Michelle Zauner is having a moment. As the woman behind indie rock and electronic project Japanese Breakfast, she’s recently collaborated with Bay Area producer Giraffage and enjoyed critical praise for her two latest full-length efforts.

But it wasn’t that long ago that Zauner was ready to leave music behind. It took a tumultuous and traumatic episode—the death of her mother—for the singer and songwriter to find her voice.

In losing her mother, Zauner found strength and purpose in unspeakable loss, reinventing herself as Japanese Breakfast and taking the music press by storm with a pair of acclaimed records—2016’s Psychopomp and 2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet.

“It kinda took me giving up on it to realize how much I was meant to do it, I guess,” Zauner says over the phone.

Years before performing as Japanese Breakfast, Zauner had been leading the Philadelphia rock outfit Little Big League.

At the time, the band had been touring on their own, and just barely making enough from shows and merch to break even at the end of the day. It got to a point where she just wanted the security of a 9-to-5 job. And her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

“My mom was going through chemo and my bass player quit the band to be in another band,” Zauner says. “So the idea of going back to the same life of DIY touring, sleeping on people’s couches and floors, working as a waitress, quitting my job to go out and tour, then coming back and looking for a new job just seemed too hard.”

However, in the end, it was her mother’s illness that became the catalyst for Zauner to pursue music on her own terms. Psychopomp, her debut full-length as Japanese Breakfast, documents the months following her mother’s death.

On a late album highlight, “Heft,” Zauner confronts the reality of her loss, along with her own fears of dying too soon, teeth bared. Rising through spiraling guitars and a tunnel of reverb, her soaring vocals finally alight as she settles on the chorus “What if it’s the same dark coming?” she asks defiantly. “The same dark… Well then, fuck it all.”

By the time she put out Psychopomp, Zauner had already been writing for years. She began learning to play her first instrument when she was a child. “I started playing piano when I was 5. I hated music theory and practicing and stuff,” she says. “But I’m glad I was forced to now.”

Her mom wouldn’t buy her a guitar until she was a teenager. Even after she did get one, Zauner says her sights were not immediately set on writing her own songs. That last push would come about halfway through high school.

“The biggest thing for me was seeing my peers writing their own music,” she says. “I was a sophomore and ran into three seniors who I recognized from my school putting on a small show of songs they had written. It made it seem more in the realm of something I could do. Sometimes music that’s not as complex almost makes it seem more reachable.”

Her sophomore LP, Soft Sounds from Another Planet finds Zauner in a new place, albeit with a lot of the same things on her mind.

With album closer “This House,” Zauner reflects on how much the last two years have changed her atop a sparse instrumental of equal parts piano and confidently strummed guitar. She sings to a husband who helped pull her through the worst of it before thinking back on a toxic past relationship that would have only made things worse.

Considering the subject matter of Zauner’s new music, it’s no surprise that much of the conversation leads back to her mother.

“For the next album I would love to write about something else,” she says with a laugh. Whether she does, though, it’s clear that Zauner isn’t prone to shy away from talking about her loss.

“I think it just depends on how it’s handled,” she says. “For me it’s just a reality that a lot of the songs are about that. And it’s a huge part of my life. I guess there are times when people forget that I’m a human being and are rude about how they ask about it. But mostly, I think it helps me to talk about it, in a way, and I know it’s helped other people.”

Zauner is currently touring in support of Soft Sounds from Another Planet. She performs at The Ritz as part of the Noise Pop festival with support from Oakland-based Jay Som and Hand Habits.

Japanese Breakfast
Feb 21, 7pm, $15+
The Ritz, San Jose
theritzsanjose.com

Anyone who has passed high school English knows the story. Facts are manipulated or fabricated outright, an unnervingly docile populace is endlessly tracked and surveilled through the use of personal electronic devices. This is the world George Orwell predicted back in 1949 with his seminal, then-science fiction work, 1984. Disillusioned with the Cold War and the human atrocities of the early 20th century, Orwell penned the novel as an illustration of a dystopia that could be. Los Altos Stage Company are looking to revisit Orwell’s classic story with a doubleplusgood stage adaption by Michael Gene Sullivan. The show runs through Feb. 18.

1984
Thu, Jan 25, 8pm, $20+
Bus Barn Theatre, Los Altos

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at RCA when it was first proposed that Kenny Rogers pick up a song originally penned for Marvin Gaye by the Bee Gees. One imagines that conversation raised some eyebrows. But “Islands in the Stream,” Rogers’ 1983 hit duet with Dolly Parton, is a national treasure. Justin Moore was born nine months after that song hit national airwaves. Coincidence? Well, consider this: “Somebody Else Will,” from Moore’s 2016 album Kinda Don’t Care, opens on a silky smooth R&B beat before exploding into a massively twangy country hook. Yep.

Justin Moore
Thu, 7:30pm, $49.75
City National Civic, San Jose

On the cusp of the 1960s, America’s civil rights movement had only just begun. While it’s clear—even in 2018—how far we still have to go, Kenneth Jones’ Alabama Story gives us a glimpse of how far we’ve come. The story follows librarian Emily Wheelock Reed as she champions Garth Williams’ controversial children’s book The Rabbits’ Wedding, a love story between two rabbits, one black and one white. Jones’ play comes to the West Coast for the first time, as City Lights Theatre takes audiences back to 1959 and segregation-era Alabama.

Alabama Story
Thu, 8pm, $19+
City Lights Theatre, San Jose

Penned by Athol Fugard, The Road To Mecca follows the story of Miss Helen, a South African widow who finds herself at a crossroads. Harboring an unconventional artistic ability, she must choose between the advice of an old friend to conform to society and the urges of a younger one to follow her heart. Elizabeth Craig, The Pear’s new artistic director, takes the helm, while emeritus director Diane Tasca picks up the lead role as Miss Helen. The play runs through Feb. 11.

The Road To Mecca
Thu, 8pm, $10+
The Pear Theatre, Mountain View

Ray Scott is a good, old-fashioned country boy. Starting his career at 19, he noodled about in a few bands before finding success writing songs for the likes of Randy Travis and Clay Walker. His newest album, last year’s Guitar For Sale, saw Scott use his rich baritone to denounce some of his honky-tonkin’ ways. The album’s lead single, “Livin’ This Way,” is an ode to the many forms of escape Scott employs when he’s feeling low. Folks can expect to hear that song and other favorites like “Those Jeans” and “Ain’t Always Thirsty.”

Ray Scott
Thu, 7pm, $10+
The Rodeo Club, San Jose

Pepe Mogt, founder of the Tijuana-based electronic music collective Nortec, found his way into music like so many do these days—by messing around with found sounds on his computer. However, rather than digging through bargain record crates searching for break beats and horn punches, Mogt pulled many of his earliest samples scouring local studios for scraps of audio abandoned by the tambora and norteño bands that recorded them.

For the uninitiated, Nortec mixes the two genres from which it takes its name—norteño, a traditional polkalike folk music pioneered in northern Mexico, and techno. The combination is almost obvious once a song gets going, especially for fans of Rey Resurreccion’s 2014, banda-sampling banger, “The Hometown.” The accordions, tubas, double bass and bajo sexto traditionally found in norteño reemerge warped and looped alongside synthesizers and 808s.

The early 2000s saw the Nortec Collective put out a steady stream of compilations and projects before splintering. They won over fans and critics alike with albums like The Tijuana Sessions Vol. 1.

“Casino Soul,” an early composition of Mogt’s, encapsulates the album’s appeal perfectly. The unmistakable sound of a tambora drum kicks the track off before some rising synths gradually intensify, threatening to drown the rest of the song out before they are cut off by modulated vocals.

What follows is a jaunty track that oscillates between intricate synth progressions and sporadic bursts of trumpet. The two elements push and pull in a call-and-response until they intertwine, pushing the song to a slow fade-out.

That’s where we find Ramón Amezcua and Pepe Mogt, better known by their stage names—Bostich and Fussible, respectively.

“It all started as me inviting local friends to create compilations and put albums out as a collective,” Mogt says. “But after we all put out a few albums, we stopped doing as much as a group, mostly because some of them don’t put out their work as quickly as we do.”

As a duo, the two are definitely the most Nortec-y of the bunch. Amezcua is seen as a godfather of sorts for the movement, with his early compositions charting the path for the sounds the collective would go on to explore.

His song “Polaris,” a swirl of relentless percussion and burping horns, in particular is cited as the genesis of the Nortec sound. The track effectively fuses something ubiquitous with an aging form of traditional Mexican music.

Mogt says he was inspired to start the collective in the late ’90s after hearing norteño being played at his sister’s wedding. His earliest experiments came from manipulating samples of old banda sinaloense and norteño albums before deciding to look for more obscure source material on the cutting room floor of recording studios.

These days, instead of pulling samples, Mogt and Amezcua typically have musicians come to the studio and make recordings for them to chop up and manipulate later on.

The duo’s innovative blend of traditional Northern Mexican music with drum machines piqued the ears of the Cirque Du Soleil team. Bostich and Fussible composed the soundtrack for the Canadian circus troupe’s recent Mexico-theme show, Luzia, which passed through San Jose last year.

Mogt describes the connection as a happy accident. After playing a set at electronic music festival Mutek Montreal back in 2015, someone from Cirque Du Soleil’s camp approached the duo about producing a song for the Luzia album.

“They said they wanted the album to be different from the acoustic sound of the show itself by making it more contemporary and electronic,” Mogt says. “So they gave us the score and we made it Nortec.”

Mogt says for the time being the pair is back to working on a new project between shows. “Right now we’re working on something new, but we’re still in the studio,” he says. “We’ve come back to messing around with analog synthesizers and old-school 808 and 909 drum machines.”

There’s been some talk about their next release moving away from the traditional norteño sounds they’ve been tinkering with their entire careers, but he says they haven’t ruled anything out just yet. “It’s too soon to know for sure,” Mogt says. “We’re still a little too early in the creative process.”

Bostich and Fussible

Jan 12, 8pm, $20

The Ritz, San Jose

theritzsanjose.com

Any musical act can talk about growing pains. With each new entry in their discography, a band or artist toils in an endless cycle of experimentation, inadvertently finding what works and what doesn’t. For Charlie Yin—better known by his stage name, Giraffage—some of that experimentation has also involved figuring out what he can still get away with.

From the outset, much of the San Francisco producer’s work involved flipping R&B samples into technicolor bedroom synth pop. Many of Giraffage’s earlier releases owed their success to Yin’s knack for isolating earworm samples and grafting them onto his own chopped and screwed beats. There they would bloom to become the centerpieces of the compositions he built around them.

As he’s watched his star rise, however, San Jose-raised producer has use this technique less and less.

“Being on a bigger label, I’m not really supposed to be sampling too much anymore, just for legal reasons and whatnot. I definitely still snuck a few samples in there,” Yin says. “But now they’re just manipulated to the point where no one can tell where they’re from.”

It’s partly for this reason that his newest full-length—Too Real, released last month—feels like it’s operating on a new sonic plane. Songs that might have featured purple-tinged ’80s and ’90s R&B snippets now trade in carefully chosen guest vocalists and intricate bricklaying.

“Maybes” starts off simply enough. A feathery drum track cradles the breathy vocals of Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner as she sighs out lyrics cryptically asking if she has what the listener desires.

Each minute seems to present two or four new musical ideas for Giraffage to add to the mix. It’s about three minutes into the track that a punchy collection of dialed-in synthesizers take the stage, rising into a tangled spire of shimmering arpeggios.

When he’s not showing off his new tricks, other songs find the producer illustrating what made many of his early remixes and edits so memorable. His melodies are simple enough to get stuck in your head for a couple days without losing their appeal.

“I think a lot of the music is informed by the stuff I listened to growing up” he says. “I always tended to gravitate towards really sparse melodies. I was never really a huge fan of like jazz, where there’s a ton of notes coming at you all at once. I would usually just connect with more simple and catchy stuff.”

Just 10 seconds into the opening track, “Do U Want Me,” this point is illustrated. The four-note melody pushes forward at breakneck speed a slinky beat that merges live drums with an echoing 808 cowbell. It’s the kind of song that could soundtrack a particularly stoney interstellar voyage or a brisk evening run.

Giraffage’s penchant for simple, slow-building melodies help set his music apart from the cacophony of drop-centric EDM producers that continue to rule YouTube playlists. It’s no surprise, then, to hear that electronic music wasn’t really what first him to making music.

“I think it was Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights,” Yin says. “I basically grew up listening to that, and that was one of the albums that inspired me to play drums and guitar initially. I was in bands and stuff in high school and we were basically just trying to be like Interpol knockoffs or The Strokes knockoffs.”

Giraffage says his journey really started when he got tired of having bandmates and opted to start messing around with his own compositions.

There’s no denying that his current output couldn’t be more different from a band like Interpol on the surface. Looking back, though, much of what made songs like “The New,” “Untitled” and “Stella Was a Diver” work in the first place was the foundation laid by Carlos Dengler’s sparse yet vital bass lines.

Yin, who was raised in San Jose, returns for a hometown show at The Ritz this weekend. He’ll be joined by fellow producers Sweater Beats and Wingtip.

Giraffage
Nov 25, 8pm, $30+
The Ritz, San Jose

Akrobatik and Mr. Lif are back. The Boston-bred hip-hop duo, better known as The Perceptionists, come to San Jose this week behind their first album in more than a decade, Resolution. Fans of the group might remember the pair from their 2005 album Black Dialogue. The project featured one of their most explosive singles—the bounding, raucous “Let’s Move,” which doubled as one of the tightest songs on the soundtrack for the auto-racing video game Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Resolution finds The Perceptionists kicking raps about things that have changed since the-mid aughts.

The Perceptionists
Wed, 8pm, $10
Back Bar SoFA, San Jose

TroyBoi is a master of tone. In a genre that all too often prioritizes cursory beauty, maximalist explosions and the instant gratification of the massive drop, the London-based producer prefers to give his listeners a single feeling to explore. Consider “O.G.” from his debut album, Left is Right—a trap affair, packed with the requisite trilling high hats, a syncopated kick-snare bounce and a gangster slow-mo refrain. Using this limited palette, he methodically adds and subtracts elements, growing and shrinking the beat, allowing it to alternate between deep and shallow breaths until it reaches its natural conclusion.

TroyBoi
Sat, 8pm, $24.50+
City National Civic, San Jose