Queen City Sounds and Art

Akiyoshi Yasuda’s Ambient Piece “day4 by memento” Induces the Listener Into a Deep and Transformative Environmental Awareness

Akiyoshi Yasuda, photo courtesy the artist

Akiyoshi Yasuda immediately puts us in a time and place that feels familiar yet enigmatic from the beginning of “day4 by memento.” The constantly present harmonic drone is like the background energy of an urban environment like a steady presence of the human collective. The layers of textural rhythm and resonating tones and swells of abstract sounds all interact to create a tapestry of noise that flows into your brain like becoming fully aware of the world around you that you normally take for granted which could be startling but Yasuda’s composition is more soothing and it causes you to pay attention to details you might not otherwise and notice things like the occasional processed piano work through the haze of closer sound sources mixing with all other sensory elements. The song is like a musical Zen experience in which one becomes present and accepting of what is around you without judgment or becoming overwhelmed by one’s hyper awareness. And then the sonic energy recedes seeming to have taken no time but in fact brought you along for that journey for over five minutes. The production on the piece itself is impressive for how Yasuda placed each sound component and orchestrated them all for a singular listening experience that conveyed experiences beyond what music often does. Listen to “day4 by memento” on Spotify and follow the Japanese composer at the links provided.

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Akiyoshi Yasuda on Instagram

Bondo’s Hypnotic Yet Cathartic Post-Hardcore Single “Running Back” Draws You In With Its Sonic Contrasts

Bondo seems to sketch and stretch out musical ideas on “Running Back,” like its structure was arranged like stringing together journal entries. Connecting thoughts and feelings with a hypnotic and meditative bass line and drums. The vocals are nearly laconic and meditative but the guitar fractures that peace and feeds back slightly to give the song some evocative dissonance. The song’s mood is reminiscent of a more mellow Unwound or more discordant Versus song which is what makes it immediately relistenable. It is economical in its composition and hits the dramatic notes at the right times with a sense of emotional urgency. What isn’t as obvious initially is how it isn’t conventional in its structure. There is no intro or outro, just moments in time in the songwriting and the way it draws you into its dreamlike tone and thrilling moments of peak catharsis. Watch the video for “Running Back” on YouTube and follow Bondo at the links below. The band’s latest, self-titled, album releases July 24, 2026 on limited vinyl, digital download and streaming.

Bondo on Instagram

Bondo on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S6E05: Michael McGrath

Michael McGrath, photo courtesy Amy McGrath

Michael McGrath is one of the premier live music photographers based out of Colorado. Born in the Bronx, McGrath found himself seeing the Rolling Stones play Folsom Field in Boulder in 1981 and found a resonance with the state and has lived in New Mexico and Colorado since. Having studied at University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and University of New Mexico in Albuquerque he took advantage of his access to camera equipment and film processing facilities to focus on his early endeavors in live music photography. Since around the mid 90s McGrath has shot for New York Times, The Denver Post, Vice, Relix and various other publications. His photos of Yoko Ono were included in the impressive one volume career retrospective of her work titled Infinite Universe At Dawn. These days McGrath is the primary photographer for the music website Audiovore. All of these details, though, leave out McGrath’s presence in Denver as one of the most active photographers of live music for over a decade and a half always capturing the essence of the show and knowing how to get the right lighting and angle to convey the life inherent in the subjects of his photos with high quality equipment. You can see him patiently and quietly getting the perfect images knowing so many of the rooms well and the lighting situations he is likely to encounter and how to adapt to dynamic situations. But beyond being a photographer McGrath has become a part of the local music community because of his expansive personality, inherent friendliness and unpretentious grace. The world of music through McGrath’s lens is a better place than we’re used to and one you want to be involved with because it lends the art a timeless and compelling quality that isn’t present in all concert photography and an intuitive sense of composition born of inherent skill and honed practice. The interview presented is very casual with plenty of surprises and left turns.

Listen to our interview with Michael McGrath on Bandcamp and follow his work at the links below. He, his wife Amy and one of their children Molly, a musician and writer, will be guests at the next Analog Salon at Posner Center for International Development on Wednesday, July 15, 2026 with doors and DJ at 6pm, talk at 7pm during which the family will in the tradition of the event discuss some of the records that most impacted them. Molly’s band Tassles will also play a set.

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Michael McGrath on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S6E04: Emily Rach Beisel

Emily Rach Beisel released their sophomore album Sumptuous Branching via avant-garde label Amalgam on April 10, 2026. The album informed partly by late medieval chant and its use of intertwining voices and a kind of organic sonic architecture free of the strictures of codified modern music theory and expectations on the part of the artist and listener. Beisel is a Chicago-based composer, improviser, educator, curator and specialist in woodwinds known for commanding and visceral live performances in which they employ extended technoque in vocals and instrumentals with analog electronics as part of the musical pieces. The album has an entrancing enigmatic quality with an expansive heaviness balanced with a keen sense of emotional atmospherics. While working on the album Beisel was reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 album House of Leaves and for the track “Cantilevers” in particular the novel’s lack of conventional resolution and a suggestion of endless pathways of endless varieties finds a parallel with Beisel’s idea of a chant in which the distinct voices often begin together but go along to their natural trajectories. Beisel conceived of the album as a set of songs that had a unified quality that could be performed live as a solo artist. Listening to the album one can hear the challenge of presenting the material live with its complex layers and rhythms yet it also feels of a piece that tells a story of a mythical journey of personal transformation through audacious creative action. Fans of Sun Ra’s more out there synth explorations and Popol Vuh’s more cosmic folk and drone leanings will deeply appreciate Beisel’s cinematic compositions and their willingness to go off standard musical paths. Sumptuous Branching is out now on limited vinyl, digital download and streaming.

Listen to our interview with Emily Rach Beisel on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below.

emilyrachbeisel.com

Emily Rach Beisel on Bandcamp

Emily Rach Beisel on Instagram

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Amalgam on Instagram

Amalgam on Facebook

Coloma’s Introspective and Melancholic Dream Pop Single “Skylights” Eases Lingering Emotional Turmoil With Its Gentle Touch

Coloma brings an intimate air to “Skylights” with a steady, jazz-like beat and gentle guitar accents and gossamer melodies around deeply introspective, melancholic vocals. It has a reflective mood processing sadness and a sense of guilt over how things have gone and a yearning for some kind of reconciliation. In moments the way the vocals and guitar are arranged and sync up in their tones is reminiscent of early Mojave 3, Mazzy Star and the more dreamlike moments of Throwing Muses. The tenderly shimmering slowcore style of the song keeps you engaged with its expansive vulnerability and in the emotional moment and treating psychological pain with the gentleness required to get through the toughest dips in mood and truly feel the feelings one might bury on initial impact in order to not be sunk by them. The sensitive and subtle production all around really helps the song to shine and for the emotional beats to hit perfectly. Listen to “Skylights” on YouTube and follow Coloma at the links provided.

Coloma on Instagram

Coloma on Apple Music

Moodlighting’s Effervescent Single “Guardrail” is a Dream Pop Song About the Foibles of the Tourist Mindset

Moodlighting, photo courtesy the artists

Moodlighting has been talented at crafting simple and uplifting melodies with guitar and vocals from its early days when the duo was performing in Denver before relocating to California. Its new single “Guardrail” is paired with “Rude sometimes” and the song showcases layers of delicate guitar with crystalline tone and expertly accented, chiming jangle riffs that complement perfectly almost ethereal vocals like a latter day Slumberland Records. The song sparkles and sounds like it’s dancing about with how the rhythms are arranged. And yet the song appears to be about being annoyed with tourists in Australia, you know the kind, that treat places they visit like an exotic and disposable commodity instead of a place with a true sense of place and organic community that has to contend with how attractive it is to people who don’t feel like they need to respect the complexity and dignity of a place and people that aren’t just there to cater to your implicitly consumerist mindset. But the song on its own feels like a soothing and unexpected breeze in the summer and an evolution into an expanded songwriting style for the band whose new album party school! drops in early August. Listen to “Guardrail” on Spotify and follow moodlighting at the links below.

moodlighting on Instagram

moodlighting on Bandcamp

Battery Operated Orchestra’s “Alligator” is a Triumphant Synth Pop Song About Exiting an Oppressive, Toxic Relationship

Battery Operated Orchestra, photo courtesy the artists

Battery Operated Orchestra’s video for “Alligator” is reminiscent of the visual style of Damian McCarthy and Phil Tippett with an unusual underground chamber in which the narrator frolics and acts out the claustrophobic mood of the song. It’s all very surreal and borderline elevated horror especially with the decayed structures of the environment and washes of color until our protagonist escapes into sunlit fields. It suits a song seemingly about someone who has felt under the spell of someone whose ways of being and talking initially charmed but the habits are revealed as methods of keeping someone trapped in a relationship and not acts of genuine love. The saturated synth and soothing moods build up to an urgent pace as escape from a stifling relationship and the path out becomes clear against the odds and it has a triumphant tone, a sound of yearned for liberation. Musically it’s reminiscent of both the Cardigans and Japanese Breakfast and fans of either will find much to like in the way BOO crafts its creative and textural beats and layers of complimentary melodies to great emotional impact. Watch the video for “Alligator” on YouTube and follow BOO at the links provided. The band’s new album Sea Views Soft Rains is out August 4, 2026.

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Battery Operated Orchestra on Twitter

Battery Operated Orchestra on Facebook

Battery Operated Orchestra on Instagram

Battery Operated Orchestra on Bandcamp

Daniele Sciolla’s Sprightly and Percussive Electronic Piece “Ultra Brave” is Like Music For an Exploratory Video Game

Daniele Sciolla, photo courtesy the artist

Daniele Sciolla offers only bright, percussive tones on “Ultra Brave.” The song’s infectiously upbeat pace is at turns minimal and maximalist but using a simple sound palette to craft a full musical experience. Like the soundtrack to an update to a 1980s video game, the type based more on exploring a world and gathering items of knowledge and building rather than consuming or destroying. Think more like music for Marble Madness or Qix but with a whole world built around them inviting curiosity. There is something refreshing to the mind with the song and even as it outros on a more chill note it feels just right for all the activity of the first part of the song. Listen to “Ultra Brave” on Spotify and follow Italian composer Daniele Sciolla at the links below.

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Daniele Sciolla on Facebook

Daniele Sciolla on TikTok

Daniele Sciolla on Instagram

Daniele Sciolla on YouTube

Rehya Stevens’ Melodiously Brooding “Comedown” is a Song About How Life Can’t be Peak Moments All the Time

Rehya Srevens, photo courtesy the artist

Rehya Stevens’ melodious voice and style on “Comedown” suggests a song about love in an earnest way but the song has some moody and brooding elements in the background that immediately let you know this is going to be a different kind of song. Stevens offers images of walking through a beautiful day giving clarity to her view of someone, perhaps even herself, who feels like they’re riding high on their self esteem and recent experiences that affirm their self-conception and ego. But Stevens sings about the inevitable comedown from that high and how one has to reconcile living with realistic ups and downs of life and with the reality that life won’t and can’t always be comprised of those peak moments. Stevens makes this perspective relatable in the vocabulary of a pop song and that’s why it hits a little deeper. The finely syncopated rhythms and the expert turns of phrase in Stevens delivery lends the song emotional complexity that its separate, relatively minimal elements along don’t make obvious until the end of the song. In the broad realm of music the beautiful synth work in the song is reminiscent of the likes of darkwave and adjacent acts like Nuovo Testamento and Dark Chisme and how both bridge creative and emotionally rich production with dance pop. One can easily hear Stevens’ sensibility working well in those contexts. Listen to “Comedown” on YouTube and follow Rehya Stevens at the links below.

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Rehya Stevens on Instagram

Subaqua’s Urgent Post-Punk Single “What a Bliss” Imagines a Future When the Psychic Weight of Patriarchal Culture is Gone

Subaqua imbues “What a Bliss” with a great sense of urgency and exhausted frustration at the inequality of society as we know it. The title refers to how it must be wonderful to not have to walk at night and having to be extra cautious, to be out in public in general and not draw unwanted attention immediately just for being female. And to have one’s natural personality and authentic self being picked apart for its arbitrary value in a patriarchal cultural conception of gender and the “proper” role of anyone and everyone. After decades of so-called progress it’s an ambient weight on the psyche for women and female-presenting people even today and with the upswing of the normalization of misogyny operating completely in the open of recent years it certainly has to be something that anyone with a sense of humanity hopes we can outgrow sooner than later. Musically the guitar and tenor of the vocals are reminiscent of Sonic Youth’s embrace of melody and discordant sounds equally and of Versus whose gift for the left field change-up in pace and tone can be heard here as well. Listen to “What a Bliss” on Spotify and follow Subaqua at the links below.

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