> CONCERT SAMPLER
Live music highlights for the week of Oct. 12-18. Rakta and S.H.I.T. Sao Paulo, Brazil’s four-woman band Rakta delivers drenching, horrormovie-soundtracking post-punk, and they’re not averse to shaking up established orders — dropping guitars entirely for last year’s III album, for example. They’re an exotic and fitting choice for opening night and opening salvoes at this Kensington spot, with many more lobbing mortars to come over the course of this weekend’s Not Dead Yet punk festival. At seven years old, NDY’s DIY approach is rolling along into middle age in fest years and still kicking as in S.H.I.T., the local howlers and NDY returnees along on the bill. (Thursday, Coalition, doors 8 p.m.) Chino Amobi Heavy and subversive to the core, the Nigerian-American Amobi’s electronic collages never stay in the same spot long enough or fit together like a pop song — he works to create chaos over order, with big bass, chopped-up beats, a clucking chicken or a call to prayers among the disparate parts. It’s music for a dance club at world’s end — immersive, challenging and in keeping with both Amobi’s co-founding role with NON, an “independent digital nation state” of African artists given to carve out their own space while disrupting the status quo, as well as this 12th X Avant Festival’s theme of resistance. (Friday, 918 Bathurst, doors 7 p.m.) Las Minas Puerto Flamenco Less an individual star turn or a club revue and more an all-star show taking flamenco around the world, it’s the touring spinoff of Cante de las Minas — at 56 years running in coastal La Union, Spain’s oldest flamenco festival. The show features 11 of the annual’s award winners combining their specialties in cante, dance, guitar, flute, sax and percussion straight out of the Andalusian heartland and incorporating sounds picked up along the way as it travels the world by sea to the ports of Galicia, Lisbon and across the Atlantic to Havana and Latin America. Intensely felt and a visual knockout, flamenco makes for an all-round entrancing night out and with this first visit into town from the troupe it has to be the pick of the week. (Friday, Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre, 8 p.m.) Jessica Lea Mayfield Amid the jangle of her fourth LP, the Nashville-based Mayfield delivers the telling kiss-off line: “I’m sorry but sorry is gone,” setting off on an honest and unapologetic ride through the trauma of her abusive marriage, and the recovery. You might say her guitar is her most steadfast companion. “I view instrumentation as another way to talk,” she told Stereogum. “The last album I made, I played all the guitars and it felt like it was just me speaking through the guitar.” With the record anchoring the set list, along with selections from a back catalogue touching on her Black Keys connections, folk, country, grunge and her roots in bluegrass, this return to Toronto looms as one of the most potent in the confessional singersongwriter division this fall. (Sunday, Rivoli, doors 8 p.m.) Kesha Formerly known as Ke$ha, she’s dropped that styling and this is her, or at least more of her own self, following a highly charged and highly public legal battle with her former producer Dr. Luke that remains without end in sight. The five years away included rehab for an eating disorder; now comes third LP Rainbow, long delayed with no thanks to all that turmoil — and surprise, it’s an almost sunny paean to optimism, perseverance and self-empowerment. This tour is the jump-start to getting her career going again with a shade of pop that leans less on party-hearty clichés and Autotuned disguising, and more on throaty anthems with a full rock band behind her supplying muscle. As striking reinventions go, more power to her. With Savoy Mo- tel. (Monday, Rebel, doors 7 p.m.) Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Joseph Shabason A lot of the pop music we hear today owes a debt to Berliner Roedelius, who with Cluster and Harmonia in the ’70s was among the early shapers of Kosmische Musik — cosmic music, or in its more familiar English nomenclature, krautrock, and hugely influential then via Bowie and Brian Eno and to this day via acts as varied as Kasabian and Toronto’s Absolutely Free. A week shy of his 83rd birthday, he drops in to catch up; he’s no less active and restless but is landing himself these days in more chill, piano-driven sonic settings. Also on the bill, multivalent Joseph Shabason’s pedal-driven saxophone trips figure to be a lovely complement off his Aytche debut solo recording, one of the year’s great late-night, head-tripping listens. (Tuesday, Monarch Tavern, doors 8 p.m.)