From the 17th floor of the KQED building downtown, San Jose is an impressive sight. The city of more than a million sprawls, unfurling against mountain ranges to the east and south and against an equally sublime range of suburbs to the north.

Normally, this view is only available to members of the Silicon Valley Capital Club. Today, however, there is an interloper among their ranks—a different kind of San Jose elite, still not quite used to the high life: producer B. Lewis.

It’s 10am and Lewis has already had a full day. While the rest of the coast was asleep, he was finalizing the art for his first proper full-length release, putting the finishing touches on an album cover he designed himself. Next, he packed a duffle bag and got in the car. When the sun finally rose over the Sierra Nevadas, he was already north of Bakersfield on the I-5, making a trip from his new home in Los Angeles back to the place where it all began: San Jose.

This week, Lewis releases his debut, Sunset on Carmella. Commissioned by San Jose Jazz, the record caps off a yearlong partnership between the musician and the local non-profit arts organization, which included a number of public performances and a series of lessons on music production delivered to a group of South Bay high school students.

For Lewis, the album is something of a farewell to his longtime home. In October, the producer moved to LA after signing a deal a major management team, the same group behind some of the biggest pop hits of the last few years.

Pick one—the new record or inking the deal—and it would already be a banner year for the producer. Yet both moves pale in comparison to Lewis’s other recent accomplishment: a writing credit on an album released just a few weeks ago by Kanye West.

The road here has been neither easy nor direct. In San Jose, few lamps light the way of the artist. But from the 17th floor, as the city comes to life, and Lewis puts a decade of grinding behind him, his future is looking bright.

PASSING PORTRAITS

Born in San Jose in 1988, Bradford Lewis was raised in a musical household. The son of a jazz musician, he started playing bass while still in elementary school. “Then guitar, and then piano. Pretty much all self-taught,” he says.

In his early years, the Lewis family moved around a lot, bouncing from Los Gatos to Willow Glen to South San Jose. Eventually, they settled in Evergreen.

As a teenager, Lewis began going to all-ages shows in San Jose and Santa Cruz, most of them in DIY spots, church basements and community centers.

“I was watching these bands and thinking, ‘I can do this shit,’” he remembers.

Inspired by the scene’s accessibility, he started his first band in high school: a metal band he describes as “experimental and wild.”

“I was like, ‘What if we got thicker strings, tune down to Drop G and just see what happens?’”

That project was a learning experience. In addition to writing all the music, Lewis provided the equipment and practice space (the family garage), booked the shows and even drove the band around.

“It came to a point in time where I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

For Lewis, the point had always been the music. Playing in the band got him interacting with other musicians and up on stage for the first time. Unequal workload aside, he enjoyed it. So, in 2007, after graduating high school, he enrolled at Ex’Pression College (now known as SAE Expression College) a local private university focused on training students for jobs in the entertainment industry. There, he began to hone his production skills, learning how to engineer, record and mix a session.

But all of that would just be prologue, the price of entry into a great coliseum of working musicians, all of them fighting the impossible and trying to survive in the Bay Area.

CHOICES

Like a true DJ, Shea Modiri gets his music the hard way: digging through the crates and checking out what he finds.

“I just love music,” the 38-year-old selector and show promoter says. These days, Modiri is a part of the soul and R&B night “The Changing Same” at The Continental, where he spins under the moniker Shea Butter.

The first time he heard B. Lewis, Modiri was doing a little digital crate-digging on Bandcamp, clicking his way through every single release tagged “San Jose,” just to see what he’d find. That’s when he discovered one of Lewis’s first beat tapes.

“He stood out,” Modiri says. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’”

He was mystified. At the time, he had been organizing a recurring party called The Treatment. He thought he knew the San Jose music like the back of his hand. But then, here was this guy with these crazy beats.

Soon after, Mordiri saw that Lewis was playing a show at First Street Billiards, the former pool hall now home to Forager.

“I was, like, a fan,” he says. “I went up to him and I was like, ‘Dude, I love your shit. You’re awesome.’”

He invited Lewis to perform at The Treatment , and they became fast friends.

Modiri started coming by the studio, aka the garage at Lewis’s mom’s house.

“That was not a comfortable studio,” he says. “It’s a garage. So when it was hot, it was fucking hot in there. And when it was cold, it was fucking cold.”

Still, Modiri was impressed by the music. Even more so, he was also impressed by Lewis’s work ethic.

If Lewis eventually had to move to LA to get where he wanted to go with music, it was certainly not for lack of trying here. From 2009 on, he collaborated with a vast range of artists big and small, many of them people he’d met around the Bay Area. There was K.Flay, whose debut album had recently cracked the top 15 on the Billboard rap charts. There was a tour with Sonnymoon, a band featuring Anna Wise, who had just recorded all the female vocal parts on Kendrick Lamar’s studio debut, Good Kid M.A.A.D. City. In 2014, he produced Winter & The Wolves by Rhymesayers rapper Grieves, putting him in touch with the Midwest’s famously vibrant underground hip-hop scene. That record even featured an appearance by underground hip-hop heavyweight Slug, of Rhymesayers’ marquee act Atmosphere.

“We did about 85 percent of that album here in my studio,” Lewis told me back in 2016. “Slug doesn’t really do features anymore, so that was kind of a cool thing to put on my resume.”

The more he collaborated with people, met people from outside of San Jose who were connecting nationwide, the more people took notice of his work—and the drive that Mordiri had picked up on years earlier.

“He probably works 10 to 14 hours a day at recording music,” Modiri says. “All he does is make music. But unless you’re working with him, you don’t see it. It probably just comes off as, ‘Oh, he’s really talented.’ In reality, it’s years and years and years of being locked up in his studio.”

One of the people who noticed Lewis’ dedication was a musician in LA named Scott Fulton.

“I came upon his work on a music blog,” Fulton says. “He released this album of beats that really caught my attention. The production was really unique and forward-thinking. I listened to it a ton at the time.”

A few years later, Fulton moved to the Bay Area and began working for San Jose Jazz. At that year’s Winter Fest, while watching Thundercat play, he recognized Lewis in the crowd.

“Only at that point did I realize he was a San Jose-based artist,” he says.

STRANGE THINGS

By 2017, Lewis and Modiri had been friends for the better part of a decade, and their relationship had begun to change.

“It was just organic,” says Modiri. “It was never like, ‘Hey, be my manager…’ But that’s exactly what happened.”

In his first act as manager, Modiri told Lewis to write up a list of all the people he wanted to work with. After one look at that list, he gave Lewis a clear directive.

“He was like, ‘You need to get to LA ASAP. There’s nothing here for you in San Jose anymore,’” Lewis recalls.

Taking his new manager’s advice, Lewis started making trips down to Los Angeles, staying for a week or two and doing the same thing he’d been doing in the Bay: meeting people, collaborating, grinding. It didn’t take him long to get in with in with the promoters of the iconic, long-running and now-retired LA party, the Low End Theory.

“It was very similar to what we were doing up here with The Treatment—a beats night,” says Modiri.

At Low End Theory Lewis was a hit, and was brought back repeatedly (including once for one of the event’s farewell shows). There, he made connections with a range of new people—among them an LA-based producer named Falcons. In 2018, Lewis and Falcons put out their collaborative Daydrift EP, a moody blur of neon synths, backpacker beats, and big pop hooks. With a team already behind Falcons, the five-song set brought Lewis’s music to an even wider audience.

Around the same time, Lewis had begun working on some tracks with a friend in LA he just calls “Jerry.”

“We have a good connection, good vibe,” Lewis says. “We like making weird stuff.”

One night while working on music together, Jerry told Lewis that Kanye was on the hunt for new beats. “I’m like, ‘Sure Kanye’s looking,’” Lewis remembers, not thinking much of it. “Everybody’s always looking.’”

Without fretting over who might ultimately listen to the session, the two set about working on a couple ideas. One of them had all the hallmarks of a B. Lewis song: dreamy, floating synth pads, understated rhythm, a subtly complex chord progression. That idea started to catch and they recorded a vocal melody: a soft, crooning vocal line that creeps upward as the chords resolve underneath.

At the end of the night, they had three or four songs. By then, Lewis had already written hundreds, most of them just sitting in iTunes folders on his computer, labeled by year. After the writing session, he went right back to working on his own projects and preparing for his next big collaboration.

“It was 2018, and the 50th anniversary of the Dionne Warwick song ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’” says Brendan Rawson, director of San Jose Jazz. “We were thinking, San Jose is such a different place from what it was 50 years ago. What’s the soundtrack of this region today?”

To answer the question, the organization began a new concert series: “Do You Know San Jose?” In addition to performances by a number of up-and-coming local musicians, the series was to feature an artist in residence, a significant role whose duties included multiple performances, a series of lessons taught to local high school students and the commissioning of a new album. For their first artist in residence, San Jose Jazz set their sights on Lewis.

“He was really top of the list,” says Scott Fulton, now San Jose Jazz’s special projects manager. “We’re really happy he said yes.”

For Lewis, used to scraping and scrapping for every job he got, the choice was easy.

“Shea just came up to me and was like, ‘You wanna do an album for San Jose Jazz?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’”

And then he got another call.

“My buddy Jerry, he was like, ‘Yo, I think we got this Kanye cut.”

’YE AREA

On Sept. 29, 2018, B. Lewis was watching the Saturday Night Live season premiere. The musical guest that night was Kanye West.

Earlier that week, Kanye had announced a new album over Twitter along with the cover art and a date: “9.29.18.” Everything pointed toward an on-air album release. But that’s not how things went.

“Never came out,” Lewis says.

Instead, at the end of the show, Kanye delivered a pro-Trump sermon to a captive audience, dipping in and out of song as he told the crowd that white people should get to make Cosby jokes, too, and that everyone should just follow their hearts.

Understandably, Lewis was confused.

“I called my boy and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘I have no fucking idea.’”

Lewis’ connection called Kanye’s people, then called back.

“He says, ‘It’s not coming out tonight. I guess he’s putting it on hold. He wants to rewrite some shit.’”

All of this was back when the record was supposed to be called Yandhi. A few months later, Kim Kardashian West announced a new release date: Nov. 23. Like the first release date, that day came and passed with no album.

Over the next 11 months, the new Kanye album was teased repeatedly. A version of Yandhi leaked, and was even reviewed a few places. Then in January, rather than release the record, Kanye started holding gospel performances billed as “Sunday Service.” In what sounds like a scene from a particularly lazy Simpsons episode, he delivered an Easter Sunday Sunday Service at Coachella.

By then, the album had been renamed. It was no longer Yandhi, with its connotations of intellect and non-violence. Now, draped in hues of gold and royal blue, the album was called Jesus is King. West had become a born-again Christian.

Lewis, on the other hand, had begun to lose faith. For more than a year, he’d been telling people about his track on the new Kanye album. The claim was starting to sound desperate.

“Nobody believed me!” he says. “I’d been teased with this thing dropping nonstop.”

Luckily, he had other irons in the fire. The record he had done with Falcons the previous year had caught the attention of Electric Feel, the production team behind “Psycho” by Post Malone, “Havana” by Camila Cabello and other big pop hits. Scott Storch worked with them, and Frank Dukes.

“The people on that label are literally the people that he wrote down on that list three years ago,” Modiri says. “Everything was planned for him to be in this spot.”

Electric Feel wanted him to move to LA permanently. Having heard what he was capable of, they wanted him doing sessions yesterday. It had taken a decade, but he was finally where he wanted to be. All that was left to do was submit the album to San Jose Jazz. With the help of his longtime friend (and the secret ear for all his projects: his mom), he pieced together his first official solo album, Sunset on Carmella. The title captures the bittersweet nature of the moment.

“Carmella Court was where I lived,” Lewis says. “So Sunset on Carmella is like the sun going down on San Jose and rising in LA.”

SUNSET ON CARMELLA

This week, Sunset on Carmella is out on all streaming platforms. In a way, it is the start of B. Lewis’ career: his first album under his own name, with a label behind it. All it took to get here was a decade of work, hundreds of songs and dozens of collaborations.

“For me, nothing was laid out,” he says. “I just kind of found my own way. I ping-ponged around until I found my own sound.”

These days, B. Lewis is no longer a San Jose resident. But sitting over a beer at the SoFA Market in downtown, he can’t help reminiscing. Towards the end of the interview, he remembers his first paycheck, back when he was still in high school at Valley Christian.

“I worked at a machine shop,” he says. “It only lasted, like, two weeks. Not because I didn’t like it, but because my friend’s dad, who ran the place, was like, ‘You need to do music.’ I got paid like $180 or something like that. I’m glad I did it, but…”

Here he pauses. The song that had been playing over the loudspeaker has ended, and a new song is just beginning. This one begins with vocals: a soft, crooning line that creeps upward over a strange sounding chord. Together, a pair of voices sing:

We began after the storm inside

The song is “Everything We Need,” by Kanye West. The melody, sung by Ty Dolla $ign and Ant Clemons, is the same one Lewis sang, in the version he wrote at a friend’s house back before the move, back before the album and management deal, back before he ever knew any of this was going to happen.

“…but I’m doing fine,” Lewis continues, as the chorus ends and the beat kicks in. “I’m doing fine.”

Los Angeles-based DJ and producer Falcons is no stranger to the hip-hop scene. Even before signing to producer and DJ A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold records in 2015, he was a regular at live events like Coachella and Boiler Room, mixing and performing alongside some of the scene’s heaviest hitters. Three years and dozens of collabs later, he’s promoting his latest joint release with San Jose-based producer B.Lewis, titled Daydrift. The melodic, trap-influenced five-track EP features guest appearances by Bay Area rapper P-Lo, GoldLink and Jazz Cartier and doesn’t disappoint: Prepare for an extended set of hypnotic and uptempo beats.

Falcons & B. Lewis
Thu, 9pm, $10+
The Continental, San Jose

The Annex in Menlo Park was doing about as well as any recording studio could hope to do. Throughout the aughts, or post-Napster years, everyone in the recording industry—from the labels and musicians to producers and engineers—had to innovate to survive. Compared to many others, The Annex had equipped itself well for the changing times.

“The main point of that studio was to be as diverse as possible, to be able to handle any project that came its way,” says Ryan Perras, a recording engineer at The Annex from 2008-2012.

He isn’t exaggerating. In addition to banda, rock and hip-hop, The Annex branched out into other areas of recording, like voiceover work for film, TV, video games and, increasingly, apps. It became the go-to spot for local athletes to record radio ads. Willie Mays, Jerry Rice and Ronnie Lott all came to record audio tracks for projects that they were working on—Mays for an audiobook, Rice for some green-screen filming and Lott to overdub some lines for an episode of One Tree Hill. Michael J. Fox came to voiceover an ABC special. Alan Parsons came to Studio A specifically to film its equipment (more specifically, its much-coveted Neve III console) for an instructional video about sound engineering. When Buffalo Springfield reunited for the 2010 Bridge School Benefit, Neil Young and crew practiced in Studio D.

And though record sales had dropped years earlier, plenty of musicians were booking time at The Annex. Over the years, countless bands from the Bay Area and beyond had come to record in one of its five different live rooms. Los Tigres Del Norte, the biggest band ever to come from San Jose (and one of the largest bands in the Spanish-speaking world), recorded almost every one of their albums at The Annex, starting before the building had even formally been named.

Since opening in 1975, The Annex rolled with the punches, expertly regrouping with the shifting record industry along the way.

And then Mark Zuckerberg went and ruined everything.

“Facebook moved literally down the street and that made everything crazy in that neighborhood,” says Perras. “It was depressing.”

Perras now runs his own studio, District Recording, in San Jose’s Sunol-Midtown neighborhood. District is an impressive studio that many in San Jose don’t even know is here. Asian Man Records (one of the precious few nationally recognized success stories of South Bay music) has utilized the studio for a number of projects.

Ryan Perras behind the soundboard at District Recordings in San Jose. Photo by Geoffrey Smith II.

Russell Bond, The Annex’s studio manager from 1975 until it closed in 2012, confirmed Perras’ take. After the social media giant moved into the former Sun Microsystems campus, a group of young real estate developers made incredibly high offers for a number of buildings on the street, including The Annex.

“Our landlord was made an offer she couldn’t refuse,” he says by email. It was a direct result of what he saw as “Facebook investing quite a bit of ‘improvement’ dollars into the area.”

“Improvement,” in this context, is a questionable word. By all accounts, The Annex was doing well for itself when the building sold. All five of its studios were booked a solid eight weeks out. And yet, when the landlord sold the building, they were given only six weeks to complete all business, strip it entirely and leave.

“No amount of pleading worked,” Bond says. “Nearly 40 years of collecting and storing media, machines and office stuff, enough to fill five studios in 16,000 square feet of space had to be moved. It was chaos.”

A massive soundboard in one of five of The Annex’s recording studios.

Before giving in to the coming tide, The Annex made an effort to raise enough money for a counterbid on the building. “A grassroots effort via a group of friends, clients and peers,” Bond says. All of them would have had partial ownership of the studio, had they been able to outbid the developers. The effort was within a few hundred thousand dollars of the goal when it became clear that they had to shift focus from fundraising to moving out.

In May 2012, after serving the Bay Area music scene for almost 40 years, The Annex went silent.

***

But if history has proven anything, it’s that all truly dedicated artists never stop creating, even when they’re on the down and out. In the same way that some of Silicon Valley’s most successful makers have embraced the principle of “failing upward,” so it goes with many of this region’s most gifted musicians. Whether it’s sleeping in their practice spaces, crashing on couches while on tour, or working shitty minimum-wage jobs to keep their gear up and running, musicians find a way.

That’s what Jack Shirley did when he opened his recording studio in the former murder capital of the U.S. with an economy computer and tiny soundboard designed for bedroom recording hobbyists—and then proceeded to produce one of the most critically acclaimed metal albums of 2013.

Tracked in just 10 days at the beginning of 2013, and released the same year, Sunbather, by San Francisco black metal band Deafheaven would go on to be hailed as a genre-redefining work. In their 4.5/5 star review of the album, All Music Guide wrote: “Many bands go through their entire career without making an album as well crafted, fully realized and downright gorgeous as Sunbather.” Rolling Stone listed it as the best metal album of the year, calling it “a mind-blower,” and it placed higher on Pitchfork’s best-of-2013 list than Justin Timberlake, MIA, Drake, Neko Case, Run the Jewels, Arcade Fire and even Daft Punk, whose “Get Lucky” charted as the No. 2 single of the year.

To record Random Access Memories, Daft Punk worked with two producers in the legendary Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles. To make Reflektor, Arcade Fire began recording in Louisiana, spent a month recording in Jamaica, workshopped the songs with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy back in Montreal, and then did more recording at Murphy’s DFA Studios in Manhattan.

Sunbather, on the other hand, was recorded out of a modest studio, hidden in a dead-end street between a boxing gym and an auto body shop in East Palo Alto.

“Just because it’s a high-end place, or they look professional, doesn’t mean you’re going to see eye-to-eye, or that they’re gonna, like, do a good job,” says Jack Shirley, owner of and sole producer at EPA’s Atomic Garden studio.

At this point, the Atomic Garden should be a household name for anyone interested in Bay Area music, or underground rock music in general. Shirley has recorded and produced not only the Bay Area’s brightest—musicians like Tony Molina, and Void Boys—but also some of the most influential metal bands from here to Europe. Jamaican reggae stars Black Uhuru recorded with him. And a number of records he’s produced have even landed on the American Billboard charts.

Shirley has managed to build a staggering resume as a producer from less than auspicious beginnings. He began his career as a record producer while also juggling art school, working at a BMW dealership and recording bands out of his parents’ house in San Carlos for $20 an hour.

“There was one semester where I was working 30 hours a week, going to school 30 hours a week, and then recording like 20 hours a week on the weekend,” he recalls. At the end of that semester he quit his job at the BMW dealership. Shortly after graduating college, he moved into the studio in East Palo Alto.

“The name of the game since day one has been to keep the overhead low,” Shirley says. In order to be able to afford the studio, he converted part of his building into housing, which he split with roommates who also ran a screen printing business. Within a year and a half, he went from working on a Dell computer with two microphone inputs to a fully functioning studio with just about anything a musician could need. In part, he chalks up this success to a bit of right-place right-time.

“I knew a lot of people who were in bands on the Peninsula and there wasn’t really anybody doing DIY recording,” Shirley says.

When B. Lewis isn’t busy producing best instrumental hip-hip/electro tracks in the Bay Area or DJing at local parties, he’s also producing bands. Just this year, he produced Boston indie-funk band Bad Rabbit’s latest record, American Love, which earned a 7.5 rating on Pitchfork.

Here, B. Lewis shares some of his favorite tracks in in 2013:

Chance the Rapper – “Everybody’s Something”
This track embodies everything you need to kick off your shoes and relax. I’m usually against using a Slum village sample, especially “Fall in Love,” but in this case, all the elements are placed just right.

Straying from it’s usual beat-orientate lineup, The Pagoda Lounge at The Fairmont Hotel presents a full rock-centered lineup for SVSX featuring Will Sprout (Mumlers), Fierce Creatures and Mike Huguenor (Shinobu) followed by an after-party DJ set by B.Lewis.

Will Sprott
11:30pm, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
South Bay fans may wonder where Will Sprott of the Mumlers has been. The singer/songwriter known for sparking the South Bay’s wave of freak-rock a few years ago hasn’t been nearly as ubiquitous here since he moved to the East Bay. But he’s been perhaps busier than ever. It’s been a couple of years now since the Mumlers’ second album, Don’t Throw Me Away. If the folky debut was surprising and offbeat enough to get Sprott national media attention, the follow-up surpassed it in every way with its grittier, Stax-on-acid soul.

Sprott, however, felt that in many ways he didn’t get to capitalize on the album’s strengths live, because it was just too hard to get the big Mumlers lineup on tour. In 2011, he decided to do some dates as a solo act.

He’s also been working on his follow-up to Don’t Throw Me Away, though he doesn’t yet know if it’ll be released under the Mumlers moniker, his own name or something else entirely. The upcoming album promises to be something unexpected. It’s not a revisiting of his sound on the last record—in fact, there are no horns at all. Instead, Sprott is focusing on bizarre new uses for vocal harmonies.

Fierce Creatures
10:30pm, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
Being a seven-piece indie-rock band gives Fierce Creatures the maneuverability to play exactly the kind of music they imagine. It also gives them plenty of room to layer in as many sounds and harmonies as they need to create gorgeous, dynamic-enriched arrangements.

They combine guitars, keyboards, drums, percussion and even some less-standard instruments like an occasional mandolin, harmonica and some bells—a tactic that creates a wall of sound larger than any one instrument. They work together to create new soundscapes, intense moods and crescendos, rather than focusing on any one member and showing off their chops.
Fierce Creatures tinker with musical styles indiscriminately, tactfully hodgepodging bits of pop, folk, soul, classic rock and experimental sounds into their songs to create something that is all their own. They dig for the most basic thread of childlike musical expression and re-interpret the standard rock & roll conventions to give new life to pleasantly familiar simple songs.

Mike Huguenor
9:30pm, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
“Agues,” the first song off Mike Huguenor’s solo album, Bardamu, is a solid, quirky alt-rock jam that rests nicely between the musical extremes of his various bands. There is Shinobu, his on-again-off-again neurotic jangle-pop quartet. Then there’s Hard Girls, the sophisticated, post-punk power trio. And of course there’s the Classics of Love, his old-school punk-rock group that’s fronted by none other than Jesse Michaels, the former lead singer of Operation Ivy.

Somehow, Huguenor also found time to record this solo EP and even shot a music video for “Agues,” which features him as every member of the band and every person in the audience. His solo material isn’t as overtly offbeat as Shinobu, or as complex as Hard Girls, or even as fierce as the Classics of Love. But what it does have is a newfound level of maturity that marries all of these elements and delivers them in an understated, clever way.

B. Lewis
12:30am, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
Producer and beatmaker B. Lewis is one of many local musicians influenced by Peanut Butter Wolf. Born and raised in San Jose, B. Lewis quickly came to appreciate Wolf’s legacy as a trailblazer once he started making music in 2009. “He definitely led the way, in the right way,” says Lewis.

Only 23 now, Lewis ironically didn’t discover labels like Stones Throw and Brainfeeder until he went away to Expression College in the East Bay. After college, Lewis moved back to San Jose. This spring, he finished the Egg Black EP, with singer Miles Bonny. What might surprise those who are only familiar with Lewis’ more experimental beats is the sleek and smooth sound of the songs’ soulful R&B.

Lewis’ newest release, A Lion’s Aperture, came out in late July, and delivers further proof of his willingness to push boundaries in a late-night groove. “Priority Number One” kicks off with spacey pinging sounds that evolve into an otherworldy wash of sound and vocal abstractions. “World Frozen Over” spins off in a swirl of sonic scat, anchored by strong keyboards.

Peanut Butter Wolf works in mysterious ways.

The South Bay music legend pioneered sophisticated production in San Jose’s underground scene in the early ‘90s, before founding the Stones Throw label and signing hip-hop revolutionaries like Madlib, J Rocc and J Dilla. And he’s still engineering musical mini-movements, as Boston band Sonnymoon learned when they first arrived on Wolf’s current turf in SoCal last September.

“He came to our show when we played with Teebs in LA,” says Dane Orr, one half of the Sonnymoon duo. “That night, Wolf was like ‘This guy Jonti’s coming to LA, you guys gotta link up. That was the first time I ever heard of Jonti. Which is kind of funny, since now we’re on tour together, but it’s really cool.”

That tour comes to Pagoda Lounge in San Jose this week, with Jonti and Sonnymoon headlining a show lined top to bottom with forward-thinking, sometimes nearly unclassifiable electro and hip-hop acts like Portland’s Devonwho and San Jose’s own B. Lewis. Knxwledge and Mndsgn are performing at other stops on the tour.

That Wolf’s dropped hint would turn out to be prophetic is surprising since Jonti and Sonnymoon seem so outwardly different. Jonti, an Australian multi-instrumentalist who released his first album, Twirligig, last year, is one of the most fascinating signings on Stones Throw; at the time Wolf described it like this: “I understand the pop references because his music is so catchy, but the arrangements blew me away. I couldn’t figure out how the hell he did what he did. That he did it all on his own at such an early age kinda scared me. I knew right away I needed to add him to the roster.”

Jonti’s music is generally more introspective and despite its intricate, catchy beats, solidly based in a singer-songwriter tradition. His remarkable talent for beatmaking somewhat obscures the fact that in many ways he’s a Nick Drake for the 21st century. Sonnymoon’s ambient brand of electronic music has an epic, cosmic feel that pushes at outward boundaries of sound.

And yet, there are, at a deeper level, a lot of similarities between these artists. Both Sonnymoon and Jonti represent a new kind of experimentation in the ever-more-blurred boundaries between electro and guitar-based rock and folk, between digital and analog. They both reject the retro (mainly ’80s-based) nostalgia that has been the trend in electronic music for several years now—an artistic decision that is not to be taken lightly, as Sonnymoon discovered.

SoCal producer prodigy Dibiase remembers when L.A. became a beat mecca in 2005. Flipping his own first beats as a teenager growing up in Watts, he wasn’t too long out of high school when he started getting invited to events like Sketchbook, the weekly Tuesday night gathering of up-and-coming talent at the Little Temple club in Silver Lake. At this point, no one knew how huge the scene was going to get, and the early efforts of the West Coast’s best new beatmakers were blasting out every week through the speakers of Dibiase’s boombox.

“I would bring it to Sketchbook every week, and everybody would bring their beat tapes or CDs,” he remembers. “I’d pass the boombox around outside like a round table, and everybody’d play what they made that week. Some people might have made 12 beats, some people might have made 5. But the people who were playing their beats were like Fly Lo, Ras G, a lot of the cats killing it. Georgia Ann Muldrow, she would play stuff there. Sacred, Taarach, pretty much everybody that was in the scene.”

Now, as Dibiase (pronounced Dee-bee-ah-see) makes only his second visit ever to San Jose this week to guest at 2012’s first Treatment night at Johnny V’s, he’s still processing how much things have changed since then. After winning more than 20 beat battles around Los Angeles, he made his name once and for all winning the Red Bull Big Tune Battle in 2010. That same year, he released his first album with one of the hottest labels around for indie hip-hop and electro, Alpha Pup Records. Machines Hate Me, while not his most mind-bending record, was a good introduction to Dibiase’s obsessions for the world at large. Dense, ingeniously sample-heavy and influenced by everything from J Dilla’s MPC work to chiptune video-game music, it’s a natural progression for a producer who started out in junior high chopping up records with nothing but an 8-second sampler and a drum machine to make his beats.

“Stuff that I did in the beginning, a lot of that was trial and error,” he says. “That ended up becoming a sound that people like now. I used to distort a lot of sounds, do a lot of low-fi sounding stuff by default. People were like ‘Man, you need to clean that up.’ Now that sound is popular, that low-fi sound. Now they make equipment and software to do the stuff I was doing by default.”

As time went on, he started trolling pawn shops for whatever equipment he could afford. An MPC cost $2000, and he never thought he’d be able to buy one. But after he got a job, his family secured the credit and he made the payments. Still, his unpredictable style didn’t change.

“The eight second samplers, there were a lot of limits. It forced you to be creative. So once I got on the MPC, I felt like I advanced a lot, but I still tried to have the approach like I was limited. Cause once you feel like you can do anything, you’re too comfortable, you get lazy with stuff.”

Now his deft touch with technology is one of his signatures. “I like to mess with a lot of different equipment, software and hardware. Every piece of equipment, I try to have a different sound on it. Still keep my signature sound, but try to create a different identity with each. You learn new tricks, and that helps you evolve,” he says.

A classic example of his style is his beat for U-N-I’s single “Beautiful Day.” But the story behind it is even more revealing of Dibiase’s obsessive, never-throw-away-anything process. It turns out the beat to the song was just one of dozens he had once been selling online for $50 each. He met U-N-I when filling in as a DJ at a friend’s show, and when they expressed interest in his work, he remembered that one beat sitting unused in a gigantic file somewhere.

“They came through to the crib like two days later, and I played ‘em that ‘Beautiful Day’ beat from that $50 batch,” he says. “And the rest is history. I remember Y-O came up with the hook right on the spot as he was listening to it. Now it’s got like a million views. Somebody could have had that for 50 dollars.”

Dibiase will guest this Thursday, Feb. 2, at Treatment, the DJ night at Johnny V’s that features resident turntablists Squareweezy, Dandiggety, Joob, Wish1, Professor Panson, B.Lewis, Insightful, Shea Butter and R-Cade. 10pm; free.