HONK! is coming! Watch for the sweet madness of the street band festival to unfold in the parks, boulevards and venues of Somerville and Cambridge from Oct. 9-12.
I rarely consent to passing along grammatical affectations such as ALL CAPS and exclamation points. But if there’s an event that deserves special consideration in this department, it’s a street band festival that’s all about making joyful noise. HONK!
In addition to parks, streets and venues, this year you’ll find HONK! in a Tufts lecture hall in Medford. That’s right: HONK! is hitting the BOOKS! An all-day, free conference on Oct. 9 called HONK! U, will put on its scholar’s cap to think hard about social and political and artistic impacts of the HONK! movement. Register online.
Talks will be delivered by artists and academics on sundry HONK!-related topics, such as Building a Singing Movement, Band Organization and Dynamics and Radical Inclusion: Gender and Democracy in HONK! If none of that appeals to you, these seminars are still good for a free cup of coffee and some finger sandwiches, if I remember my graduate years correctly.
Or have universities gotten CHEAP! with budget cuts during the Trump years?
Hit this
Thursday and Friday: Dissolve Music (MIT, Cambridge)
The MIT Spatial Sound Lab has been doing strange things with audio since 2019. Projects include turning black hole data into music and advocating for spatial justice. The Dissolve Music showcase happens every other year, featuring experimental sound artists who blur the boundaries between music, performance art and technology. Admission to the two-day event is free, so save your dollars for a bevvy at the campus food court. If you really want the full academic experience, there is also a series of related “lightning talks” on Friday afternoon, which will provide some insight into the methods behind the madness.
Oct. 5: Pixel Grip, Coatie Pop (Sonia, Cambridge)
Chicago’s Pixel Grip brings darkwave with a dancehall attitude to your local rock club in Central Square. The electronic rhythms are unrelenting, so bring plenty of stamina to the show. Its latest album “Perceptide: The Death of Reality” builds bridges between Depeche Mode and Grimes. For those with a lot of leather in their closet, this might be your time to shine. New York City’s Coatie Pop will uncork the techno jar in the opening slot.
Oct. 9: Ohio State Fair (Warehouse XI, Somerville)
It’s a record release party for Ohio State Fair, which previewed some new material off the forthcoming “Desire Path” EP at Fuzzstival in September. Heavy, occasionally discordant, texture-laden pop full of emotional resonance. Pinpointing trends in music is a fool’s game, but anecdotal evidence supports the claim that the musical underground (and some of the aboveground) has gotten noisier as we stumble towards fascism in the second Trump administration. Do not go quietly into that Dylan Thomas poem night. Warmachine, Dino Gala and hc keke start the party.
Live: Sebadoh at Middle East
Indie rock legends of yore Sebadoh resurfaced at The Middle East on Sept. 21, part of a string of dates the trio has played in an especially productive 2025. Take note, because hitherto they hadn’t performed since a promotional tour for the album “Act Surprised” in 2019. Which means the band is seeing sunlight more often than your average cicada, but can’t be called prolific by any standard definition.
At the peak of Sebadoh’s celebrity in the ’90s, the band from Northampton pioneered a lo-fi version of postpunk with strong pop instincts. Their music screeched and scrawled along with the best noisemakers of the decade while still delivering melodies that stuck with you and lyrics with emotional resonance.
If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed Lou Barlow sneak through Somerville in May. He performed a sorta solo gig at The Rockwell – without the rest of Sebadoh, with Nashville’s Bobby Bare Jr. (Guided By Voices, Silver Jews). The evening was advertised as a “song swap,” a “Nashville tradition” in which songwriters take turns playing their originals. It’s also a way for two veteran musicians to share a bill without worrying who’s opening.
Sebadoh was always a band with a sense of equity. Though creative differences led to membership changeups over the years (notably, founding member Eric Gaffney’s departure in the early years), the albums they recorded always exhibited a signature patchwork of songwriting credits. The variety of competing indie rock sensibilities in Sebadoh’s music was always the greatest strength and weakness of the band.
True to form, band members took turns leading the band at The Middle East. Lou Barlow started the night on guitar with a suite of Lou-driven numbers. Jason Lowenstein traded instruments with Lou for a string of Jason-driven songs, including the “Bubble & Scrape” favorite “Happily Divided” during the middle part of the set. Percussionist Bob D’Amico stayed put behind the drum kit.
Creative equity aside, Sebadoh knows on which side its bread is buttered. Lou wrote most of their biggest hits and proved the breakthrough personality of the band. He switched back into the lead role for the final suite of classics, including “Soul & Fire” and the closer, a feedback-free (has the band been softened by the years? or the fans? or both?) version of “Brand New Love.”
Minibeast, led by Peter Prescott (ex-Mission of Burma), added another layer of local postpunk royalty to the gig and deserves more than a quick plug of its latest album “The Maze of Now,” a beautiful psych-noise blunderbuss. But you take what you can get after nearly 50 years in the rock ’n’ roll underground.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
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