Schedule:

7:00pm RAVS

8:00pm Buffalo Nichols

RAVS

RAVS is a 27 year old musician from Dallas, TX who has been creating her own definition of what being an artist means. She taught herself the guitar when she was 15 years old after dominating the expert levels of Guitar Hero. She learned countless covers by her favorite artists such as Amy Winehouse, Norah Jones, A Tribe Called Quest, Mac Miller, Chance The Rapper, and Tyler the Creator. But, she didn’t start writing her own music until she got to college at The University of Missouri; a time where she was so overwhelmed with the idea of needing to decide her future at only 18. Music started as a therapeutic hobby, but quickly became her sole focus when RAVS decided to merge her soul-wrenching love for hip-hop with her own chords and lyrics around 2015. The rest was history.

Buffalo Nichols

On his second album, The Fatalist, Carl “Buffalo” Nichols does things with the blues that might catch you off guard. There’s 808 programming, chopped up Charley Patton samples, washes of synth. There’s a consideration of the fullness of the sonic stage and the atmospherics of the music that can only come with a long engagement with electronic music. But this is no gimmicky hybrid or attempt to turn the blues into 21st century music by simply dressing it with skittering hi-hats. Nichols’ vision for the blues is of a form of music that’s intimately tied to everyday life in 2023, something that’s reflected not only in the choice of instrumentation, but in the complexities of the songwriting and the gray areas his lyrics explore. This is music that comes straight from the present, and as such, it’s a reminder that the same shit that drove the first blues singers to pick up a guitar.