Queen City Sounds Podcast S6E01: Low Cut Connie

Danny Clinch photographing Low Cut Connie on December 21st 2025 in Asbury Park New Jersey.

Low Cut Connie is a rock and roll band based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The group fronted by singer, pianist and songwriter Adam Weiner began in 2010 as a way to manifest his songs as a dynamic live act. Prior to Low Cut Connie Weiner was mainly a solo artist who played piano and sang in bars of all stripes, restaurants, honky tonks, warehouses, anarchist squats, DIY spaces and all manner of places where the opportunity presented itself. By the time an actual band came into the picture Weiner had honed his stagecraft and command of an audience from thousands of hours of getting in front of not always receptive audiences. The 2010 debut Low Cut Connie album Get Out the Lotion, despite being recorded in original guitarist Neil Duncan’s garage in Florida in just four days, had a captivating immediacy and freshness that garnered critical acclaim from the likes of Robert Christgau (writing for MSN rather than Village Voice at the time), Ken Tucker of NPR and Merrill Garbus (Tune-Yards).

Across subsequent albums Weiner’s songwriting built upon an ability to express stories and situations about the lived experiences of real people as they are, not overly romanticized, and discerning and vividly articulating an essence of the human condition that anyone hearing the song and witnessing it live could immediately identify. A Low Cut Connie video typically has people in it that might look cool but aren’t necessarily fitting a Hollywood archetype and simply the kind of people you run into every day and showcasing their inherent grace and dignity even if a particular song is about an aspect of life that isn’t the most fun. There is an emotional honesty to a Low Cut Connie song that draws you in and perhaps get you to dance. The style draws some inspiration from the likes of Sly & The Family Stone and Aretha Franklin and their gift for insightful social commentary inside an undeniably moving and exuberant bit of music as well as early rock and roll and infused with a touch of punk spirit and charismatic stage presence. The music combines high energy with raw vulnerability and compassion showing how that combination can not just be exciting but cathartic and good for the soul.

Over the years Low Cut Connie has garnered attention from public figures and high profile musicians such as Barack Obama, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Howard Stern and Nick Hornby. Obama included the track “Boozophilia” (from the 2012 album Call Me Sylvia) on his Summer Spotify playlist for 2015. Since then the group has released a handful of critically acclaimed albums, been featured on television, performed at festivals like Newport Folk Festival, Bonnaroo and Pickathon and otherwise built a devoted cult following and expanding collaborative work and recordings. Then on February 13, 2025 Weiner put out a statement about canceling the band’s scheduled March 19, 2025 performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in response to President Trump’s takeover of the institution. The invite to perform had been extended prior but the newly re-elected president’s legacy and policies promoting racism, hate generally and authoritarianism was and is antithetical to even the conceit of human decency much less the diversity of the band’s fanbase. Other artists canceled their own performances and otherwise resigned from the Center’s board of artistic advisors. That may Low Cut Connie released the acoustic version of the single “Livin’ in the USA,” a song that didn’t have explicitly topical references but the music video and the sentiments of the song seemed to be a critique of the Trump administration’s radical immigration policies and the illegal and unconstitutional actions of ICE throughout the country not to mention talk even in the previous administration of stripping legal immigrants of their citizenship status. And by extension that being something that could be done to anyone that dared to oppose the Trump regime. The song got Weiner threats online of violence and death thus vindicating the song’s message completely.

In February 2026 Low Cut Connie released the electric version of “Livin’ in the USA” as a peek into the forthcoming 8th studio album Livin’ in the USA out July 3, 2026. The album itself is a vivid set of snapshots into the American character and psyche. At a time when it feels like things are falling apart and on the verge of collapse, this new set of songs sees past the divisions without ignoring sources of conflict and despair and keys in on the hope inherent to being weary of things being desperate in a climate of ambient chaos, menace and oppression. Throughout the ten songs we hear stories of human connection and the ways in which we can alienate ourselves from others and from our own hearts. It doesn’t necessarily offer solutions but offers resonant emotional truth in a time when we are bombarded by lies and misinformation by not just the president but the oligarch/technocrat-captured media and social media. It’s a record the reminds us that analog human experience is our best hope for liberation from the perils of the current era.

Listen to our interview with Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below. They will perform three shows in Colorado this summer. Beginning in Snowmass on Thursday, June 25, 2026 for the town’s free concert series, in Fort Collins at the Aggie Theatre on Friday June 26, 2026 with J. Roddy & The Automatic Band and The Patti Fiasco and on Saturday, June 27, 2026 at The Bluebird Theater with Queen Frog.

lowcutconnie.com

Low Cut Connie on Facebook

Low Cut Connie on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E50: Wheelchair Sports Camp

Wheelchair Sports Camp, photo by Erik Ziemba

Wheelchair Sports Camp began as a solo project for rapper/producer Kalyn Heffernan who started releasing music under that moniker around 2009. The project has always benefited from Heffernan’s creative and energetic wordplay honed from growing up as a vocalist and imitating her favorite artists of that time. Since 2009 Wheelchair Sports Camp has become a fixture in Denver underground music but a project that has a footprint well beyond Denver due to fortunate tour and opening slot opportunities and some national press support. After all Heffernan isn’t just a rapper and producer, she’s an activist for disabled communities and really anyone experiencing persecution and prejudice. Her participating in the occupation of then Colorado Cory Gardener in 2017 garnered her pieces in various publications including a feature on Democracy Now! including an interview with legendary investigative journalist Amy Goodman. Which is part of the point of the art, to draw attention to everyday people’s struggles as a means of addressing injustice.

Listen to any Wheelchair Sports Camp track and you will hear a richness and variety of sonics that set the band apart from many other hip-hop projects. Longtime collaborator Jerod Sarlo aka Qknox brings a deep underground electronic dance sensibility informed by classic hip-hop production to various recordings. Other members of the live and recording band include or have included Gregg Ziemba on drums, Joshua Trinidad on trumpet, Wesley Watkins on synth, Tom Hagerman and Jeanie Schroder of DeVotchKa on accordion/strings and tuba respectively, experimental hip-hop luminaries RAREBYRD$, Abi McGaha Miller on sax and vocals and more recently Jello Biafra, Mark Bliesner aka Radio Pete, Michelle Rocquet and Kimya Dawson. A debut album was released in 2016 called No Big Deal and that era of the band was very avant-garde jazz forward in the sounds but it also showcased Heffernan’s development as a lyrics offering deep personal lyrics and incisive social commentary. Between then and now the COVID-19 pandemic happened and Wheelchair Sports Camp did a soundtrack to a theatre production of Alice in Wonderland in 2021 as well as music for an installation at Meow Wolf (Wheelchair Space Kitchen, 2025) and various singles.

In 2026 the second full length oh imperfecta was released via Alternative Tentacles. The imprint is more known for punk but anyone familiar with the label’s roster knows it’s the home of weird punks in general and other artists outside the mainstream. The new Wheelchair Sports Camp album feels somehow both stripped down and maximal in impact. The songwriting feels incredibly focused and not just for this band. The songs address the instability and peril of the world we’re living through at the moment and understandable emotional reactions to all of that when your own life could use with some maintenance to put in motion to where you want it to be but still having to find the daily strength to get through to those better moments. The song “Dead” is a delightfully pointed song about how aspects of our warped culture deems certain people disposable as a drag on society and how that designation can be applied to anyone when the powerful want it to. It’s a hip-hop album with that sensibility and production guiding its style and sound but its spirit is rebellious and very punk in attitude.

Listen to our interview with Kalyn Heffernan and Gregg Ziemba on Bandcamp and follow Wheelchair Sports Camp at the links below.

Wheelchair Sports Camp album release w/Jello Biafra, Dressy Bessy, BRÜHA and RAYANN! at Meow Wolf Convergence Station Perpelxiplex, 7pm doors, 8pm show, all ages.

wheelchairsportscamp.com

Wheelchair Sports Camp on Instagram

Wheelchair Sports Camp on Facebook

Wheelchair Sports Camp on Bandcamp

Order oh imperfecta at Alternative Tentacles

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E49: The Picture Tour

The Picture Tour, April 10, 2026, photo by Tom Murphy

The Picture Tour is a shoegaze/post-punk trio from Denver that started as a songwriting vehicle for guitarist/singer Billy Armijo around 2018. The project really got off the ground as a live band in 2023 after the debut album Before the Sound, Before the Light was released in February 2022. Armijo was born in New Mexico but spent core years of his youth in Colorado as he developed as a songwriter in the mid-90s as someone who embraced moody post-punk like The Cure and Joy Division at a time when even mainstream alternative rock popular on radio was more or less the opposite of those sounds. What darkness was present in commercial music was presented in a different way than brooding and more emotionally nuanced post-punk. Armijo was in high school bands but nothing that really recorded until after he went to college and he started recording solo material under the moniker The Bedsit Infamy starting around 2003. The outlets for sharing music at that time was limited but Armijo’s songs caught the attention of the now defunct Banazan Records in Orange, California which released lungs, my heart. blood, my stomach in 2008 (at least according to Discogs) on CD. Armijo’s songcraft and homegrown production was a clear standout at a time when what would now be called bedroom pop was enjoying a bit of a renaissance. As a live act The Bedsit Infamy played shows from 2008-2011 with live members included Brad Turner, who Armijo had met in college, and who himself was a gifted home recorder of experimental pop music as Nuts + Berries and Ian Schofield.

The Bedsit Infamy released a final album in 2014 called Ashes reflecting the the arc of music post-live act. Although Armijo wrote superb pop songs with that band it didn’t represent his ongoing interest in post-punk and shoegaze and he had by 2013 joined Emerald Siam, a rock band that combined gritty garage rock sound, atmospheric melodies and emotional catharsis. The group, fronted by Denver music luminary Kurt Ottaway (Twice Wilted, Tarmints, The Overcasters) was a prominent act in the Denver scene for around a decade before it dissolved in late 2022/early 2023. When The Picture Tour debut live in 2023 it was a trio comprised of Armijo, Mike Genova on bass and Drew Dyer on drums. And the songs from the first record (which had percussion contributions from John McIntire of Tortoise) came to vivid life and the melancholic but emotionally rich vocals alongside strong rhythms and optimal guitar tone immediately established The Picture Tour as one of Denver’s best post-punk bands with some shoegaze soundscaping and garage rock edge. That trio recorded a sophomore album Blood. Machine. Gasoline. released in 2025. The album was like a deep dive into the culture and mythology of night time urban life and recreational driving in the darkness like music for a David Lynch or Nicholas Winding Refn movie never made. I captured the romance of a time in the Mile High City that is long in the past but which can be relived in the mind through art when not everything seemed to be figured out or repurposed into a technbro fauxhemian playground and bland “development” of dubious purpose and longevity. In early 2025 it was announced the Dyer was moving out of Colorado and in his place there was John Zucco from Gothic noise rock band Reposer. His first show with the band distinguished him as a great fit.

Listen to our interview with Billy Armijo on Bandcamp and follow The Picture Tour at the links below.

The Picture Tour on Instagram

The Picture Tour on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E48: White Satan

White Satan, photo by Tom Murphy

White Satan is set to release his debut album with Farm Toad, wolf, on May 30, 2026 with the performance at The Black Monarch in Victor Colorado with master Theremin player Victoria Lundy as a guest. Whether or not White Satan is a lampoon of a sinister Gothic Americana figure and/or pure performance art with great craft and execution behind it, he is nevertheless a “Denver Country Doom Rebel” and for the new album he and collaborators Gregory Hill, Maureen Hearty (both of Farm Toad) and Kim 9 chose to re-imagine country and pop classics of yesteryear into subversive and often unsettling forms. The darkly pastoral renditions include vocals that are not merely spoken word but a kind of performance art that uses the voice as a means of projecting a different mood and perhaps emotional intention with the source material. With covers of “Some Velvet Morning” (Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra), “She Thinks I Still Care” (George Jones), “Wichita Lineman” (Glen Campbell), “Hello I’m a Jukebox” (George Kent) “Hello It’s Me” (Todd Rundgren) it’s also a bit of an homage to a tradition in pop music of an interpretation and putting one’s unique stamp on the song and making it one’s own. White Satan has in the works a heavier album on he way but for now you can witness the brilliant weirdness for yourself live and perhaps pick up a CD of the album.

Listen to our interview with White Satan on Bandcamp and follow his exploits at the links below.

White Satan with special guest Victoria Lundy at The Black Monarch, May 30, 2026, 8PM $10. <— POSTPONED

White Satan on hypnoticturtle.com

Hypnotic Turtle on Facebook

Hypnotic Turtle on Instagram

Hypnotic Turtle on Twitter

White Satan on Facebook

White Satan on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E47: George Usher

George Usher, photo by Karjaka

George Usher is an acclaimed and veteran singer/songwriter based in New York who finally realized an ambitious creative vision with his latest record Stevensonville. Some 30 years in development the record is a 12 part song cycle with a special illustration for each song (created by Laurie Webber). The 12” LP is limited to 200 copies via Strothard Bulldog Productions and released March 20, 2026 and it includes a 28-page booklet with the lyrics and the illustrations in a gorgeous presentation of a high concept record. The album tells stories of inhabitants of the titular town after the fashion of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology of Our Town by Thornton Wilder. The song is in a power pop mode but with a sophistication of songcraft that brings with it great nuance of mood and atmosphere even when it comes off as more straight ahead pop and rock. The album is an ambitious work from the music to the presentation the likes of which we rarely see now or ever and the finished product is a work of art in itself that invites delving deep into the album as a complete work.

Listen to our interview with George Usher on Bandcamp and follow him at the links below.

George Usher on Facebook

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E46: Howard Wuelfing

Howard Wuelfing, photo courtesy the Howard Wuelfing

Howard Wuelfing is a writer, musician, zinester and publicist involved in the USA and even international music underground based primarily on the East Coast. He has been involved in bands like The Nurses, The Slickee Boy and Underhaven and recently released a seven inch with legendary recording engineer and musician Don Zientara. During his long career Wuelfing has written for Washington Post, Creem, Spin, Your Flesh, Forced Exposure, Boston Rock, The ob and The Village Voice. As a publicist he was involved with Columbia Records and JEM Records as well as his own Howlin’ Wuelf Media. His work also appeared in the first volume of Where the Wild Gigs Were. Wuelfing has helped to promote numerous bands across decades and his reach is wider than would ever be obvious. In 2025 DiWulf Publishing run by Wuelfing’s wife Amy Yates Wuelfing and Steven DiLodovico (who put out the great No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens published in 2014) released Descenes and Discords: An Anthology. The large format book collects the entire run of Howard Wuelfing’s late 1970s and early 1980s zines Descenes and Discords. Descenes shined a light on D.C.’s punk and post-punk community and Discords took up a more national range of coverage. The book is filled with full facsimilies preserving its old school layout and Xeroxed aesthetic. The volume includes new commentary from Wuelfing as well as a conversation between the author and Ian MacKaye whom we all know from his work in Minor Threat, Fugazi and other projects as well as a forward by D.C.-based cultural critic Mark Jenkins to establish the historical context for readers. It is an important document for a time, a milieu and a subculture that has helped shape American culture to this day.

Listen to our interview with Howard Wuelfing on Bandcamp and order a copy of Descenes and Discords: An Anthology here.

howlinwuelf.com

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E45: Keith Carne

Keith Carne, photo by Guy Eppel

Keith Carne is perhaps most prominently known as the drummer for indie rock trio We Are Scientists which he joined in 2013. Carne’s background in the studio with the band and in the jazz program at Rutger’s University as well as the tri-state DIY scene seems to have given him plenty of chops, the skill set and the cultivated creativity for his debut solo album Magenta Light which released on April 20, 2026. The record isn’t a giant leap sideways from his music with We Are Scientists yet it is distinctively different. The songs are often cinematic in their close attention to atmospherics, mood and pacing. You can hear the underpinnings of an organic jazz structure but Carne allows the songs to breathe and expand as they will drawing the listener in with the music’s imaginative arrangements and gentle touch. It often sounds like what would have happened had chillwave matured more into a more sophisticated dream pop (as many of those artists have). The whole set of songs feel like the perfect music to soothe the mind on a long plane flight or other journey as it explores themes of connection, mortality and existential introspection.

Listen to our interview with Keith Carne on Bandcamp and follow him at the links below.

keithcarne.com

Keith Carne on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E43: Conrad Kehn of The Playground Ensemble

The Playground Ensemble, Eight Songs For a Mad King, March 8, 2019, Mercury Cafe

The Playground Ensemble is a new music group based in Denver formed in 2006. Composed of professional musicians, composers, educators and members of the local community dedicated to presenting modern chamber music not purely as a vehicle for performing classical music of centuries past. The group cultivates local composers new, up-and-coming and more established as a means of showing how music based in classical modes can be a valid and vibrant mode of expression. Operating in a multi-disciplinary fashion often collaborating with dancers, poets, spoken word artists, visual/multi-media artists The Playground Ensemble has also brought noteworthy artists to town that might not otherwise find an avenue for live performance in Colorado. From the beginning one of the leading figures of the group has been Conrad Kehn who came to more classical composition as a regular thing later in life than some other musicians. From Gehring, Nebraska, Kehn had a bit of a background in classical music but like any young person in the late 80s and early 90s he got into alternative music and by late summer 1992 he had moved to Denver and attended Denver University.

As happens when you have an interest in music you end up meeting people and he moved in with a member of a band called Pieces of Lucy. He and the bass player moved on from the project and formed Skull Flux. The band was too Goth for the metal scene, too hard rock for the Goth scene but anyone listening in retrospect would recognize the band as death rock band ahead of its time. The group played shows with the likes of Twice Wilted, Body of Souls and 40th Day, noteworthy acts in the broad realm of alternative music. Guitarist Greg Stretton would go on to a stint in industrial dream pop downtempo band The Siren Project and bassist Steve Millin in progressive folk group The Reals. Kehn formed the short-lived more industrial group Kallisti before shifting more into avant-garde and modern classical music as an academic, a place he has contributed to greatly locally and connected to globally.

The Playground Ensemble is celebrating its 20 year anniversary with a 20 hour marathon on Saturday, March 21, 2026. In ambitious yet accessible fashion with community outreach and goals in mind the event will include a morning yoga session with music, afternoon and evening concerts feature new music (in the modern classical sense) as well as a later night experimental music event with after hours improv. Sprawling from MSU’s Kalamath Building to Stanley Marketplace to the Holiday Theater and Glob it is an event aimed at highlighting various aspects of The Playground Ensemble’s legacy and ongoing goals.

Full schedule and details below. For more information please visit www.playgroundensemble.org. Listen to our conversation with Conrad Kehn on Bandcamp.

Spontaneous Team Composition Workshop (all ages and levels welcome)
Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Kalamath Building
800 Kalamath St, Denver, CO 80204

Join Denver’s The Playground Ensemble as we celebrate our 20th season with a 20-hour MARATHON of new music.

The day opens at 7:00 AM with a yoga session and gong bath, followed by the Sound Bites breakfast meet-and-greet.

After breakfast, participants will be divided into small groups and given 90 minutes to collaboratively create a new work to be shared at the end of the session. Each group will be facilitated by Playground Ensemble teaching artists who will guide participants through the music creation process using hand gesture composition, graphic notation, structured improvisation, digital audio workstations, and musical story-telling to name a few.

Bring your own instrument and we will also provide a variety of electronic and found sound instruments to help ‘orchestrate’ and inspire creativity. The teaching artists will demonstrate how these approaches are adaptable to a wide range of educational contexts and are accessible to learners of all ability levels and musical backgrounds. The session will conclude with a performance of each group’s composition.

Afternoon at The Stanley Marketplace
2501 N. Dallas St. Aurora, Colorado 80010

Join Denver’s The Playground Ensemble as we partner with Friends of Chamber Music to celebrate our 20th season with an afternoon of music creation and community at The Stanley Marketplace. Each session highlights a different part of what makes Playground Ensemble the innovative organization that it is.

Family/Community Music-Making 1-2:30 PM: We invite families (grown-ups too!) to create their own instruments and compositions. Create your own compositions using colors and shapes and hear them played on the spot! Record your own beats at our electronic music station. Make tongue depressor kazoos, and play our collection of strange found sound instruments.

At 2 PM, Sing With Us! Meet us in the Stanley commons for a community singing of Pauline Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation. Using any vowel sound, sing a tone that you hear in your imagination. Listen for someone else’s tone and tune to its pitch as exactly as possible. Introduce new tones at will and tune to as many different voices as are present. Sing warmly.

String Quartet Concert 2:30 PM: In keeping with the spirit of Stanley Marketplace, the Playground String Quartet provides an eclectic sample of works by Latino, Indigenous, and women composers. Including works by Gabriela Ortiz, Raven Chacon, and Caroline Shaw, this program contains the breadth of both Playground’s style and their mission.

Playground at 20!
MCA Denver at the Holiday Theater
2644 W 32nd Ave, Denver, CO 80211

Hosted by MCA Denver at the Holiday Theater, this series of concerts is the heart of MARATHON.

The evening starts with Shane Courville (trumpet, electronics, composer) and Nathan Hall (piano, electronics, composer) presenting solo, duo, and improvised works on themes of freedom: freedom of nations and sovereignty, freedom to express our own identities, and the freedom of creative collaboration.

Up next join Leah and Josh for a 30-minute program of (mostly) contemporary art songs that recall childhood and gently remind us never to stop playing, even amidst the gloom and doom of life today. When you look through the kaleidoscope of your childhood, what do you see? Do the bright spots of hope, nature, and laughter stand out, or does darkness prevail?

After these two duo sets we gather for a celebratory toast to all that has been accomplished in the previous two decades while looking forward to the future.

At 8PM is the main event, The Playground @ 20!

This chamber concert features the first work we ever played, a new commission by Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez for bass flute and ‘ghost’ string quartet, and a new work by Playground Director Conrad Kehn for the entire ensemble.

The evening will also feature the Colorado premiere of Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Ithánali, about a Chickasaw woman astronaut who is designated to be the first human to set foot on Mars, aware of the irony of her own action – colonizing Mars – and how it compares/contrasts to the historic colonization of her own tribe.

We will also highlight one of our favorite works commissioned with I’m Waiting for Your Crip Cadence, a collaborative composition by Nathan Hall and performance artist MG Bernard that creates an auditory and visual experience of what it is like to exist in a chronically sick bodymind exploring ideas of the disabled experience of non-linear time, and the doctor-patient relationship through a visceral display of how she is bound to the medical industrial complex, dependent on uncomfortable relationships of care, and indentured to pain.

Late Night GLOB

Close out MARATHON at Denver’s DIY citadel, GLOB.

This underground atmosphere set will intersperse avant DJ sets by former Playground board member DJ i.lind before our Music of The Shining, a show based on music from the Stanley Kubrick (and Stephen King) classic.

At midnight Playground composer and board member Silen Wellington will lead us in Haunting, a ritual performance. This is followed by Loretta Notareschi performing How All’s to One Thing Wrought! an improvisational work for a custom-designed virtual instrument that uses the electronic transformation of a single cello low C to express the spiritual idea of an interdependent web of all existence. Luke Wachter will perform …and we are a collection of memory for solo vibraphone and still photography which juxtaposes the impermanence of improvisation with the immutability of static images, examining how identity is constructed in the mind by collecting and reinterpreting memories and shared experiences. Ryan Fiegl winds us down with an electronic music set with reactive video as his musical alter ego Severed Shadow.

The evening closes with an open invite community-improvised drone session carrying us into the early morning.

For more information visit www.playgroundensemble.org.

  • This program is supported by Denver Arts & Venues through the DENVER CREATES Fund.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E42: Turning Jewels Into Water

Turning Jewels Into Water, photo by Ed Marshall

Turning Jewels Into Water is a project with composer/percussionist/turntablist Val Jeanty and percussionist/composer/electronic musician Ravish Momin. Formed around 2017 when the two met at a jam session at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York. Recognizing a shared affinity for crafting unique rhythms and soundscapes and compatible methods of working the two artists have since worked together to explore the ways in which new technologies can be used to blend electronic and acoustic instruments in creating music that reflects the diverse cultural heritages and musical interests in common. The name of the project is a commentary on access to natural resources and howthat has been politicized in human struggles for power especially in the capitalist era increasingly so with the rise in climate change impacts. A casual listen to any of the duo’s three albums reveals a mastery of rhythmic arrangements and patterned tones for a sound that is ambient adjacent but more akin to the kind of early industrial beat-making and culture jamming sounds heard in a band like Cabaret Voltaire but steeped in modern sensibilities and production methods.

Listen to our interview with Ravish Momin on Bandcamp and follow Turning Jewels Into Water at their website linked below. See the project live at The Bug Theater presented by Creative Music Works on Saturday, January 24, 2026. There is an artist discussion and Q&A for premium ticket holders at 6pm with the performance after (doors 7, show 7:30).

Turning Jewels Into Water website

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E41: babybaby4ever

babybaby4ever, photo by LK Konkoli

Over the last handful of years discerning fans of synth pop in Denver that have been fortunate enough to witness a babybaby4ever show have an artist worthy of her influences. Lily Conrad grew up in Golden, Colorado and started playing music at a young age getting into playing guitar and then cello by her middle school and teen years. In 2016 in college Conrad started making music and performed her first show as babybaby but in the past couple of years she changed the project name so that it was more findable via internet search engines. Early on playing out in and around Denver Conrad was part of the local DIY scene playing house shows and underground venues like the now defunct Posh House. Around that time she started playing keyboards in the live version of psychedelic garage rock band Rose Variety with her friend Becc Perez. The pandemic era stretched time in weird directions but since the world opened up again Conrad started playing around more often in her solo project at venues that could better represent her developing sound and its highly developed, rich synth tone and production. The show now includes props and aspects of performance art from Conrad making a babybaby4ever show memorable both visually as well as for the finely crafted songs that have the spontaneity and vulnerability of classic indiepop and the robust and enveloping melodic tonality of 80s New Wave. In 2026 babybaby4ever releases the new album 4ever is a long time via Denver-based imprint Witchcat Records. The nine songs are loosely a kind of breakup album as breakthrough. The lyrics and moods honor the heartache and the will to move forward by embracing vital experiences and the roots of who were are and what makes our lives feel vibrant.

Listen to our interview with Lily Conrad of babybaby4ever on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below. The album release show happens on Saturday, February 7, 2026 at Hi-Dive with Pleasure Prince, Xenon Thief and DJ WNGDU, doors 7pm, show 8pm, $12.

babybaby4ever on TikTok

babybaby4ever on Instagram

babybaby4ever on YouTube