Ladies and gentlemen, the dancefloor is open. After more than a year of weekends inside and social interactions over Zoom, Continental Bar & Lounge in downtown San Jose pulls back the velvet rope this Saturday and once again invites you to lose yourself in the music. To help get you there, they’ve got a slew of DJs dropping deep grooves, rare beats, and whole moods all night, including local Chale Brown, neodisco producer Julius Papp, and NY house master Mr. V. The flyer announces “vibes commence at 8.” Here’s hoping they never stop again.

The Grand Reopening
Sat, 8pm, Free
The Continental, San Jose

After all the gifts are unwrapped and the hot toddies are kicking in, sometimes you just need to get out of the house and get down. While plenty of watering holes will be closed, the Continental will have a wide open dance floor. This James Brown tribute—hosted by the Conti in coordination with Motown on Mondays—is a bona fide holiday tradition. Just a couple of years ago, Mayer Hawthorne stopped in and played a set, so there’s no way of knowing who might show up, but you can count on DJs Sake One and DJ Cutso being on the decks to keep everyone rocking around the Christmas tree.

Continental Christmas
Mon, 8pm, Free
The Continental, San Jose

Music is typically a pursuit for the ears, but some songs occupy a time and place. Just as the olfactory sense can bring back vivid memories of things past, music has the power to transports listeners to new places. Los Angeles producer Mndsgn (pronounced “Mind Design”) conjures smoke-filled rooms and dimly lit house parties with his spacey R&B and jazz-influenced compositions. His latest LP, Body Wash, is a magenta-tinged, 16-track journey into a psychedelic bubble-bath.

The Stones Throw-signee, whose real name is Ringgo Ancheta, is a one-man band—building his own beats, playing the keys and singing. On “Alluptoyou,” the fourth track off of Body Wash, twinkling keys accompany Ancheta’s heavily effected vocals as the plodding drum track stutters and seems poised to buckle under its own weight.

“Sometimes you’re thinking, what planet am I really on” Ancheta repeatedly sings in his reserved croon. The producer goes on to deliver a series of couplets fueled by self-doubt and fear before arriving at the answer found in the song’s title.

It’s clear that all of this was assembled on a computer, but the work feels decidedly organic compared to Ancheta’s contemporaries. By contrast, fellow L.A. beatmaker and Klipmode collective member Knxwledge uses some of the same production tricks to lend his music a signature otherworldliness. However while Knxwledge is content to just spin knotted webs of sample-based interstellar boom bap, Ancheta looks to spin a yarn as well.

The star of Body Wash isn’t any one song or element, but the overarching story Ancheta weaves in the process.

As he describes it on his Bandcamp page, “In the narrative, a homeless man encounters a mysterious woman who gives him shelter. She instructs him to bathe with a very peculiar body wash. As he soaks and sinks deeper in a thick lather of this unknown solution, the man finds himself transported to an alternate dimension.” Anchetta never quite tips his hand about how the story relates to his own life, but bathing being a metaphor for the creative process doesn’t sound too far off.

The story truly comes into focus in the last handful of songs. A trio of alternately subtitled instrumental tracks called “Searchin” bring the story to its climax. The lack of vocals implies the point at which our hero finally loses himself in that other world.

San Jose will get a chance to get lost in the sauce with Mndsgn when he comes to play a set at The Continental. He will appear alongside the resident Changing Same DJ crew of Chale Brown, The CME, Shea Butter and Mark PISTK. 

Mndsgn
Aug 10, 9pm, $10+
The Continental, San Jose
thecontinentalbar.com

“IF WE COULD make people smell and taste the show, we would,” says Rafael Pereira, one half of Lima, Peru-based tropical bass duo, Dengue Dengue Dengue!

He’s referring to his and his partner, Felipe Salmon’s, dance parties, where the rhythms and instruments of divergent musical traditions intersect in exciting ways. Cumbia’s joyful, tropical rhythms, the surf rock-informed Peruvian genre—“chicha”—and the wild, click-clack of indigenous Amazonian drumming are all sealed together by the subsonic thud of Western bass music.

As it is, Pereira and Salmon haven’t figured out how to tickle the olfactory senses of their listeners with sound, but they do use their backgrounds in graphic design to heighten the experience of each Dengue Dengue Dengue! show. Using audio-visual mapping, they craft complex laser light compositions, which are inspired by aliens, space ships and the humid, leafy jungle for which their native land is known.

After scoring some favorable press from the likes of Vice’s electronic music channel, Thump, Dengue Dengue Dengue! are embarking on a world tour to promote their forthcoming LP, Siete Raices, tentatively set for an April release. Their first trip to the U.S. will take them to 12 venues in 20 days and will include a Sonido Clash-produced set at The Continental Bar on March 10.

In press photographs and on stage, the pair always wear masks, which resemble something a shaman might don in preparation for an ayahuasca-fueled ritual. The neon, geometric face coverings enhance the trance-like effect their music can have. Pereira and Salmon often hand out masks to the crowd, inviting their fans into the fold of their psychedelic tribal dance party.

In a way, Dengue Dengue Dengue! are 21st-century shamen, guiding their audience on a spiritual journey through light and sound. Pereira explains that he and Salmon like to begin their performances with a beat that is easy to dance to. However, once things start heating up, he says they like to get “weird”—breaking with traditional rhythm structures and challenging the audience.

“We push the limits of what we are doing,” he says, explaining that the duo keep a close eye on the crowd, pulling back when things get too out-there and pushing forward when people seem at ease again. The ultimate goal, he says, is to allow the audience to get lost in the music—the same way one might become enveloped within a psychedelic experience: “You can be dancing for an hour, and you won’t notice.”

Dengue Dengue Dengue! plays on Mar 10, 9pm, $6-$10 at The Continental Bar, San Jose.