Please join us for an evening of music to celebrate the release of Yoko OK's first full-band album, Immediacy, recorded this past spring with Adam Hirsch at Tiny Telephone in SF. Also playing will be Bean Kaloni Tupou (Try the Pie) and Abe Hollow.
All donations to the event will benefit Adobe Books' project, Books to Prisoners (more info below).
Event poster art by Sophia Cates and Yoko OK.
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MUSIC
Yoko OK is the solo project-turned-band of Yoko Oji Kikuchi, in collaboration with talented longtime friends Marissa Deitz (cello) and Dibson T Hoffweiler (drums). Yoko is a NYC-to-Bay transplant, language student, songwriter and basement dweller. Growing up in New York, she performed and toured with a professional children's chorus, and at age 13 she fell in love with lady-fronted rock bands, punk music, and playing the guitar. From 2004-2009 she co-fronted the NYC-based band Dream Bitches; from 2012-2017 she performed in and toured with the Oakland deathrock band Bitter Fruit. All of these projects have helped inform the current sound of the band, which has been recently described as vast, geometric, trippy, and literate.
Immediacy, her fifth "solo" album (or the band's debut), is about recovery and the breaking of destructive cycles, uncertainty, solidarity, the romance of friendship, and growing up. https://yoko-ok.bandcamp.com/
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Bean Kaloni Tupou fronts the SF-based band Try The Pie. They're amazing and mesmerizing and emotionally raw, and you should totally come watch them play and hear their gorgeous songs. (This bio not endorsed by the artist..) https://trythepie.bandcamp.com/
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Abe Hollow is an Oakland-based songster who makes music about memory, potential, and the ecstasy of the Yiddish-American gothic apocalypse. https://abehollow.bandcamp.com/
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ADOBE BOOKS TO PRISONERS
Since 2014, Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative has been supporting California prisoners by offering free books to inmates who write to the bookstore and request books. Programs that send books to prisoners are vital collaborations between bookstores and small organizations or individuals. The books and postage are donated to or purchased by the organizations, with the help of fundraisers such as this one.
California prisons currently do not allow individuals to send books to their friends and loved ones within the prison system. Instead, they have to be ordered for the prisoner through a licensed bookseller or bookstore, which is often expensive. If a prisoner does not have anyone on the outside who can afford to do this, then they can only access books through the prison library (if there is one). Many prison libraries are very limited, and prisoners will often have their library privileges revoked as punishment.
Organizations such as Adobe's Books to Prisoners Project (coordinated by Nancy Frank, and inspired by the East Bay's Prisoners Literature Project) are serving an important function by collaborating with existing bookstores to send books to prisoners at no cost to the prisoner. We hope that you can attend this event and make a donation!
