Reverb And The Verse has been going in Denver since 1999 when Shane Etter and Jahi Simbai (aka Providence) met through friends who figured they might gel as a duo. Between Etter’s technical wizardry with synthesizers and production and Simbai’s deft and thought-provoking wordplay Reverb And The Verse became a staple in the local underground music scene. But their wide-ranging musical interests and eclectic aesthetics always seemed to make them perhaps too experimental or not otherwise right for the hip-hope scene and too hip-hop for other scenes. And yet Etter and Simbai have produced an impressive body of work across ten albums including their 2022 and final album BLACKWALL. From jump it’s a decidedly different and engrossing album that hits like a secret and great industrial or darkwave record but with a hip-hop production aesthetic (of course much of industrial production was inspired by hip-hop sampling techniques and sequencing) and Simbai’s commanding vocals and incisive social analysis. One would hope that in an era when Vince Stapes, Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, Tyler the Creator, Death Grips, Moodie Black, Dälek and clipping. thrive that Reverb And The Verse would have been embraced by a wider audience but time will tell. BLACKWALL is arguably the duo’s finest moment across a catalog of consistently impressive and imaginative work with something to say with poetic finesse. All of it can be found on the Reverb And The Verse Bandcamp page.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Etter and Simbai to discuss their backgrounds in music, engineering (not the musical kind) and the ideas and experiences that shaped their extraordinary music. Listen below on Bandcamp and look out for a vinyl release later in 2022 and, with any luck, live performances of these songs and news of what the artists will do next.
Ov Stars is a duo comprised of Alice Genese and Shaune Pony Heath. Genese some may know for her tenure as the bassist in Psychic TV from 2003-2020. She had also been involved in the underground music scene around Hoboken, NJ as a member of Gut Bank and Sexpod whose own output is perhaps long neglected but worth exploring on their own. Heath was born and raised in South Africa and moved to the USA at 23 to pursue a creative life not as readily available in his home country. Genese had already started releasing music as a solo artist with her 2014 debut album Sticks and Bones and through her brother she was introduced to Heath and the two gelled personally and creatively. Their debut EP as Ov Stars, Tuesdays, is a warm and energetic blend of cosmic country circa Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, psychedelia and pop. Fans of Low and Marianne Faithful will find a good deal to appreciate in the finely crafted melodies and evocative atmospheres across the record’s five tracks. The duo is starting to perform live shows so check in with Ov Stars on Instagram @ovstarsband for live dates and notification of when the vinyl edition of the EP is released in later 2022. Tuesdays is, however, available now digitally on Bandcamp.
Psychic TV at Summit Music Hall 12/11/15, photo by Tom Murphy. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on left, Alice Genese on right
Listen to our interview with Ov Stars on Bandcamp and if you happen to be in Brooklyn on or around June 30, 2022 you can see Ov Stars performing as part of the We Are But One – Breyer P-Orridge exhibit at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.
Letting Up Despite Great Faults, photo courtesy the artists
Letting Up Despite Great Faults released its latest album titled IV on March 4, 2022 and marked its first full album in nearly eight years. But for a band that got off to what might be described as a slow start in 2004 in Los Angeles followed by the 2006 release of its first EP Movement (which was reissued on cassette in 2021) the group, lead by singer/guitarist/songwriter Mike Lee, fairly quickly progressed from an early synth pop/proto bedroom pop project to a more shoegaze band by the time of its self-titled 2009 debut and following its move to Austin, Texas at the beginning of 2012 the band has fused the more soundscapey side of its songwriting with the entrancing pop hooks that have always been its hallmark. The new record and its lead single “She Spins” hits your ears right away as one of the great works of guitar pop of the past two decades. Its unconventional melodic lines subvert expected musical tropes of the genre and the intricate guitar interplay recalls the best sides of the Paisley Underground and C86 but with lush production that makes it an easy record to get lost in with a single listen. We had a chance to speak with Lee about his early days as a musician, his development as an artist within the context of Letting Up Despite Great Faults (a name that’s a nod to the Blonde Redhead song “Loved Despite Great Faults”) and the aesthetics of IV from the songwriting to the cover art which Lee, as a graphic artist himself, helped to create.
Listen to our interview with Mike Lee on Bandcamp linked below and catch Letting Up Despite Great Faults performing with Blushing, Old Soul Dies Young and Moodlighting at Lost Lake on Wednesday, April 20, 2022, doors 7, show 8, $12.
Mondo Cozmo aka Joshua Ostrander once fronted the alternative/indie rock bands Laguardia and Eastern Conference Champions before recording under his own name in 2016. The project’s records beginning with 2017’s Plastic Soul through New Medicine from 2020 have had a lively and eclectic quality that synthesizes Ostrander’s folk influences with those more experimental and electronic for a sound that feels both familiar and fresh. His 2022 album This Is For The Barbarians propels Ostrander’s creative instincts in interesting new directions for an album that is often evocatively intimate, delicately thoughtful, brash and rebellious and contemplative all at once. It is a deep record with thought-provoking and insightful commentary on the state of the country and the world as well as the impact of navigating a time of great conflict and disorder bordering on chaos. One hears in the music the influence of Bob Dylan, Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen. Ostrander consulted with the latter on some of the songwriting for the new record and in our interview with the open and engaging musician Ostrander talks about what he and the boss discussed.
Listen to the podcast interview on Bandcamp linked below, catch Mondo Cozmo on tour now with The Airborne Toxic Event. Follow Ostrander on his website www.mondocozmo.com.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre has followed the colorful and heartfelt creative vision of Anton Newcombe since its 1990 inception in San Francisco. Its aesthetic informed by 60s psychedelic rock and experimental electronic music has evolved greatly in always fascinating directions through challenging personal times and tense periods within the band while garnering a strong cult following on the strength of its prolific output. Before psychedelic rock became a trendy style of music again in the past decade and a half, the Jonestown Massacre was influencing that directly or indirectly through bands it inspired or through Newcombe’s idiosyncratic mentoring. Too many people took the 2004 documentary Dig! at face value when it was a snapshot of a time in American underground music when alternative music was becoming relegated to the underground again while the possibilities of overcoming the forces of the music-industry-with-music-as-commodity seemed possible. Fast forward twenty years and Newcombe’s idealism and wide-ranging curiosity and creative vision seems vindicated by bands not only able to more directly reach an audience but one more organic and global. One June 24, 2022 the group will release its new album Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees, the product of much experimentation in terms of songwriting, production and testing reactions to the music through YouTube and other social media outlets and one of Newcombe’s strongest set of songs in recent years. We had a chance to speak with the songwriter about 2022 tourmates Mercury Rev, the band’s artwork for the tour posters unique to every date, his following the instinct to create regularly as a way of self-inspiration and staying in the habit of creating at as high a level as possible and the flow of the wordplay of his poetic and playful song titles among many other subjects.
Brian Jonestown Massacre performs at Ogden Theater on 04.12.22 with Mercury Rev. Listen to our interview with Newcombe on Bandcamp linked below. Full tour itinerary (including past dates) beneath the interview link and for more information please visit thebrianjonestownmassacre.com.
27th March 2022 Philadelphia, PA USA Union Transfer 28th March 2022 Brooklyn, NY USA Brooklyn Steel 29th March 2022 Jersey City, NJ USA White Eagle Hall March 30th 2022 Baltimore, MD USA Rams Head Live March 31st 2022 Providence, RI USA Columbus Theatre April 1st 2022 Boston, MA USA Roadrunner April 2nd 2022 Montreal, QC Canada Le National April 4th 2022 Toronto, ON Canada Queen Elizabeth Theatre April 5th 2022 Detroit, MI USA Majestic Theatre April 6th 2022 Indianapolis, IN USA The Vogue April 7th 2022 Cleveland OH USA Agora Theatre April 8th 2022 Chicago, IL USA The Vic Theatre April 9th 2022 Milwaukee, WI USA Turner Hall Ballroom April 10th 2022 Minneapolis, MN USA First Avenue April 12th 2022 Denver, CO USA Ogden Theatre April 13th 2022 Salt Lake City, UT USA Metro Music Hall April 15th 2022 Vancouver, BC Canada Vogue Theatre April 16th 2022 Tacoma, WA USA McMenamins Elks Temple Hotel – The Spanish Ballroom April 17th 2022 Seattle, WA USA Showbox April 18th 2022 Portland, OR USA Roseland Theatre April 20th 2022 San Francisco, CA USA The Fillmore April 21st 2022 San Francisco, CA USA The Fillmore April 22nd 2022 Los Angeles, CA USA The Wiltern April 23rd 2022 San Diego, CA USA The Observatory North Park April 24th 2022 Santa Ana, CA USA The Observatory OC April 25th 2022 Tucson, AZ USA The Rialto Theatre April 27th 2022 San Antonio TX USA Paper Tiger April 28th 2022 Austin, TX USA Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater April 29th 2022 Dallas, TX USA Granada Theater April 30th 2022 Houston, TX USA The Heights Theater May 2nd 2022 Lawrence, KS USA The Bottleneck May 3rd 2022 Saint Louis, MO USA Delmar Hall May 5th 2022 Nashville, TN USA Brooklyn Bowl May 6th 2022 Birmingham, AL USA Saturn May 7th 2022 Atlanta, GA USA Terminal West May 9th 2022 Asheville, NC USA The Orange Peel May 10th 2022 Carrboro, NC USA Cat’s Cradle May 11th 2022 Washington, DC USA Black Cat
SUMAC formed in 2014 when Kurt Ballou of Converge connected guitarist Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mammifer, House of Low Culture) who had written the initial elements of songs with Baptists drummer Nick Yacyshyn to help realize Turner’s vision of crafting the heaviest music of his career then thus far. Brian Cook of Russian Circles and formerly of These Arms Are Snakes and Botch rounded out the classic and current line-up in time for the group’s debut album. The resulting four albums since (The Deal from 2015, What One Becomes in 2016, Love in Shadow out 2018 and May You Be Held released in 2020) are indeed some of the heaviest records of recent years. But as with Turner’s other projects it’s never just heavy for the sake of that quality, it’s intricate and imaginative, emotionally charged soundscapes in which the contributions of all the players seems to be highlighted. Certainly with the most recent album it’s not relentlessly crushing dynamics but a flood of textures seemingly elevated in a suspended and sustained whirlpool of sound that rushes through you and then out like experiencing a state of being. Calling it post-metal or sludge metal is one way of giving people an idea of what they’re in for but the music itself has more in common with artists like Neurosis and SunnO))) than with some other bands lumped under those genre designations. Perhaps it is conceived of as a mind-altering experience to perform and thus witness when you’re in the room with it live. The fact that SUMAC has collaborative albums with noise legend Keiji Haino who is highly selective with whom he does work speaks much to how SUMAC isn’t merely a metal or heavy band.
Turner has long been a champion of forward thinking underground music since the 90s with his label Hydra Head Records which issued releases from the likes of Boris, Big Business, Cave In, Daughters, Dälek, Jesu, Kayo Dot, Oxbow, Khanate, Harvey Milk, Xasthur and The VSS. Its roster is a kind of who’s who of heavier experimental music of its heyday. Through the label and touring Turner has had a vehicle for exploring his creative interests in music and visual art which brings an added dimension to SUMAC’s releases as well and the ethos with which the band operates. On its current tour the group will be joined by purveyors of death doom Blood Spore and Los Angeles-based avant-garde saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi.
We recently had a chance to talk with Turner about his roots in music, his early and ongoing experiences with DIY music and culture, working with Keiji Haino and the aims of his record labels Hydra Head and SIGE among other subjects that hopefully hold surprises for the patient listener. Find links to SUMAC, Hydra Head, SIEGE, Thrill Jockey and information for the Denver show (including buying tickets) this Sunday, March 13, 2022 below the Bandcamp link to listen to the interview.
Dale Bozzio is one of the New Wave style icons of the 1980s as the lead singer of Missing Persons. Her unique singing style and compelling stage presence coupled with her daring fashion sense for an aesthetic that was a bit futuristic the way David Bowie was in the mid-70s made Bozzio a fascinating figure in popular music. Hits like “Destination Unknown,” “Words,” “Mental Hopscotch,” “Walking in L.A.” and “Windows” took the fairly experimental art rock band into the mainstream. Its members had all been a part of Frank Zappa’s band in the late 70s and brought those technical chops and conceptual creativity to the more pop-oriented Missing Persons and having hits has cemented the band as a fixture of 80s pop, as their body of work deserves, but its craft and experimentation can often be missed in the larger cultural context. Nonetheless, Spring Session M, the group’s 1982 full-length debut, has aged well from its original era but the 1984 follow-up Rhyme & Reason, dismissed as an “art” album at the time of its release, is now starting to get some appreciation for its more forward-thinking material. But by 1986 due to interpersonal dynamics the band split with some brief reunions in 2001 and 2009 before Dale Bozzio relaunched the project as an ongoing concern in 2011 with strong live shows.
In December 2021 Dale Bozzio released her rather candid and poignant memoir Life Is So Strange: Missing Persons, Frank Zappa, Prince & Beyond. In the book Bozzio reveals to us aspects of her early life and the unorthodox ways in which she met Zappa climbing through a bathroom window at a music venue he was playing in Massachusetts as well as the ups and downs of life and her career and the extraordinary people with whom Bozzio worked and some of whom in with which she had a love affair including Prince. It’s a quick read and informed by Bozzio’s humor, warmth, personal insight with the unmistakable sensibility of someone who was and is creatively ambitious and wanted to do something with that spark that she cultivated from a young age. You can order the book directly from Bozzio on her Facebook page (linked below) which comes with a pink seven inch vinyl of “Destination Unknown” b/w “Mental Hopscotch” as remixed by Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus/Love and Rockets fame.
We had chance to speak with Bozzio by phone about some of the stories she details in the book and aspects of her life that perhaps aren’t included so hopefully you enjoy listening to the conversation and get a sample of what a sharp and, well, cool and thoughtful a person Bozzio really is. Listen to the interview on Bandcamp below. Also, catch Missing Persons on tour with that Lost 80s Live! tour running through summer 2022.
hackedepicciotto at Mutiny Information Cafe in 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
Daniel de Picciotto and Alexander Hacke have been pivotal figures in experimental music in their home city of Berlin going back decades. Hacke has long been a member of pioneering industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten and de Picciotto was a co-founder of traveling electronic music festival the Love Parade. Both have also been members of influential post-punk band Crime & the City Solution. These creative endeavors would be enough to secure their place in music history but anyone involved in the world of art and creative work knows you cannot rest on your laurels forever and de Picciotto and Hacke have both worked in film scoring, various musical projects and in the case of de Picciotto a writer of both a memoir (The Beauty of Transgression published in 2011 about de Picciotto’s early years in Berlin) and graphic novels (We Are Gypsies Now: A Graphic Diary from 2015 about the travails of trying to find a place to settle as artists when Berlin seemed to begin to be unaffordable; Die heitere Kunst der Rebellion – in English The Cheerful Art of Rebellion published in German in 2021 covering her Berlin years 1987-1995). Hacke and Picciotto have also released solo albums all worth exploring including de Picciotto’s affecting 2021 LP The Element of Love.
Several years back Hacke and de Picciotto established hackedepicciotto as a vehicle for their musical collaboration and their multimedia shows as touring artists has consistently brought fascinating narratives and visceral performances to cities around the world. In 2021 the respected Mute Records label released the latest hackedepicciotto album The Silver Threshold. The album is a showcase for what the project has been steeped in for years while also a fine example of pushing aesthetics and exploring sonic and thematic possibilities across eleven tracks, each a marvel of expanding stylistic experiments while commenting on having lived and traveled across continents and truly conjuring a sense of place and time while using sense memory and psychological states and sharp cultural observations as raw material for composition.
I recently had a chance to discuss The Silver Threshold with hackedepicciotto in depth through the use of modern technology to bridge the gap between Berlin and Colorado. Our conversation about symbolism, themes, the challenges of modern culture for creative life and more with any luck flowed well even for the listener as much as it felt to on my end. And if fortune favors us further hackedepicciotto will get to tour more extensively in the year ahead to bring this unique album and their other work to life in their inimitable and always engaging manner. Listen to the interview on Bandcamp and check out The Silver Threshold and other hackedepicciotto also on Bandcamp linked directly below as is the project’s website.
Adam Sherburne is perhaps best known as the charismatic frontman and guitarist for industrial/hip-hop group Consolidated. Known for its radical activist political stances focused on human and animal rights, ecology and a sustainable civilization including advocacy for vegetarianism and the perils of capitalism and nationalistic chauvinism. Listen to any Consolidated album and there are no bones made, no vague mincing of words and yet all informed by a sharply observed statements and a playful sense of humor that is as inviting as it might put off those who for whatever reasons oppose a more progressive political worldview aimed toward making the lives of all and not just humans better.
Early on in the live Consolidated live performances the group passed microphones to people in the audience to discuss and comment on the songs as part of a process of “inter-active democracy” (according to an article in Trouser Press penned by j. poet and Ira Robbins). This attempt to blur the line between band and “audience” with a paticipatory approach has been part of what has made Consolidated different from many of its peers. And in recent years Sherburne has come up with a concept he calls Free Music that takes that concept to another and deeper level as a way to deconstruct and transform the way music is made, shared and distributed as a collective, culture project rather than simply a commodity. Below is his chart of “Music Industry Vs. Free Music” plotted out with a direct simplicity that, whether you agree with him or not, is easily accessible and easy to implement. It may not be an approach for everyone but anyone who has been part of the music world in recent years or really for decades the industry, such as it is, has been largely dysfunctional, predatory and anti-art and culture in the end. Seeing one’s way past the context of one’s existence in the capitalist paradigm can be challenging and tricky but once you can conceptualize a path out of that and being defined in terms directly relatable to that paradigm it’s not so tricky to understand that your whole life can be liberated in ways you had perhaps not thought of before. Even if you have to keep participating in that system to survive or even to function as a musician and artist you need not have your aspirations and imagination colonized by it to the level of your identity and system of values. Should anyone’s life and all things in the world really defined by your temporary utility to the dictates of an arbitrary and far from benevolent economic system? Whether or not you end up subscribing to the ideas of Free Music it’s a question implicitly posed by its theoretical foundation in praxis.
Back in December we were able to discuss these concepts with Sherburne at length and a bit about his development as an artist and activist in the wake of seeing Consolidated live with Front 242 in September. Consolidated released its latest album We’re Already There in 2021. You can listen to the interview on Bandcamp below the chart and also linked are the new album as well as the group’s active Facebook page.
Jim McCarty is a founding and current member of The Yardbirds. The latter was one of the most influential and creative of the blues rock bands of the 60s whose membership included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page who, when the band broke up in 1968, formed Led Zeppelin. With a string of hits that include “For Your Love,” “Shape of Things,” “Heart Full of Soul” and “Over Under Sideways Down,” The Yardbirds were one of the key bands in the development of British blues rock and psychedelia. After the group split, McCarty became part of a variety of bands across the 60s, 70s and 80s (Renaissance, Together, Box of Frogs et. al.) and has released solo albums under his own name but since 1992 he’s also been part of the reformed Yardbirds. In 2018 McCarty issued his autobiography, focused on the career of his most well-known band, Nobody Told Me to great critical acclaim. On June 7, 2020 McCarty’s wife of over 25 years Elisabeth (Lizzy) passed away from cancer. The tragic event propelled the musician to look back on his life and examine his personal journey as a creative person fascinated by larger questions about life and left field realms of knowledge and comprehension of spiritual and philosophical issues. In the subsequent memoir, She Walks In Beauty (invoking the title of the Lord Byron poem) McCarty charts that path in an unpretentious and engaging way tracing the line between his imagination being sparked by the landmark British television show The Quatermass Experiment in 1953 through science fiction, an interest in UFOs, esoteric knowledge, the occult, Buddhism, mysticism, spiritual mediums and all manner of ideas that stir creative pondering and exploration of ideas and concepts that also informed the music. It is an intimate and touching portrait of a time and the people, including Yardbirds singer Keith Ralf who shared McCarty’s interests in unusual subjects, McCarty met along the way including Lizzy. We had a chance to speak with McCarty about the book and the fascinating details of his journey through learning about a wide range of Western and Eastern esotericism and spiritual traditions and its overlap with creative work as he followed his instincts and curiosity even as someone who was and remains a skeptic but one open to possibilities.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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