Sounds & Scenes from the Bay

On this episode of North Gate Radio, five reporters explore how arts and music serve as vessels for storytelling and community building throughout the Bay Area. You’ll hear about the Oakland musicians composing original songs inspired by literature, how artist Diedrick Brackens weaves stories about identity into cotton tapestries, and why a Daly City DJ is turning grocery store aisles into viral Filipino house parties. We also examine the local movement of artists reclaiming their independence from Spotify’s algorithms and close with a celebration of the lowrider community receiving federal recognition through a new collection of USPS forever stamps. 

 

This is a recording of North Gate Radio that was broadcast live on KALX radio station, 90.7FM.

 

Full Transcript

Zoe Meyer: Good morning, welcome to Northgate Radio. I’m Zoe Meyer.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: And I’m Lylah Schmedel-Permanna. Today is April 23rd, and we’re excited to share stories about arts and music across the Bay.

Zoe Meyer: We start our show with an Oakland book club made up of musicians.

Claire Calderon: This is not a musical book report.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: Then, an artist uses weaving to tell stories about identity.

Diedrick Brackens:  I think there’s something kind of throwback and romantic about the machinery, the processes.

Zoe Meyer: Then, we meet a DJ who’s gone viral for performing at a grocery store in Daly City…

JP Breganza:  I saw pure Filipino joy that night.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: Next, Spotify comes under scrutiny.

Stephanie Dukich: Since leaving Spotify, I find myself streaming much less.

Zoe Meyer: And, the Bay Area low rider community gets a commemorative stamp.

Rebeca Flores:  It honors that complex paint job, marbleizing the custom paint jobs, and giving that high honor to the low and slow.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: But first, Patricio Provencio with the news.

Patricio Provencio: Live from North Gate Radio, I’m Patricio Provencio.

The race for Governor is heating up following East Bay Congressman Eric Swalwell’s recent exit. He was leading the pack, but now that he’s gone, no clear front-runner has emerged yet.

Last night, the six remaining candidates met in San Francisco for a televised debate, hoping to claim front runner status.

The debate focused heavily on the state’s affordability crisis and housing. Here’s Southern California Congressmember Katie Porter taking aim at former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra…

Katie Porter [YouTube video]: “Mr. Becerra, you have all these lovely plans, but there are never any numbers, any revenue plan, any details, anything that pushes on the status quo.”

Meanwhile, Republicans hammered the one-party rule in California for failing to address affordability.

A man was found dead in the bushes near Sproul Hall on campus yesterday morning. University staffers discovered the body shortly after noon.

Campus police say the person does not appear to be affiliated with the university, and there are no obvious signs of foul play.

The discovery comes just a day after a separate student death at a residence hall. However, officials say the two cases are not believed to be connected.

Counseling services are available to all students and staff.

And finally, have you ever been to the Embarcadero Plaza and caught a whiff of stagnant water? Well, help is on the way.

San Francisco is dismantling the Vaillancourt Fountain at the foot of Market Street.

The fountain has been a point of debate since it was installed in 1971.

While some preservationists are fighting to save it, the city says removing it will make room for a more flexible public plaza, and many passersby will simply appreciate a breath of fresh air.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Patricio Provencio.

Zoe Meyer: Hey Lylah, how do you feel about book clubs?

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: They … can be cool.

Zoe Meyer: You sound skeptical.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: Well it depends. Even if you love books, it can be hard to get everyone on the same page… literally. Then people no-show or just come to drink.

Zoe Meyer: Well, what if a book club was more like a concert?

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: Oh, that sounds fun!

Zoe Meyer:  Here’s Chelsea Kurnick with the story about Bushwick Book Club Oakland.

Chelsea Kurnick: Claire Calderon is one of the organizers of a book club by and for musicians. She says the planning begins way before the meeting.

Claire Calderon: Yeah, a group of musicians, sometimes I would say up to 10, are invited to all read the same book.

Chelsea Kurnick: And compose a new song inspired by the book, which they then perform live at the actual book club meeting, which is open to the public, like a concert.

Claire Calderon: It’s a big part of the Bushwick Book Club experience that the song that each musician is debuting has never been heard before.

Chelsea Kurnick: It’s called Bushwick Book Club because it was founded by musician Susan Hwang in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn way back in 2009.

Claire Calderon: And the idea spread. So now there are chapters in several different cities around the states and a few elsewhere. I know there’s one in Sweden.

Chelsea Kurnick: Calderon is a musician and she first learned about the Bushwick Book Club when her band Coraza was invited to perform a song. It was inspired by Dawn by Octavia Butler.

Claire Calderon [Live Show]: Unfastened.  I am wet dough folding. I am atoms expanding.

Chelsea Kurnick: Calderon says learning to write songs in response to books added dimensions to the band’s sound.

Claire Calderon:  It just sort of surprised all of us with what we were capable of.

Claire Calderon [Live Show]: I am after…

Claire Calderon: There’s something different about the way that you read when you know you’re going to be responding in this way. That was the best advice that somebody gave me about being part of Bushwick Book Club. This is not a musical book report.

[Music]

Chelsea Kurnick: Selena Feliciano is a singer/songwriter who lives in San Francisco. By day, she directs an environmental nonprofit. Feliciano calls herself an “eco sad-girl” and says she thinks about humans’ relationship to the land every day.

The first song Feliciano made for the Bushwick Book Club was inspired by Gabby Lala’s graphic memoir “Not the Path of Totality”. It’s called “Mother Song”.

Selena Feliciano [Live Show]: Swear resounding to giving up doubting. Committed to grounding in this lifetime, lifetime.

Chelsea Kurnick: Feliciano first found out about Bushwick Book Club after one of the organizers played music with her at a Juneteenth event. She says there’s a magic in coming together with other artists for one night to debut songs that all respond to the same book.

Selena Feliciano:  There’s so few spaces like that, that feel, um, quite connective and also sort of ephemeral.

Chelsea Kurnick: This spring, Bushwick Book Club invited Feliciano and five other musicians to compose a song for the upcoming Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. Each artist got to pick which headlining writers they would be most excited to compose music for.

Feliciano was drawn to the event focusing on how Afrofuturism and speculative storytelling can help us imagine liberatory futures.

Selena Feliciano:  It feels like medicine. There’s like the sweet medicine of building of new worlds and there’s also the bitter medicine of, like, really pulling back the veil on the reality of the systems that we live within.

Chelsea Kurnick: At the event, Feliciano will debut a new song based on the works of Susana M. Morris and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Feliciano is drawing inspiration from Gumbs’s 2020 book, “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals”.

Selena Feliciano: Just feels really exciting to me as someone who really identifies as a marine mammal. I love to surf. I’m in the ocean almost every single day. And, in Puerto Rico, where I still have family, there’s this saying that surfers will throw around to each other and they’ll ask like, “¿Te curaste?” like “Did you heal yourself?” And that means, like, did you go surfing?

Chelsea Kurnick: This is the second year Bay Area Book Festival has partnered with Bushwick Book Club Oakland to open their events with music about the books. Calderon says last year, the music grounded the authors and the audience in their bodies and emotions.

Claire Calderon: It’s my impression that everyone showed up a little differently than they would have if we had just jumped right into the intellectual, into the discussion itself.

[Music]

Claire Calderon: There’s something about being forced to kind of slow down a little bit and listen to a song. That changes how present we are.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Chelsea Kurnick.

[Music]

Zoe Meyer: Learn more about the Bay Area Book Fest and get tickets to the headlining events at bayareabookfest.org.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: Weaving is one of humanity’s oldest art forms, and one San Francisco-based artist is reimagining the craft. Lenéa Sims caught up with Diedrick Brackens to talk about his new show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

He tells us what we can learn from the ancient technique of weaving today.

Lenéa Sims:  In the works for Diedrick Brackens’ new show, we see the artist’s signature stark Black bodies woven into colorful, cotton images of flora, fauna, and landscape. Extremely difficult to construct, the weavings can take up to 6 weeks to create and are also massive in scale – the largest is over 20 feet high.  Brackens and his team also dye their own yarns, hand-weave, and assemble the tapestries entirely in house.

I sat down with Brackens at his San Francisco studio to talk about his new exhibition, titled “Gather Tender Night”.

Lenéa Sims: Gather Tender Night is your first solo show in the Bay Area. Can you tell me a little bit about the works in the show and how the show came to be?

Diedrick Brackens: I have for a while thought a lot about nighttime as this space of secrecy, this space of ritual, a space of escape. I’m trying to conjure these histories of enslavement, but particularly freeing oneself from enslavement. I’m thinking about queer histories of cruising or folks meeting, at night out of doors.

Um, so trying to tie together a lot of these, the histories that feel important to me and my own self narrative, but also making them expansive enough hopefully that people can think about, what it is to kind of like really be alive at nighttime.

Lenéa Sims:  Brackens’ studio is quiet and organized around half a dozen wooden floor looms. Drying racks in one corner are heavy with bundles of yarn in pinks, purples, and orange. On one far wall, a new work is being drafted across five large paper panels. I asked him to tell me more about his process.

Diedrick Brackens: So I’m doing a kind of collage of found images, drawn images, photographs of myself, and then those things get blown up to the scale of the weaving. So, if I make a 16 foot weaving, I make a 16 foot drawing.

People think that the work might be autobiographical. Sometimes it is, but I’m also trying to mine history, mythology, and I hope it allows people to read the work in a more successful way than to think about, just my particular story.

Lenéa Sims: Can you tell me a little bit about your upbringing and have you always been an artist and how you found your way to weaving?

Diedrick Brackens: So, my father was in the army. We moved around quite a bit when I was young, but I’m originally from Texas. So I think of it as core to my identity. And I made art from a young age. My grandmother taught me to sew when I was probably seven or eight years old. And so from very small would make little objects and things with needle and thread and fabric and string.

When I went to undergrad, I knew I would study art, and then the summer of my first year at the suggestion of a professor, I took a weaving class. Had no conception about fiber art, about weaving. I couldn’t have told you what weaving really meant. And then I saw the machines, the looms, sitting in these perfect rows in like a sun-filled room with color coded yarn across the back wall and was like, whatever this is, I want to do it.

Lenéa Sims: You talked about not really even having a concept of what weaving is, and when I talk to people about weaving, I get that reaction a lot. People are like, is that knitting? Is it sewing?  And I wonder, why do you feel like weaving is relevant today?

Diedrick Brackens: I think generally we don’t know how things are made, where they come from, we just take for granted that we have things and so I think there’s something for me about engaging specifically in weaving that reminds people that cloth is produced, that it has stories. There’s great narrative potential in textiles and weaving.

Lenéa Sims: Another symbol that you use a lot is the unicorn. Can you talk to me a little bit about why the unicorn?

Diedrick Brackens: The unicorn is so layered at this point. So I had a lot of studio visits in grad school where the professor or a visiting artist would walk in. They would look around and more than once they’d be like, oh, you’re Black, you’re queer, and you weave, like you’re a unicorn. And like literally it happened like three times and I was like, I’m gonna weave a unicorn. Like it feels like it captures something that I couldn’t say in words and it becomes kind of a self-portrait.

Lenéa Sims: It’s funny because I’ve gotten this unicorn comment also and I think about black exceptionalism, you know, we have to be bigger and better and brighter and shinier, and I wonder if that at all resonates with you.

Diedrick Brackens: Absolutely. And I mean, I think there’s something about the idea that we would be fictional. Like the idea that Black folks, folks of color showing up in places that have been closed to us makes us unreal in some way I think is something that I was trying to kind of poke at.

Lenéa Sims: Thank you.

Diedrick Brackens: Yeah.

Lenéa Sims: Diedrick Brackens’ “Gather Tender Night” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is on view now through August 23.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Lenéa Sims.

Zoe Meyer: Filipino music is having a moment. If you’ve been online this past year, you’ve likely seen viral Filipino house parties in Seafood City grocery stores across the country.

Reporter Grace McCarty talks to DJ JP Breganza, who started the trend right here in the Bay.

JP Breganza: How’s it going guys? My name is JP Breganza. I’m from Vallejo, California, and I’m a videographer, video editor, and now DJ.

[Music]

Grace McCarty: So you started off telling me you weren’t even a DJ to begin with. Now you have a show that’s spread to Vegas, to Seattle, to LA. How does that happen?

JP Breganza: Funny enough, I actually never wanted to become a DJ at all because growing up in Daly City in the nineties I learned about how much it took to become a DJ.

Radio DJ [Internet Clip]: We’re back on First Cut. I’m Lisa.

JP Breganza: The turntable side of things. The scratching, the beat juggling, all the, all the tricks …

Radio DJ [Internet Clip]: Morena Batoni finds out what’s hot in Daly City for our uptown downtown guide.

JP Breganza: …with simply just two records in their hands.

[Record scratching]

Male Voice [Internet Clip]: Daly City is known for its DJs. You know, if you’re from Daly City and you’re a DJ, you must have skill.

JP Breganza: So, that was the DJ I was exposed to, and I was like, man, I love DJing so much that I can’t ever be one, because I feel like I would’ve just insulted the art.

Grace McCarty: So you started dabbling in DJing, streaming it, and playing some Filipino bangers. Where did Seafood City come in?

JP Breganza: Someone commented, “Hey, I need you to DJ at Seafood City right now.” And I was like, wow, that’s such a stupid idea. Why would I ever do that? And then right after I said that out loud to myself, I was like, “Wow, that’s a stupid idea. I should do that.”

JP Berganza [social media video]: We’ve got a lot more shopping to do.

JP Breganza: I actually screenshotted that comment, posted it on my story, and then I tagged Seafood City. And within five hours they actually responded. So, they pitched to me this idea of having a late night market…

JP Berganza [social media video]: Guys, it is 11:01pm.

JP Breganza: … inside their store.

JP Berganza [social media video]: If you guys wanna pull up and party while you wait in line, feel free.

JP Breganza: And they wanted me to DJ and just, you know, fill the air with music while there would be karaoke going on. Typical Filipino party where it’s just singing, music, and food.

JP Berganza [social media video]: I hope you guys enjoy and dance along or sing along if you know any of these songs. Let’s go!

Grace McCarty: Could you take me through your first show? Describe, what it was like, what it looked like? Were people like, what is he doing up there?

JP Breganza: I was stationed at the cash registers with my speakers in the booths, slowing down the line, and people were just getting so upset. You would get those looks from those uncles and aunties be like, oh, why is he taking up two cash registers? Or, oh, why is he playing music so loud?

[Music]

JP Breganza: It felt like I was pranking people.

[Music]

JP Breganza: They didn’t understand what I was doing. For the first three hours and it wasn’t until the last hour where my set I actually prepared for that night played.

[Music]

JP Breganza: The way I built my set was memories of what I remembered listening to back in the day as a child growing up, what my older cousins were listening to, to what my aunties and uncles are listening to…

If you know this song please. I see a bunch of Filipinos and I better see y’all sing….

[Music]

JP Breganza: I saw pure Filipino joy that night. Like, oh yeah, I remember this song. Or, oh, I remember this song too. Or, how old is this guy? Because how does he know this song?

Grace McCarty: Now that you’ve got this legacy for yourself known as the Seafood City guy, how are you, you know, what do you see next for your path?

JP Breganza: So what I saw at Seafood City back in September was all the elements of a Filipino house party without that one auntie going, oh, where’s your boyfriend, girlfriend? Or, oh, did you know your Ate got into USC?

What I’m actually planning on doing for this year, for 2026, is that I might just wanna host one more Filipino house party. So I plan on doing a backyard tour called Isa Pa, where I ask, if they’re willing to host, bringing the whole family over one more time. Isa Pa, which is what it means.

So 2026, I’m actually not gonna be playing for Seafood City anymore. I’m actually going to be bringing this passion project along.

Grace McCarty: That’s great. Thank you. It was nice getting to know you.

JP Breganza: Thank you so much, and it was great just talking to you too.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: In the last year, artists like Deerhoof, Cindy Lee, and Massive Attack have left Spotify. And they’re not the only ones. They say they’re leaving for many reasons, including Spotify running ads for ICE  recruitment…

Male Voice [Spotify clip]: join.ice.gov and fulfill your mission.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: Spotify dropped those ads. Now, reporter Gabriel Lopez tells us how music lovers and local artists are feeling about streaming platforms.

Gabriel Lopez: Oakland’s Tal Robinson releases dance music under the persona RITCHRD.

JP Berganza [Internet clip]: I wear a lie, you taught me more. I wear a lie, you taught me more. I wear a lie, you taught me more. I wear a lie, you taught me more.

Gabriel Lopez: For their first several years they released their music on Spotify.

Tal Robinson: I remember one month I made like $900 from streaming. But I’m just not getting streams anymore.

Gabriel Lopez: Despite over three million streams, the income from that success is entirely dependent on factors outside their control like visibility on the algorithm.

Tal Robinson: My placements changed. I wasn’t getting placed in the playlist anymore. Because the listeners, I didn’t have any connection with them, the second Spotify stopped serving it to them, they like, don’t care.

Gabriel Lopez: Their past few releases have exclusively gone to Bandcamp, a marketplace for artists to directly sell their music online. Daria Lorde, another producer who has worked with RITCHRD on their label NO BIAS, began releasing limited run remixes, edits and tracks on her Bandcamp. She did this partially to develop a stronger connection to her audience.

Daria Lorde: These ideas of like, oh, I can pay seven dollars and I can listen to every song ever. I don’t blame them. Of course, that sounds great. It sounds like, witchcraft, you know? But it does turn the musician into, like, a ghost, like, a ghost, like, a ghost.

Singer [Internet clip]:  When I’m with you, you’re all I need. You’re the air I breathe. When I’m with you…

Gabriel Lopez: Jeff Nelson is a lawyer and founder of SpyHop Law. He represents artists in issues of IP and contracts. He says Spotify doesn’t pay per stream. It divvies up payments based on share of total streams, which unfairly benefits the larger record companies.

Jeff Nelson: I think it was 2024 where Spotify made the shift to not paying anyone who had, or not paying any songs that had streams of a thousand or less in any given year. And that really impacted the, what I would call working musicians, when you’re kind of scraping by, every dollar hurts.

Gabriel Lopez: So what role does the music consumer have on this system? At a forum last fall in Oakland, aptly named Death to Spotify, two avid music lovers, Stephanie Dukich and Manasa Karthikeyan championed a Spotify-free life. Both Dukich and Karthikeyan say listening to music is now a more active experience for them.

Stephanie Dukich: I think the onus is on the consumer. I think we as a society have to find better ways to engage with sound, but I don’t think the artist who’s gonna be making no money anyway can be faulted for getting some revenue from streams. I think we just have to reimagine the whole thing altogether.

Manasa Karthikeyan: I also like have found myself since quitting, being really dedicated to buying CDs, and I got a little portable Walkman for that. I actually have been, like, listening to music that way a lot.

Gabriel Lopez: So, what can be done? Lawyers like Jeff Nelson say collective action could effect change.

Jeff Nelson: I have a hard time seeing how artists can make real changes without banding together and protesting.

Gabriel Lopez: For listeners? Daria Lorde, the music producer likening Spotify to sorcery, feels developing a stronger relationship with music and musicians can start a societal sea change.

Daria Lorde: Anyone can make music, just make one song and making that one song will build you a different relationship with music, and you’ll maybe have a little more empathy towards all the people that are making the music that you’re listening to.

Gabriel Lopez: For North Gate Radio, I’m Gabriel Lopez.

Zoe Meyer: The US Postal Service recently unveiled a new collection of forever stamps featuring low riders, and the celebration was right here in the Bay. The stamps feature different classic cars, including fancy hydraulics and vibrant paint jobs. Community members say the recognition was long overdue.

Brenda Yamilex Vasquez reports.

Brenda Vasquez: On this sunny, warm day at the San Francisco Post Office, hundreds of people gather with their classic cars, as the sounds of music and the smell of copal fill the air.

[Music]

Brenda Vasquez: This was a victory for many in the lowriding community, which dates back to the 1940s with Mexican-American origins throughout the Southwest. Rebeca Flores is the founder of  Danza Azteca Xitlalli-Xolotl and spoke at the unveiling.

Rebeca Flores: It’s a monumental moment for many reasons. Back in the day when I grew up, lowriders were delinquents. They were arrested on their knees handcuffed when they were trying to just cruise on 24th Street.

Brenda Vasquez: San Francisco has a strong presence in the lowriding community, but its influence stretches far beyond the city.

Meet Larry Reyna from Berkeley—he’s been part of the scene for five decades and is a member of the Brotherhood Bay Area Car Club. Reyna recalls when police would harass him just for cruising.

Larry Reyna: I’ve gotten, I wanna say, at least 30 to 40 tickets.

Brenda Vasquez: Reyna, before retirement, was employed at UC Berkeley for 41-and-a-half years and would drive his lowrider to work.

Larry Reyna: When I first got hired, I was 18, I would get pulled over every day by the same UC police officer. I would tell him, “You know, I work here.” He goes, “Well, you look suspicious.”

Brenda Vasquez: How did you guys manage to work through that and continue showing up in your cars and being your full, authentic self?

Larry Reyna: We just never gave up.

Brenda Vasquez: Did you ever imagine being recognized by USPS on a stamp?

Larry Reyna: No, I was really surprised, especially with everything that’s going on around right now.

Brenda Vasquez:  Back across the bay I spoke with Ruben Espinel, from the San Francisco Colors Car Club. He drives a 1951 Chevrolet style line Deluxe. For Espinel, the importance of lowriding extends beyond just engineering. When he was planning on popping the question to his longtime girlfriend, he asked for a favor from his fellow club members and took advantage of the special sound feature their cars hold.

Ruben Espinel: So I reached out saying, “Hey, I’m gonna propose, can you guys pull up? You know, I wanna surround the house with low riders and then have the mariachis in front.” And we all sounded off our sirens, and she’s like …

Ruben’s Wife [Video]: Ruben, there’s … What is the mariachis for?

[Loud siren]

Mariachis [Video]: Rosa, pintada de azul, es un motivo…

Ruben Espinel: And it’s really cool to, you know, drive by an empty lot and remember like, it wasn’t just an empty lot that day. It was full of life that, that afternoon

Brenda Vasquez:  Back at the post office in San Francisco, Phil Fisher, Public Relations Director for the Sacramento Low Rider Council, explains a bit more about the historic significance of forever stamps.

Phil Fisher: You get a commemorative stamp, according to the post office, uh, the postal service, when you have a significant impact on American history, American society, and American culture. So I want to thank again the United States Postal Service for recognizing that lowrider culture is American culture. We are American culture, something we have known for generations.

Brenda Vasquez: Before the ceremonial welcome dance performed by Danza Azteca Xitlalli-Xolotl, founder Rebeca Flores described the moment as a high honor to the low and slow.

Rebeca Flores: Thank you for recognizing that there’s good things, and that’s a brilliance in this time in the dark times of our country. We are rich and we have a lot, but the subculture of Mexicanismo is beautiful, entonces que viva la raza and right now we’re here, right? Que viva la raza! Be proud and be brown and be down.

Brenda Vasquez: From being persecuted for their appearance to being federally commemorated for the same reason, the relationship between the U.S. and its lowrider culture has come a long way.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Brenda Yamilex Vasquez.

Zoe Meyer: That’s it for North Gate Radio. Thanks for tuning in. Today’s show was produced by Steffi Puerto and Gabriel Lopez. Our Director was Chelsea Kurnick, and our Executive Producer was Dinée Dorame.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: Rick Johnson was our engineer. Queena Sook Kim and Ethan Toven-Lindsey were our faculty advisors.

Zoe Meyer: North Gate Radio is a production of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I’m Zoe Meyer.

Lylah Schmedel-Permanna: And I’m Lylah Schmedel-Permanna. Tune in next Thursday to hear more stories from our program.