Independent Rock Fest Brings Heavy Sounds To Oakland
Now celebrating it's third year, PRF BBQ West 2016 hosts an eclectic group of noisy, heavy bands from the Bay Area and abroad for three days of cutting-edge sounds and barbecued meats in Oakland this weekend. Founded by Benjamin Abraham and Conan Neutron (the former leader of local noise-rock outfit Replicator), the festival came together as a West Coast offshoot of an informal series of concerts/parties held by a loose collective of musicians and artists active on the Internet forum connected to Chicago's Electrical Audio, the studio run by noted engineer and noise-rock icon Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac).
Bringing together a group of like-minded experimental punk and metal bands exploring abrasive textures and complex time signatures, PRF BBQ West was held at Leo's in Oakland for its inaugural year before splitting time between Oakland's American Steel Studios and the Elbo Room last year. For 2016, the festival takes a bold leap by moving to the much larger Mosswood Park Amphitheater for Saturday and Sunday after opening at the Starline Social Club on Friday night. The first evening's festivities feature an array of Bay Area acts including East Bay bands Glaciers and Reptoid and a headlining set by SF/LA-based group Cartographer.
The weekend shows will unleash a full eight hours of music (and free barbecue with admission) starting at noon at Mosswood Park, the space in Oakland that has hosted thousands the past couple of years for the summer Burger Boogaloo festival. On Saturday, venerable Bay Area experimental punks Oxbow top the bill. One of the longest running fringe outfits in the Bay Area, Oxbow has gone from clearing rooms in the '90s with it's squalling, abrasive music and the disturbing, sometimes confrontational onstage performance of singer Eugene Robinson to become an acclaimed mainstay on San Francisco's fringe music scene.
Rising from the ashes of Robinson's artrock-meets-hardcore band Whipping Boy, Oxbow moved in a far more unconventional direction when it came together as a recording project late in the decade. Joining Robinson and guitarist Niko Wenner were former Whipping Boy drummer Dan Adams (who switched to bass for the band), while drumming chores were split by Greg Davis and Tom Dobrov (Davis would take over full time in 1993 after Dobrov's departure).
Formed around the concept of musical freedom with no commercial aspirations, Oxbow mixed elements of noise rock that echoed Nick Cave's early band the Birthday Party and NYC sonic extremists Swans as well as such diverse inspirations as blues (in Wenner's screaming, dive-bombing bottleneck solos), dissonant modern classical, punk and metal. The cacophonous musical bed was matched by Robinson's wailing, unhinged delivery of multi-tracked vocals that sound like avant-garde singer Diamanda Galas channeling the right Reverend Al Green. The band's dense and challenging early albums found a core of fans drawn to the extremism of the music, including the aforementioned Albini, who would help track Oxbow's even more ambitious efforts, 1995's Let Me Be a Woman and 1997's cinematic Serenade in Red.
Since the turn of the millennium, Oxbow has only issued two proper studio albums -- An Evil Heat in 2002 on Neurot Records and the conceptual opus The Narcotic Story on Hydra Head -- but the group also branched out into film with the release of the tour documentary Music For Adults. The film followed a 2002 Oxbow tour through Europe and some of Robinson's more physical confrontations with concertgoers who decided to test out his reputation for brawling (the MMA-trained singer would publish an acclaimed first-hand account of his exploration of combat, Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About A**-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your A** Kicked for Asking, in 2007).
More recently, the band has been at work on their long-awaited forthcoming album The Thin Black Duke (the band's first new effort in nearly a decade), but Oxbow has also delved into a variety of configurations, performing as an acoustic quartet as well as a stripped-down duo of just Wenner and Robinson. The pair has also toured Europe and played Birmingham, England's 2012 Supersonic Festival backed by a full chamber ensemble billed as the Oxbow Orchestra. While the now-completed The Thin Black Duke is scheduled for a November relase, the band has recently launched a GoFundMe campaign to help recoup some of the $40,000 Oxbow members have spent during the past ten years of recording the album. Other highlights on Saturday include Seattle-based band Seminars, local noise-rock favorites Hurry Up Shotgun and Neutron's fronting latest collaborators, the Secret Friends.
