Great photos from Hallowbaloo this year, including the Baths show that I opened!

Photos by Tracy Chan.

“The South Carolina-based ‘chillwave’ musician and his band brought their signature brand of funky, groovy, electronic shoegaze jams to a sold-out show at NextDoor Saturday night. Opening were local acts Clones of the Queen and Painted Highways. Although the club was packed and sweaty, people really got into the music, some dancing and some just swaying with eyes closed.”

Photos by Brian Tseng.

Gary Chun again!

“Chaz Bundick and his crew manned their spaceship last night at Nextdoor, and took the good ship Toro y Moi and an audience of eager passengers to a nearby galaxy of sound and rhythm, forward thrusters go.”

Profile/promotional piece from Gary Chun.

Friend and ally Gary Chun gives COTQ and the Toro Y Moi show another shoutout in the Honolulu Pulse picks. Too kind.

“Arguably the busiest indie rock band in Honolulu, Clones of the Queen had six shows lined up this month, and will be concluding their run this weekend and Thursday. Band member Matthew McVickar (also known as solo act Lapwing) is promoting his first club concert, and he got a great first mainland act in Toro Y Moi, the retro-pop-funk band led by Chaz Bundick. He and the band, along with fellow indie noteworthy band Painted Highways, will open for Bundick and company Saturday night at NextDoor starting at 9. Tickets are $20.”

Contrast put up the mixtape of MP3s I put together at Ara's request, and I think it helped a lot, because there were 122 downloads (!) of the .zip file. (I mistakenly hosted the ToroMix I made on Ge.tt, who, after that many downloads, removed the file, so the link doesn't work anymore. I was excited about Ge.tt because it's clean and allowed for hot-linking to files without interstitial 'Download This!' pages, but I should have known better to trust a baby webapp with vital data.)

So far, my favorite of the "Takeaway Shows" series. This is why I love music, plain and simple. Absolutely amazing.