The Secret Society Of The Sonic Six will bring their darkened disorientations to the bay area this coming week with performances in San Francisco and Oakland.  The group will be performing tracks off their next 12" release, The Pick Up, due out in Feb on 4:2:2v2, a new label out of Denmark.

Friday November 18th finds (((6))) at the Retox Lounge, a small watering hole in the Potrero Hill neighborhood.  This is the 5th anniversary of the Death Rock Dive Bar night and features locals Nezzy Idy and Headless Lizzy as well as the DRDB DJs. Make sure to head downstairs as the performance space is in the basement.






Saturday November 19th (((6))) will be visiting their gestation grounds for the first time since relocating to Los Angeles many years ago.  Katatonik is an underground monthly featuring dark experimentalists, mostly of the electronic variety. The nite is organized by the Katabatik label / soundsystem crew.  Check out the intense comps that the label has put out @ http://www.katabatik.org/kollektion/


This nite happens to be the 6th Katatonik so alignments are in place for a magikal (((6)))  evening.  Vancouver based Animal Bodies and Monsters of the Id will also be performing, along with DJ's R.M.S., Pink.Noise. and Mattreya.  The location is a tightly held secret so please contact a Katabatik representative @ contact@katabatik.org for addess specifics.  I can tell you that it's not too far from Jack London Square.

Celebrate the eco-active spirit of California that John Muir helped to establish in our great state with O Zone, September 30th, when the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will come alive with an evening of food, cocktails, music, performances, and eco-friendly activities that will inspire you to take action to save the environment. Learn how making small changes can have big consequences on conserving our natural world and discover ways to empower the adventurer/explorer/eco-pioneer in you. 

Don't miss the Mustache and Beard Contest! OMCA is in search of the "Best John Muir Beard in the Bay!" Amoeba will be on hand with all sorts of giveaways and a Beard & Mustache Photobooth!

ALSO: get down to the beats of DJ Platurn who's spinning crucial tunes before headliner The Coup performs! Catch Whiskerman in an Oak Street Plaza acoustic set! Get in the gallery for an acoustic set with Conspiracy of Beards!  

   

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Long before Oakland (aka "The Town") was a hipster destination teeming with endless cafes offering good quality coffee, there was the North Oakland coffee spot known as Royal Coffee, and in more recent years known as Cole Coffee. In 1987, Royal Coffee, which morphed into Cole Coffee in 2005, first opened on 63rd Street near College Avenue in North Oakland near the Berkeley border. Offering strong, quality, affordable coffee with no pretensions and located just half a block down from La Farine bakery, it immediately built a loyal following. Even the recent era influx of new Oakland cafes similarly offering choices of quality coffees and teas has not affected the College & 63rd Street business one bit. This is because Cole, nee Royal, is as much of a social gathering point as it is a place to buy a good cuppa joe.

When Cole Coffee's owner Michael Murphy purchased the business from Royal Coffee six years ago,  changing the name to Cole Coffee at the time, he was already quite familiar with the business and its loyal clientele. "I managed Royal Coffee from 1992 until I puchased the business in 2005," he told me. He recalled how back when he started managing the business that, "Royal only had the 63rd Street location and then opened the cafe in 1995." Cole Coffee is one business split into two locations that are side by side. At the front cafe part (corner of 63rd & College) you can sit down inside or outside and specialty coffees are custom made on drip in front of you. Then the Cole Coffee shop round the corner down a bit on 63rd (with an apartment door entrance separating the two) is where you can buy coffee by the pound to go and cups of the reliably strong roasted and tasty house coffee. About a dozen small round green cafe tables line the outside on 63rd and snake up around onto College.

Oakland's Beer Revolution, located at 435 3rd Street @ Broadway down by Jack London Square, is all about beer, boasting a mind boggling choice of over 500 different brews, mostly bottled but also on tap.

But Beer Revolution, which is owned and operated by the lifelong punk rock husband & wife team of Fraggle (born Mark Martone) and Rebecca Boyles, is also all about celebrating music -- namely punk rock with an emphasis on 80's punk (especially West Coast punk), all of which acts as the perfect soundtrack to this one-of-a-kind beer tasting emporium.

"Music is very important to us and it's been a predominant part of both my husband's and my life forever, really," Rebecca told me. "I've been very much involved in the punk rock scene for pretty much my whole life and so has Fraggle. It's a part of our lives so we made it a part of our business too." Fraggle, whose passionate punk past includes putting in years as one of the crew of volunteers at 924 Gilman Street Project, confided to me, "It was at an MDC show that myself and Rebecca met."

Not surprisingly then, the legendary Austin, TX formed / SF based punk band MDC (Millions of Dead Cops) is a regular on the Beer Revolution's playlist. Other artists that you'll likely hear being blasted from the in-house sound system include Minor Threat, Fear, 7 Seconds, Operation Ivy (Fraggle was once roommates with the band's Tim Armstrong), GBH, Stiff Little Fingers, The Adolescents, D.I., Social Distortion, and La Plebe (one of the newer punk acts that Fraggle is into).

It may not even have been open a full two months yet but already Oakland's Remedy Coffee at 4316 Telegraph Avenue (between 43rd St & 44th St) in the ever evolving Temescal district has the warm & comfortable feel of a local cafe that has been there a lot longer than just seven weeks. The friendly and attentive Todd Spitzer is the owner of Remedy and I instantly knew I liked the guy and his new business when I first went in and saw him proudly sporting a T-shirt that read Live in Oakland. Love in Oakland. Love Oakland, and, between preparing individual servings of fresh coffee, he was changing the record on the turntable (yes, a vinyl player!) behind the counter.

That was about four weeks ago and in the short time since, business has quadrupled for Remedy -- and for good reason. It's a welcoming, very spacious, well lit environment with a variety of seating options (high stool counter, sofa level, & standard cafe table inside and out), excellent coffee (they specialize in light coffee), free Wi-Fi (unblocked under Remedy Hearts You), great music selection and nice bass-y speakers well positioned up high, excellent art on the wall (artist Cathy Lo currently), plus numerous cool curiosities such as a Pacific Bell phone booth right when you walk in the main door. The back patio is still to open, but it will soon. The clientele (many of whom arrive by bike) is a nice wide mix of people from The Town: musicians, DJs, artists, students, blue collar workers, OPD, young, old, straight and, gay. It's open Monday to Friday 7am to 6pm and weekends 8:30am to 6pm.

Before opening Remedy, which is right next door to Flying Yoga, round the corner from a cluster of Korean restaurants known to many as Little Korea, and down a block from Rent-A-Relic, Todd had a coffee cart set up right outside. With help from friends, he slowly but surely over a period of year worked on getting his business off the ground. He carefully crafted the interior of Remedy, which is modern without being cold or alienating. I recently caught up with Todd to ask him about going from cart to cafe, light roasted versus dark roasted., Oakland as a place to live & work, the meaning of the Remedy logo, and, of course, music -- inviting him and his staff to submit their all time Top Five Albums lists. The staffer descriptions are all Todd's.