Quincy’s own Nightbrain will take the stage at the 33rd High Sierra Music Festival after winning the festival’s annual Bands Contest. The band could not be more thrilled: High Sierra is “a really diverse yet intimate space for music,” said lead singer Suzanne DeMartimprey. “It’s such a cool opportunity to get into an international crowd.”
Beginnings
Nightbrain got its start late in summer 2020, during the COVID pandemic. DeMartimprey and Alex Lemnah, keyboard player and band leader, found themselves living on a property in Twain with a few friends and a lot of time on their hands. They started playing with loops and developing songs together. Soon they were playing small shows, the very first a memorial service.
Over the next few years the group grew organically from two friends with a loop machine to a six-piece band: Emmanuel Lemnah on drums, brothers Chris and Nathan Retallack on bass and guitar, respectively, and Chase Ramirez as percussion and horn player. Nightbrain is a true local band. Five of the members grew up in Quincy, each performing with the Quincy Junior-Senior High School jazz band in their time. DeMartimprey hails from Westwood, just over the Lassen County line.
The band describes itself as a genre-bending blend of groove, rock, Latin and synth psychedelia styles. Their inspirations are just as varied. Nathan Retallack cites Spencer Kilpatrick as a current favorite. “His playing is really genuine and inspiring,” he said. DeMartimprey favors blues and bluegrass, the likes of Erykah Badu, Norah Jones and Aretha Franklin — “the classics,” she said — influences evident in her own vocal style. And Billy Strings, she added.
An evolving creative process
Early songwriting mirrored the process of the band’s formation, with Alex Lemnah developing progressions and DeMartimprey collaborating on lyrics. The other band members shaped parts for themselves within that established structure. The result is Nightbrain’s first album, “In Daylight,” released to stream in late 2024. CDs will be available at High Sierra, with vinyl coming soon. The packaging features cover art by local painter Liz Swindell and photography by Simon Berry.
For both Lemnah and DeMartimprey, the album is an exploration of the subconscious. It’s also “an exploration of my various types of love and an exploration of melody and harmony,” said DeMartimprey. This sparked a few mild quips about exploration and early explorers, the sort of easy banter that comes naturally to people who spend a great deal of time together.
The band is already hard at work creating the songs that will make up their second album. This time, the writing process has been more dispersed, with all band members being more deeply involved, each taking the lead for some songs. “Writing is an evolving process,” said Alex Lemnah. “We’ve always been a band in evolution.”
The mechanics of streaming music platforms encourage releasing each song as a single, as well as a fully fledged album — a strategy the group plans to embrace, Alex Lemnah said. “The model of releasing an album is a little outdated. We pretty much just went for it and we’ll probably go for it again.”
At home at High Sierra
Nightbrain is one of two bands chosen to perform at High Sierra Music Festival through the annual Bands Contest. It’s a performance many years in the making. Collectively, the band members have attended High Sierra over 75 times, according to their website.
“I think I was around 9 or 10 years old when I realized I wanted to be up on one of those stages at High Sierra,” Alex Lemnah recalled. Now, after years of work, that dream is coming true.
Alex and Emmanuel Lemnah applied for the inaugural Band Contest when it was introduced almost 10 years ago, but with no luck. This year, it was DeMartimprey who, the night before the deadline, rapidly spun up a website (a requirement for the contest) and completed the application.
Nightbrain was one of 16 finalists selected from around 250 applicants. At that point, the whole group went all in preparing for Round 2 of the contest, a performance in Nevada City. The community showed up, Emmanuel Lemnah said: 30 fans driving 2 1/2 hours on a Thursday night to cheer the band on. Even before Nightbrain took the stage, the outcome was clear: “Our fans were by far the most unhinged,” Alex Lemnah said.
The third and final round of the contest consisted of an online vote. Once again, “the community rallied like only Quincy can,” Alex Lemnah said. The band is enormously grateful to their community of fans. “It’s incredible,” said Ramirez.
Nightbrain is scheduled to perform on High Sierra’s opening day, Thursday, July 3, at 1:30 p.m. inside the Lagniappe Lounge in the Funkin’ Jamhouse. They hope to be “that band who’s everywhere” at the festival, Alex Lemnah said: Wherever you turn you see their poster, hear someone talking about them or see them playing. It’s “the right time and place to be doing what we’re doing,” Emmanuel Lemnah said. “With the right people.”
New to High Sierra this year is a local popup stage in the Grandstand Meadow, where regional bands will perform in the intervals between festival sets. Nightbrain plans to be among them, along with the band members’ various other groups, including Algo Latino and The Back 40. Local musicians Mason Edwards and Murphy Wylde are also expected to perform.
Nightbrain aims to play fewer shows this summer than last in the hope of devoting more time to songwriting. Fans can still catch them at the Art Town event in Reno July 18. Then, in the autumn, it’s off on a tour of the northwest with stops in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with a showing at the Offbeat Music Festival in Reno Oct. 3.
