City Guide: Portland Music Edition
With Alex Fitch from Maps Music
Maps is a full-service music licensing and audio branding agency built to elevate creativity, with artists and content makers all around the world.
We love Maps for their consistent bolstering of Portland-based musicians, fun events hosted in their beautiful Southeast Portland space (“Good Space”), and their general attitude toward making musicianship financially sustainable.
In the words of Maps’ founder, Alex Fitch:
“Maps is an amalgamation of my experience being a long time touring musician. Coming from a musician background, I wanted to find ways to create financial sustainability for musicians since it’s becoming increasingly hard to sustainably exist as a musician. We work to represent artists and labels around the world, and from various decades, across all genres, to license their music in advertisements, TV shows, and films.”
“‘Good Space,’ is our 3rd space/community & event space concept where we have hosted live performances from artists overseas, dinners, intentional listening events, and art shows. Many don’t know the difference between Maps and Good Space, and that is okay, we are here for the ambiguity : )”
We asked Alex about his favorite Portland spots for a special, music-themed City Guide. Read on for recs!
Barn is a Black-led space & platform for electronic music artists located here in Portland, OR. It’s a DIY, self-funded effort built and run by Cole Mitchell Johnson, who is arguably putting Portland back on the musical cultural map in America. It’s rare to have spaces in Portland that don’t have deep pockets and money and $100k sound systems, doing such high level programming. This is the pure embodiment of a genuine love for music and artists built by sweat and tears. Cole at Barn is flying artists out from all around the world to perform, making every flyer, promoting, managing the venue, and also DJing what seems like at least weekly (often B2B with Omari Jazz, another huge contributor to the space and Portland music community).
Cole, aside from being a great musician under their project name “sqip,” is also an incredible graphic designer and coder (they worked on our website).Their flyers were featured in Wieden+Kennedy as a larger art exhibition. Cole and Omari are also Maps artists and we are really hyped on everything they are doing for Portland and the music scene.
Owner Michael Gersten is another one of these Portland people who has a true love and appreciation for music and the music community. I don’t make it over as much as I should since it’s in Kenton, but I’ve known Michael for a minute, and have seen the amount of energy he puts into supporting artists, hosting shows, and having great vinyl selection. Our artist Helado Negro just DJ’d over at Specks, and they have a new really impressive sound system I’m excited to check out.
I would be remiss for not including this place. It’s just a true gem of old Portland located next door to Sweedeedee; a long standing Portland institution. The selection of vinyl is very uniquely Mississippi, which includes often lost and forgotten international music, delta blues, folk, jazz, and more left of center “outsider” type music. We are also honored to be working with them to place their music in TV shows, films, and other projects.
Throwing this out there as a wild card. It’s a cocktail bar in SE that is obviously well known around town. But someone over there……whoever has the aux whenever I go in has immaculate taste. I think I know who it is…. But I want to keep guessing.
Honorable Mentions
I have to include: Passenger Seat Records, Music History, Music Plastique + Partly. They are all super rad, great people, working hard and with passion, doing things for the community.
Find Maps Music and Good Space at 1227 SE Stark Street, Portland, Oregon 97214.