The Truants, The Twitches, The Tortured, Sincerely Dead music show

2015-07-05 at SUB/Mission in San Francisco, CA

I became friends with Johnny Truant on Facebook when I made an advertisement post about my recording studio on a FB group he is also on. I went to see his band The Truants for the first time the previous weekend. That show ended up turing out to be fantastic. It was in a smallish warehouse in Berkeley. I enjoyed his band very much. They are basically "post-punk." They are a three piece and Johnny sings and plays bass, this guy Khalil Sullivan does really atmospheric electric guitar, and Johnny's dad Steve Bauer is the drummer. I get the impression Steve has a jazz background. The other band I really liked at that show whom I had not seen before was The Twitches, who are also local. The cool thing about The Twitches is they seem to be super young, and it was life affirming to me to fundamentally connect creatively and culturally with people much younger than me.

Johnny is a confident but nuanced creature.

This is The Truants' guitarist Khalil.

The guy on the right is Johnny Lawrie who is the frontman for The Tortured, who were also playing this night. The Tortured are a straight up punk band in the classic style. For this show Johnny Truant was playing bass for them too.

Khalil is currently getting his Ph.D at UC Berkeley, focusing on Queer popular music.

This night's show was happening at SUB/Mission, one of the very few San Francisco all ages venues. This place is tragically shutting down due to gentrification issues. Having the venue's sound room built into a suspended van is brilliant.

I forget what he was talking about but this is a photo sequence of Khalil making an argument about something.

When the show was about to start they made everyone there get in line to pay, have your wrist stamped, and if you were underage have "X's" drawn on your hands so you couldn't buy alcohol at the bar.

This guy is August Carroll and he is the frontman for The Twitches. I really like his band's music. August is also super nice. He's now studying at Expression Center for New Media to become an audio engineer.

The guy on the right is Johnny Truant's parter Colin Lorentzen.

Johnny Lawrie has basically achieved full realization of the punk aesthetic.

The first performance of the night was Daniel Irvine's "Sincerely, Dead" project. It was two video projectors projecting on him with a full band recording, with him singing. One of the projectors was projecting the silhouette of the band on the recording. It was a very cool effect. The music was too metally/melodramatic for my tastes but as a theatrical production is was pretty legit.

I forget this woman's name but she saw me taking pictures at the show and asked me to photograph her. I gave her my card and told her to e-mail me so I could send her the photos, but I haven't heard back from her.

The Twitches.

The Twitches inspired a friendly mosh pit.

The Tortured.

The Truants.

Khalil's sound is super atmospheric, which compliments The Truants' driving beat nicely.

Copyright Nicholas Taplin 2015