Events by this organizer

Like his work as a visual artist, Coast’s music is a reflection of his surroundings and his youth. Huge vistas, grassy hills, the blue of the sea. Boys getting into fights in parking lots. A first kiss with someone you end up being really, really sweet on. All of it is deeply personal and felt. Much of Coast’s art is like this: defies easy categorization, embraces the coming, the going, the catharsis. It makes sense: Coast is an inherently introspective person. Someone who grew up in the Bay Area suburbs and never quite fit in, getting into a few fights along the way. Someone who tried out film school but was already making videos at the age of seven.

Music, for Coast, is an extension of all of his other artistic practices, all of which are connected, incredibly symbiotic. On his debut EP, Where Are You Going?, 22 year-old Coast lets us in on the mystery, just a little bit: he is growing, sinking into his seat, shaping the aches into a substance worth sharing—the result is something like an anchor, a pin to drop on a time in your life.

Sapphira Cristál is a classically trained opera singer, composer, and drag queen known for her theatrical lip sync style and six-octave vocal range. She holds 14 pageant crowns — including Miss’d America 2020/2021 —and has performed nationwide. Notably, she has appeared twice at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival: first in 2019, when she sang on the same bill as Stephanie Blythe, and again in 2023, when she was featured as a headlining artist. In the drag sphere, Sapphira is renowned as a charismatic host who commands the room and establishes a special, intimate connection with her audience.

Sapphira works to inspire young people through appearances at colleges, youth camps, and high schools. She taught several years of master classes in drag makeup and performance at Emerson College, and she has given artist talks at Rockland Community College. An experienced attitude and stage presence coach, Sapphira has also taught master classes at the Philadelphia Burlesque Academy and various dance studios.

Whenever she gets the chance, Sapphira partners with charitable organizations to raise funds to change people’s lives. Her personal credo is: “There is no better exercise for the heart than reaching down to lift someone up,” and she has made it her mission to uplift, encourage and inspire those around her.

In the 13th gigennium of cosmic expansion, minerals fired from the deaths of immense astrological engines of atomic fusion have coalesced, bubbled up, been digested and excreted innumerable times by increasingly complex lifeforms, fused as spermatazoon and ovum in passionate ballets of furious congress, producing beings who in turn survived and thrived by ingesting and metabolizing these same ancient minerals in all states of complexity, from rock to infant and most likely excrement, because nobody washes their hands. Primordial explosions formed rocks that learned to speak and to write, to dance, mine phosphates, destroy, love, eat rotten fruit to get drunk and eventually refine that process into the production of churro flavored vodka (look it up, it’s real). All this thrives due to the radiation blocking fields produced by a molten core made of speakers and guitar strings. No, really. Steel wound with nickel, magnets, vibrations. It’s all the same shit. We had no choice. A cup thrown in the ocean contains the ocean while the ocean contains the cup. We are JJUUJJUU and so is you.

More specifically, JJUUJJUU is a rotating ensemble of domestic & international collaborators, wrangled by Los Angeles based musician, Phil Pirrone. He began his career as a touring musician at the age of 15, playing bass. In 2011, Pirrone borrowed an SG and a DL4 and began his exploration of recording looped based music. He later brought song ideas to life with the rhythmic companion of friend and then collaborator, Andrew Clinco (aka Drab Majesty mastermind Deb Demure). Around the same time Pirrone launched the Moon Block Party and Desert Daze festivals, and Space Agency Booking. By then, a veteran of multiple bands and several years of touring, he shifted much of his attention and vision to organizing festivals around Southern California and booking North American tours for an artist roster that includes SUUNS, Acid Mothers Temple, Ulrika Spacek, Follakzoid, L.A. Witch, Holy Wave, Imarhan, Khun Narin, and more.

JJUUJJUU’s debut release, the FRST EP, recorded at Thee Mens Warehouse by Orange County psych experimentalists Lucas Drake & Manny Lopez of Dahga Bloom, was released in 2013 on NYC label, Beyond Beyond is Beyond. The EP, and a subsequent stand alone single, “Bleck,” began to build excitement about the project, garnering attention from outlets like Noisey, LA Weekly, Paste and Impose, and multiple appearances on Last Call with Carson Daly. Throughout this period the lineup and instrumentation of JJUUJJUU moved in step with the project’s ethos of ephemera and flux. JJUUJJUU continued to tour the US in several different configurations with Pirrone at their center, sharing stages with Tortoise, Allah-Las, Temples, Tinariwen, Night Beats, Les Claypool, Songhoy Blues, and others.

Over the last several years, Pirrone recorded in various spaces around California, with “an array of buddies” to document the songs that would make up JJUUJJUU’s debut LP, Zionic Mud. Sessions included collaborations with Vinyl Williams, Jeffertitti and Mason Rothschild of Fever the Ghost, and the album’s release will be accompanied by a companion release featuring alternate versions of the album’s tracks remixed or reimagined by many of the band’s notable supporters, including J Mascis, METZ, Jennylee of Warpaint, Liars, and Autolux. The album will be released on Dine Alone Records on April 13th.