On Saturday, September 28, more than 35 bands will take over 10 St. Mary’s Strip venues for the San Antonio Music Showcase, a Current-sponsored night highlighting some of the city’s finest homegrown talent. We hit up members of four of those acts to talk about the Alamo City’s music scene, hitting on its highs and lows.

Sam Berton, Vocalist and Guitarist, Noise Quota
Young band Noise Quota performs ’90s rock-inspired garage and bedroom pop.


How long has Noise Quota been together?
Noise Quota has been an idea in my head since before graduating high school in 2015. It started off as more as a garage punk kind of band, and as members changed and I got better at my instrument and my tastes kind of changed, we fell into a different kind of sound. But the Noise Quota that people would know about today has probably been going on since 2016. That’s also when we started playing shows regularly.


When did you start going to shows?
Honestly, I didn’t realize that there were a lot of shows to go to in San Antonio until I started playing them. It was going to places that I wanted to play at like Imagine Books and Vapure back in 2016, that made me realize that there was a whole music scene here, so it was actually pretty late. It was around the same time that I wanted to play shows with my band that I started going to shows regularly.




Being sort of new to the music scene, what are some positive and negatives you see?
It’s crazy how many really talented people there are making music here in town that you don’t really have to scratch too far beyond the surface to find out about. I think it’s cool that there are a lot of supportive people in the music scene.


And there are cities like Austin that — it’s really well known they’ve got this great music scene, [but] there’s not much difference as far as talent. We have a lot of talent. I just think that there are a lot of infrastructural differences between here and Austin that make San Antonio feels like it’s more underground and unrecognized. I do think that San Antonio has a lot of potential, and if younger bands can continue to support each other the way that I’ve seen coming into the scene a few years ago. If that can continue, I think there’s a lot of room for growth.


Noise Quota plays the Indie Rock Showcase at Hi-Tones during the San Antonio Music Showcase.


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