For the better part of two decades, singer and songwriter Allen Clapp wrote his songs, made his records and toured with his band The Orange Peels from the vantage point of the Eichler home he shared with his wife, Jill, in Sunnyvale.

Then came 2014, when he and Jill—who plays bass in The Orange Peels—were rear-ended on Interstate 880. They could have been killed in the horrific car accident; thankfully, they both escaped serious injury.

“We had a second chance at life,” Clapp says, remembering the accident. “At that point, we had talked about moving to the Santa Cruz Mountains for a decade. So, it was like, let’s just do it.”

Today, Clapp and his wife live just 18 miles, as the crow flies, from their former home in Sunnyvale. Environmentally, however, it might as well be in another country. Home is now a hexagonal house sitting alone on a mountain adjacent to 50 acres of redwoods in the rugged terrain north of Boulder Creek, in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

This week, The Orange Peels celebrate the release of their latest album, Trespassing. It’s their seventh release as a band, dating back to 1997. But it’s their first to be conceived and recorded at their new redwood-shrouded retreat. When you make the move from urbanized Silicon Valley to what feels like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, that’s going to make a difference in your music.

“The biggest impact of living in this place is the bigness of everything,” Clapp says by phone from his mountain lair. “There are 200-foot redwoods all around us, gigantic mountains. The largeness of living in a place like this seeps into the music. I mean, this album sounds enormous to me, compared to some of the stuff we’ve done recently.”

Both Clapp, as a solo artist, and the Orange Peels have cultivated a sterling reputation as smart, melodically talented indie-pop artists that capture the slippery essence of living in the Bay Area.

Trespassing continues that lineage with a collection of shimmery pop jewels that dance seductively in the space between dream pop, chillwave and ’80s-style synth. But if you listen closely enough, you’ll also hear the wild and wooly mountain vibe bleeding through. Some of the drums, Clapp says, were even recorded outdoors among the redwoods: “You can hear what the woods sound like up here.”

Trespassing was created during the harrowing winter of 2017, when rain fell by the bucketload on Clapp’s corner of the Santa Cruz Mountains. “In our neighborhood, we got more than 110 inches of rain, which all fell within about two months. The power was constantly going out. Big trees were falling. Roads were going out. The whole mountainside was in a cloud for, like, 90 days.”

It was against this weird backdrop that Clapp wrote most of the material that ended up on Trespassing, including the album’s first track “Camera 2,” an urgent if elegant freak-out that captured the sense of doom on everything from the political situation to the insane winter. “Reality had just fractured,” Clapp recalls, “and that song came out of that surreal feeling.”

“Dawn Tree” is dedicated to a certain tree on the Clapps’ property, which represented a kind of second chance after the rainy season. “One morning, I walked out and there was this crazy refracted light and there was this oak tree. The sun’s coming up behind it, capturing all this moisture in the air. So, yeah, I wrote a song to a tree.”

On top of performing with the Peels and as a solo artist, Clapp works as a mini-mogul in Bay Area indie music with his label, Mystery Lawn Music. In that role, Clapp collaborates with about a dozen Northern California bands in an effort to articulate and capture a distinctively Bay Area sound.

“I’ve spent my whole life in this area,” he says. “And there’s a way that the air feels and how the light looks because you’re on this little spit of land between two giant bodies of water, the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. I just think there’s something magical about this part of the world.”

The Orange Peels
‘Trespassing’
Apr 27, Minty Fresh

The King of Crunk got his party on at Pure Lounge in Sunnyvale on Thursday, spinning a set of club bangers and spraying the crowd with champagne. Our photographer CJ Supnet was there to capture the action. Whether you made the scene or not, you’re gonna want to peep these photos.

In an age where too many DJ “performances” amount to little more than the pressing of buttons to initiate pre-recorded tracks, Los Angeles-based MAKJ stands out as a craftsman of the turntable. He scratches, beat-matches and improvises on actual vinyl. And he laments that these most elemental of DJ-ing skills have apparently been discarded by the current electronic scene, which he says often values massive bass drops and gaudy stage production over technical ability.

“I really feel like it’s a lost art right now,” says Mackenzie Johnson, the man behind the MAKJ moniker.

Johnson is one of the hottest new electronic musicians in the country—boasting a quickly growing fan-base, popular collaborations with Bassjackers and Lil Jon, and appearances at electronic music festivals, such as Ultra and TomorrowWorld. What is less known is that Johnson spent his formative years as a professional racecar driver in Asia.

Born in San Luis Obispo, the 29-year-old Johnson says being a professional racecar driver isn’t all that different from being a musician or DJ, and he credits his former career with helping him succeed in his current profession.

“I learned a lot: how to work with people, how to manage my money,” he says. “And how to be self-sufficient at age 14, which is a pretty hard thing to do nowadays.”

It was as at age 15, when he was already a veteran driver, that MAKJ first fell in love with DJ-ing. “I saw a DJ playing and was super interested in what he was doing,” he recalls—“just the way he was making the crowd react to certain songs was really amazing to me.”

After graduating from Cal Poly, where he played frat and house parties, MAKJ was mentored by the late and legendary DJ AM, before bursting onto the scene.

MAKJ mixes a variety of electronic music, incorporating contemporary EDM sounds, house, and trance influences with older DJ-ing techniques. “Everything I’ve taken from the past or everything I’ve learned, I use nowadays,” he says about his penchant for old-school flair. All of these threads combine into music that is absorbing, enticing—and most importantly—accessible. “It’s quick, DJ-friendly,” he says, “You can hear it anywhere from a college bar to a Vegas nightclub.”

While it may seem that MAKJ’s ability to manipulate the discs would give him a leg up, technically speaking, MAKJ says it doesn’t really make much difference to the audience. “The general public doesn’t really know what a DJ is doing,” he says. While he bemoans the dwindling art, he still sees it as an integral aspect to his sound. And, in hopes of remedying the apathy of crowds, MAKJ has begun to incorporate GoPro cameras in his performances, so that he can show the audience what he is actually doing. He plans to hire a full-time visual coordinator next year.

In the last two years Johnson has toured extensively in America, Asia and is wrapping up a recent jaunt in Mexico. His next stop is Sunnyvale’s Pure Lounge—a comparatively small venue for a MAKJ show, which Johnson welcomes.

“When you’re standing up there in front of God knows how many people, you kind of get lost,” he says. “EDC in Vegas was a perfect example—the stage was so big the audience didn’t really didn’t know where I was.”

While MAKJ now understands how to play to those giant crowds (relying more on showmanship than musical ability, he says with dismay), and despite the money such performances bring in, he still prefers intimate atmospheres.

“I came from playing house parties, so I really like the intimate vibe,” he says. “I like small parties where everyone’s watching what I’m doing on kind of a personal basis.”

However, you will be hard-pressed to find MAKJ at any house parties anytime soon. After this current hectic tour, he has another full tour planned for 2015. It kicks off in February.

MAKJ shows no sign of slowing down, no matter how excruciating the schedule. When it gets particularly hard on the road, MAKJ likes to remind himself of his fortunate position and how he got there.

“There’s definitely a lot worse places I could be in. I think about that every time I question this whole thing,” MAKJ says,  “I remind myself that I could always be doing a whole lot worse.”

MAKJ performs at Pure Lounge in Sunnyvale Dec 11 at 10pm. More info.

Saturday evening—deafening riffs and distortion blast out at me from the stage where the Stone Roots strum their guitars. The trio belts out Americana hits without ceasing, only once pausing to down some whiskey shots sent over from the bar. I watch from the lounge of Quarter Note, a neighborhood bar in Sunnyvale that is unlike any I’ve visited.

Quarter Note is different from the DJ-spun Top-40 nightclubs that fill most cities’ downtown areas; it’s rougher and less mainstream, yet it’s as American as apple pie. Quarter Note is a hard-rocking dive dedicated to original live music acts and offering music-based entertainment every day of the week.

Instead of being a bar that just happens to have a stage, Quarter Note is a stage that happens to have a bar. Karaoke, jam sessions and gigs take place on the huge spot-lit stage, which sits prominently in the center of the room. Circled around the stage are the bar, small tables and booths, providing the perfect places to see the shows.

The crowd is an older sort, appearance inspired by their music. The women wear tight jeans and spaghetti tops, while the men sport bushy goatees and wear large belt buckles and leather jackets. Despite their intimidating appearance, they seem amiable, greeting each other with hugs and pats on the back. Likewise, outsiders draw no ire. What matters is the music and all who come are united in their passion.

After the Stone Roots finish their set, the Road Vikings enter the stage. Though the band is largely a Bay Area one, its frontman looks every bit the globe-trotting metal musician, with his leather vest, long hair, beard and sunglasses. With a metal scream, he launches into their set, supported on both sides by guitarists, fingers flying over their strings.

The Quarter Note
1214 Apollo Way, Sunnyvale
408.732.2119

Saturday evening: Off work, I change out of my uniform—a pair of cheap khakis and a polo—and don another uniform of sorts: a black pinstripe suit and wingtip shoes. I’m back on the clock, and tonight’s objective is Pure Lounge.

Pure Lounge is Sunnyvale’s newest lounge, so new that it doesn’t even have a sign, just a banner that hangs over the former theater it occupies. The exterior is bland, yet ironically, Pure distinguishes itself as the flashiest, glitziest and most glamorous club on gentrified Murphy Avenue.

Pure caters to the young and wealthy, offering a “Vegas-style nightlife” far removed from Nevada. It’s a world that I have only experienced in movies, full of carefree youth and lots of disposable income. It’s an alien world.

Red velvet ropes cordon off the entrance, snaking around and forming a queue. Burly, suit-clad Secret Service agents cluster around the ropes, every so often fingers rising to the earpiece radios curling up from their collars, while a hostess scurries about, clipboard in hand. The entrance screams “exclusive.” In the movies, entering a club like this is a subjective process, guards seemingly picking people at random based on any perceived “coolness.: Tonight, I fancy myself a Don Draper of sorts—handsome and proper with a certain je ne sais quoi that I hope will bluff me past security.

Turns out, all I needed were the wingtips and $20, a paltry sum for Pure’s target clientele, but a substantial sum for me. But that old maxim, “You have to spend money to make money,” is true for reviewers. I pull a Jackson from my wallet and hand it to the cashier behind the ticket booth, who hands me a cheap orange raffle ticket in return: my ticket in.

The narrow entryway opens up into a massive room with a sprawling Euro-Asian decor. The white plaster walls are lined with imitation Greco-Roman columns. VIP booths line the aisles and the dance floor, unoccupied booths cordoned off with velvet ropes. The entire room sparkles with soft lighting: LEDs in the VIP tables glow an ice blue while spinning spotlights throw shapes across the walls and floor.

The party’s in full swing. Dress shirts and curve-hugging evening dresses fill the club to near-capacity. Patrons crowd the dance floor, holding glow rods high above their heads and grinding to the beats of celebrity DJ Slick D, and overflow onto the aisles, all under the watchful eyes of the security, who stand scattered around. The DJ makes love to the crowd, constantly shouting out to all the “single ladies,” while a photographer roams the crowd, snapping portraits for the website. The liquor flows freely. As the night continues, the party escalates: in a VIP area, two women straddle each other and grind ferociously to the point of clothed sex. I leave shortly after last call, around 1:30am, partied out but in far better shape than many others.

Pure Lounge
146 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale