Howdy. My name is Gabe Dominguez, and for the past 17 years I've written and performed my own music under the moniker of SHAKE YOUR PEACE! I'm a Utah boy, but I'm currently howlin' out of the land of the Lenni Lenape (central New Jersey). My family members and the art that we produce are the products of multicultural threads, held in tension: indigenous and immigrant, as well as black and white; part colonizer, and part rebelling colonized; and my music comes from this place of tension, and of reaching, for the ground.

I play a style of music that I like to call "whup music." Whup is a rock & roll hybridization of: Afro-Latin and Caribbean rhythms, bluegrass fiddling, gospel choir, marching band percussion, and ecotopian perspectives. Yep. That's why I call it whup for short. Take a listen.

Here's a way I like to describe it: "social/eco-justice music you can dance to."

If I were trying to write a breathless artist's statement I might say: "a defiant celebration of human cultural diversity and the wilderness."

...and every tree's our country's flag,

air - water - earth - we give rights to 'em,

so you can open your stores, and throw your wars,

my people won't shop or fight for you!"

(SHAKE YOUR PEACE!, 2023, track 6 "Whenever You're Ready")

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Another way to put it: "Whup Music" sounds like what you'd get if Paul Simon, Michael Jackson, Hector Lavoe, The Mississippi Mass Choir, and eco-anarchist/author Edward Abbey had a baby, and that baby was raised by LA hippies amongst the cowboys of Utah.

"Tie-dye shirt in a country bar,

I was looking 'round the room,

this girl said: "what you lookin' for hippie?"

and I said: "guess I'm looking for you?" 

she said: "I'm lookin' backatchoobaby!"

(SHAKE YOUR PEACE!, 2023, track 2 "Backatchoobaby")

Wait hold up. Bluegrass fiddle and Afro-Latino beats!? Yeah so, as a teenager growing up in Orem, Utah in the 90's, I cultivated a deep love for the fiddle music I heard being played by local bands like Kirkmount, Ryan Shupe & the Rubberband, and my good friends in Fiddlesticks. To me, the sound of their fiddles whupping over the strings made me feel like I did when I was galloping up on the peaks of our local mountain, Timpanogos; it sounded like the wind in my ears. It was the sound of unbeatable wilderness to me. That connection between fiddle music, and wild mountain freedom, is welded tight in my DNA.

In total contrast to these wholesome family bands, my charismatic Mexican dad was raised in the rough ghetto streets of South Central LA where he completely absorbed the unique expression of black street culture that surrounded him there. A child of Mexican immigrants, whose parents refused to speak Spanish to him (so that he and his siblings wouldn't have an accent and face discrimination), raised by a slice of black America, my dad imprinted an organic Afro-Latino cultural thang on me that is totally his own. My dad has often joked however, that the first time he met Puerto Ricans, it was an aha moment for him.

All was well with my soul until I moved to San Francisco in my 20's. During this time I'd go to my housemates' Latin music shows (Puerto Ricans) and though I'd be loving the music, my soul would be yearning for a bluegrass fiddle solo that would never come. On the flipside, when I'd go to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festivals in Golden Gate Park every year I'd be loving the fiddle music, but I'd be yearning for the band to just, put, some, BOODIE on it! Whup music was created because I couldn't find the music that I wanted to hear: Afro-Latino with fiddle, Bluegrass with boodie, and sounding like the wind in your ears.​