**GOON** “Come along and wake up on the way,” sings Goon frontman Kenny Becker, “orange shapes arrange and change again/quiet Isaac in a mild dream.” The lyric evokes the hazy dreamscape spaces occupied by the band’s new album, Hour of Green Evening. It describes an in-between time, the pre-dawn quiet over a still-sleeping suburban neighborhood, insects buzzing and the creatures just stirring awake. The yearning of kids in their beds for the world beyond, of being stuck just on the precipice of everything. The sun soon to rise, the whole world about to be in bloom. Goon began as Becker’s Bandcamp solo project in 2015. At a friend’s encouragement, Becker compiled the best of his tracks and released them as an EP, 2016’s Dusk of Punk. He recruited bandmates from his college buddies and released a second EP, all the while working on the band’s first full-length, 2019’s Heaven is Humming on Partisan Records, followed by the self-released Paint By Numbers 1, a collection of his mid-pandemic home recordings. After several band members departed for other jobs, cities, and life experiences, Becker recruited a new band—Andy Polito on drums, Dillon Peralta on guitar, and Tamara Simons on bass—and set about recording a second LP, Hour of Green Evening, in Tropico Beauty studio in Glendale, California, working with producer and engineer Phil Hartunian. Alex Fischel from Spoon also sat in on the session, providing piano and keyboards. “We tracked ten days in the studio to start, and ended up working a total of twenty,” says Becker. “For the first six or seven days we did it live, the four of us in the room, with Phil in the control booth, tracking straight to two-inch tape. It was isolated deep pandemic vibes. We felt like we had enough days booked away from the world to really take our time.” The evolution of Goon has come to full fruition on Hour of Green Evening. It’s the band’s most complete statement, engaging all aspects of their sound to stunning effect. The record conjures the nighttime suburban world of Becker’s youth, a mix of concrete and cookie-cutter homes with the lush beauty of California landscapes. The album thrums with mystery, with the half-remembered past hazy as dreams, the mixed sense of comfort and longing for freedom so essential to youth. The world of Hour of Green Evening is lush and strange, populated by people dreaming, sleeping and waking, existing in that in-between space of the nighttime world. Plant references abound, the “hydrangea lawns” of “Last Light On,” the “eucalyptus wall” of “Wavy Maze,” the oleander in the hypnotic “Lyra,” all swirling together in an endless suburban gloaming. **BEAMING**: Are we having fun yet? After years building their respective legacies in the independent music scene, Derek Ted and Braden Lawrence let this question guide the creation of their latest project: beaming, a playful indie pop venture built around an ethos of curiosity, collaboration, and levity. The duo’s self-titled EP introduces the project with four infectious songs at the intersection of pop, rock, and folk. This comes as no surprise given the band’s pedigree: Braden spent over a decade playing in Philadelphia-based indie darling The Districts, while Derek is a solo artist and prolific producer who has lent his talents to rising stars like Odie Leigh, Runnner, and Field Medic. “In the industry today, it feels like everyone has to be really efficient in order to make the machine run,” explains Derek. “But back in the day, timeless music was created by a bunch of people. Collaboration is actually hella goated, and I feel like people forget that nowadays.” If hella goated is any indication, Derek Ted cut his teeth in the DIY music scene of the San Francisco Bay Area, busking around the East Bay while studying audio engineering and eventually working at SF’s Tiny Telephone Studios. By the time he moved south to Los Angeles, he’d found a robust community of fellow musicians and a strong desire to take full ownership over his production work. “I turned my garage in Burbank into a studio, but I didn’t really realize I was a producer until I’d already produced a lot of stuff,” he explains. “I feel like producing took the pressure off me having to make my art the thing that pays the bills, which was always the part that took all the fun out of it for me. Once I started producing and mixing for other people, I realized I could have fun making music without having to beg people to listen to it.” As his production work took off, Derek relished the experimentation and creative chemistry of helping artists bring their visions to life. In addition to producing for his frequent collaborator Field Medic, Derek lent his talents to a wide array of projects including Dora Jar’s “Look Back,” Hunny’s album new planet heaven, and several tracks on Jesse Rutherford’s album Wanted?. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country in Pennsylvania, Braden Lawrence was living in a very different kind of artistic ecosystem. Braden and his friends started their band The Districts when they were still in middle school and signed to Fat Possum Records right after high school graduation. “It was go to college or see what happens with the band, and we chose to do the band stuff,” Braden laughs. Over the next 13 years, Braden wore a variety of different hats for his band as they played all over the world, touring with the likes of Modest Mouse, Hippo Campus, and Dr. Dog. He credits this experience with building his confidence on a wide array of instruments, a versatility he now applies to his work with beaming. “Most of the instruments you hear on beaming are Braden playing, and then I’ll spend like a month mixing and hashing out the production details,” says Derek of his and Braden’s artistic process on beaming. I’m on that Rick Rubin mindset where I don’t like to play as much as I like to oversee the energy and the bigger picture and the songwriting.” Presented by Hi-Dive. This is a 21+ event