“Commit to Fit” and bring in health and wealth for the new year at the third annual Total Health and Fitness Expo. The event will include fitness and nutrition experts who can keep you on top of your New Year’s resolutions, provide healthy food options and offer a look into cutting-edge fitness products and apparel. There will also be a Super Training Classic hosted by American professional powerlifter, Sacramento resident and Super Training Gym owner Mark Bell. This event will also feature a special guest appearance by Brian Shaw, a four-time World’s Strongest Man winner (2011, 2013, 2015, 2016) and the first man to have ever won the Arnold Strongman Classic and World’s Strongest Man competition in the same year (2011 and 2015!). There will also be a prize-winning freestyle pole battle for all levels of pole athletes with $2,500 going to first place, $1,000 going to second place and $500 going to third place. There will even be a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournament sponsored by MMA fighter Urijah Faber and his Sacramento-based gym, Ultimate Fitness. There will be many more events, booths and competitions that you won’t want to miss, so head to Cal Expo (1600 Exposition Blvd.) to get your fit on! The event runs Saturday, Jan. 13 from 10 a.m.–6 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 14 from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tickets are only sold at the gate and are $9 for adults, $4 for adults 55-plus, and children age 12 and under are free. For more information, visit Totalhealthfitnessexpo.com and see how you can get $2 off your admission through Thrive Market.
**This write-up first appeared in print on page 10 of issue #256 (Jan. 1 – 15, 2018)**
Odesza has been headlining festivals, selling out arenas and topping the electronic charts for months and it’s easy to see why. Their shows are roiling waves of glittering twenty-somethings, smiling, bouncing and grooving in multilayered seas of synth ecstasy. Slap a pair of headphones on and you begin to feel the scope of the music, the infinite slow building area of sound that stops somewhere on the moon. These are the soundtracks to smoke filled late-party chill-outs, red-eyed flights and nighttime pool lounging.
With the incorporation of a full brass band to their live sets, Odesza manages to feel like someone packed New Orleans into an underground warehouse party—just the right mix of close intimacy and blown out confetti celebration. It’s easy to see how the music became popular; it’s simply jarring to trace the explosion all the way back to two fresh-faced boys out of college trying to make music before they were forced to get “real jobs.”
Speaking with Harrison Mills by telephone while he’s walking around under a bridge in London, it’s refreshing to hear his rationale on music making. Mills is intent on smashing together influences that range from trap and hip-hop all the way to Bossa Nova, in order to sneak these deeper genres into tasty jams for the more casual listener. And it’s clear that the band isn’t interested in pursuing clubby bangers, they’re searching for the deeper, larger sound that transports the listener. Odesza’s latest album, A Moment Apart, released in September 2017, opens with a woman speaking about a Russian cosmonaut peering out of the view hole of a spaceship looking at the curvature of the Earth with a small knocking rhythm as his only company. The knocking builds into the first track and by the second, “Higher Ground,” the listener is already there in the space ship. Naomi Wild’s achingly sweet voice strikes the perfect balance between a lonely longing for home and a feeling of already being there with trailing fingers, wrapped in soft sheets.
You see it in the faces of the revelers moving to the rhythm cascading through the speakers, eyes closed, lips moving to the words, millions of miles outside of their bodies on songs like the swaggering “Late Night,” or their international smash “Say My Name.” Blending the deep waves of synth, into the throbbing, pulsating bass lines creates a tightrope walk for the audience and they’re either swaying with their eyes closed or shuffling in time with their hands up. It’s a delicate balance to create and Submerge spoke with Mills about the process of crafting it while shuttered in during the dark Seattle winter.
Can you speak a little bit about the formation of the project and how it has changed since then?
I mean, we were just two kids in a basement right out of college making music before we had to get real jobs. So I’m not sure if there was a real goal in mind. I think we were inspired by a bunch of different kinds of music, and we were trying to find a way to use production as a way to genre blend. We wanted to make headphone music that still translated to the dance floor and still play out live.
Is that still the goal?
Well, when we make our live show we treat it as a totally different medium. We make a lot of new versions of our songs, so in some ways we’ve built things more for the medium that they’re presented in. So our albums have become more intimate and in our live shows have become bigger and more epic I guess?
How’d you set about making your live show bigger?
I mean we have a drum line that comes out; we have horns. I have a guitarist that sometimes plays bass for songs. Me and Clay are doing drumming, triggering stuff. We try to treat it as a really theatrical piece, try to make it more fun. We try to jump through a lot of musical styles throughout, so there’s a dance section, a heavy section, an intimate section; we try to make it really feel like a show. We’ve spent a lot of time building it that way. It’s just something we’ve always loved so we try to incorporate a lot of things in our live show and our albums in that way.
Because your music feels so cinematic what kind of movie would you want to score?
I’m a big fan of science fiction, so like Blade Runner maybe. That soundtrack is amazing. But I love a lot of different artists who’ve done scores before. I’d be up for anything; I think I’d jump at the opportunity to do it.
Can you talk about how you guys came to the sound of Odesza? How would you define it?
That’s kind of a tough question. We do a lot of different styles of music, I mean from something like “Bloom” to something like the Regina Spektor song [“Just a Memory”] are just so different. One is very personal and almost minimal, and the other is big and has horns with a trap influence. So it’s tough to define exactly what we do … I think we build in a lot of different sounds. I think there’s a bit of a hip-hop influence that doesn’t get recognized as often. I grew up on really loving hip-hop production, that’s where I started. Loving electronic music, and just trying to trick people into hearing a bunch of different genres and wanting to make it feel cohesive, that’s always a fun project.
So you’d say the hip-hop element is the thing that pulls it together?
There’s that and there’s this youthful element of euphoria that we’re always grasping at. It has a driving background from the hip-hop production and more focus on the drums from kinda the hip-hop world. But then again in the new album, there’s a lot of Brazilian influence and Bossa Nova, and all these other percussion elements. And there’s all these little elements that trickle into each song.
What’s your songwriting process like and was it different from your new record?
I think in a lot of ways we’ve grown a lot as artists and as people. We’d been on the road for three and a half years touring our first and second albums. And so we had stopped touring and it was the first time being home and actually having silence for a moment. And I think it gave us a moment of reflection and perspective through it all, and I think the growth and maturity from that has added depth to the new album.
Would you say recording this in Washington has shaped the record in some way?
I think coming back to our roots, in the harsh winter, it really bred creativity. Then again, when you’re shut in for so long you can kinda lose your mind. We just had a lot of time to reflect on the album we really wanted to make. So that’s what it ended up being.
Would you say that ended up making your album a little bit darker?
I think our previous work had so many positive overtones because we had longed for summer and hadn’t gotten it very often. So that light and sunshine was the inspiration for what we were doing. But for this album, this was the first time we tried to make a full spectrum and sound … We had never delved into the darker and more melancholic kind of sounds we liked. We were just touching these things we had always enjoyed in music. And with darker, people sometimes interpret that as sad, but I think there’s a beauty in melancholic melodies and this was the first time we really embraced it.
Can you talk a little bit about the collaboration on the new album?
Well this is the first time we were the most involved in every piece of the process instead of writing it over email. We would go to a lot of studios, and we’d sit down with a lot of singers and they wrote it either with us or next to us. It felt more collaborative in that way.
What would you bring into the studios?
We’d come in with really simple ideas, maybe like a loop that maybe had a chord change into a chorus style beat. But we really wanted whatever they chose was something that really resonated with them. Because everyone we worked with, we believed in their voice, their lyricism, the things they do well. Sometimes studios really feel like doctor’s offices and they don’t really breed creativity in a lot of ways. So we wanted to make something really laid back and have them choose something that they were drawn to. We’d start small with something small and then build all the pieces. Then we’d take it home and work it through from scratch with the vocals we had recorded.
What would you say is the best way to experience your music out of the live setting?
The albums I’ve really loved are sometimes like background music to the things I’m doing. Like, I’d put an album on before I’d taken off in a plane and I would listen to the whole thing from start to finish and then I’d want to hear it again. I think it’s an intimate album and should be heard with headphones. Maybe when you’re doing something where you can get lost in it. Personally I would say, taking off in a plane with headphones on, but it’s subjective. People should experience it in their own way, whatever makes sense for them.
See Odesza live when they play Papa Murphy’s Park at Cal Expo in Sacramento on Oct. 31, 2017, (aka Halloween). Also performing will be Illenium, SOFI TUKKER and Kasbo. Tickets can be purchased at Odesza.com/shows. This is an 18-and-over concert.
**This interview first appeared in print on pages 14 – 15 of issue #250 (Oct. 9 – 23, 2017)**
The annual Harley-Davidson Legendary Sacramento Mile (presented by Cycle Gear) will be bringing the excitement of high-speed motorcycle racing to Cal Expo on Saturday, May 20, 2017. This well-known flat-track race attracts pro riders and racing teams from near and far. This year, Harley-Davidson and Indian motorcycles will be pitted against each other to put the rivalry between the two bike manufacturers to the test. The Harley-Davidson Factory Flat Racing team will be riding new liquid-cooled XG750R motorcycles, in place of the XR705 motorcycles that the team has ridden in the past. (The XR705 is the most successful flat-track racing motorcycle of all time, so the expectations for the new XG750R are very high.) With new technology in the mix, and the rivalry between Harley-Davidson and Indian motorcycles being a main theme, the competition is sure to be fierce. Records may be broken. Legendary racer Kenny Roberts will be the Grand Marshall of the event this year, and he will be accompanied by his son, World Champion Kenny Roberts Jr. Gates open at 3 p.m., and the opening ceremony starts at 6 p.m. This event is open to all ages. Tickets include motorcycle parking, access to the pit and the opportunity to get autographs signed by racing legends. You can buy tickets online at Sactomile.com, or you can purchase them by calling the toll-free ticket line: (844) SAC-MILE.
**This write-up first appeared in print on page 9 of issue #239 (May 8 – 22, 2017)**
This winter’s concert schedule in Sacramento is STACKED! Kick off the season in style at 107.9 The End’s Jingle Ball 2016, presented in partnership with Midnite Events on Friday, Dec. 2 inside the Pavilion at Cal Expo. Headlining will be the chart-topping, hit-making DJ duo known as The Chainsmokers, whose career catapulted after the release of their tongue-in-cheek track “#Selfie” in early 2014. Since then, the NYC-based artists have released hot track after hot track, netting near constant airplay (see the song “Closer” featuring singer Halsey as an example, that song is freaking everywhere). Also on the Jingle Ball lineup is Dillon Francis, a super popular DJ, producer and internet celebrity from Los Angeles and Krewella, another legit electronic dance music duo consisting of Pakistani-American sisters Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf. All three of these acts are festival headliners, so to see them together on one bill in Sacramento is exciting for any fan of dance music. Opening Jingle Ball will be Alexx Adam, Billy Lane and Nick G. Tickets start at $50 and are available at Sacjingleball.com (and if you’re balling out of control you could even spring for the $2,500 “elevated cabana” for you and five friends; it even includes “complimentary snacks” and “fun surprises!”). This event is 18-plus and the doors will open at 8 p.m.
**UPDATE: Hopefully you got your tickets early because this show has already sold-out!**
This article first appeared in print on page 8 of our Oct. 24 – Nov. 7, 2016 edition of Submerge (issue #225).
Deep-fried foods, horse racing, animal exhibits, carnival rides, wine and beer gardens … Yup! The California State Fair is right around the corner, running from July 10 to 26 at Cal Expo, bringing with it a plethora of not only the aforementioned things, but plenty of awesome live entertainment too. Here are Submerge’s five not-to-be-missed acts at this year’s State Fair. All shows are free with fair admission, but you can also purchase tickets to get closer to the stage. Visit Castatefair.org for show information and to purchase tickets.
Paul Rodriguez on July 11:
Rodriguez is an actor and comedian who has been making people laugh for decades. He has been in over 45 films, was voted one of the most influential Hispanics in America and was honored with the Ruben Salazar award by the National Council of La Raza. Put on your laughing pants and come see Paul do what he does best. $12 Gold Circle seats.
MKTO on July 13:
This hip-hop pop duo consists of Malcolm Kelley and Tony Oller, previous stars of Nickelodeon’s TV series, Gigantic. They describe their album as music for “misfit kids and total outcasts—just the kids we were in high school.” So, bring your dancing shoes (and ears, of course) to watch the awesome performance of MKTO. $16 Gold Circle seats.
Ashanti on July 16:
Ashanti blessed the hip-hop/ R&B scene back in 2002 with her debut song, “Foolish.” From there, she put out instant hits, “Rock Wit U,” “Rain on Me” and her duet with Ja Rule, “Happy.” Come join her and feel good vibes and energy. $12 Gold Circle seats.
Theory of a Deadman on July 22:
Modern rock band, Theory of a Deadman burst onto the airwaves back in the 2000’s with their singles, “So Happy,” “Bad Girlfriend,” and “Make Up Your Mind.” Recently, they’ve blasted into new territory, completing their first ever country song, “Livin’ My Life Like a Country Song.” Come watch Theory of a Deadman as they display their amazing talent and make you realize why they’ve been a top contender on the Billboard charts. $16 Gold Circle seats.
Brett Eldredge on July 26:
2014
Country Music Association Awards’ New Artist of the Year, Brett Eldredge graced our eardrums with his number one hit, “Don’t Ya” and “Beat of the Music.” He has been featured on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, LIVE! with Kelly and Michael and Late Night with Seth Meyers. Get your boogie on and enjoy the last night of the fair with Eldredge’s good looks and beautiful voice. $25 Gold Circle seats.
Whereas Christmas only lasts one day, Sacramento Beer Week lasts 10 whole days! That’s a week-plus of beer, food, beer, entertainment and beer (glorious beer). This year’s Beer Week will see local bars and restaurants hosting a variety of events—way too many to list here—but here are a few that we think you’d be crazy not to check out. For a full listing, go to Sacramentobeerweek.com!
Touch: Home Brewing Demo with Track 7 Brewing and Brew Ferment Distill at Bows and Arrows • Feb. 24, 2013
Have you ever tasted a finely crafted beer and thought to yourself, “I could totally do that?” Well now you totally can! Sacramento Beer Week will get its DIY on at Bows and Arrows on Feb. 24 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., during Bows and Arrows’ Sunday brunch, you will learn the ins and outs of home brewing and make your own IPA. Track 7 will provide the grains and hops and Brew Ferment Distill (located at 3527 Broadway, Sacramento) will bring the supplies. Bows and Arrows will also offer Track 7 beers on tap, including the brewing company’s much ballyhooed double IPA collaboration with Knee Deep of Lincoln, Calif. Best of all, this event is free and open to the public! Your attendance is guaranteed to quadruple your beer nerd cred points instantaneously. Check out Bowscollective.com for more information.
Photo by Scott Bellisario {Social Stitcher/Instagram @ufallome}
See: Sacramento’s Newest Brewery, New Helvetia Brewing Company • Feb. 25, 2013
New Helvetia Brewing Company just celebrated its grand opening this past week, but its roots in Sacramento’s beer scene actually delve much deeper. The company’s mission is to create craft beer inspired by the Buffalo Brewing Company, which was established in Sacramento in 1890. On Feb. 25, New Helvetia will host a casual gathering with Dr. Charlie Bamforth, U.C. Davis’ Chair of the Department of Food Science and Technology and Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences. Tickets to this event will be $25 in advance and $30 at the door. The ticket price will include up to six 10-ounce pours of New Helvetia’s brews. New Helvetia Brewing Company is located at 1730 Broadway, Sacramento. For more info on the brewery, go to http://newhelvetiabrew.com/.
Hear: Lagunitas’ Brewmaster Tony Magee Talk Shop at The Torch Club • March 1, 2013
Not only can Lagunitas’ brewmaster Tony Magee make a great beer, he’s also really good at playing American roots music. Magee will be making the trip up from Petaluma, Calif., to meet with all of you and perform a few songs at The Torch Club (904 15th Street) from 5 to 9 p.m. As an added bonus, he’ll be bringing Lagunitas’ Wilco Tango Foxtrot Brown Ale in tow. The Torch Club will offer an $8 beer and brat combo and $4 refills on your frosty beverage. You even get to keep the glass! Lagunitas may not be a Sacramento beer, but it is a local favorite, so expect this event to be especially lively.
Taste: The Rainbow of Beers at the Third Annual Capital Beerfest • March 2, 2013
Dude. Bro. OK. So all these Sacramento Beer Week events (and the multitude we didn’t have space to list) are awesome, but if there was one that you’d have to consider the pièce de résistance, it’s this. From noon to 5 p.m., Cal Expo will fill up with the sweet, sweet aroma of fermented barley and hops. The air will permeate with an alluring maltiness (which isn’t a word, but you see what we’re going for here). As of press time, 84 breweries have signed on to appear at the Capital Beerfest, 21 of which are from the Sacramento area. We’d normally consider namedropping as beneath us, but in this case we’re just going to let it roll: River City Brewing, Sudwerk, Ruhstaller, Roseville Brewing Company and Lockdown are just a few that will be representing our region; meanwhile, Alaskan Brewing (Anchorage), Goose Island Beer Company (Chicago), Hop City (Brampton, Ontario, Canada), Oskar Blues (Longmont, Colo.) and Rogue Brewery (Newport, Ore.) are some of the out-of-towners. You’ll also be able to sample food from restaurants participating in Sacramento Beer Week. Clearly, this event is going to be epic. All that it’s missing is you. Tickets range from $40 to $75 (and $5 to $20 for designated drivers). For more info on where to get tickets, go to http://capitalbeerfest.com/.
Head on down to Cal Expo for Sacramento’s largest annual ski and snowboard show. Peruse the wares of multiple vendors such as Ride Snowboards, K2 Skis, Nordica and Burton, and $1 million worth of brand name merch will be on sale for discounted prices of up to 70 percent off. Saturday, Nov. 10, 2012 will be the Ski and Wine Expo, which will feature 50 wineries offering tastings while you check out all the latest ski gear; and on Sunday, at the Board and Brew Expo, load up on all your snowboard needs while you sample the offerings of 30 breweries (Sierra Nevada is the festival’s official partner). Entry to the festival is just $20, which gets you three free lift tickets and winter sale access. For $40, you’ll get the VIP treatment, which in addition to the lift tickets and sale access, also provides free beer or wine tastings and a free two-night stay at select hotels. This is an event that will satisfy most, if not all, of the senses. Festival hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. For a full rundown, go to Skiandboardfest.com.
Fright Planet is really stepping it up in 2011 with their haunted theme park at Cal Expo (gate 9 off Ethan Boulevard at the former Paradise Island Theme Park). There are five massive themed haunted houses: Pirates of Scurvy Island, Dead Man’s Lagoon in 3-D, Death Row, Blackout! and Psycho Midway in 4-D (“terrorific scents” add the fourth dimension according to their website, Frightplanet.com). Each haunted house attraction is about 5,000 square feet. There’s also a 100-seat “ScreamMax” theater where you can catch a 25-minute 3-D movie featuring “spectacular 3-D effects and a frightful soundtrack.” There really is something to scare everyone, even you tough guys out there, at this hell-ish (in a good way) theme park. Claustrophobic? You might want to avoid Blackout!, where you really can’t see shit and there are “hidden scares.” Hate clowns? Stay the heck away from the Psycho Midway! All Fright Planet cast members–there are a whopping 150 of them–have to go through a formal audition process and attend “Scare School” before they step foot into a haunted house to scare you and your friends. Their set painter is even a retired Disneyland artist, so everything looks realistic. Fright Planet is open now until Nov. 2, 2011, check their website for times and for tickets (which range in price from $19.95 to $35) call 1-866-666-1313 or visit Frightplanet.com
