RIGHTSTARTER

Our new single, “Noble Savage”, drops on all streaming services on October 24, 2024!

RIGHTSTARTER is a creative and dialectic initiative founded by acclaimed writer/musician PC Muñoz and award-winning rapper/electronic musician DEM ONE; vocalist/musical Swiss Army Knife Bryan Dyer regularly joins for performances and recordings. In an age of rancorous rhetoric and division, RIGHTSTARTER presents a guttural artistic response to this global moment. We aim to illuminate submerged truths, transgress imposed boundaries, subvert expectations, and assert denied identities in hostile times. Our aesthetic is the Zen of the One, with echoes of free improvisation, musique concréte, hip-hop, and funk. Our ancestors include Gil Scott-Heron, Leonard Cohen, John Cage, Don Cherry, and Chuck D. Our name comes straight from a 1987 Public Enemy song. Our creations come in all forms.

Our current multimedia project Black/Pacific: Sounds of the Noble Savage was commissioned by Mosaic America. This project thoroughly examines the call of the West, the lure of the Pacific, and the distorted historical views of indigenous Black and Brown humanity. We premiered this project at the 2022 San José Jazz Summer Fest. Check the trailer for the premiere here.

Past projects include the conception of Blood Moon Orchestra, a name and project idea which originated as a RIGHTSTARTER offshoot and is now a standalone project; two videos with Seattle filmmaker Christopher “Paper Son” Woon, live painting/music events with San Francisco painter Leon Loucheur, a live music installation at the San José Museum of Art, a live performance at San Francisco's Apple Union Square for the Today at Apple programming initiative. Upcoming projects include continued DEPROGRAMMING ANTIBLACKNESS workshops, and further pop-up performances and audio communiques.

PC Muñoz is a recording artist, musician, and writer based in San Francisco. His singular compositional and performing style bridges the gap between the insistent rhythms of funk, jazz-informed improvisation, pop songforms, and aleatoric processes of the avant-garde. His body of work includes recordings and writings across multiple mediums, from GRAMMY-nominated contemporary classical music with composer/cellist Joan Jeanrenaud to CMJ-charting funk songs and modern dance/multimedia productions. PC’s past projects include collaborations with rock legend Jackson Browne, dream-pop artist Ingrid Chavez, choreographer Robert Moses, Dr. Fink of Prince and the Revolution, woodwinds renegade Kyle Bruckmann, Oakland hip-hop artist Kev Choice, choreographer/composer Robert Moses and countless other musicians and artists across a wide range of genres. He is a current Mosaic America Fellow, a recent (2022) Quinteto Latino Composer-in-Residence, a 2014-2015 Dresher Ensemble Artist-in-Residence in Oakland, a 2014 Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center grantee, a 2013 Loft Literary Center Equilibrium Fellow in Minneapolis, and was a Board Governor for the SF Chapter of the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs from 2015-2018. He is also the first Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, CA. His work has been praised by NPR, Performing Songwriter, Electronic Musician, DownBeat, the Wall Street Journal, and his writing is featured in the new collection from University of Hawai’i Press, New CHamoru Literature. He currently also plays with multi-reed sorcerer David Boyce in an experimental jazz duo called Red Fast Luck. Learn more at pcmunoz.com and redfastluck.com.