Oakland on Record
Looking back on 2023 and into 2024 with my peers in the Oakland, Pittsburgh music scene.
My dozens1 of subscribers have been pestering me recently. “Caleb! What’s the name of your band? Where do bands at Pitt even play? Do you make any money? What’s the name of that lamp band you play with that you keep telling me I have to listen to?” People want to know what’s going on, and I am so excited to deliver.
Welcome to Oakland on Record, an interview with some of my friends and peers in the Oakland, Pittsburgh music scene. You’re about to meet some of the coolest people in the city — a mix of artists, photographers, managers, and event producers, all of whom know ball — and get their thoughts and opinions on what it’s like to be involved here over this past year, and what you can expect going forward.
Responses have been lightly edited for concision and clarity.
Part 1: The Homies
Hey! I’m here with?
Max: Max Z. Begler.
WBY: Eli and Mark.
Ben: Ben Orr!
Seth: “Seth Berkin”2
Chloe: Chloe Simpson.
Of?
Max: Sunny Daze & the Weathermen, Pittsburgh’s Premier Flower Punks.
WBY: Wild Blue Yonder. We can’t wait to see where our talk will Yonder off to. Lol.
Ben: Funky Lamp!
Seth: Pitter Patter, Everyone’s Mom’s Favorite Band.
Chloe: the website Urban Cowgirl Renaissance, as well as The Scene Will Never Die, a documentary on Pittsburgh’s music scene.
You’ve been to a lot of Oakland shows in the past year — is there anybody whose set knocked you off your feet?
Max: Pitter Patter has always gotten me hype. They have so much energy and are so fun to watch it’s hard not to like them. Funky Lamp is another one. They’re just so fun and such a great fusion of sound. Of course Wild Blue Yonder. Anyone who can jam like that with such a mix of jazz and jam band influence is always impressive to me. An old Oakland staple, Tough Cuffs, I’ve seen probably 5 times and every time they’re awesome. Energy like no other and a sound that you can’t help but punch a friend to. And last but certainly not least is one of my all time favorites, Melt. Watching them is frightening honestly. So much talent and noise between three people and worst of all they are so casual about it… like they’re bored while playing the hardest and heaviest riffs.
WBY: Giovanni and the Inhibitors, Trip Lotus, James Castle, Byron Mash.
Ben: Man. As far as local peers goes, I'd have to hand it to Moontown. They've got incredibly catchy and beautiful tracks in their discography. We saw them (for the nth time) last Saturday at Live From Oakland3 and their music was stuck in my head for days.
Seth: Everyone in the scene is absolutely crushing it, and what’s cool about this scene is that everyone is doing it in their own way. Each band has unique strengths and everyone is making the music they want to make, performing in the style that they create and hone in on with each performance. Some bands that recently stood out to me are Trip Lotus with their unbelievable songwriting and how tight their group is, and Moontown consistently hits the audience with a wall of sound and unreal tones.
Chloe: I have to say that Sunny Daze & the Weathermen has to be up there for me. They are just so talented and so much fun! I also just recently saw Grin Hound in Oakland. Completely infused with electricity. The list goes on. Funky Lamp, 9FiftySeven, Moontown, and Wild Blue Yonder are just a few more of the incredibly talented Oakland bands that I’ve seen — but I know for a fact there are a lot that I haven’t seen.
Despite the fact that bands in a college town are never professional musicians, the artists in the Oakland scene have been putting out a steady stream of music over the past year. Are there any songs or records that stood out to you over the course of 2023?
Max: Out of the Oakland scene there’s been some really awesome music people have done that’s just so exciting. Trip Lotus released their album “Pleasantly Disguised”. Ear candy baby. And Wild Blue Yonder’s newest single “when I’m with you” was so beautiful. It has all the elements of of why I enjoy them so much as a band. Also Pitter Patters album “Naturally Selected”. But it feels like the music being released out of here is more professional with every new album or song that comes out.
WBY: “My Friend” by 9FiftySeven and “So Stay” by Moontown.
Ben: Maybe there's a bias here (their frontman and our drummer happen to share the same body) but I would say Trip Lotus's "Pleasantly Disguised" stood out to me the most. It's one of the strongest and most well-rounded albums I've heard from the scene.
Seth: “It’s Been A Hard Year” by Frog Legs is my personal favorite album from the Pittsburgh scene in 2023. Everything that Heading North has released has been absolutely phenomenal and I can’t wait to hear what else they have in store. “Pleasantly Disguised” by Trip Lotus, “My Friend” by 9FiftySeven, “Clocked Out” by Clay Coast, and “American Windmill” by Valleyview are all spectacular as well and I’d highly recommend checking out these bands if you haven’t already.
Chloe: Yes! “My Friend’ by 9 Fifty Seven has got to be one of my absolute favorite songs of all time - it is sooo catchy. “Munhall Man” and “Snake Bite” and “The Beach is Alright”4 by Sunny Daze & the Weathermen is also being streamed on repeat this year. Actually, their whole EP.
Despite how strong the scene already is, it feels like there’s a lot of room for growth for music in Pittsburgh. What sort positive changes would you love to see (or lead!) in the year to come?
Max: I think one of the biggest things we can do on a personal level is stop underselling the scene. There are so many amazing bands that have come out of Pittsburgh. Not just in the past five years, not in the past ten, but in a great deal of the history of Pittsburgh. We have such a rich history of music here from Jazz to rock to pop to anything you can really imagine. Sure we don’t live in New York or Los Angeles and we don’t have a scene that is that large in that sense — but for what we have, it’s really incredible and should not be overlooked. People should continue encouraging art to be made here and recognize the fact that the art that is made here can be just as good as art made anywhere else.
WBY: Post Genre! We would love to see Oakland move towards having an independent venue, and keep new bands coming into the scene.
Ben: In the last two years, Pittsburgh's underground scene has blossomed with talent, but I think that it's only poked its head out of the ground in terms of audience and recognition. Unfortunately, the demand for music here caps out at the university level; pretty much every time we've ventured outside of "the Oakland bubble" has reinforced that thought. But I wouldn't call it a limiting factor. There's something like 100k undergrads in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The room for growth is the share of those students who know about the local music that Pittsburgh has to offer. I would love to see a really serious, guerilla marketing movement targeting the student population putting local music on the map for the kids who might end up loving it. In the meantime, though, helping Oakland's own Post Genre Records in every way that I can is the most I can do to strengthen the scene here. They're putting on some super high-quality shows as close to campus as you can get. I'm excited to see where they'll go in the coming year and I'm happy to be along for the ride.
Seth: The scene is in a great spot right now, but there’s always room for improvement. More venues and spaces where live music is encouraged and appreciated would be wonderful. There have been a handful of collaborations on recorded tracks within the Pittsburgh scene and I think that’s a really cool way to bolster our scene as well. New bands and artists popping up is always something fun to look forward to, and continued growth out of everyone who is already established is just as exciting. As long as people are attending shows enthusiastically and respectfully, artists and venues are supporting each other, and the scene continues to stay on the track that it’s on, there will be a ton of big things coming to DIY Pittsburgh.
Chloe: The biggest change - and possibly the most important one - I want to see is a venue. A music venue for Oakland. One that is permanent and owned by the community or some sort of student cooperative. Post Genre Records is doing some good work with the Innovation District to be headed in that direction, but this community is in dire need of a venue we can walk to where shows happen weekly. It would help to centralize the music community of Oakland, make it more mainstream, bring people together, allow bands to meet each other and cooperate, and overall become a massive benefit not to only the students that live here but the larger neighborhood as well. Oakland used to be the place for live music and after we lost those venues - the Decade, the Electric Banana - we experienced a massive loss of a space of music. Now that we are more disconnected than ever post-COVID and in the era of social media, I’ll say it: OAKLAND NEEDS A MUSIC VENUE!!!!!
Part 2: Allow Him to Reintroduce Himself
This was originally intended to be one large article: everybody gets asked the same questions, I pull together the responses, and we’re in and out. However, I got the opportunity to sit down with Adam Klenovich, founder of Black Lodge and one of the leaders of Post Genre. After our interview, I realized that this needed its own section. Before we get into the interview, I just want to say: if you live in the area, please please PLEASE support Post Genre. Adam, Eli, Mark, and everybody else there are doing amazing work that benefits everybody who goes to school in Pittsburgh and loves music. Buy a ticket, buy some merch, check out their website, tell your friends — whatever you can offer, it would mean so much. Thank you!
So first off, do you want to tell us who you are and a little bit about yourself?
Sure! My name is Adam Klenovich. I helped form the Black Lodge and help operate Post Genre. I started the Black Lodge in September of 2022 when I moved to Oakland after high school. We did the Oakland Indie Fest in April 2023, raising $3,000 for the East Palestine train derailment. We did a festival this fall, the Oakland Block Party, and that's kind of when I got connected with Post Genre. We started looking at how we can create a way for music in the local scene to continue without having gaps with people graduating and people leaving after four years. Mark, Eli, the rest of the people that we've been working with, we thought of different ideas and came down with, like, “We need a permanent venue in Oakland.”
We've been thankful enough to be able to be granted partnership with the Pittsburgh innovation district to do a limited series, which we did from September to December 20235 in 115 Atwood, which is a workspace by the Pittsburgh Innovation District. They let us redo the whole space — it's usually an office space, we put audio in there, lighting, all that different stuff, did five shows and then we've been granted permission to do a continuing series in a church on Atwood Street. So that's kind of where we're at right now.
Awesome. I'd love to hear about your relationship with music. Are you a musician yourself?
I'm not. I used to play trumpet, but stopped doing that back in high school.
But you've always had a love for music?
Of course, yeah. During COVID, I had started my own clothing company. [I was] just bored. I was a sophomore in high school, [I had] nothing to do. You couldn't even really see any friends, so you're inside with a laptop on the internet, and it's like, “I got how many months?” And I was just like, “I want to be able to do something that I'm gonna look back and be like, ‘Oh, I didn't waste like, you know, this time playing video games or doing something like that.’”
During that time, during COVID, that's when I got into making clothing, doing more art stuff. And one of the one things I wanted to do was host a concert. It was the one thing that I knew — people are gonna want to get out after all this is done. People are gonna want to come together.
Since then, [I’ve] just been trying to do this thing. Threw my first concert when I was a junior in high school; one of my buddies owned a house in Friendship. We just put up posters everywhere, I didn't even know a single musician. I just DM’d people on Instagram. [laughs] People, for some odd reason, said “yes” to play at some high schooler’s show. We got musicians there. We sold a bunch of tickets and raised about $500 for charity, but a lot of people actually came out and I was like, “This is something I want to do.”
You had a clothing brand?
Yeah.
So you've always been an entrepreneur? You've always been looking to put yourself out there and create something and try to share it with other people?
Yeah! When I was a junior in high school, I worked on a project. We actually had a limited gallery in Lawrenceville, on Butler St., where we had a storefront on Saturdays and Sundays for four weeks. We sold probably, I think, like $3000-$4000 worth of clothing. That was the first time I ever was part of a project where we had a clear deadline. We had to get all this stuff done, and I just loved the rush being part of something bigger than yourself. And it's very similar to the stuff we're doing now with Post Genre, where you're working with a team, you're working on deadlines, you're contacting media, you're sending emails, you're sending more emails than you should. [laughs] But that's where I really found that I wanted to do stuff like this. I enjoy being a leader and working with people and being a part of a team. It’s awesome.
This is this is a question that you're going to be inclined to be humble towards, but I want to boost your ego a little bit! Do you feel like your presence in the local music scene has made a big difference? I think it has, and I think a lot of people would agree.
It’s more than that. You just have to be thankful is that everybody here is like a family. Everyone here is very social, everyone wants to be a part of something. It's not like it's just one person, either. I've been helped out by so many musicians when we didn't even have microphones or we didn't even know how to run a show. They brought microphones, they helped us out and did audio work for free, they helped work the door and all this different stuff. There's so many different people, I genuinely think I got lucky to be a freshman and to be able to live in a house and have people want to be there and have musicians be super helpful.
I think people respect what we've been able to do with the Black Lodge, and it's kind of a mutual thing: I have a lot of respect for the musicians and everybody who is a part of it, and I think people see what we're doing and want to support it. [pauses]
It's very much that I got lucky being here at the right time at the right place and meeting the people that I've met. We can have these relationships with organizations where they don't just see us as kids. Moving into the space we did on Atwood St. for the series in the fall, they were extremely surprised how professional we were. I think I think sometimes musicians get a bad rap when most of the time people came to the shows because they just wanted to listen. People may drink or smoke before, whatever, but pretty much everybody wants to be there for the music. That was really a selling point. It’s a thing where people genuinely want to be there for the music. A place like the church can only exist because the audience is here to make that happen.
Do you feel like having the partnership with the Pittsburgh Innovation District and having a professional venue like the church makes you seem more legit? Does that feel like something that's going to be a big step for you guys?
That's something we're trying to balance — how do you use the resources from an organization as large as the Pittsburgh Innovation District without, you know,
Selling out?
Exactly. So that's something we're balancing — keeping the same image working with these organizations and not just relying on everything that they have to say, because we need to listen to the needs of the artists. We need to listen to the needs of the attendees. We need to see how we can [create] a mutual relationship between us, the organizations that are helping support us, the musicians, and then the attendees as well.
You've got a show coming up on February 3rd. Obviously, that's the big thing in the short term. What does the success of that show look like for you?
Success? We haven't been granted like an actual number of how many tickets we could sell for that space — we're still working with the fire marshal to understand what that number is going to be. We'll know that before the show next Saturday. But I mean, preferably selling it out!6 Having a large, safe audience, people coming and having a great time, [especially] people that have never been to shows. [Success] is to get as many new people involved as possible, because we both know people that are going to come to it that have come to past shows that are very excited for this. But we really want people who haven't been to shows to come to this stuff and have a great time.
I've met countless people that have been like, “I'm a senior this year, I've never gone to a show before. And this is my first time, and I don't know why I haven't been doing this.” It's very much an opportunity to be able to tap into the population of people that have never been to shows, showing them that this is an alternative to going to house parties or bars or whatever.
And in the long term?
We're waiting on a grant right now that we submitted in August that we're waiting on. They said we should know in February. If that doesn't work, we have other grants that we've actually submitted as well. We’re waiting on other ones to open that we could submit. And it's just that same thing — if we aren't able to get one grant, we're going to keep fighting [for the next]. Our hope is to run this venue as a nonprofit so we don't have to work with the traditional business initiative to sell this many tickets, or have X amount of people come through the door. As a nonprofit, [what we want] is to be able to run it and get funding to be able to have local artists come and play there, so we don't have to book out people. That's when you really become a sellout — when you have to pay the bills, and you can’t care about the artists because you're just trying to survive. I mean, if you look at other venues in the city — Mr. Smalls is one, they've talked about almost going bankrupt multiple times. It's something we have to be very careful and proactive about, and that's something we're thinking about every day: we need to get funding, we need to get support that isn't just selling tickets, because that's not going to support the community. If we're only trying to make money in [the venue], we aren't going to be able to have shows that go with our entire mission. Getting a grant would be a really big thing for us.
Last question. You've you've spoken a lot about the work that we're doing, speaking for Post Genre. But be yourself for a second: what’s your goal as Adam Klenovich for the year 2024?
Last year, we were able to raise in total about $8,700 for charity. One of the biggest things I want to do this year is raise around $20,000. That's the plan right now — continue doing charity work, continue doing nonprofit work, support local charities, local organizations, because I think music and charity have a really good relationship. So I'm very excited to see what we could do this year, potentially with the second Indie Fest, and see how big that weekend could grow that to be. I love reaching out to organizations, doing sponsorship packets, emailing local businesses… there's lots of great companies who are headquartered in Pittsburgh that you know, we haven't even been able to tap into, so we're really excited to be a little bit more recognized this year as an organization as we go out and try to get those larger donations.
Closing Notes
I shouted out Post Genre before their interview, but please go check out and support everybody who was gracious enough to grant me their time in the first half of the article. Below are links to every interviewee’s stuff — they’re all supremely talented and awesome people.
Beyond that, this was my first time doing an interview-based article and it was a lot of fun. If you liked this and would want to read more in this style, please let me know! If you hated it and want me to stick to bangers like “she parks on my machine till it's soft,” also let me know that!7
Cheers :D
Shoutout to my recent 13th subscriber who allowed me to edit this from “dozen” to “dozens.”
The editors are aware that the quotes imply this may not be Seth’s real name. This will be explored in a future article.
Live From Oakland is a concert series sponsored by the Pittsburgh Innovation District and produced by a coalition of city employees and Oakland music faces. More on that later.
Not to be too indie but I heard “The Beach is Alright” before Sunny Daze even existed just saying
My band played this! We’re about to release the live recording from that show! Follow us on insta @southsiders.pgh!
They sold it out well in advance of the show, and Volume 2 of the series has sold out as well. Awesome shit.
Although if you hated it you probably aren’t still reading