Today we give thanks to you, dear reader–for your relentless curiosity, your impeccable taste, and your ongoing interest in The Music of Oregon. Without you, we and the musicians we enthuse about would be nothing more than random voices in the forest, echoing off the Doug Firs like the ghost choirs of vanished Sasquatch clans who, according to some rogue historians, still roam the region’s mountain ranges searching for love and mushrooms.

But there you are, headphones in hand, turntable at the ready, prepared to order for yourself and your loved ones another round of gift packages direct from your favorite Oregon musicians. Not just vinyl records and magnetic cassette tapes and digitally encoded plastic compact discs, but also tee-shirts and the all-important PNW Hoodie; even a few patches and pins and tote bags and eye pillows (no eyepatches, alas, but an Oregonian can dream). All of this and more awaits you on Bandcamp, the musician’s best friend and the industry’s worst nightmare–just in time for next week’s return of the Fee Free First Friday on December 6.

We recently experienced a thrilling shock of excited outrage when a local advertising firm published a list of “Iconic” Portland bands of the last five decades. Nevermind that half the musicians on their list are solo artists, not bands. Nevermind also that the majority of them are musicians who arrived in Oregon so recently they haven’t even updated their bios yet, or musicians who scored one big hit and decamped to Los Angeles, or musicians who bought houses in the West Hills after selling a few pop songs to Hollywood. Nevermind the bands on this list who were a big deal, sort of, in 1979 or 1989, and briefly played “a pivotal role in the early development of grunge,” or whatever, and were never heard from again. Nevermind the bands that were actually from Olympia, but played regularly at Satyricon and Berbati’s and La Luna and so are remembered fondly by people who made zines and whose couches Courtney Love once crashed on. Nevermind that there are exactly zero heavy metal bands and exactly zero classical composers on this list. Nevermind that empty word, “Iconic.”

In fact, nevermind altogether. We could play No True Scotsman all day. Better to light a candle, eh?

In the interest of packing this BCFFFF list with as many Oregon musicians as possible, we’re going to say as little as possible about each one (lest this become yet another 5,000 word opus). We’ve chosen to feature albums from each artist that we feel are most representative of their sound, or the ones they’ve released on limited edition hand-spattered vinyl, or just the ones we liked best. Most of the artists we’re including here have some sort of physical merch available (those vinyls and patches and seedies and tees), and we’ll note those as we go.

Note, too, the many omissions. Since we’re talking about Bandcamp today, we’re missing a lot of our favorite Oregon classical composers, including all four of the Big Four Names of the Oregon School of Composition (Kenji Bunch, Nancy Ives, Robert Kyr, David Schiff). We’ve mostly included musicians who are still active and still in Oregon, which means Dandy Warhols are in and Hazel is out. There are a few superstars on our list, but we retain a strong preference for the underdogs.

And it almost, but not quite, goes without saying that this is simply one very biased music journalist’s take on Oregon music. I bought my first Oregon-made CD in 2004 (Menomena’s I Am The Fun Blame Monster, still a favorite). I like heavy metal bands and classical music composers. I’ve never really been able to get that excited about Dead Moon. Nevertheless, I did my best.

So. Let us begin, as we feel we must, with Witch Mountain.

Caveat lector: The Greatest Song in the World didn’t actually sound anything like this….this is just a Tribute.

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Witch Mountain, South of Salem

Nearly all of Witch Mountain’s albums are now sold out in their physical formats, although of course you can still find them all on Discogs. What remains is their first real album, recorded after a long semi-hiatus and the fateful show when singer Uta Plotkin jumped onto the Satyricon stage and into the band. South of Salem is still available on CD via Bandcamp, along with a bunch of patches and pins and t-shirts and face masks and tote bags pressed with the band’s sweet logo; also available is drummer and co-founder Nathan Carson’s bizarro horror novel Starr Creek (signed by the author!)

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Luke Wyland, Kuma Cove

Wyland is half of Methods Body–the half that doesn’t play drums, the half that plays computer. This particular album celebrates the connection between computer, nature, and self. The composer explains:

The title, Kuma Cove, refers to a beloved cove on the coast of Oregon my wife and I return to yearly. There has always been something so magnetic about coves. The way they cradle one from the overwhelming enormity of the ocean beyond, muting a primordial fear. I experience these improvisations as ecosystems I’m able to inhabit for stretches of time, embodying the particular rhythms and sensorial textures within each. Music is my forever cove.

Everything you hear is created live in Ableton on a setup I’ve been honing for 15 years. I celebrate MIDI and computer music as an extension of self and strive to make it as expressive as any analog instrument. I was a visual artist for the first half of my life and quickly adapted those skills to composing and producing on a computer. The transition felt natural within the landscape of DAW’s interfaces, especially as a synesthete. Ableton and its community of Max creators continue to surprise me with its expansiveness.

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Kirsten Volness, River Rising

You can read all about this one in our interview with Volness right here.

Note too that you can purchase a “One-of-a-kind, handmade eye pillow filled with Oregon-grown Cascade Lavender blossoms and Camas Country flax seed.” It looks like this:

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Laura Veirs, Found Light

Plenty of Veirs’ classic albums (The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae, Troubled by the Fire, Carbon Glacier) are here on Bandcamp, most of them on vinyl, but we’d like to call attention to this one for two reasons. One, it was co-produced by bassist and all-around weirdo Shahzad Ismaily. Two, it comes bundled with a t-shirt featuring this sweet cat illustration:

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Usnea, Bathed in Light

We first got turned on to Usnea by the cryptid sound engineer Fester, who recorded their first three albums (Usnea, Random Cosmic Violence, Portals Into Futility). The band moseyed down to Oakland to record their fourth–and, it turns out, last–album, last year’s Bathed In Light.

Yes, that’s right, you just missed your final chance to hear these guys live: They played their last show at Pyre Fest last week. D’oh! Read about that here.

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Ural Thomas & The Pain, Dancing Dimensions

Ural Thomas has a terrific backstory, which you can read all about right here. This album, his third with The Pain, is solidly in the “psychedelic soul” category, the sort of thing The Temptations got into after Dennis Edwards replaced David Ruffin in 1968 (i.e., everything from “Cloud Nine” onward).

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Caroline Shaw, Leonardo da Vinci OST

On Shaw’s soundtrack for the recent Ken Burns film about the infamous High Renaissance polymath, the infamous Contemporary American polymath works with three of her frequent collaborators: Attacca Quartet (Orange, Evergreen); Sō Percussion (Narrow Sea, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, Rectangles and Circumstance); and Roomful of Teeth (Partita for 8 Voices, Rough Magic). Also appearing on this soundtrack is a new collaborator, John Patitucci, a jazz bassist best known for his work with Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, and Darrell Grant.

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Satan’s Pilgrims, Thomas Lauderdale Meets The Pilgrims

Just look at that ridiculous cover. Look at it!

This album is exactly what it looks like: the dude from Pink Martini with the classic Oregon surf band. Last year, Lauderdale told the convoluted story of this album’s history to The Oregonian, and the beginning goes a little something like this:

Lauderdale first saw Satan’s Pilgrims around 1993, before he had formed what would become Pink Martini.

At the time, The Pilgrims were a popular Portland instrumental surf rock band that featured three guitarists. During their heyday, the band went on tour throughout the state, the country and in Europe. In 1995, The Oregonian wrote of their debut CD, “At Home With Satan’s Pilgrims”: “This CD is quickly becoming mandatory listening at outdoor barbecues all over town this season.”

“They’re incredible,” Lauderdale said. “It’s an incredible show. They are five sexy guys, but in capes playing these sort of surf-spooky instrumentals. I thought they were the coolest band in town.”

Lauderdale wanted to figure out how he could work with The Pilgrims, and one idea he had was a surf version of “Rhapsody in Blue,” a song he had been playing on piano since he was 13. In 1995, Lauderdale finally got into the studio with Satan’s Pilgrims.

“We recorded a whole bunch of songs,” he said, “and then it sort of languished.”

That was because at the same time, he started recording something else: His first Pink Martini album.

“It was pretty much by happenstance that the Pink Martini record finished first,” Lauderdale said, “and then it sort of took off.”

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RLLRBLL, 4 Corners

There are kind of two kinds of Portland band: the ones who get huge and cease to be thought of as Trve Portland Bands (we’re thinking of Everclear) and the ones who toil away for decades with their dedicated local fanbases and never move off to LA and never end up at the Grammys. The present author confesses a certain affection for the latter, having a soft spot for artists who cherish freedom above ambition — there’s something very Oregon about that, right?

One of the greatest of these is the qabalistically named RLLRBLL, who took a double legal challenge (some rando Australian band also named themselves after the old James Caan sci-fi movie) and turned that into an excuse to go all KMFDM. They’re originally from Montana but have been melting faces in Portland for three decades. Despite a variety of lineup shifts the core has always been the same: bassist Monte Allen, drummer Gilles, and keyboardist-vocalist Mae Starr.

Everything you can do with a trio, these three do. It might be putting it too strongly to call them Portland’s Melvins, but it might not. Dive into their catalog and find out!

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Jack Radsliff, Barefoot

Is jazz guitarist Radsliff’s album called Barefoot because the drummer is the notorious barefoot drumslinger Alan Jones?

Nah, probably not. We include this one not only as a sample of the many, many luscious offerings available from Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, but because it is one of the few PJCE releases available on vinyl (Rivkah Ross’s Dare to Hope is another).

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Crystal Quartez, Causal Loop

You may remember Crystal Quartez from her Soundwalk with Third Angle New Music, when she attached sensors to plants in the International Rose Test Garden and turned that into music. Wild stuff! The result, Sonic Blooming, is no longer available on cassette, although you can still stream it. But you can pick up magnetic tape of her preceding album Causal Loop, which the composer describes like this:

With Causal Loop I’ve invited listeners to enter healing space and to dive into the non-linear relationship between cause and effect. This album was a huge part of my personal journey of healing from trauma, and being able to transform that experience into a sonic healing space meant holding space for both darkness and light. I used found sounds, analog, acoustic and digital instruments to mirror the complex world around me, until each song revealed their own set of instructions. I think of them as restorative sound rituals for me to move within. As I broke sounds into their smallest particles, the veil between my internal process and the external world dissolved. Through this work, I hope to hold open the door to the invisible to you as well.

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Quasi, Breaking the Balls of History

Quasi is one of those Portland bands that didn’t exactly blow up but didn’t exactly labor in obscurity either — they played with Elliott Smith but didn’t go with him to the Oscars. A rough decade after their most recent album, 2013’s “double album/Liberation Cookbook/Encyclopedia of Kicking Ass” Mole City, the duo hunkered down and whipped up this rugged pandemic record. Lucky us!

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Old Grape God & Bloomcycle, I Turn the Room to a Lava Lamp

Rapper, producer, painter, maker of hats. Check out the embroidered rope cap that goes with Old Grape God’s latest album, Pifferent:

OGG’s other big thing is limited edition hand-painted cassettes, which tend to sell out. You can still get ahold of this one, and also the 2020 masterpiece Cathartritis. And you can read Robert Ham’s interview with OGG right here.

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Neighbors, Gratitude

The neighbors in question are bassist (and Alan Jones Academy of Music instructor) Garrett Baxter; guitarist (and Creative Music Guild artistic director) Mike Gamble; and drummer-saxophonist-producer Machado Mijiga. Here’s how they describe their “garage band”:

We’ve got a garage band, but our “garage” is a studio, and our “band practice” is a full-blown recording session, once a month.

All you slackers and fussbudgets who sit on music for years and years, tinkering and fretting, take note: These guys recorded, mixed, and mastered this album yesterday.

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Nasalrod, Building Machines

Here’s where we want to point out a spread of crazy merch. In addition to the usual vinyl records they have tees featuring an absurd velociraptor-vs-unicorn drawing (courtesy of Portland artist Vo Minh McBurney), beanies and trucker hats (wear both at the same time) and a patch with another McBurney original (colors by drummer Spit Stix) that looks like this:

Nasalrod is also Patient Zero in the Nadine Records empire; read our interview with bassist and label chief Mandy Morgan right here.

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Møtrik, MØØN: The Cosmic Electrics of MØTRIK

Once upon a time, there was a genre called “Krautrock”–it was called that because it was invented by a loose collective of German musicians, many of them working with sound engineer Konrad “Conny” Plank and inspired in equal parts by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Motown (Miles Davis took a similar turn around the same time). The bands themselves mostly preferred the term “Kosmische Musik,” and as their sound has over time caught on and spread all over the world it’s been gradually dekrautified and occasionally labeled “Motorik” after the driving beat that’s always there, holding together whatever weirdness is happening in the synthesizers and tape machines.

Anyways, since the Apocalyptic Year 2012, Oregon has had its own Krautrock-Kosmische-Motorik band: Møtrik. These guys lean into the post-70s motorik world, when the spirit broke free of its West German progenitors (Kraftwerk, Neu!, CAN, Cluster, et alia) and started haunting bands in Britain (Hawkwind, Bowie, Joy Division); the US (Devo, Pere Ubu); Japan (Yellow Magic Orchestra, Kikagaku Moyo); Australia (King Gizzard); and so on. You can still hear plenty of the old German influence, and that distinctive English post-punk electric bass sound is all over their records, but they sure still sound like an Oregon band.

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MIZMOR, Prosaic

Another thing you hear a lot in both Oregon music and in experimental metal: the one-man-band phenomenon (we can probably thank Quorthon, the mastermind behind Bathory, for inspiring such autonomy). MIZMOR is one such, the brainchild of the mysterious A.L.N., who describes his latest like this:

The idea behind Prosaic was to make an intentionally less conceptual, more slice-of-life record. I wanted to make an album that was less precious and obsessed-over, more honest and real; less grandiose and more human. I found it an interesting challenge to find the line between ‘you can do better’ and ‘you’re beating a dead horse.’ I tried to make my process more efficient and even fun at times. I simply wanted to share, but if that meant exacting all-out perfectionism, I wasn’t going to make a record. Right now I’m interested in making less self-indulgent music. The themes are the absurdity/futility/purpose/meaning of work, mindfulness/consciousness/living in the present moment/shedding illusions, depression/acceptance/contentment. This is the first MIZMOR album without any content relating to god/atheism. You also won’t hear any shrieks.

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!mindparade, Skyscapia

This psychedelic group has managed to sell out almost all its physical media (even the t-shirts are sold out!) — nothing remains but this one lonely cassette tape of their “ambient record! rock record!” Skyscapia, which was created in-studio via improvisation and overdubs. Here’s how they describe the process:

Skyscapia began with a bed of ambient group improvisation which was then sculpted via stream-of-consciousness writing + recording methods in the studio. Nothing was pre-written before the recording process of this piece.

And that’s exactly what it sounds like.

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Machado Mijiga, Beach Jamz ‘89–Live!

Mijiga doesn’t really do physical media, being apparently too busy making mountains of music to bother with things like pressing it to vinyl and burning it to CDs. You’ll just have to press and/or burn your own, or stream it like a Millennial (we won’t tell). His catalog is moderately vast, and there are much newer releases we could have chosen, but we had reasons for picking this one from a few years ago.

One, Mijiga picks up his sax on a few tracks, and we don’t get enough sax on his later releases. Two, it was mostly recorded at Jack London Revue in February 2020–ominous thunder!–just before The Great Reset, and is therefore a kind of time capsule. Third, well, this is one of the first Mijiga albums I heard, and it still holds a special place in my crusty heart.

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Methods Body, Plural Not Possessive

Methods Body’s “opus against the algorithm” contains one 22 second track, two five-minute slabs of weirdness, a nine-minute opener, and a fifteen-minute climax.

Take that, TikTok!

This stuff arguably sounds more “Kosmische” than Møtrik does, more in line with the gonzo shit you hear on early Kraftwerk and Faust records, the glitchy Side B soundscapes that make you groan achingly for that pounding motorik beat to come back–but with these guys the beat almost never actually drops, and we end up in all-new, head-scratchingly skritchy, gloriously undanceable territory.

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Erin Jane Laroue, Chalant

Laroue is generally thought of as a singer-pianist, whether as a solo performer or as half of Jamais Jamais, and there’s plenty of that whole Tori Amos thing here, and it all sounds quite moody and wonderful. What elevates Chalant is the studio (in this case Pine Box, in the old La Luna building), which allows her to vocally harmonize with herself, add organs and superrich synthesizers to her piano, and in general be a badass.

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Gabriel Kahane and Oregon Symphony, emergency shelter intake form

Read about this one here and here.

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Jimmie Herrod with Pink Martini, Tomorrow

So, yeah, Herrod has an amazing voice. What else is new? After sixty years of cover versions, “Exodus” has received its definitive rendition. He makes a song from Annie sound great. Annie!

And this one will look great on your mantle as you spin its 10 inches of pure vinyl bliss.

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Hell, Hell I

Simply fucking brutal.

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Deena T. Grossman, Thrice Burned Forest

Read our recent interview with the composer here.

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greaterkind, change of plans

This is another of those pandemic records; the band describes it like this:

Sleepless nights, dead days, breakups, and a pandemic. These are the sacrifices that made greaterkind’s ‘change of plans’ a reality for our ears. Brought together through fellowship, years of recorded sessions and shows now culminate in the group’s first full length release.

Just check out that lineup: keyboardist and vocalist Charlie Brown III, guitarist Peter Knudsen, drummer Cory Limuaco, and bassist Ian Michael Lindsay. And those guest artists: Lo Steele, Domo Branch, MAE.SUN (aka Hailey Niswanger), Jarrod Lawson, Noah Simpson (on “voiceover” no less). These are all people you know if you’ve spent more than five minutes listening to Portland jazz.

Oh and don’t be shocked by the $1000 price tag on the digital album (head over to their sister site for that). It’s just that this is where you can buy the vinyl record.

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Darrel Grant’s MJ New, Our Mr. Jackson

Grant has released a ton of great music over the years, from his early days cutting heads in New York through large-scale works with Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble and choral music with Resonance Ensemble.

His most recent release pays homage to the Modern Jazz Quartet and is dedicated to the legendary Oregon drummer and KMHD host Cartlon Jackson.

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Mike Gamble, Sastrugi

Like Mijiga, Gamble doesn’t really go in for the whole “physical media” thing. We chose this one because it’s the best representation of what we like most about Gamble’s work — excellent electric guitar playing on a bed of Friselly weirdness.

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Federale, No Justice

It’s not their newest album, but this remains the one that most perfectly captures what we want Federale to sound like–grim and dusty as a stark, windy, bone-strewn desert landscape.

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E. Ellison, Pillars

Read more about this one over here, in our passionate exposition of the “there’s too much damn music” problem.

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Eight Bells, Landless

Eight Bells’ second album remains a favorite, not least because it’s the only one recorded by what we’ll always consider their classic lineup (founding guitarist/vocalist Melynda Jackson, founding bassist/vocalist Haley Westeiner, drummer Rae Amitay).

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dolphin midwives, Body of Water

A singing harpist with an array of looping pedals. What could be more Oregon?

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The Decemberists, Picaresque

Hard to believe this album is twenty years old now. It’s the war-torn, Dubya-era one; the one they recorded in an old church; the one when they really started cooking as a band; the one that led to The Crane Wife and all the success. Listen to it now and think “this is just some Portland band”–peel away the cultural baggage — and it still sounds pretty awesome.

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The Dandy Warhols, ROCKMAKER

If the Decemberists have cultural baggage to listen past, that goes triple for Dandy Warhols. These guys had — still have — a huge local following; their songs were in ads and video games and tv shows and movies; they played with Bowie.

But, again, you strip all that away and just listen to it and what do you get? Terrific Oregon music that just happens to have guest appearances by Frank Black, Debbie Harry, and Slash.

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Blackwater Holylight, Silence/Motion

Read Robert Ham’s profile of this crew right here.

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Bijoux Cone, Love Is Trash

Psychedelic pop that is the perfect balance of those two elements: never too far-out, also never too poppy. Just when you’re thinking “Hall & Oates,” the reverby Fender Rhodes comes in and you think “Flaming Lips”; just when you’re thinking “of Montreal” the sax shows up and you think “X-Ray Spex.”

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Andy Akiho, Oculus

Yup, this is the one with the long-gestating marimba-and-string-quartet opus LIgNEouS on it. Read more about the premiere of that one right here, and read our most recent chat with Akiho right here.

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Agalloch, The Serpent & The Sphere

We made one exception to our All Bandcamp rule, for these guys — you have to go over to the Eisenwald North America Webstore to get their vinyls and their CDs without having to pay for shipping from Germany (you can of course stream them from anywhere). But they’re worth it.

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YOB, Our Raw Heart

We end where we should have started (had we been utterly strict about the reverse alphabetical order gimmick), with Eugene doomsters YOB. We already wrote about these guys in our metal roundup a couple years back, which you can read here, so this seems like a perfect time to wish you a happy Thanksgiving and kiss you all an Irish goodbye.

Ta!