Leave your hushed whispers and inside voices at the door of the San Diego Central Library on Saturday, Oct. 29, because it’s gonna get all sorts of noisy. Now in its third iteration, the Checked Out noise and experimental music festival pushes the boundaries of both music and library norms when it makes books fall from the shelves this weekend.
Organized by Sam Lopez and noise music collective Stay Strange, the mini fest features one-man industrial doom metal band Author & Punisher, aggressively busy electro-grind-skronk from Planet B (with Justin Pearson of Retox/the Locust), rebel hip-hop outfit Skrapez and sludge-surf from MF Redeemer.
The event kicks off with family-friendly arts and crafts outside in the library courtyard, where a Build-a-Beast workshop brings to life the monster dolls of your dreams. Lending a hand with the demonic crafting will be local artist Martin Ontiveros, who will be showing his own sci-fi and horror-inspired works as he helps you and your littles with your creature creations. Meanwhile, sound artists Scott Nielsen and Steve Flato will be recording sounds from both inside the library and out in the courtyard, then remixing and manipulating them into an improvisational soundtrack for the whole event to sit against.
And the list goes on: Sight artist !ZEUQSAV!; Les Temps Barbares and their dense, fractured music; handmade primitive masks made by shock performance artist Xavier Ramirez; monster portraits by M.J. Stevens -- you gotta check out Checked Out to see it all.
Checked Out starts at 4 p.m. in the courtyard at the San Diego Central Library on Saturday, Oct. 29. Music begins at 6 p.m. in the Neil Morgan Auditorium. This event is free and open to all ages.
Hannah Lott-Schwartz, a San Diego native, moved back to the area after working the magazine-publishing scene in Boston. Now she’s straight trolling SD for all the music she missed while away. Want to help? Hit her up with just about anything at all over on Twitter, where -- though not always work-appropriate -- she means well.
