Pickathon 2016 starts this week! (Check back tomorrow for the Mercury‘s VERY THOROUGH guide to Portland’s finest and funnest music festival.) And that means our video series of performances from Pickathon 2015 is drawing to a close. Shed a tear. This special series has highlighted the Starlight Stage, the intimate after-hours stage that hosts Pickathon shows well into the wee hours. And there’s no finer finale for the Starlight series than this clip of six-string bass maestro Thundercat popping his way through “Lotus and the Jondy.”
If you recognize the little snippet Thundercat plays at the front of this tune, that’s right, it’s the closing theme from Adventure Time (AKA “Island Song” by Ashley Eriksson of Olympia band LAKE).
Pickathon re-ups this week starting Thursday (for early-entry ticket holders) and continues all the way through the weekend. If you’re not going, there’s a livestream this year, too. Here’s the complete schedule of the livestream (PDF opens in a new window), which you can access at pickathon.com starting on Friday at noon. In the meantime, get your video fix by checking out all the past episodes of the Starlight Stage series—brought to you by New Belgium Brewing—available at these hot links below.
• Episode 1 – Sonny and the Sunsets
• Episode 2 – Israel Nash
• Episode 3 – Hiss Golden Messenger
• Episode 4 – King Tuff
• Episode 5 – Tinariwen