Interviews – Page 21 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 42: Rowboat

Rowboat at Mutiny Information Cafe September 2019, photo by Tom Murphy

The roots of Rowboat are in Sam McNitt’s solo work as a songwriter from his early days writing music in a more folk style. But in the mid-2000s he started the band Small Objects with his friend Jeff Shapiro before that more indie rock band split with most of its members starting shoegaze greats Blue Million Miles. The latter garnered local attention for its raw sonic power and McNitt’s thoughtful yet emotionally charged lyrics. When Blue Million itself parted ways around 2012, McNitt moved into doing Rowboat as his musical focus. The literary and powerful lyrics delved deep into dark psychological places that we often try to shy away from in not wanting to confront the foundations of our insecurities, examine deep seated emotional wounds and and the components of our desires and aspirations. McNitt does so with a poetry and sensitivity that gives his song writing a nearly palpable depth. Inspired by visual art McNitt’s music conveys imagery that embodies the moods and places he and his bandmates go in the songs. The gentle catharsis of the live show always seems unexpected and welcome. The most recent Rowboat album Forests Burn released on February 25, 2022.

Listen to our interview with McNitt on Bandcamp linked below and go see Rowboat at Down in Denver Fest on Saturday, 8/20/22 at 9:30 pm on the Further Stage. For more information on the festival and on Rowboat, visit one of the links beneath the link for the interview.

downindenver.com

Rowboat on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 41: Ray Diess

Ray Diess makes experimental electronic dance music and has been playing live under that project name for a few years minus the time of the pandemic when no one much was having shows. His 2022 album It’ll Always Ache released in July 2022 and its blend of synth pop, hyper pop and darkwave has a surprising depth of emotional expression. If you have been out at select shows you may have caught Diess live and his dramatic performances or just run into him making the shows work at places like Jester’s Palace or maybe even seeing him play keys in With Special Guest. He has collaborated on music with confrontational EBM/darkwave artist Hex Cassette and he otherwise seems as involved in his creative community as making the music that is a part of it. We recently caught up with Diess and discussed his background growing up in rural Elizabeth, Colorado and getting into theater and metal and ultimately to where he is now with music that has a similar intensity but a different sound.

Listen to our interview with Ray Diess on Bandcamp linked below and check out It’ll Always Ache on Spotify.

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 40: Alpha Cat

Alpha Cat is the musical project of Elizabeth McCullough that came together when she started writing songs some of which would become the 1999 EP Real Boy. The latter began as demos produced by McCullough’s friend, Television bassist Fred Smith and it enjoyed attention in the national charts for six weeks. The follow-up release Pearl Harbor had some unfortunate timing with the image of a bomb on the cover when it landed in October 2001 yet did well on college radio early the following year. But then, as happens with many people, McCullough went through and ended an unfortunate relationship and in April 2006 she started working on 15 instrumental tracks for what was to be her next album Venus Smile. With seven vocal tracks complete by summer McCullough lost her voice and fell into a dark place emotionally and psychologically and wouldn’t return to that music for over a decade. After hospitalization and various treatments McCullough in recent years engaged in a form of therapy to get to the root cause of the trauma that had run throughout her life. Starting in 2019 she has also revisited the finished recordings for Venus Smile and is now releasing the material in segments that make sense and work as a piece including the 2019 album Thatched Roof Glass House and the newly issued Venus Smile EP out now on Aquamarine Records. In this interview McCullough and I discuss her life and career thus far and the path through the sometimes unpredictable perils of mental health struggle and a culture that helps to exacerbate and perpetuate them.

Listen to the interview on Bandcamp linked below and connect with McCullough at the links provided where you can purchase the music as well.

Alpha Cat website

Aquamarine Records website

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 39: doubleVee

Treat Her Strangely is the new album by Norman, Oklahoma-based art pop band doubleVee. The project formed in 2012 with Allan Vest and Barb Hendrickson whose creative backgrounds in music and art complemented each other well. The duo married in 2015 and released their debut album in 2017, The Moonlit Fables of Jack the Rider. Allan had been the lead singer and guitarist of indiepop band The Starlight Mints from 1998-2009. The group’s orchestral pop songs were some of the more creatively ambitious works in the realm of what was coming to be called indie rock and The Starlight Mints garnered attention and placement in film and television for its colorfully baroque compositions. Barb spent sixteen years in public radio and she wrote, hosted and produced Filmscapes, a nationally syndicated film music program that afforded her the opportunity to interview the likes of Danny Elfman and Philip Glass whose own music have long graced film scores. Barb’s and Allan’s experiences jibe well together in the songwriting for doubleVee with a body of work that reveals a talent for pairing mythical storytelling with establishing a deep mood and dynamic orchestration of musical elements so that the songs are like vignettes in the story arc of each album even when the albums are not necessarily conceived as having a unified concept or aesthetic. The albums draw you in like the theme music for a great radio drama from another era. In the interview we discuss the roots of doubleVee’s artistry, their mutual appreciation for a good Caesar salad, the possibilities for presenting this music of cinematic scope live among other refinements.

Listen to the interview at Bandcamp linked below and follow the adventures and goings on of doubleVee at the links provided.

doublevee.net

doubleVee on Twitter

doubleVee on Facebook

doubleVee on Instagram

doubleVee on YouTube

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 38: White Hills

Since 2003 White Hills from New York City has been making psychedelic rock that has evolved in consistently interesting ways across a prolific career. The core duo of Dave W and Ego Sensation have incorporated elements of krautrock, space rock, metal, ambient soundscaping, post-punk into their sound so that the project’s body of work is eclectic yet coherent with a palette of mind-expanding sonics and rhythms that have separated the band from most other artists that might fall under the psych umbrella. For White Hills it’s not just a sound adopted from influences, it’s an outlook on the possibilities of the psychological impact of the music on both the members of the band and those who take in one of its records or attend a performance. Each record has been made with an approach that gives it its own sonic identity so that while the band’s sound may be fluidly evolving it has built into its aesthetic a drive to not get stuck in a rut. Now after nearly 20 years as a band White Hills has established its own imprint Heads On Fire Industries with its first physical release being that for a double vinyl of The Revenge Of Heads On Fire which is a reworking and re-imagining of the 2007 album Heads On Fire for which several more songs were recorded during the sessions with an album in mind with that music included but due to a disagreement with one of the parties involved with the record some of the songs were left out. So with some refinements added to complete the recordings left on the cutting room floor, as it were, really on an old, thought dead/defunct hard drive, White Hills presents the album as it was meant to be heard in its originally conceived form and with its themes of transformation and self-inspiration seeming as relevant now as it was at the time of original release. The vinyl edition of the record is available for pre-order (releases, assuming things go as planned, on September 16, 2022) on the band’s Bandcamp page linked below where you can find other links related with White Hills currently on tour with Telekinetic Yeti.

See White Hills with Telekinetic Yeti and Hashtronaut at Globe Hall on Sunday, August 7, 2022 and listen to our interview, apologies for the usual mobile phone connection issues, on Bandcamp also linked below.

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 37: Felix Bechtolsheimer of Curse of Lono

Felix Bechtolsheimer of Curse of Lono, photo courtesy the artist

Curse of Lono is an alternative rock band based in London, UK that formed in 2015 when former Hey Negrita members Felix Bechtolsheimer and Neil Findlay continued making music together after their former band’s split. Curse of Lono borrowed its name from the rare 1983 Hunter S. Thompson book of the same name and its songs have been informed by a literary sensibility and exquisitely soulful moods. The group’s new album People In Cars (Submarine Cat Records) is named after Mike Mandel’s 2017 photo book featuring people through the windows of cars in a Los Angeles intersection in 1970. The aesthetic of the photos parallels that of the songs with their late night, weary, existential folk blues like one might hear in the late 1980s and early 90s albums of Leonard Cohen. There is a noir quality to the songs and its themes of menace, depression and personal dissolution resonate like Ed Brubaker’s Reckless series. A version of the new album was recorded in June 2020 with each band member (guitarist Joe Hazell, drummer Neil Findlay, keyboardist Dani Ruiz Hernandez and bassist Charis Anderson) recording their parts individually. But Bechtolsheimer had lost his father that April and he began writing more songs for the album and delved deeper into his psyche and re-recorded the songs in stripped down form with Bayston pedal steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte and Boxed In drummer Liam Hutton in the first part of 2021. The resulting album is a vibrant and introspective piece of work like many long nights driving alone and leaving oneself exposed to the raw side of one’s feelings and tapping into their insight that can be covered over in everyday life.

Listen to our interview with Felix Bechtolsheimer on Bandcamp linked below and follow Curse of Lono at the links below.

Curse of Lono on Instagram

Curse of Lono on Facebook

Curse of Lono on Twitter

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 36: Chuck Wright

Chuck Wright performing with Quiet Riot, photo courtesy Chuck Wright

Chuck Wright is perhaps most well known as the long time bass player in heavy metal band Quiet Riot and he performed background vocals on all of and bass on “Metal Health (Bang Your Head)” and “Don’t Wanna Let You Go” on the band’s breakthrough 1983 album Metal Health. Throughout the 80s Wright played in prominent hard rock bands like Giuffria and House of Lords and rejoined Quiet Riot in 1986, playing with the band on and off on studio recordings and in the live band until 2021. During that entire time Wright’s skill as a bass player and producer brought him to a wide variety of musical projects including seven film scores like that for the 1997 action fantasy film Kull the Conqueror. Since 2015 he has headed Ultimate Jam Night at the Whisky a Go Go which has featured up to several dozen professional musicians a week (barring of course pandemic limitations). So decades into his career Wright has finally released his debut solo album Sheltering Sky. For the record Wright has brought to bear his eclectic sensibilities and styles in cinematic fashion for a set of songs that incorporate hard rock, progressive/art rock, jazz fusion and more experimental musical ideas including those for his fascinating cover of Björk’s “Army of Me.” Over 30 guest performers grace the record including members of Tesla, Dream Theater, Great White, Asia, Jefferson Starship, Allen Hinds and Toshi Yanagi but there is a coherence of creative vision that Wright was able to assemble in a way that challenged his multifaceted skills and creativity rather than simply putting out a record that seems to have rested on the laurels of his musical past.

Listen to our interview with Chuck Wright on Bandcamp below. Sheltering Sky came out on Cleopatra Records and for more information on Wright, his releases and his career please visit his website, both linked below.

www.chuckwright.com

www.CleopatraRecords.com

Chuck Wright on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 35: J. Niimi of Man’s Body

Man’s Body is a band based in both Los Angeles and Chicago. The “soft punk” band recently released its second full-length album A Set Of Steak Knives on NocturnalSol (a division of Heyday Media Group) which was recorded at KooPin in Queens, NY, Kingsize Sound Labs in Chicago, IL and Grandma’s Warehouse in Los Angeles, CA representing perhaps the sensibilities, influences and roots of the music. The music is an eclectic form of what might be called power pop but with the kind of post-punk that has vivid moods and strong atmospheric elements and the loud-quiet dynamics that are often attributed to Pixies but which can be traced to Mission of Burma. Whatever influences the group has absorbed Man’s Body has its own sound born of its members’ various backgrounds. Greg Franco came up in the Hollywood punk and underground rock world of that city having formed The Blasphemous Yellow with his brother at age 16 and played shows with bands like Psi Com (which included a pre-Jane’s Addiction Perry Farrell) and Tex & The Horseheads (which included Jeffrey Lee Pierce of Gun Club fame in its early incarnations). J. Niimi has been in and around the Chicago music scene since the late 80s as a multi-instrumentalist, a songwriter, a luthier and as a music journalist. The two met when Niimi’s band Ashtray Boy played one night in Los Angeles and the two hit it off as friends and a year later Franco’s band Rough Church played at Schubas in Chicago where Niimi was invited to fill in on drums. From there the emergent band Man’s Body would go on to record the Found EP at Steve Albini’s studio Electrical Audio and two full length albums. A Set Of Steak Knives and its lush production and evocative and imaginative songwriting is proof that though Niimi and Franco live in different parts of the country that their creative chemistry is yielding a compelling body of work.

Listen to our interview with Niimi on Bandcamp linked below and to listen to A Set Of Steak Knives visit the NocturnalSol Bandcamp page also linked below where you can also order a limited vinyl edition of the record.

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 34: John Baumgartner of The Trypes

The Trypes is an experimental, psychedelic folk band that began in 1982 in Haledon, New Jersey. It’s instrumentation began with an eclectic mix of sounds and textures so that its music was difficult to narrow down to an established genre. Fans of Savage Republic (who were contemporaries) and Stereolab will find something to like in The Trypes’ unconventional use of rhythm and composition at times seeming to favor compound time signatures and textural atmospheric elements. Its brand of folk and psychedelia sounded like it had tapped into a bit of the minimalist post-punk of the early 80s like Young Marble Giants and the more avant-garde Swell Maps whose own use of noise collage has some resonance with what you hear in a song by The Trypes. Around the mid-80s Glenn Mercer and Bill Million of influential post-punk band Feelies joined The Trypes for a time when their own band was on hiatus adding to some of this group’s artistic legacy. In 2012 Acute Records released the collection Music fore Neighbors which collected the group’s 1984 EP The Explorer’s Hold as well as unreleased demos and a compilation track not so easy to come by. But now in 2022 that compilation has been reissued on Pravda Records to celebrate the band’s 40 year anniversary and now includes songs from a 1984 showcase at the Bottom Line in New York and two tracks recorded when the original Trypes performed a reunion show in 2017. The CD is available now with a gatefold vinyl to be issued later in 2022. This interview was conducted with founding keyboard player John Baumgartner and delves into the group’s early days in New Jersey and its development and for many rediscovery.

Listen to the interview with Baumgarnter on Bandcamp linked below and for more information on The Trypes and to order the CD/download of Music For Neighbors visit the links below.

The Trypes on Facebook

Pravda Records

Queen City Sounds Podcast Ep. 33: Green Typewriters

Green Typewriters, photo by Tom Murphy, 2022

Green Typewriters formed in 2007 out of songwriting sessions between Gioja and Jared Lacy. The couple had met in New York when Jared was visiting a cousin and the two hit it off immediately. Gioja had grown up in Orlando, Florida and had moved away to get away from had felt like a narrow social circle with limited life choices at the time. The band named itself after an Olivia Tremor Control reference and its own songs came out of a similar love of transporting sounds and recording experiments and like OTC those songs ended up being as much pop as psychedelia. Green Typewriters became a bit of a fixture in Denver’s indie underground in the late 2000s and early 2010s before going on hiatus while Gioja attended mortuary school and Jared pursued graduate studies in philosophy and religion. Though the project has been around for fifteen years it had never had much in the way of official releases minus some burned CDs the band would give away at shows. So it’s 2022 EP The Solar Anus (named after the parodic essay by Georges Bataille) marks its first official release and on cassette with artwork by Wendy Danger York. The album was produced and engineered by long time DIY/underground musician Zach Bauer who some may know for his fine recording skills but others more so for his numerous experimental bands like the punk noise outfit Zombie Zombie, the doom metal-esque The Outer Neon, psychedelic post-punk group Wicked Phoenix and Can tribute band Future Days. Those who regularly attended shows at Rhinoceropolis may have witnessed Zach as a member of Spellcaster’s Rock and Roll Time Travel Committee. What is less known is Bauer’s gift for writing and recording artistically ambitious pop songs, a skill he brought to bear in helping Green Typewriters realize making fifteen years of songwriting into a coherent and vibrant set of songs.

Listen to our candid interview with Gioja and Jared on Bandcamp linked below. Green Typewriters will perform at Enigma Bazaar celebrating the release of The Solar Anus on Saturday, July 16, 2022 with Falcon’s Eye. To connect with the band visit it’s LinkTree for the appropriate avenues.