Breakfast All Day is a volunteer-run collective that’s keen to create intentional, accessible, and inclusive spaces for art and music in Northern California. Recent bookings include Waxahatchee and PWR BTTM, but traveling artists often skip the span between the Bay Area and Portland. Towards changing that, the organization looks to establish a venue in Arcata, a city in Humboldt County near the eponymous college, to serve both touring acts and local artists.
In an explanatory zine, the collective describe itself as a group of “artists, musicians, queers, activists, weirdos, [and] anarchists” who are interested in challenging received notions of arts spaces and venues. Particular to Arcata, the publication goes on to outline an autonomous, conscientious model for avoiding and resolving conflict, along with practicalities about building a reputation to attract touring groups. In other words, Breakfast All Day appears to be founded on principles that large, long-running venues elsewhere too often fail to recognize the need for at all.
As a member of a regional arts foundation, BAD is eligible for grants and institutional funding, but Of Foggy Forests & Broken Strings, a cassette compilation featuring artists such as All Dogs, Try the Pie, and Downtown Boys, among others, goes the underground fundraising route, calling upon artists the collective has already worked with to help realize its vision of a more permanent space in Arcata. The compilation, premiering below (followed by a flyer for the release show), is an instance of what the collective calls for in its zine: “[a] radical, beautiful little [act] of opposition to the drudgery of lamestream life.”
