Artistic growth

She runs: It’s Monday at Goldfield Trading Post, which means James Cavern’s open-mic brought out a throng of chatty, beer-guzzling music fans. Or in this case, fans of Rebecca Peters, the evening’s featured act.

Peters has performed in various incarnations over the past few years, switching from duo to solo acoustic to full band to solo acoustic. Now, she’s back as a solo artist, but with a backing lineup of Ryan Tillema (guitar and bass), Christian Midthun (drums) and Demetri Wells (keys).

“How do you feel?” Cavern asks Peters during the night’s extra lengthy soundcheck.

“I feel really good,” Peters says, excitedly eying the 75-or-so in the crowd. “Look at all my friends.”

It’s a pretty big night for Peters: her first single-release party as a solo artist. She recently quit her full-time job in order to fully dedicate herself to music. She’s finishing up her debut EP, which has been started and scratched over and over again for more than a year.

“I’d go into the recording studio and be unhappy with the sound or confused,” she tells SN&R. “I’m glad now in hindsight, because I really was confused about the direction and style of my music. … People were putting me in the soul genre and R&B box.”

Now, Peters says she’s embracing an indie-folk sound. But by the end of her Goldfield set, it becomes clear that her new direction isn’t that simple. “What Do You Want?” combines Peters’ naturally soulful, deep and sultry vocals with sparse, ethereal instrumentation. And “Run,” the new single, showcases haunting three-part vocal harmonies, powerful drums, unusual dynamics, intricate layers and Joe Kye’s violin. This is the start of Peters as a cinematic artist, ditching any soul, R&B or folk limitations.

She’s launching an IndieGoGo campaign this month to help finish the EP, which she hopes to release in late April or May.

“This EP in general is really about the crossroads everyone experiences in their lives, the difficult decisions they make every day,” she says.

In that sense, it’s deeply personal, as she’s just decided to move to Los Angeles in April with her music career in mind.

“I’m making a lot of big changes and embracing things that are scary and frightening,” she says. “I’m hoping to encourage people to do whatever feels right.”

Hip-hop, reinvented: It’s rare to see two emcees on stage with their heads down, quiet, during the climax of a song. But that happens several times over the course of Ensemble Mik Nawooj’s performance at Sol Collective Saturday night, because the rappers aren’t the star of the show. They’re just one equal part of the 10-piece hip-hop orchestra, which merges hip-hop with classical music to stunning effect.

With piano, drums, bass, cello, violin, clarinet, flute and a soprano opera singer, the Bay Area-based ensemble creates tremendous builds, euphoric crescendos and tragic epilogues. Composer JooWan Kim conducts from behind his piano, wearing long, flowing clothes; long, flowing hair; small, round glasses and Birkenstocks. He doesn’t present himself like a hip-hop artist nor a classical genius—with prestigious degrees from the Berklee College of Music and San Francisco Conservatory, no less. And by and large, the rest of the ensemble eschews such comparisons as well. Their casual nature helps envelop you in the strange, extraordinariness of the situation: a group of expert classical musicians performing covers—or “deconstructions,” as Kim puts it—of the Wu-Tang Clan’s greatest hits.

That’s not quite it either, though. Kim is completely reinventing the structure of each Wu-Tang song, making them multilayered, complex and challenging works. They’re not a genre mashup, and they’re no longer hip-hop or classical. Ensemble Mik Nawooj’s sound operates on its own plane, a completely modern vision that will surely earn copycats in the future.

The following words, projected on the back wall of Sol Collective, pretty much sum up Kim’s story: “I met hip-hop once, now we’re best friends.”

—Janelle Bitker