vernal Birth is music to asphyxiate to. A collaboration between Bonnie Baxter of Kill Alters and Matt Stephenson of Machine Girl, Ultra Cycle Pt. 1: Vernal Birth is the first of four seasonally-driven installments. …

“We titled our album Plague Notes easily a year before COVID exploded in Wuhan,” says Marc Kate, San Francisco-based composer known for his conceptual solo projects and production in electronic post-punk band Never Knows. “It’s more about our obsession with all things apocalyptic. Who knew it could be so prescient?” …

“Popular Monitress” isn’t exactly a solo venture. Jon Leidecker, who has been releasing music under the pseudonym “Wobbly” since 1990, has captured communion with the machine. The San Francisco-based multimedia artist, known for his involvement in legendary experimental group Negativland and the Thurston Moore Ensemble, released “ Popular Monitress” in February, a follow-up to his 2019 release, “ Monitress.”

San Francisco, it seems, is starved for poetic mobilization, an enlightened whisper in a withered ear bent by time and the bludgeoning of bureaucrats, those who have too long lined their pockets at the expense of the city’s purveyors of art, culture, and joy. Tongo Eisen-Martin is a bracing answer to the technocratic pall, a social landscape he observes to be “an open air corporate campus.” Or, put another way, “This police state candy dispenser that you all call a neighborhood” (“ The Course of Meal “).

“There’s this book called ‘The People Could Fly,’” says Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate. “It was a book of Black folk tales, and in the title story of the book, there’s some Africans, so-called enslaved on a plantation, and the assertion of the narrator is, ‘The people could…

Negativland is a chronic cultural carnivore. Since 1980, the experimental sound collage group has been sampling offal from the corporate culture machine and repackaging it with subversive hilarity. Their latest album, “ The World Will Decide,” was released on Nov. 13. Today, the group consists of Mark Hosler, David Wills (a.k.a. “The Weatherman”), Jon Leidecker (a.k.a. “Wobbly”), and others. Whether their subject of critique is the omnipresence of corporate advertising or the reign of technocracy, Negativland has proven audio collage to be a wickedly effective means of exposing cultural hypocrisy.