Interim police chief Adrian Diaz announced several planned changes to the force this week. The changes include converting 100 officers to patrol duties, increasing patrol shifts, decreasing the overtime budget, and increasing supervisory accountability. The idea is that by moving officers from special units to patrol there will be more available to handle 911 calls. (KUOW)

Landlords are bribing renters with concessions since the market has stalled during the pandemic. A report from Zillow found that 37.5% of listings in the Seattle area in July had some sort of concession advertised. This is compared to last year when only 16.7% had a concession like free rent, free parking or gift cards. (Seattle PI)

Ice cream for a cause? Sign us up. Local ice cream shop Sweet Alchemy has teamed up with Intentionalist — a website that promotes businesses from marginalized communities — for a new project that showcases flavors from BIPOC-owned restaurants. You can try “Brew the Right Thing” — a collaboration with Fulcrum Coffee—or History in the Baking made with Salvadorean Bakery. Pre-ordering is available now. A portion of sales will help one of a few different Seattle nonprofits. (Eater Seattle)

Saving the historic Ark Lodge theatre. The old Masonic Lodge that the Columbia City theatre is housed in went up for sale recently. Independent movie theatres like the Cinerama, Seven Gables, and Guild 45 have all closed in recent years. The Ark Lodge’s owner has set up a T-shirt sale and is planning on launching a GoFundMe campaign to try and keep the theatre open. (South Seattle Emerald)

Your patience with me for not having a new artist to highlight last week will be rewarded with today’s double feature. Both artists are from Seattle and made a name for themselves in the music scene. David Ansari was part of Vallis Alps, an indie-pop duo that played a number of festivals, while Sol Moravia-Rosenberg has independently released five EPs and three albums since 2008.

The two collaborated on the brand new track “Not Me,” which is the latest single off of Ansari’s debut solo EP (it drops today). Ansari made the beat shortly after moving to New York and quickly came to the conclusion he wanted Sol to rap on it. The product is a single featuring distorted beats and a frenetic big city vibe. Listen to the new single and watch the video here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity, you can read the full interview here. 

Name: davey // Sol
Website: notdavey.com // www.solsays.com
Socials: twitter.com/no_davey, facebook.com/notnotdavey instagram.com/notdavey // www.twitter.com/solzilla, www.instagam.com/solzilla
Song to know: Not Me (feat. Sol)

What is your relationship with Seattle currently?
D: Seattle’s where I grew up. I’m living in LA now but this town will always be home.

S: I was born and raised in Seattle and live here currently.

Favorite venue in Seattle you’ve played? Favorite Seattle venue to see a show at?
D: New Neumos, old Neumos. just Neumos in general.

S: My favorite venue I’ve played is also my favorite venue to watch shows. The Showbox at the Market! 

How would you describe your sound, individually speaking?
D: It’s like if you gave Rachmaninoff an MPC and asked him to make rap beats out of samples from Pantera records, and then you played the resulting beat tape over Bluetooth 1.0 on a broken car stereo.

S:  I usually leave the descriptors to the listener. For me, I’m just trying to make something I would enjoy listening to myself.

What was your collaboration process like? Did the lyrics exist before the beat or were they made together?
D: The whole thing was pretty effortless — I made the “Not Me” beat and knew pretty quickly that I wanted to reach out to Sol to rap on it. So after our mutual friend Budo connected us, I sent the beat over to Sol and he started writing immediately. So technically the beat came first, but the song itself didn’t really exist until Sol had done his thing.

[For davey] What made you decide to go solo?
D: There was a point in 2017 when I was burned out from a year of touring with Vallis and losing sight of why I enjoyed making music in the first place. So I decided to actively put aside time to just make beats for fun, without any expectations of polishing them for release. I ended up spending a lot of time messing with radios and synths and seeing how far I could distort and stretch sound before it became grainy and unusable. Eventually, I had a folder full of ideas that were starting to form an EP, and at that point, it was a no-brainer.

[For Sol] Can you talk about the lyrics like ‘Too many young Black G’s screen printed on tees’ and ‘Don’t talk to police, they just kill in the streets,’? You said you wrote this back in Winter 2018, but there’s a new sort of relevance to them right now. Why’d those lyrics come out then?
S: Plain and simple, these issues are in no way new. We are frankly just in a different moment as a society where the collective consciousness is thinking more directly about race in our country. I wish more than anything that lyrics about these issues would be dated but the reality is we live in a world poisoned by racial bias and institutional racism and I don’t see these issues ever going away in my lifetime in the current “modern” society we live in. With that said, we have to keep confronting these things and pushing forward towards progress. That’s what those before us did and that’s what those after us will have to do. It’s an intergenerational, global struggle against oppression, so when I talk about these things, I am simply referencing the reality of this struggle. I don’t have the answers, just a bit of a platform and a consciousness I can’t keep quiet.

Where can people find your music? How can they support you and other local musicians during this pandemic?
D: You’ll be able to find my music in all the usual spots online. I would say the best way of supporting me at this point is following my socials — I know it’s a boring answer, sorry — because I’ve got so many exciting things in the pipeline for 2020-2021, and that’ll be the easiest way to keep up. There are some great Seattle-based funds that support artists financially through the COVID-19 crisis that people can give to.

S: Support your favorite artists by buying their merch and music from them directly! It goes a long way.

Favorite song from a Seattle-area artist OR about Seattle/the PNW?
D: “Southside Revival” by Blue Scholars

S: “I Just Wanna” by Jarv D

Anything else you’d like to add/promote?
D: If you donate to either tahirih.org (legal support for immigrant womxn & girls) or your local Black Lives Matter chapter, I’ll send you a free copy of my EP when it comes out later this year.

Have you taken public transportation recently? If you said no, you’re not alone. Since the start of the pandemic, ridership has dropped drastically for public transit systems across the country.

What does that mean for public transit in the Pacific Northwest?

Reader Julie F. asked that question for the final story in our series with VertueLab: How will public transit survive the falling ridership and revenues wrought by the pandemic?

We dug into that question in Portland and Seattle, and here’s what we found.

This series is sponsored by VertueLab. VertueLab did not provide editorial input.

Enjoy the long weekend—I know I will. See you back here Wednesday! ✌️

—The Evergrey