Weekend Preview: Summer Fun, History Happy Hour And Baths

CAVANAUGH: Summer nights, star-gazing, happy hour, catching a live band. What can I say! It's San Diego! We have the kind of events on this Weekend Preview that won't take you out of your comfort zone but will leave you with a pleasant summer glow. I'd like to introduce my guests, Kimberly Cunningham is Associate Editor at San Diego Magazine. Welcome! CUNNINGHAM: Hi, thank you so much. CAVANAUGH: And Jeff Terich is here music editor at San Diego City beat. Welcome. TERICH: Thank you very much. CAVANAUGH: Kimberly, summer just arrived. You know what's going on though thanks to the research that you and your team did for San Diego Magazine Summer Guide! So we're going to ask you about a couple of standouts from the issue. What does summer in San Diego mean to you? CUNNINGHAM: Well, when I think of summer in San Diego, I think of bonfires at the beach, sailing at the bay, concerts at Humphrey's and Shelter Island. It's a time to just get outside and enjoy this beautiful city that we're so lucky to live in. CAVANAUGH: It's so easy to just come across something wonderful to do on a summer night just by walking around in a neighborhood. Now, there's a great opportunity if you're into star-gazing to star-gaze once a month this summer. Tell us about Gazin' with the Experts at the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center. CUNNINGHAM: At dusk on the first Wednesday of every month, the San Diego astronomy association hosts Gazin' with the Experts. They set up telescopes near the found by the Science Center. And it's free, and you can look at the moon and stars and planets. And they'll tell you what you're looking at and explain things about the universe. CAVANAUGH: Wow. CUNNINGHAM: And it's also free, which is cool. CAVANAUGH: That is cool too. Of it's been so overcast lately though. I wonder if you can see anything. [ LAUGHTER ] CAVANAUGH: I know you're also looking forward to watching movies outdoors this summer. CUNNINGHAM: There's a bunch of different ones going on throughout the summer. One that's coming up on July 3rd at the USS midday, they'll be showing the family-friendly escape from planet earth. Then you can catch The Big Lebowski in Mission Hills. CAVANAUGH: You do have to make an appointment, or don't you for Summer Under the Stars? CUNNINGHAM: That's a ticketed one. So make sure you go online first. CAVANAUGH: The Midway though, is that free? CUNNINGHAM: I believe so. Make sure to check beforehand. But most of them are free if they're outside and at the parks. CAVANAUGH: Now, you are also talking about a summer and ice cream. Two things that go together. You found some outrageous flavors, some extreme ice cream! CUNNINGHAM: This was some of the most fun research we've ever done at the magazine. [ LAUGHTER ] CUNNINGHAM: This is a flavor called the beach comber at lighthouse ice cream and yogurt. It's ice cream with marshmallow cream and pop rocks. There's also a great one in National City, and they have all kinds of crazy flavors including wasabi sorbet. [ LAUGHTER ] CAVANAUGH: And you did this research personally? CUNNINGHAM: Well, I had some help! But yes. [ LAUGHTER ] CAVANAUGH: Great. Now, Jeff, you're excited to see Baths perform tonight at the Casbah TERICH: Baths is a 1-man sort of electronic indie pop project by a singer songwriter named Will Wiesenfeld. He combines glitchy electronic sound with this big, dreamy, indie rock songwriting. And it comes together really powerfully. CAVANAUGH: I did read a review on this. And I saw his sound described as chill-wave? TERICH: I don't know if I personally would call it that. But I think his -- chill-wave was sort of a mini-genre that cropped up a couple years ago, and I think he's transcended that. CAVANAUGH: Now, he got his start as a bedroom musician. His first album was literally recorded in his bedroom? TERICH: Yes. CAVANAUGH: How do you take that music and perform it for other people? TERICH: I think that's one of the -- the beauty of making electronic music. It's easy to translate to the stage because so much of it is just so convenient. You can play it from your laptop. You can loop samples. And it's able to translate pretty well live, primarily just because you don't have to worry about trying to play everything. So he can play the vocalist role a little better when he's on stage. CAVANAUGH: Okay, let's hear a bit from Baths. [ Audio Recording Played ] CAVANAUGH: And this is only his second record? TERICH: That's true. CAVANAUGH: His first one was Cerulean. It was upbeat. This is being compared to it as its sort of dark twin. TERICH: That's true. They're almost like yin and yang. Cerulean was a bright and summery record. And it was fun and danceable. And Obsidian is much darker. It was written after he spent some time bed-ridden after getting a pretty bad infection. But it's also a more organic-sounding record. There's more live piano and drums and guitar on it. It still retains the electronic elements, but it also fleshes out the sound more in different ways. CAVANAUGH: And he's classically trained? TERICH: He is. He has a rich background in music, and he's only 24 years old, so he's very accomplished for how young he is. CAVANAUGH: So you get this heavy electronic sound on stage at the Casbah what are we going to see? Is he going to be alone? Or does he bring other people with him on tour? TERICH: It's changed a little bit over the last couple years. When he start first started playing live, it was just him. And he'd play keyboard on stage, samples, drum loops. But now he has somebody else on stage with him so they sort of split up the work. He can do more of the lead singer role, be out in front and not have to be behind the decks or anything like that. CAVANAUGH: Pushing all the buttons. TERICH: Exactly. But there's also -- they incorporate some guitar and more live instrumentation into the live show now. CAVANAUGH: Let's go onto History Happy Hour! It's a fun happy hour event all summer long at the San Diego history center in connection with an exhibit there. Tell us about that. CUNNINGHAM: Well, it's happening the last Friday of every month at Balboa Park. It's happening tomorrow. And basically Balboa Park has decided to get in on the craft beer craze that has become such a big part of San Diego's identity. And it's just a cool way to merge the past with the present, and you can sample beers as you learn about this history of beer making in the city. CAVANAUGH: Now, tell us a little bit about the Bottled and Kegged Exhibit. It is part of the San Diego history music honoring, really, this explosion of microbreweries in San Diego. CAVANAUGH: Well, it covers the history sort of from preprohibition through present day. And I guess right after prohibition, San Diego was making about 25% of the beer supply in the country before big brands like Coors and Anheuser-Busch pushed out the local companies. CAVANAUGH: I did not know that! CUNNINGHAM: And it also talks about some of the entrepreneurs and leaders in the industry and has different beer-making equipment and kegs and things and how that's changed throughout the years. CAVANAUGH: Which brewery will be hosting this happy hour that's coming up? CUNNINGHAM: This one will be by amplified ale works from mission beach. CAVANAUGH: And their hold point is that they're even smaller than a microbrewery. They're a nanobrewery! CUNNINGHAM: Right, it's the smallest scale of a brewery. And it was started by JC Hill who owns California Kabob in Mission Beach. And one of the things that's cool about it is that it's by the ocean. And so many of the breweries here are located inland or further up north. CAVANAUGH: And there's food too, right? CUNNINGHAM: Yes. There's going to be -- there will be mini-empanadas from papa Luna's empenadas. And they'll be pouring samples of the dry school hop out IPA, and double execution IPA. Of CAVANAUGH: What other breweries will be sponsoring events in the summer? CUNNINGHAM: In July, they'll feature Alpine Beer Company, and a screening of the documentary Suds County U.S.A. in August it will be all about home brewers. So some of the most innovative people doing it at home will come to the event. And then in September, White Labs, a yeast production company, they've sort of made public the science of beer making and how beers vary based on the flavor of the yeast. So you can go there, and it's a really interesting place to go. And in November, Stone Brewery is going to do it. CAVANAUGH: Jeff, you're going to leave us with a metal band from Seattle called Big Business playing at the Soda Bar on Friday. TERICH: They're a duo that's all rhythm section. It's just base and drums. And they have been together for about ten years. The drummer used to be in a band called the Murder City Devils. And the base player used to be in a band called Carp. And they make a lot of noise for just two people. CAVANAUGH: Well, you set it up perfectly. Let's hear them. [ Audio Recording Played ] CAVANAUGH: That's two people? TERICH: Two people! [ LAUGHTER ] CAVANAUGH: Okay, now, they have been labeled everything from sludge to stoner. Can you clarify what their sound is? TERICH: I'll do my best! In metal, there's a lot of different subgenres, and sludge is definitely the one they probably fit most into. But sludge can mean anything from really slow, dark gnarly sounding stuff to almost anything that didn't fit into any other subgenre of metal. They make a sludgy sound, but they're so much more, I believe, accessible than a lot of other metal bands. CAVANAUGH: Some people hear that and say thank you very much, but not for me. TERICH: Sure. CAVANAUGH: You have 30 seconds to give us a reason why people should be more open to metal. TERICH: I'll try to give you as much as I can. Well, first of all, listening to metal is just fun. Going to see these bands live, they put on a good show, there's a lot of energy. And you'll find that they're usually really fun people to talk to and hang around with, but on top of that, you're amazing musicians and because it's not quite as commercial, they have more freedom to just experiment and try more innovative things. CAVANAUGH: You did it in less than 30 seconds! [ LAUGHTER ] TERICH: How about that! CAVANAUGH: Pretty good. Big Business will perform on Friday, June 28th at the Soda Bar in City Heights.