It was on Halloween one year ago that Chip DeVille (A.K.A. DJ CaSp3R) held his last RetoXx show at the Cardiff Lounge in downtown Campbell. Since then, the party has set up shop at Johnny V’s, where a Halloween party tonight features a packed lineup.

For this year’s Halloween show, DeVille booked the most performers he’s ever had on one night—Three rap acts and four DJs. Portland rappers Landon Wordswell and Garin Reese will be biking down the coast to play this show on their West Coast bicycle tour). Other rappers include local YDMC and Santa Cruz-based Grim Bzns. DJ CaSp3R will be spinning some tunes, as well as RetoXx favorites, DJ MARCade, SMiZZle and B-Boy Drift.

RetoXx Monday begins at 9pm at Johnny V’s. It is a free event.

Claudeo come from San Diego with one purpose in mind—to get people on their feet to dance. In the process, they’ve chosen some unusual places for dance parties. Here in San Jose, they selected the local dive-bar of choice, The Caravan, where they are playing this Thursday, September 13th. But Claudeo—who are Ivan Deyoung-Dominguez and Chris Changchien—are determined to get some feet moving no matter where they go.

The duo met in 2011 while working together on a project for UCSD and realized they both shared a mutual passion for making crowds shake their booties. But underneath the surface of their interest in pounding drum beats and screeching synthesizers, they also shared a passion for indie-pop songwriting, inspired by bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Coldplay.

They mix keyboards and guitars while trying to employ elements from the rock and electronic world in a pop setting. The end result is a mishmash that falls somewhere between Daft Punk and the Killers. For a dance band, they have a fair amount of variety in their songs with even a few sappy acoustic ballads for the slow dances.

Claudeo plays The Caravan on Thursday September 13th at 10pm. The show is free.

The Limousines short relationship with record labels is coming to an end. After they self-released their EP Scrapbook and full-length Get Sharp, and even got some radio airplay on their own, Universal Republic signed the band for a single-song deal for “Very Busy People” and Dangerbird Records re-released Get Sharp. The duo is going back to its DIY roots with Hush and recently launched at Kickstarter campaign to fund the project.

“We could easily get another record deal, but that would just mean putting our band, our lives, in the hands of people who are less passionate about our music than we are,” the band wrote on their kickstarter page.

They are asking for $30,000—the minimum needed to finish recording, mastering and mass producing the album—which at the time of writing this post was nearly met. If they exceed $30,000, they plan to properly promote the album by hiring agents, publicists and going on tour.

The band is more than happy to be working on the album without label support. According to their Kickstarter page, they had a lot of reluctance signing with a label in the first place.

“We had every intention of staying independent, but we were constantly pestered and tempted by record labels—We know that would be a dream come true for most bands, but to be completely honest, it was kind of scary…Guess we ended up losing our bearings and they eventually convinced us we needed the help of a label to take the band to the next level,” they wrote on their Kickstarter page.

The Kickstarter campaign to fund Hush ends on Tuesday September 25th.

San Jose native Derek Jameson is known for songs that fuse hard beats with naked emotion. One of the biggest weaknesses of club music is its tendency toward dehumanized, assembly-line blandness, but Jameson turns this blueprint for mechanization on its head with the passionate sincerity of his lyrics. He has an unusual talent for channeling emotion and even a message in the chaos of the dance-floor grind.

Yet surprisingly, that wasn’t always the case. Instead, the singer, dancer and actor, who headlines San Jose Pride this weekend at Discovery Meadow in San Jose says he was actually “the most shut off person when I was younger.” And his journey from that icy teenager to a man with “rule by heart” tattooed on his chest began in the most unexpected of places.

“At 15, I was asked if I wanted a job in entertainment at Paramount’s Great America. I took it not knowing that it would set me up as a performer for the rest of my life,” he says. “I was acting, dancing, and singing in stage shows for years at that park.”

The rigor of doing show after show after show every day for the crowds boosted his confidence immensely, so much so that he counts it among the most important formative steps in launching his musical career—along with a little soul-searching.

“Performing at Great America, being in bands, traveling the world, and learning to love myself were the most important steps in becoming who I am today,” he says.

Once he realized what an outlet it could be, music became his passion. “I knew that the only way I could express emotion was to write it down. I started playing the piano at the same time as I got the Paramount gig,” he says. “I just took to it naturally, like the the sound was part of my mental makeup. It was the way to marry the feeling of music with the depth of words that I had kept internal.”

He made his first real impact on the music industry with his single “Ribcage” off his 2010 debut album, The Invention of Love. The video probably had even more of an impact, both metaphorically and practically, with its sly equation of boxing with affairs of the heart—both delivering their blows to the body part of the title.

His latest single, however, shows how he’s evolved both musically and lyrically on his second release, the EP A History of Heroes. Heavily infused with dubstep, “Mr. Soldier Man” expands on his effort to bring meaning to dance music, digging into the definition of masculinity.

With Electronic Dance Music still emerging as a genre, Skrillex’s set at Outside Lands last weekend was probably the best free publicity the Identity Festival could ask for going into its return to Shoreline Friday.

When the EDM-focused ID Fest came around last year, the music was mostly still a club phenomenon, at least in the South Bay. But since then, there’s been a lot of epic raving to go around, from Bassnectar’s San Jose show to the I Love This City festival to Skrillex’s Golden Gate debut.

This year’s headliner is Eric Prydz, who I think can be largely credited (or blamed, depending on your point of view) for kickstarting the ‘80s revival, which started bubbling up not long after his 2004 song “Call on Me,” which took the title line (and vocal sample) from Steve Winwood’s mid-80s megahit “Valerie,” drenched it in electro riffs, and stuffed it into the most laughably hypersexual (and yet, still totally hot) music video ever set in a gym.

The Shoreline stop also features Le Castle Vania, who has become a South Bay fave after regular club stops here, and Doctor P (the only DJ who also played I Love This City), as well as Excision, Paul Van Dyk, Hardwell, Bingo Players, Showtek, Noisia, Adrian Lux, Eva Simons, Audrey Napoleon, The Eye and more.

The IDENTITY FESTIVAL will be presented Fri, Aug. 17 at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, 2pm; $60.

Boston electro duo Sonnymoon generated a lot of buzz when they played San Jose in June, and left a lot of people who missed their show at the Pagoda chomping at the bit to see them. That explains why tickets are already being snapped up for the group’s return on Friday, Aug. 10.

The announcement of Sonnymoon’s show comes as a surprise for a couple of reasons. First, the East Coast band seemed to getting to the South Bay about once a year, with more excitement around their arrival each time. But Anna Wise, one half of the founding duo along with Dane Orr, is from NorCal, and the group has been spending more time in California. Secondly, the show, which brings them back to the Pagoda, is actually part of San Jose Jazz’s Summer Fest this weekend, and is being billed as “Jazz Beyond.” The show is free with festival admission, but even the separate, non-festival tickets are going fast.

After the Sonnymoon show (which begins at 8:30pm), the Pagoda will host a second Summer Fest-related event, “After Hours at the Pagoda.” Julius Papp and The Selector DJ Kirk will perform from 10pm-1:30pm. Tickets are also free with Summer Fest admission, $10 without. On Saturday, the Pagoda will host another “After Hours” show, this time featuring top San Francisco DJ J Boogie.

Sometimes Aaron Aquino can’t believe what passes for a live show from beatmakers. If it’s some guy fiddling half-heartedly behind a laptop for the whole set, the man better known by his DJ handle Squareweezy is not impressed.

“Is he checking his email, or performing for us?” Aquino says he has to ask himself.

Though he’s best known as part of the tight-knit San Jose crew the Bangerz, Aquino’s been mixing it up lately with quite a few solo gigs. And forget hiding behind a laptop, you’re just as likely to find him writhing on the edge of the stage, wrestling with some bizarre electrical instrument he’s pulled out of his bag of tricks.

Expect the same energy when Squareweezy performs at the Pagoda Thursday, as part of a “Night of Live Beat Performance” that will also feature B-Dot, Professor Panson, Sesshins and Dranal.

For Aquino, it’s all a lead up to the release of his upcoming EP, which he tentatively plans to drop in September.

“They’ve been constantly evolving,” he says of The Weezmatic EP’s bass-heavy songs. He’ll be playing several of the new tracks at the Pagoda show, and even those who’ve heard their earlier incarnations live are likely to be surprised.

As for the live sets, he just likes to practice what he preaches. “When I play, I can’t help myself. I try to bring the art of performance to the show,” he says. “When my name is on the bill, I want to keep it unpredictable.”

SQUAREWEEZY performs an 18-and-over show at the Pagoda in San Jose on Thursday, July 19, 9pm; $5.

The Pagoda’s monthly D1ME series of DJ events gets two top-shelf guests this week when producer Full Crate and singer Mar from the Amsterdam beat scene drop in on Friday.

Full Crate & Mar’s first collaboration, 2009’s “She Was Fly” was disarmingly simple and elegant. At its core little more than Mar repeating the title over Full Crate’s warm synth tones and organic beats, the single nonetheless caught the attention of important ears both on the Euro scene and Stateside. Since the subsequent release of their EP, Conversations With Her, the high-school-friends-turned-electronic-duo have toured sold-out shows from Brussels to Berlin to London to New York.

Their sound has evolved into something more complex, but no less soulful and ambient. Having released their own solo EPs, the pair are back in the studio together, preparing their first full-length, which is set to drop later this year.

D1ME featuring resident DJs The C.M.E., Sig-O, Smoovgroovs and G-Wrex, along with special guests Full Crate & Mar, will be held at Pagoda Lounge in San Jose on Friday, July 6 at 9pm; $10.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.