Winter Williams Presents the Bay Area debut of Dusk Dept. with Otis McDonald Trio opening at the Ivy Room in Albany, CA on Wednesday, May 13th.
Doors are 7pm and downbeat 7:30pm.
Advance tickets are $15 and can be purchased here at ivyroom.com.
Day-of tickets can be purchased at the door for $20 (cash only).
Dusk Dept. is a seven-piece collective emerging from the deep corners of the modern funk underground…a shadowy convergence of musicians whose fingerprints can be found on the grooves of the heaviest hitters in the lineage of rhythm.
Formed unofficially from the raging of late night sessions that transformed into full-fledged studio recordings, Dusk Dept. keeps its members hidden beneath black hoods, trading ego & resumes for atmosphere, and identity for collective creating. Onstage, the robes blur every boundary…between player and audience, between band and ritual, between now and the memory of some older recording that felt cutting edge that you just discovered that you now can’t remember.
Their debut, a self-titled album arriving this May 2026 on Ear Up Records (founded by Jeff Coffin of the Dave Matthews Band), sounds like the meeting point of the sacred and the filthy; analog funk baptized in mystery. Seven players. Seven voices. One department in charge of the night shift.
Dusk Dept. doesn’t announce itself. It appears… an injection of brass, a thump of bass, a silhouette under dim lights. Then it’s gone, leaving behind only sweat, grooves, and questions.
From the mind and ears of producer/multi-instrumentalist, Joe Bagale, comes a sound that is fresh but tangibly rooted in nostalgia. The name is Otis McDonald. The mission? Good Music. In 2015, Bagale released 80 tracks for free, under the name Otis McDonald. Released as copyright free music, exclusively through the YouTube audio library, by 2016 these tracks had been downloaded over 3 million times, and appeared in over 3.5 million videos all around the world with an astonishing total of 7.6 billion views. in 2019 Bagale released a full length album, "People Music," in collaboration with his youtube subscribers, took over the lease for Studio D at the historic Hyde Street Studios, in San Francisco and in 2020 he launched a weekly live stream where he creates a brand new track on the spot and releases every week on all streaming platforms. Whether it's performing, writing, producing, or coming up with new ways to engage with his fans, Otis Mcdonald plans on giving the world a dose of the past while always looking to the future.
