Amoeba Music is proud to once again be part of the Berkeley World Music Festival, which offers a FREE full day of live concerts in Berkeley, starting from 12pm at People's Park and ending at 9pm at the Village. Performances are featured in Telegraph Avenue cafes and shops, near UC campus, and at People’s Park. This year, the Festival celebrates nine years of showcasing the Bay Area’s rich world music scene with an amazing line-up!

At Amoeba Music Berkeley:

Fely Tchaco - Live at Amoeba Berkeley 6/2 at 6pm

Join us at Amoeba Berkeley at 6pm for a special Berkeley World Music Festival performance from Fely Tchaco! The Ivory Coast-born singer, who now resides in San Francisco, delivers the best music of both cultures, a bridge between where she comes from and where she lives now. More details HERE!

At People's Park:
Six-time Grammy nominee Maria Muldaur and Bay Area’s premier Cuban bandleader, Fito Reinoso, headline at the People’s Park dance party. Druid Sister’s Tree Party opens the party with a riveting display of Celtic and Gypsy tribal grooves. A colorful crafts bazaar (Noon to 6pm) adds to the festivities in the park.

By Spensaur Cooper
Photos by Spensaur Cooper & Gene Bae 

The 5th Annual Record Store Day provided Amoeba Berkeley with a reminder that the East Bay loves its music. An hour prior to open on that beautiful Saturday morning, folks had already created a line that passed Cafe Mediterranean, and for good reason too.

Record labels big and small released hundreds of titles specifically for Record Store Day this year. In Berkeley, we seemed to have more titles than we ever had before so instead of our normal corral set up, we provided a few different stations in the center of the store to accommodate the overflowing of new releases. Highlights from our shipments included The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends LP, Phish's Junta Deluxe (Pollock Version) LP, Devo's Live in Seattle 1981 LP, Lee Hazlewood's The LHI Years LP, The Pharcyde's Bizzarre Ride II, as well as countless others.

As the line from outside poured into our RSD aisles, things got hectic but customers worked together, handing albums to others who could not reach and looking out for their fellow record enthusiasts. 

Beginning at noon we kicked off our afternoon of DJ sets with Mike Schulman, head honcho of Slumberland Records, who played everything from cheery reverberant pop, to darker 80's post-punk and even some rocksteady ska to round out his hour.

Amoeba Music is pround to sponsor Cal Students for Hip-hop's 16th Annual Hip-hop in the Park, Saturday May, 5th noon - 5pm! This FREE Hip-hop festival in Berkeley's People's Park features music, live graffiti art, and more! 

Check out this all-star line-up:
Dumbfoundead
Gift of Gab of Blackalicious
Ladies First: Raw G, Aima the Dreamer, Persia, Maya Songbird, and DJ Pam the Funkstress
Ameish and the Society
Jnatural
Understudies vs Candlespit

DJ Platurn and Jern Eye will be hosting part of the breakdance cypher!

People's Park is located in Berkeley between Haste and Dwight off of Telegraph. 

Amoeba is proud to team up with Berkeley's Moe's Books for a reading and acoustic performance with Eric Erlandson! Eric will be performing and reading from his book Letters To Kurt on Wednesday,  April 25th at 7:30pm. 

Erlandson is best known as co-founder, songwriter, and lead guitarist of the band Hole, which he formed with Courtney Love. Their albums Pretty on the Inside, Live Through This, and Celebrity Skin achieved international recognition and success. Live Through This was named one of the top 100 albums of all time by Time magazine. Since the breakup of the band in 2002, Erlandson has been involved in a number of musical and literary projects including Letters to Kurt, an anguished, angry, and tender meditation on the octane and ether of rock and roll and its many moons: sex, drugs, suicide, fame, and rage. It's part Dream Songs, part Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and the Clash. Rants, reflections, and gunshot fill these fifty-two prose poems. They are raw, funny, sad, and searching.

This weekend the Berkeley Video & Film Festival is happening at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas with a concentration on short films/videos typically of about ten minutes in length. At opening night last night of the eighteen year old festival, Dan K Harvest was at the downtown Berkeley cinema and got to view a dozen of these shorts. "It was invigorating, with lots of dark, foreboding, futuristic doomsday themed films and a lot of relationship commentary," he said. In addition to about 15 local productions, there are also many entries from around the US and overseas, including challenging new independent cinema from Italy, Cuba, Germany, Venezuela, and Great Britain.
 
"There was even a film by a 12 year old that was fascinating," said Harvest. Today, the second and final day of the fest, at 6:30pm, Dan K will be featured in the ten minute Escapin' From Oakland. Earlier this week, while still at the Interbike Convention in Las Vegas, I caught up with the longtime Oakland renaissance man, whose illustrious career has included being a rap recording artist, a BMX bike champ, and almost a reality TV star, among many other things (a few years back he was featured in an East Bay Express cover story), to ask him about the festival, the film, and himself. Never one stuck for words, Dan K responded in detail via his iPhone.


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