Riston Diggs

MC Riston Diggs (the Known Unknowns) recorded his debut album, The Blvd Experience, following the completion of a nine-year Navy career where he served as an aviation administrator. His video for “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” featuring producer/singer Sly Beats, was shot at various locations in San Diego. A new Three Headed Monster EP pairs him again with Sly Beats providing vocals for tracks such as “Back For More,” “Breath Mint,” and “Changed World.”

“The EP is a celebration of our time recording and working together,” Diggs tells the Reader, “a quick capsule of the interesting year we all had for the first time in our lives and how we overcame it. We were already collaborating way before the pandemic, so it was easier to continue to work during the lockdown whenever scheduling permitted. That’s Sly Beats’ specialty, he makes the beats and adds seasoning to the record via singing the chorus.” Riston Diggs will open for One Hot Planet at Soda Bar on August 8. “I’ll be closing out my set with the guys joining me on stage. I also have another project debuting on my birthday, September 7. This will be a solo project produced entirely by dynamic sensation BNYN. I’m already performing songs from the project at my gigs.”

Dave Keuning

Iowa transplant Dave Keuning attracted the attention of 20-year-old Brandon Flowers after placing an ad in the local Las Vegas Weekly looking to form a band, mentioning Oasis. With a four-track demo in hand, Keuning impressed Flowers enough to result in them co-founding the Killers. Keuning just released his sophomore solo album A Mild Case of Everything, featuring 16 tracks written throughout 2020 and recorded in his San Diego home studio. A music video is streaming on his YouTube channel for the guitar driven opening track “From Stardust,” directed by longtime collaborator Russell Sheaffer. The animated stop motion film short explores the theme that all living beings, especially animals and humans, are all connected. “I wrote and recorded this album throughout 2020, I am really proud of the music, and I think it is my best work,” says Keuning. “I felt more comfortable as a singer this time, and also had a lot of fun with the guitar. I also took some chances on some short songs, long songs, and did whatever I felt like. ‘Don’t Poke the Bear’ is a 9-minute song I wrote in the middle of the night and just kept adding parts to it until five in the morning.”

Silent

A video is streaming online for the new track from goth-inclined rockers Silent, “Empty Spaces,” from their upcoming sophomore album (their first in five years) Modern Hate. “For this record,” says the band, “an ever-evolving work in progress on and off over the last five years, the focus culminates in what is happening around the world right now. Modern Hate represents all the racist, supremacist bullshit that has come to the surface again as a new form of rage and hate, not only in America, but across the world. The band also considered all of the mass shootings and killings that have happened across the U.S. over the years. These are some of the heavy influences that brought the band to the idea of the album’s title. Most of the lyrics focus on the disturbing flaws of people and religion, love and dreams.” Jung Sing has been talking up the album with online music sites such as Ordinario Extraordinario and Scene Point Blank, and the band is racking up new accolades at Post-Punk.com, I Die: You Die, in British magazine The Quietus, and elsewhere.

EN Young

Reggae singer E.N. Young has kept busy during the pandemic, with a single called “Queendom” made available in both electric and acoustic versions, as well as a collaborative album, Raggamuffin Ride Riddim’, featuring eleven different singers on his song “Cooyah Raggamuffin.” He also released a remake of a track from his first album, “Wicked Man,” this time featuring reggae star Michael Palmer. Now, “I’m working on live dub performances from many songs I’ve produced over the years,” says Young, who recently gave his four year-old son Sol his first dub lesson. “As a young kid getting into reggae music, I discovered dub and was immediately hooked and taken into a trance. It was after listening to the ambient spacey mixes from engineers like King Tubby, Scientist, [and] Mad Professor that I knew I needed to learn more about this art. Dub is an alternative mix to a song. Instead of focusing on the lead vocal or lead instrument, dub focuses on the drum and bass, while creating space using time-based effects on the different layers in the song.”

Scott Weiland

In their San Diego days (1987 through 1990, when they moved to Los Angeles), Stone Temple Pilots called themselves Mighty Joe Young. In a 1994 Rolling Stone poll, STP was voted Worst New Band by critics, and Best New Band by readers. The same year, STP’s song “Plush” won a Best Hard Rock Performance Grammy. The band’s late singer Scott Weiland will be the subject of an upcoming biographical film from Dark Picture called Paper Heart, based on Weiland’s own memoir Not Dead & Not for Sale, co-written with David Ritz. “It’s an honor to have the trust to tell Scott’s story and the ability to portray the lesser known sides of him,” says Dark Picture cofounder Jennifer Erwin, “the loving and tender man he was, the high school athlete he was, the melancholy soul he was, and the legendary frontman that he will always be.” Weiland passed away in his sleep while on a 2015 tour stop in Bloomington, Minnesota, with his band the Wildabouts. His son Noah Weiland recently formed a group called Blu Weekend with Tye Trujillo, son of Metallica’s Robert Trujillo. Noah and Tye previously played together in Suspect208 alongside Slash’s son London Hudson, but Noah Weiland departed that group in January.