simianthinker

The Haunted, “High Desert Psych” of Sun Blood Stories

Sun Blood Stories makes its latest appearance in Denver tonight, 9/15/17, at Lion’s Lair with Big Dopes and Serpentfoot. The former quintet now trio from Boise, Idaho, has been creating its experimental psychedelic music since 2011. Though the band emerged around the time when the most recent wave of psychedelic rock was headed toward its peak, Sun Blood Stories seemed to come from a different place. Its shows feel a bit like you’re seeing what a traveling, shamanistic musical ceremony might be like. Its songs, some rock, some weirdo folk but all informed by an attempt to create a mood and an experience as much as, or more so, than melody.

The 2017 album It Runs Around the Room With Us has a title that suggests the supernatural and the songs themselves are often melancholic compositions haunted by memories, dreams and experiments in crafting atmospheres that stir the imagination and don’t seen leave the mind. We recently caught up with the band via email to discuss some of its history, inspirations and perspectives in creating its riveting body of work. Where a specific band member responds the name will precede that response otherwise assume it’s a collective answer. But you can figure that out because you’re smart.

Queen City: What brought you together to form Sun Blood Stories?

Ben Kirby: I played as a solo act for awhile and really just wanted a band because that’s a shit ton of work and pressure for just one person. Delegation is key.

Jon Fust: He actually just wanted a bunch of mindless fools to do exactly what he told them.

Amber Pollard: Which totally backfired because what he ended up getting was a bossy chick and a drummer who can literally never make a decision about anything.

Ben: Anyway, through a couple line up changes and stylistic progressions, we arrived at this band.

The name of the band suggests that maybe you have a narrative element to your songwriting. Would you say that’s true? What kinds of stories tend to make their way into your songs?

There’s definitely a few continuous themes that tend to push their way into our music: time and death, dreams and wonder, pain and dealing with it. Oh and politics.

Amber: I write a lot about my own personal experience and how that relates to the current political climate. This comes pretty naturally as I am a loud activist in our community. On this newest album we touch on themes like the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change, the confederate flag, the lack of adequate healthcare for the underinsured, police brutality, human trafficking, LGBTQIA rights, etc.

Were you in bands before SBS? What kinds of bands?

Jon and Ben were in a band called Talk Math to Me which was loud and garage rock-y which was active from 2010-2011. When Talk Math to Me dissolved Ben started playing solo as Sun Blood Stories.

When you started out were there really any bands locally that seemed like-minded? What kinds of places did you play early on and did any of them play an important role in your development as a band?

Jon: I feel like Boise has a really good community and the bands are all friends but there aren’t too many overlapping genres here.

Ben: We played really everywhere we possibly could.

Amber: Treefort Music Fest has really given SBS a yearly goal to just play better. The first year of the festival [2012] was Ben’s first year of performing as Sun Blood and every year since we’ve worked really hard to ensure that we are growing and trying to keep up with Treefort’s cool.

What bands or other artists that had a particular impact or influence on what you’ve done with SBS?

Jon: My natural instinct is to say The Velvet Underground because they make me wanna make weird noise.

Ben: I’ve learned a lot from Deerhoof both from seeing them play and reading interviews about how they actually run the band.

Amber: Can I just pick a genre? Cause I listen to A lot of 90s R&B and Hip Hop. It’s taken a lot of strategy and smooth talking to convince the band to let that influence our music.

Having traveled around on tour, what have you come to appreciate about Boise and being based there?

Amber: 1, I can go out and not see anyone I know or I can go out and be surrounded by friends. It’s small enough and big enough for both. 2, I can ride my bike any where in the city. 3, cost of living is pretty low in comparison to other Metro areas which makes supporting this band a lot easier on us a family.

Jon: I like Boise because the music scene is in a cool stage of growth right now and I feel like we’re right in the middle of it.

Ben: Um, I’ve loved many of the towns and cities we’ve gone to but I always just want to come back home.

It’s always awkward trying to describe someone else’s music much less your own, but why do you shorthand describe your music on your Facebook page as “High Desert Experimental Psych-Fuzz”? Certainly that kind of description could be used to describe Spindrift, some aspects of Black Mountain or a trippier, harder edged Ennio Morricone.

Amber: At Treefort 2015 Wolvserpent posted a picture of us performing on Instagram. Their caption described our sound as “High Desert Psych,” and I just embraced that. I added in the experimental descriptor because sometimes we don’t know what we’re doing but it always sounds good. After a bit I needed to add in the Fuzz part because who doesn’t love fuzz?

Ben: Also it was the coolest 5 words we could think of at the time.

Jon: We have a Facebook page?

Your music has always had experimental underpinnings. You could have followed the psychedelic rock trend of the last 7 years and done okay for yourselves. But you seem to have really embraced what some might consider the weirder side of your songwriting as part of the whole. Why is that such an important aspect of your music and what do you think got you interested in exploring that richly as you have?

Jon: It just felt natural.

Ben: I’ve always loved deeply weird music. The fact that we’re considered a psych band is really interesting to me because it’s almost just a coincidence that the psych thing was happening as we were beginning.

Amber: The Residents and captain Beefheart have really held a place in Jon’s heart since he was very young. Fitting into a genre is just not our jam. I’m much more interested in carving out our own space and I think we do a pretty good job of that. Like when we release a new single and people hear it on the radio, people who have listened to our album or seen our show can tell right away that that’s Sun Blood playing through their speakers. I don’t want that to change.

It Runs Around the Room With Us is very different from Twilight Midnight Morning. Neither would be considered a straight ahead rock record, for sure. But It Runs Around the Room With Us not only suggests the presence of spirits in the music with the title, it’s more overtly ambient/deeply atmospheric. What inspired that approach to the songs for the album? What sorts of feelings and ideas spawned that set of songs?

Ben: Much of the difference between the two albums is the lineup change that occurred between the recording of each. We went from being a quintet to a trio and there was considerably more space within the sound. We tried to reign in some of barreling cacophony and focus more on the development of the pieces themselves.

Jon: Yeah I feel like the line up change had the most significant impact, at least for me and what I’m playing. Having two less members opened up a lot of space in the music, which forced us to get more creative with how we filled that space, and allowed me to start playing keyboards along with the drums.

Amber: I kind of feel like the tracks on It Runs were all loosely based on “Misery is Nebulous,” the final track of Twilight. The elements of that song that really stood out for us were the build, the spaciousness, the beauty and the pain. We took those elements, expanded on them, and used them as the foundation for this album. Creating this album was a healing experience and playing it live is like a therapy session.

Soft Kill’s Post-Punk Roots Remain in the Underground

SoftKill_JoannaStawnicka1_900 — Soft Kill, photo by Joanna Stawnicka

Portland, Oregon-based post-punk band Soft Kill is currently on tour with Chameleons Vox. For the Denver date at The Bluebird Theater on Wednesday September 13 the bill include Denver’s own industrial punk band Echo Beds and beat-driven, post-punk shoegazers Voight. It is, frankly, a show that represents a respectable spectrum of a wave of bands that have come along over roughly the past decade that comprise what could loosely be considered a new incarnation of the kind of music that came in the wake of punk when many creative types realized they didn’t need to adhere to an established mode of musical expression. Industrial developed alongside punk with the advent of Throbbing Gristle, but both musical impulses were anti-establishment and made a lifestyle alternative to mainstream mundanity viable.

By the 1980s industrial, post-punk, death rock, dark synth music, noise and even punk were still relatively underground phenomena even as bands like U2 and Echo & The Bunnymen took post-punk into the mainstream, Fad Gadget influenced Depeche Mode who took avant-garde synth music and gave it pop accessibility and both Skinny Puppy and Ministry proved that challenging music could find more than a simply niche audience. When the alternative music explosion of the early 90s changed the face of popular music some of the aforementioned bands benefited while much of the rest became sequestered to the “Goth scene” or largely forgotten.

The so-called post-punk revival, including “dance punk,” of the mid-90s to the early 2000s brought atmospheric, moody music into the mainstream but began in scattered underground scenes around the country. Groups like !!! (Chk Chk Chk) in Sacramento, The Faint in Omaha and The Prids (initially in Missouri, then Nebraska and for around two decades now, Portland, Oregon) created some of the most compelling post-punk in the history of that music. As did New York-based bands such as Interpol, The Rapture, The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem. Perhaps you’ve heard of some of them. All of those bands knew their musical roots in 70s and 80s post-punk, no wave, early darkwave and Krautrock but at that time many of their fans eschewed the term Goth and those so self-identified seemed to dismiss the post-punk revival bands as simply indie rock. The connection between post-punk, Goth, industrial, minimal synth and related music seemed lost.

That is until a generation of musicians, mostly born during the heyday of post-punk and industrial, rediscovered that music and embraced it as something vital that stirred the imagination. That there was an overlap with the noise scene that survived in the depths of the underground didn’t hurt. It was from there that Tobias Sinclair, one of the guitarists and singer in Soft Kill, emerged as a fledgling musician in the larger DIY music scene in New England. He had attended shows at the influential DIY space Fort Thunder in Providence, Rhode Island where, according to Sinclair, “Every other warehouse seemed to have someone with a P.A.” as well as places like Munch House and Dirt Palace.

Going to these unconventional spaces to experience music left an indelible mark on Sinclair.

“It was really inspirational without a doubt that people could just hold their own shows without all the bullshit of a bar,” says Sinclair.

At a memorable show that included now Denver based artist Mat Brinkman, Sinclair experienced the kind of creative expression that one rarely experiences anywhere else.

“With Forcefield he and seven other guys would knit these seven foot tall outfits and play oscillators,” recalls Sinclair. “That completely blew my mind compared to all the other conventional trappings. All that stuff is more important to me probably more than obvious influences on Soft Kill. hat was really inspirational for me because somebody that didn’t ever have lessons or what I perceived at that time as an inherent talent, I loved the lack of those limitations and I could kind of go nuts with it and teach myself to play an instrument based off of what felt and sounded cool rather than what was in a book.”

Around that time, Sinclair and his friends saw the 2001 Friends Forever documentary which shared some of the experiences of the Denver-based noise/performance art band that toured, or even played locally, in a van that often served as both transportation and impromptu stage. After catching Friends Forever at a venue in Western Massachusetts, Sinclair became friends with Friends Forever’s Josh Taylor. It was then that Sinclair and his band Night Wounds relocated to California and played numerous times at long-running DIY space The Smell in Los Angeles. By a strange quirk of fate, Taylor, who was involved in running Monkey Mania, a beloved DIY venue in Denver, moved to Los Angeles to help run The Smell and work at Amoeba Records at the same time Sinclair, who had worked at Amoeba, moved to Denver into Monkey Mania in 2006.

At that time Night Wounds was still an active band that toured the DIY music circuit that had been, and remains, so inspirational to Sinclair and it connected with like-minded noise rock bands like Chicago’s Coughs, Montreal’s AIDS Wolf and Vancouver, British Columbia’s Mutators. All of which were big names in the small realm of DIY noise rock. Also during that time, Sinclair was deep into a thirteen year struggle with drug abuse that ended in 2016. Although his experience with hard drugs took its toll on Sinclair in various ways, access to substances is what anchored him to cities like Denver and his now home of Portland, Oregon. “I wasn’t aspiring to go to a place to go be fucked but I definitely stayed longer because of that, if that makes sense.”

Sinclair admits that the drugs are part of the reason Soft Kill has taken a lot longer to blossom into the band it has striven to be, it also coincidentally pushed his timeline as a musician into developing the ideas and sounds for which Soft Kill is now known. But before Soft Kill, Sinclair had, alongside Night Wounds, been part of a Goth-y punk band called Blessure Graves.

“When I started Blessure Graves the big thing was the lo-fi garage rock revival,” says Sinclair. “And there was this very small niche out of that which was Goth music made with a similar fidelity. It felt like a quick, flash in the pan. What happened with us was when I started Soft Kill in 2010 we did one album and then my demons got the best of me and I started getting locked up and having to take a long time to stray away from music. When I got out, I started seeing that a bunch of people saw An Open Door as one of the top two or three records that had come out in recent years out of that type of music. That influenced me and people in the band now to put more energy into it in 2012. But by the time we really got momentum was 2014. By that point we realized that our first record had been celebrated as one of the integral releases in post-punk records of the past ten years—they said it was top tier. We thought whoa, that’s crazy, it must be because there aren’t other bands doing that.”

“We started going out and touring and we were blown away by how many bands there were. And from there onward, for the first time in forever I felt there was a large, legitimate scene with dots connected much more than they’d been in the past 15-20 years. There’s a lot of labels that cater to it. Some of the bands have become popular and it’s not been limited to just one style. Not all these bands sound like Joy Division.”

The larger scene that Sinclair had discovered included a constellation of bands and labels across the country and around the world. Imprints like The Flenser, Dais, Sacred Bones, Dark Entries and Beläten are just a few of the labels releasing the music. Bands such as Curse, Beastial Mouths, Troller, Some Ember, All Your Sisters, Burning, Youth Code, Pop. 1280, Echo Beds, Voight, Church Fire and numerous others have been touring and finding an audience eager for sounds and a culture that maintains a connection to its underground roots and experimental music that has yet to be completely co-opted and tamed by mainstream commercial interests.

2016 represented a landmark year for Soft Kill. Its arguably best album to date, Choke, was released on Profound Lore. Best, because it most fully realizes the band’s love of hypnotic beats, driving bass and rich, expressive, evocative tones. Sinclair had booked a Chameleons Vox tour in 2015, through simply contacting vocalist/bassist Mark Burgess. In 2016 Sinclair went on to book two other of the most influential bands for Soft Kill in Sad Lovers and Giants and Modern English, the latter performing its classic 1981 album Mesh & Lace in its entirety for the first time as the group had not toured on the record the first time around. He also booked Clan of Xymox for the third edition of the Out of the Shadows festival alongside Denver-based darkwave band Tollund Men, who released his favorite tape of recent years—Autoerotik.

“When we played Denver the first time at Leisure Gallery they played and we were like, ‘No way, this can’t be happening!’ I think they were really taken aback by how into their band we were. We showed up superfans. They played with us the next time we played there and I think they disintegrated after that.”

“I really like repetitious stuff in general but there’s this slow burn to that whole tape. It’s got hooks and it’s dirty as hell but I can put that on and crank it up and it’s the perfect background music for me. I dug the tones that he gets out of distorting everything to the maximum degree. It was a band I always loved but that particular tape I’m really glad they did that last and went out on that note. He showed he wasn’t beating a dead horse, that he had mastered the vision that he had so it makes sense that he moved on from there. I respect that because I know he could have taken many an opportunity that he didn’t. I love when people don’t give into that bullshit.”

Sinclair’s soft spot for Denver, born of his experience living in the Mile High City and experiencing Friends Forever in New England, extends to the underground metal and hardcore scene in Denver and he expresses an appreciation for acts like Blood Incantation and Civilized. In the near-ish future Soft Kill will also put out a split with Denver death grind heroes Primitive Man, whose Ethan McCarthy shares the history with Sinclair of having lived in and operated Monkey Mania, though not at the same time. But, as is the way with the informal, DIY there is no pressure to put out the split release to fit some record label release schedule. Sinclair met McCarthy and so many other musicians who have impacted him through the underground music route.

“Ultimately, this is how I met all these people and this is the world that we want to exist within and regardless that we sound nothing like Echo Beds, that’s a band we would go on tour with before whatever people think makes sense,” says Sinclair.

TIME’s Ecstatic, Theatrical Live Show Brings Transcendence Through Sound

TIME from Gainesville, Florida, is currently on tour bringing its otherworldly synthesizer-based compositions to many corners of America. Its 2016 self-titled album is reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s devotional albums and Peaking Lights. It has the saturated tones and atmospheres that have made so many analog synth projects of recent years tap into a sense of nostalgia for a time when, as Americans, we had the time and leisure to let our minds explore inner space or find solace in letting the imagination exercise its capacities in creative activity we often feel pressured to set aside in favor of non-meaningful work to merely survive. TIME’s music reminds us, if perhaps indirectly, that we must consider what we would want to do with our lives if we weren’t yokes to the machinery of late capitalism. Maybe it’s that the music has some roots in South Asian spiritual practices as hinted at below. Think something like Dead Can Dance, Sky Cries Mary and Tangerine Dream and you have something of the vibe.

The live shows will include a sense of theater beyond the rich atmospheres and emotional catharsis of the music so don’t miss out if you get the opportunity to witness TIME for yourself. We caught up with TIME during their transit through the southwest via email and learned a bit about their foundation, their connection to the DIY music world and what exactly is Mirror Vision, the art project that lent its name to the band’s tour in early 2017.

Queen City: Where did you grow up? What kind of music did you have access to when you were younger?

Madhava Collins: I grew up in the Canary Islands and South Wales. I would say that when I moved to the US 12 years ago my musical library broadened and became more sophisticated. I grew up on a lot of timeless classics. My mom would play old soul and Motown records as well as Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Donna Summer [and such] then there’s the whole Spanish and Spanish speaking South American music: Salsa, merengue. Growing up Catholic, there would be several festivals of the saints in our town and the whole village would come out and celebrate and there would be live music all night long. And of course, also, disco!

Michael Collins: I grew up in Gainesville, discovered punk rock through a Minor Threat mixtape my brother made me and stumbled upon the tail end of the golden era of the Gainesville punk scene in the late nineties. Seriously formative in my understanding of DIY culture and the community necessary to support it.

Had either of you played in bands prior to TIME? What kind of music? What made you want to do something different?

Madhava: I’ve been fascinated with playing music since I was a child. One of the best things they taught me at school was how to sight read music. During my college years in Salem, MA I played blues harmonica and later chromatic harmonica in jazz band. I was in one of my music teacher’s bands for a little while. Then I dropped everything and became obsessed with devotional music from India. I started playing harmonium and an Indian drum called mrdanga. Up until 2 years ago I would play other people’s music and never felt inspired to write lyrics or compose songs. Then, while driving one day, I started hearing in my head a random arrangement of a traditional vaisnava song from my spiritual practice that is a prayer of protection to the lion incarnation of Vishnu. I began recording melodies, lines and drum beats on my phone recorder with my voice while stopped in traffic and it later became “Nrsimha Pranam,” which is on our album. That moment was like a flood door opening and since then I have probably recorded around 30 songs in the same way, two of them which will be in an upcoming album we are planning for 2018.

Michael: I had a high school band called Dasi which then became Prince Rama of Ayodhya and eventually just Prince Rama. We released about five albums together and toured almost constantly. It started as a “psych-folk” project and shifted towards tribal/noise/synthpop as our tastes evolved. Working with them was truly amazing but in many ways I had to set off on my own to discover my own voice.

What inspired the formation of TIME?

Madhava: Michael and I had been dating for a year or so when I started composing and he set me up with some software so I could begin laying everything down. He was super impressed . I think he was surprised too because I don’t think he knew I had that in me, and neither did I to be honest. That’s when we formed the band.

Michael: I had been performing solo for a few years under my own name, put that on the back burner to perform traditional kirtan on the streets of New York with a bunch of Hare Krishnas and then Madhava came along with an amazing collection of songs that inspired me to dust off the old synthesizers and get back in the game.

How did you get started playing live in Gainesville with the kind of music you make?

Madhava: Our first show was at a bike collective in Gainesville and we played with Ghost Fields. One of the audience members was pretty much the go to booker for DIY, experimental, awesome music in Gainesville. He brings amazing people here like Boy Harsher and Curse. Some known and many unknown but incredible people. He started booking us for his shows and gave us a good start.

Were you aware that there were other bands making new, all synth/electronic music that wasn’t part of the whole dance music world (EDM and such)? Were there other bands in Gainesville or nearby making the kind of music you wanted to before you started TIME?

Michael: Contemporary EDM I’ve avoided like the plague. My exposure to electronic music was initially through electroacoustic composers creating insane tape and synth based compositions under the auspices of forward thinking institutions (Pierre Schaeffer, Steve Reich, Terry Riley) and also the world of noise and harsh electronics that was so prevalent in the mid to late 2000’s (Teeth Mountain, Sewn Leather, DJ Dog Dick, etc.). I eventually discovered Bobby Orlando and Italo disco and my life was never the same.

When did you become aware of like-minded artists around the country? Particularly in the DIY music world. Though I suppose Michael’s experience with Gainesville punk and Prince Rama didn’t hurt.

Madhava: This is our 3rd DIY tour and actually it was just a year ago that we set out on our first tour, which was 3 months long and took us pretty much everywhere, including Canada. There were only a handful of U.S. states where we didn’t have shows. Back then I was more naive about DIY touring. When I met Michael he had mentioned that he was going on tour for a few weeks with a friend and I pictured them in a huge tour bus with a crew. I had no idea DIY touring was a thing, but now I handle pretty much all the booking and get excited when I discover new amazing artists and folks from cool local scenes.

Michael: As a punk rock youth I was involved in Gainesville DIY spots and saw so many amazing bands pass through, it was only natural that I eventually sought to do the same.

Your self-titled, 2016 album reminds me tiny bits of Alice Coltrane circa Turiya Sings, early Dead Can Dance but with synths rather than guitar and analog synth science fiction soundtracks if the 80s. What inspired the combination of sounds and ideas for that album?

Madhava: That same summer I started composing I was working as a yoga teacher at summer camp and I asked Michael for some good relaxation music for my classes. Not only did I get that from him, but also amazing synth music: John Maus, Martin Dupont, Emeralds, Zeno and Oaklander and Inner City just to name a few. I got super into it!
Michael: John Maus, Popol Vuh, Bobby O, Robbie Basho—artists seeking transcendence through the medium of sound.

Your current tour is the Infinity Tour. What is this Mirror Vision thing that gave name to your tour earlier this year?

Madhava: That’s our collaboration with our friend and Florida artist Jay Rosen. Michael and I were living at a show space where Jay had his exhibit last year and we were so impressed. It was the most incredible thing in the whole show. Everyone flocked to try on his head pieces. When you wear them it totally transforms your reality. You can see out, depending on the light, but you also see multiple reflections of yourself inside from different angles and sometimes you can even see behind you. It’s like being a kaleidoscope.

One day Michael asked Jay if we could tour with the pieces, so we took them on the road for our Mirror Vision Tour earlier this year. When we got back from tour we said “Now we want a whole stage!” And he built it in less than 3 months. My personal connection with Mirror Vision is that it serves as a visual representation of an important concept explained in the Bhagavatam, one of the main texts of our spiritual practice, that this material plane is a distorted reflection of the spiritual plane.

There seems to be a real moment right now, or has been going on for a few years, where synthesizer music, darkwave/industrial and post-punk music is enjoying a real renaissance and this time more interconnected than before. Do you feel this is the case? If so, how has this benefited you? Are there other bands you’d recommend to anyone out of all that and why?

Madhava: It’s hard for me to say whether synthesizer, darkwave/industrial and post-punk music are at a renaissance right now because it’s music that I am super into and I feel like we attract or surround ourselves with people on the same wavelength. I have talked to folk who have no clue about this music at all, and I doubt they would say it’s currently prolific. One of my old pals from college, upon hearing our album, said “What is this? I’ve never heard anything like it! I can’t make sense of it!” Mind you, this is a person who plays bagpipes and is into contra dancing or something like that. At the top of my list of current artists right now is Drab Majesty. Not only is their music incredible in and of itself, but they have an interesting aesthetic and performative vibe which is a direction that we are also exploring.

Titwrench 9th Edition This Weekend 8/25 – 8/26 at the Mercury Café

RARE BYRD$ at Titwrench 2016, photo by Lauri Lynnxe Murphy

Titwrench kicks off its 9th Edition tonight at the Mercury Café with performances from experimental and underground musicians from Denver and around the country. The festival is a community focused celebration of “women and LGBTQIAP artists and musicians and other underrepresented/emerging artists pushing the boundaries of genre and form.” The event will also feature workshops, crafts vendors, food and drink, tarot card readings, a yoga session on Saturday morning and much more. That’s what it is but if you go you will see the kinds of music that probably isn’t on the radar of any mainstream publication or news outlet and thus maybe, if you’ve never been, you’ll get to experience something refreshingly different.

Titwrench cultivates emerging artists in the community while featuring significant artists from the Rocky Mountain region and elsewhere. For instance, atmospheric sound collagist/sculptor Laura Ortman from New York performs on Friday as well as melodic doom punk “glam insect metal” band Chicharra, from Albuquerque and Denver’s own dream folk genius MIDWIFE. Saturday the performance art/sound experience troupe Milch De La Maquina will deliver another unforgettable performance and should not be missed. RARE BYRD$ will bring an example of hip-hop from the future and Shooda Shook It will provide the soundtrack to a No Wave funk dance party. But all of the artists are worth your time. Below is information and a program of events copied and modified from the Titwrench #9 page. We will be sharing interviews with Laura Ortman and Marisa Demarco of Chicharra and Milch De La Máquina later today and tomorrow as well as photos and observations post festival.

Friday August 25 and Saturday 26th 2017
Decor by Secret Love Collective
Music and local artisans/vendors from 4:00pm-2:00am both nights
At Mercury Cafe Denver
(ADA accessible venue)
2199 California Street
Denver CO 80205
–
All ages + All welcome
With your favorite Mistress of Magic Piper Rose guiding the way all weekend long

Tickets at this link.
* sliding-scale pricing
10% of all funds raised go to the sustainment of grassroots programs byWEBS of Support!
—
Workshops happening Saturday August 26th include:
DIY Marketing and Branding for Working Artists
Beat-making for Beginners
Performance + Vocals 101

SCHEDULE of music and performance:

FRIDAY AUGUST 25
400pm doors open with DJ Avalon (Denver/San Juan)

500pm Girls Rock Denver (bands TBA)

530pm Giraft (Denver, CO)
moody minimalism

600pm Emily Frembgen (New York, NY)
third wave americana

630pm Pearls and Perils (Denver, CO)
mad medicine for crazy hearts

700pm yesol (Denver, CO)
sweet harp and strums by Cory Feder

730pm The Molly Growler Project (Denver, CO)

800pm Prism Bitch (Albuquerque, NM)
turbo rock n’ soul punk

830pm K.O. SOLO (Seattle, WA)
electroimprovisational ambience

900pm Litter Brain (Albuquerque, NM)
bratty hardcore punk

930pm Cthulha (Albuquerque, NM) experimental solo piano and surprises

1000pm Nizhóní Girls (Albuquerque, NM) desert surf punks

1030pm Laura Ortman (New York, NY) solo experimental violin/meditations

1115pm Chicharra (Albuquerque, NM) glam insect heavy rock

1200am MIDWIFE (Denver, CO) delicate drone-pop anthems by Madeline Johnston

1:00am – 2:00am we dance it out with DJ Avalon!

Milch de la Máquina at Titwrench 2016, photo by Vincent Comparetto

SATURDAY AUGUST 26th (morning)
1000-1100am
Community yoga led by Piper Rose w/live music by Annastezhaa (Aurora, CO)
dreamy harp and vocals
——–
WORKSHOPS all afternoon on Saturday 8/26 – check our Facebook for details!

Weedrat at Titwrench 2016, photo by Sarah Slater

SAT AUGUST 26 (evening)

400pm doors open
with DJ DYNAMITE

430pm Girls Rock Denver

500pm Buried Moon (Denver, CO)
dark psyche

530pm Glitter Vomit (Albuquerque, NM)
like a unicorn wandering in the forest

600pm The Maybe So’s (Denver, CO)
from the brilliant minds of Bianca Mikahn and Jenee Elise

630pm Esmerelda Strange (Denver, CO)
one woman man band

700pm Bonnie Weimer (Denver, CO) banjo rambler

730pm kismet&dough (Denver, CO)
collaborative project by patrycja sara
a question. an off-kilter lullaby asking you how much your dreams cost

800pm EBONY & ERMINE (Albuquerque, NM)
wordseamstress magic

830pm R A R E B Y R D $ (Denver, CO)
sonic freak queens

900pm RAMAKHANDRA
(Denver, CO)
progressive hip-hop featuring Annastezhaa

930pm Dance Break w Erin Stereo (Denver)

1000pm Milch de la Máquina (Albuquerque, NM)
desert bird performance art troupe

1030pm Glassmen (Madison, WI)
indie experimental folk rock

1100pm PRETEEN OD (Denver, CO)
avant-garde classical weirds

1130pm Mirror Fears (Denver, CO)
industrial dark wave

12:00am (Midnight) Shooda Shook It (Tucson, AZ)
disco funky punks

12:45 Get Along (Denver, CO)
indie glitter dance pop

and then we dance it out some more with Erin Stereo! ♥

Victoria Lundy at Titwrench 2016, photo by Vincent-Comparetto

Join us on Sunday August 27th for brunch at Mercury Cafe, followed bySlutWalk Denver 2017 from 12-3pm at Civic Center Park!

Psychic TV and a New Parallel Culture Part One

Psychic TV, photo by Drew Weirdermann, interview/story by Tom Murphy Psychic_TV_by_Drew_Weidemann_Web

Tonight, Psychic TV will perform in Denver at the Mercury Cafe with Rotties and DJ Tocsin uniting a Denver institution whose existence dates back to the late 70s and an original location off of 13^th Avenue and Pearl Street and a band that had yet to get its footing in the USA until Denver concert promoter Tom Headbanger got PTV into its first tour bus and from there into a kind of cult following that resulted in a more cultural institution to spread esoteric and spiritually evolutinary/revolutionary knowledge into the world at large with network of likeminded communities and seekers under the umbrella of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Those worlds come together again with this show at the Mercury.

Ahead of the show we were able to speak with the band’s leader, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to discuss the still powerful and abundant ability of creativity and imagination to transform at least the world around you and to impact the world beyond. We will publish the conversation in full in the next few days. In this first section we discuss Gen’s early projects and how they lead in part to the founding of noteworthy modern music label Dais Records, which not only made the early Worm and COUM Transmissions recordings widely available but is also a proponent of music by artists touched by the continuing legacy of the strain of music operating outside the mainstream pioneered by Gen and their collaborators in creating a parallel culture.

Queen City Sounds and Art: Psychic TV kind of got its start here with a bus provided by Tom Headbanger.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: We used to love that bus so much. We had so many amazing times on that bus. Then when we moved to New York with Lady Jaye we discovered you’re not allowed to have a bus in New York so we gave it away to some hippies in California as a gift. Apparently a year later they got very stoned and burned it.

T: You’ve long been a keen observer of society and culture. Right now we’re at an interesting/dangerous point internationally. But I think we can act on the local level with creativity and affect the larger world. As a teen you did the ‘zine Conscience and then later in your late teen years and early 20s, COUM Transmissions.

GBP-O: There was an exhibition in Howden, Yorkshire in January that was a retrospective of COUM Transmissions and Spydeee [Gasmantell] was there. I hadn’t seen him for decades so that was really nice. We’re corresponding again now. He’d done an issue of Conscience after we’d gone off to university and got expelled from the school for it. So the last issue was seized, banned and he was expelled for and that was the end of Conscience. We started one at the university we called Worm.

T: That was a band as well?

GBP-O: It was going to be. We did that one record and we disbanded and forgot about it. But that was one of those amazing stories when the Tate Britain decided to buy my archive we needed people to help us catalog everything. So we got these people who volunteered to come in. One of those people was Ryan Martin who came to me one day and said, “Gen, what are all these reel to reel tapes in this box?” “Oh, it’s just stuff we were doing when we were young. It’s rubbish. Don’t listen to it. Forget about it.” He said, “What does it sound like?” “You don’t want to listen to it, it’s not important.” “I think it is important and that people would like to hear it. Even if it doesn’t sound great it’ll show people your thinking about sound from an earlier age.” So we said, “If you think it’s so interesting, why don’t you go and do it?” Then he went off to start Dais Records with his friend Gibby [Miller] and now Dais is celebrating it’s tenth anniversary this month. It has released records by eighty different people all because he nagged me about this old, reel-to-reel tape. He released Early Worm and [The Sound of Porridge Bubbling, Sugarmorphoses and Home Aged & The 18^th Month Hope from COUM Transmissions]. We like that something done that long ago can trigger someone else into changing what they do in life. Suddenly it’s become this energy attractor and makings things possible for lots of extra people. In a way that’s what we’ve always been trying to do—come up with ways of looking at things or perceiving things or just shifting the point of views so that new opportunities and ways of analyzing society can happen.