On May 20th you’ll have a chance to witness an awesome night of guitar-driven music by two artists with amazing voices and stories. Local favorite urbanation will open for Black Belt Eagle Scout – an artist that is on Paste Magazine’s 20 Artists We are Most Exited to See at SXSW and Stereogum’s list of the 40 best new artists of 2018. Black Belt Eagle Scout’s tour is completely sold out in Portland on May 18th, Seattle on May 19th, and San Francisco on May 21st. The only way to see this awesome band in Northern California is in Davis on Monday, May 20th. Tickets are available.
Katherine Paul fronts Black Belt Eagle Scout, and she grew up in a small Indian reservation, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, surrounded by family focused on native drumming, singing, and arts. From an early age, Paul was singing and dancing at powwows with one of her strongest memories at her family’s own powwow, called the All My Relations Powwow. Paul reminisces, “When I was younger, my only form of music was through the songs my ancestors taught the generations of my family. Singing in our language is a spiritual process and it carries on through me in how I create music today.” With the support of her family and a handful of bootleg Hole and Nirvana VHS tapes, Paul taught herself how to play guitar and drums as a teenager. In 2007, she moved to Portland, Oregon to attend college and get involved with the Rock’n’Roll Camp for Girls eventually diving deep into the city’s music scene playing guitar and drums in bands while evolving her artistry into what would later become Black Belt Eagle Scout.
Black Belt Eagle Scout’s 2018 debut album Mother of My Children caught the attention of many as one of the year’s best albums, with Pitchfork observing the album as being “particularly elegant in the way it demonstrates how grief and love share space when something precious is taken from you, how the distinction between those emotions can blur,” and Vulture called KP “a powerful new voice.” The artist just released two new tracks on the Loss & Relax b/w Half Colored Hair 7-inch on April 26th via Saddle Creek.
Bianca Ocampo, also known as urbanation, is a twenty-year-old musician and college student making sounds from her SF Bay Area hometown. Growing up in a musically inclined family while having formal training in piano for twelve years and violin for six, urbanation’s instrumental background has only furthered her innate talent of playing by ear and creating stirring melodies. urbanation has a ”modern renaissance woman” approach, being fully responsible for her vocals, composition, writing, recording and mastering without any help from other producers or artists – placing importance on her music’s authenticity and truly representing the independent essence of the indie genre.
