Musician Interviews
“I was able to secure a PPP loan with the SBA to support my music career,” says southeast San Diego rapper Cesar “Crhymes” Tellez. Despite losing 15 months of career traction to Covid, “the blessing …
Javi Nunez was into gothic metal and punk before he dove into deathrock, a subgenre of punk and goth that originated on the west coast circa 1980. The crossover act for him was Rudimentary Peni, …
“Our 12-inch vinyl EP is still months out, due to the crazy pressing backlogs, so in the meantime, we’ll be doing several digital releases,” says Dewey Defeats Truman singer-bassist James Reader, who’s working with Scott …
“We’ll shoot a good deal of the show in studio,” says producer M. Florentino Buenaventura of the new online Music Scene SDTV program. “But like most news outlets, we plan to have correspondents out on …
The men of Tijuana’s punk quartet DFMK — the letters stand for “doing fucking meth kills” on days when they don’t stand for “don’t fuck my kids” — allow that their hometown can get a …
The new album from Darius Degher (Sham Saints, Darius & the Magnets) features instrumental music inspired by surfing. “Groundswell Corduroy is a low-temperature variant of surf-rock,” he says, “the teen effervescence long gone, but it …
Steve Rosenbaum can trace his journey as a musician back to two sources. The first was receiving a toy guitar and the second was The Banana Splits TV show. One fateful day, he was in …
If you heard Jordan Krimston’s history of playing in bands, you would likely assume he was a grizzled, local music scene vet in his mid-50s. The 23-year-old has played in more groups over the past …
Mike Kociela’s old band, New World Spirits, got signed to Universal Records in the mid-90s. They were chewed up and spit out by the label a couple of years later. By 1997, he had formed …
“I’m releasing my debut single on March 26, called ‘Melancholy Treasures’” says Sky Star, one half of the musical duo Smokelines. “The song talks about my move from San Diego to New York City for …
“It was pretty ironic, losing our home during a stay-at-home order,” says Valentine Byrne, who was recording an EP last April when disaster piled on top of pandemic. “I’ll never forget receiving that phone call …
“I really thought I’d build a simple archive and hoped that a few of the old crowd would turn up to participate, but within a year, we’d located most everyone involved,” says Matthew Rothenberg, co-founder …
Based in La Jolla, Plunderbund (defined in the dictionary as “a league of commercial, political, or financial interests that exploits the public”) is a power trio playing alternative and power pop tunes, often with a …
Gary Wilson’s new album is Tormented. Which is not to say that Gary Wilson himself — notorious denizen of San Diego’s weirder side — is necessarily tormented. Although he came reasonably close to going over …
“Smokelines is the product of our regional, cultural, and musical differences,” says San Diego-born Skylar Blaze Star, one half of a new musical duo with New Yorker Faith Gara. “We’ve combined my west coast sunset …
Based in southeast San Diego, Cesar “Crhymes” Tellez first made his mark with Sicko Records and DagoSD.com, as well as hosting a Friday night Imperial Beach event called Club DagoSD and collaborating with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. …