"Bay Area musicians tend to be exposed to a lot of different traditions: funk, punk, jazz, rap, disco, raves, psych and jam bands, Mills and the experimental world. When I started producing shows, that eclecticism made it easy to create these gatherings where everybody was talking to everybody. One big room with all the freaks."
Will Bundy, Eternal Now
Guest Feature
This fall, DOG presents [E16] Compound Wonders—a series of four live music events focused on our collective relationship to sound, featuring performances from artists exploring acoustic folk, ambient soundscapes, jazzy ensembles, and analog electronica.
For our third night of the series on November 2, we reached out to Will Bundy, co-founder and director of Eternal Now, to curate the evening.
Eternal Now is a book shop, record shop, ar(k)chive, and communal space for the arts located in Oakland, California. The shop sells physical media and artwork, and hosts concerts, conversations, visual art events and other happenings — both inside the shop and out. Eternal Now also houses a growing archive of art publications, music and ephemera available as a resource to their collaborators.
Over its first year-plus, the space has hosted performances and collaborations with artists like Lonnie Holley, Kehlani, Colloboh, Kesh, Tracy Ren, Nkiruka Oparah, Ovrkast, Zekarias Thompson, Matt Robidoux and many more.
Ahead of Saturday’s performance, the Landscape team invited Bundy to talk about his local cultural influences, bridging intersecting communities, and what lies ahead for the future of the Bay Area creative scene.
WB: Originally, I’m a writer. That’s where I started, writing about music and visual art. These days, I mostly do an informal kind of curatorial work. Over the years that’s taken on a lot of shapes: journalism, concerts, art exhibitions, film and literary projects, advising artists. Basically, I’m an obsessive, omnivorous listener/reader/watcher, and I like bringing artists and cultural artifacts into conversation with one another—hopefully in some unexpected ways.
LS: I’d love to learn about the influences that have shaped you and motivated you to get involved in cultural production. What do you enjoy most about being a part of this community?
WB: I grew up in Berkeley, in the early 2000s which was a really fertile place and time for me to follow my curiosity down a lot of rabbit holes. I think a lot about that cultural moment: early internet optimism and P2P sharing, the long tail of ‘60s counterculture, MTV, hyper-accelerated global capitalism, the CD boom. So many book and record stores I could walk to.
The Bay Area independent music scene was also big for me, especially rap. The people we considered giants—Hieroglyphics, The Coup, Andre Nickatina—were also accessible, around. You might see your favorite rapper at Berkeley Bowl. Some of your heroes had day jobs and did shows at these crunchy community venues. I still seek out scenes where artists work independently, or interdependently, in a way that feels enmeshed with real community.
LS: In brief, what is the origin story of Eternal Now—the name, and the place?
WB: The name Eternal Now obviously has a certain lineage and connotations. Don Cherry and Alan Watts and a moment where pop and folk art, the Western avant garde and Eastern religion were all in conversation. I was also just drawn to the idea of being both in and out of time. A place where works and ideas, even contradictory ones, are speaking to each other across time, space, generation, and geography.
WB: The first and most literal connection is that I’ve always loved reading about music. Blogs and books and music magazines, when those existed. The Source and early Mass Appeal were pretty formative. URB, The FADER. I also think all good writing is rhythmic. In general, I’m drawn to work where the boundaries between medium and genre are porous. Lyricists with a literary sensibility, filmmakers from the music video era, musicians from secular genres making devotional music.
LS: Is there a book or album that has had a particularly deep influence on you?
WB: Stankonia and Aquemini rearranged my brain as a kid. Recently, DJ E by Chuquimamani-Condori launched me deeper into their work as E+E, DJ E, etc. I had heard a few Elysia Crampton records, but there is a massive catalog—albums, mixes. Lots of it is in this everything-at-once collage mode. It feels otherworldly and completely unplaceable, but tethered to these really intentional personal and cultural reference points.
The other day I picked up a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal. I like feeling writers wrestle with the big questions in real time. On the music book side, my all-time favorite is Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach .
WB: My creative partner, the designer Ali Madigan and I, have been working out of the space since 2017. Initially, my co-founder Jared and I started scheming on a more public space concept, traditional retail. When the pandemic hit, it made a lot more sense to slow cook something closer to home.
West Oakland is a place with a really rich cultural history and a heavy history of inequity and displacement. Our stretch of San Pablo is a few blocks out of Downtown, but it can feel like a vortex. There’s a lot of life if you’re looking for it: liquor stores, pockets of subculture, industrial production, non-profits, families. We’re a part of that. We also try to bear witness and be in solidarity with our neighbors experiencing homelessness. We have an open door policy and we don’t try to abstract what we do from the world around us. The shop is meant to be a hidden gem but it is by no means exclusive.
LS: Upon entering the storefront, you feel as though you’ve entered an oasis. What role do you think spatial design plays in creating an inviting, transformative space?
WB: Ali Madigan led the design of the shop, which is an extension of the building, an ongoing architectural design project known as The Palace. Ali’s approach to space is really elegant, but also punk and deeply intuitive. It’s calculated, but also intentionally imprecise, handmade. Your question captured the feeling and intention well. Step inside, take a breath. OK, I’m somewhere else now. The idea was to carve something out of this century-old brick building that feels new, but grounded in a particular place and time and context.
The programming at Eternal Now, both in your space and beyond it, consistently highlights exciting Bay Area musicians. What are some ways you connect with and support local artists? How have they shaped your relationship with the wider community?
In my 20s, I came back from school in L.A. feeling energized as a writer and I found all these incredible artists to talk to and started writing about them, piecing together collaborations, figuring out how to celebrate what I was seeing. Bay Area musicians tend to be exposed to a lot of different traditions: funk, punk, jazz, rap, disco, raves, psych and jam bands, Mills and the experimental world. When I started producing shows, that eclecticism made it easy to create these gatherings where everybody was talking to everybody. One big room with all the freaks.
WB: I’ve been most energized by seeing artists take on the mantle of activism over the last year. In so many ways it’s looking so bleak out there in the world. But watching the protest the artists staged at YBCA’s Bay Area Now, in solidarity with Palestine, it felt heartening. Contagious. Other friends, like the Working Name Studios crew, and like Cheflee and Skyway Man, are doing beautiful work that gestures toward a better world in both quiet and loud ways.
Our biggest challenge is one we share with most working artists in the Bay, which is a general lack of infrastructure and safety. The artists we work with are working fucking hard to survive under capitalism in an economy that is pretty hostile to making a living making art. For the space, I’m actively looking for the kind of institutional support that would make it possible to focus on sharing art and putting money in artists’ pockets rather than perpetually hustling.
WB: Being in space together is a powerful starting place. Shared sensory experience, eye contact. Imari and James are perfect collaborators for Compound Wonders’ theme of bridging intersecting communities. Both are people with fluid, wide musical vocabularies and tap into this big venn diagram of Bay Area community. Same goes for DOG and Eternal Now, these two kindred spaces coming together.
LS: What’s next for Eternal Now?
WB: Two years in, Eternal Now is entering what I’d call our second chapter. We built the thing, we’ve experimented a lot. Proof of concept. Now it’s time to see what it looks like when we invite in more collaboration, more structure, and build our capacity—and we’re fundraising, for anyone who’s curious ;)
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