Meet the New Music Boss

Hello, I'm Dave Segal, the new music editor of OC Weekly. Pleased to meet you.

To expand a bit on Weekly Calendar editor Tom Child's recent post on the staff music blog, From the Cheap Seats, I come here from Seattle, where there are as many bands as there are Starbucks units. A fair number of them are pretty good, too (the bands, I mean, not the coffee shop; I don't frequent Starbucks because I'm a rebel). I'd like to think an area as sprawling and cultured as Orange County would have similar quantities of kick-ass groups. Prove I'm not a foolish optimist. Please.

One of my goals here is to discover extraordinary talent residing in Orange County, no matter how seasoned or green it happens to be. Here's where you, the aspiring or long-underappreciated musician, can help me to help you. Please send me your music or point me to links to your website and/or MySpace page (see my info at the end of this post). Shove your art in front of my big nose and make me pay attention to it. If I deem it worthy (and I consider myself an open-minded SOB), you will get covered, sooner or later, in print and/or on From the Cheap Seats.

To elaborate, I'm looking for the extraordinary, the mind-blowing, the head-scratchingly bewildering, the brilliantly absurd. I am not looking for the one-billionth reiteration of a style that sounded tired in 1979 or in 1992 or even in 2001—unless you're so amazingly adept at it one can't help gaping in awe at your awesome replications of said traditional styles. I call on deep-crate-digging DJs, eccentric laptop producers, Aeolian harpists, conga virtuosi, avant-jazzers, rock mavericks, singer/songwriters who'd rather burn down a coffeehouse than perform in one, heavy-metal junglists, rappers whose backpacks are bulging with tomes by Henry Miller and Georges Bataille—basically, anyone surfing against the grain and kicking the status quo in the nads—to send me your brainchildren for consideration.

My mailbox and ears await your handiwork. Gracias.

Dave Segal

OC Weekly
1666 N. Main St., Ste. 500
Santa Ana, CA 92701
dsegal@ocweekly.com