T-Rextasy will perform two shows in Colorado this week with Blacker Face. Monday, August 6 at Your Mom’s House in Denver [show canceled and relocated to TBA, ask a punk] and Tuesday, August 7 at Surfside 7 in Fort Collins. The New York City-based band has garnered a bit of a following in the past few years for its spirited and unconventional pop punk. Formed in 2013 while its members were still in high school, T-Rextasy demonstrated an astute and thoughtful take on social issues and identity from a young age imbued with a genuinely clever and irreverent sensibility.
Drummer Ebun Nazon-Power had been playing in bands prior to T-Rextasy when she heard about Lyris Faron from a friend. “We first met at my show at my high school,” dsays Nazon-Power. “After she saw me play she said, ‘I want to start a band with you.’ She wanted an all girl band, you know, to play some rock and roll music. I was down with that. Within a couple of weeks we started practicing together.”
The group’s first performance was at a house show and one of its earliest gigs at a more conventional venue was opening for the great New York City indie pop band Frankie Cosmos at the DIY space Shea Stadium. “That was a big deal for us because it was our first opportunity to play before this big group,” says Nazon-Power.
Critics have referred to the band’s lyrics as radically political in the best sense—mincing no words yet creatively engaging.
“So educational but not didactic?” asks bassist Annie Fidoten. “As songwriters we’re rooted in thinking about things that are happening in our immediate periphery, to ourselves and our friends. ‘Chick’n’ is a song I wrote when I was 17 and now I’m 22. I was literally sitting around with people at the cafeteria and talking about how pet names annoy me as much as cat calling does. There’s something creepy about it. I thought it would be clever to put that into a song. A lot of people probably feel the same way and it becomes social commentary that resonates for other people. We’re always trying to write songs that we think might resonate with other people who have experienced those things themselves. If something happens in adolescence and we’re still thinking about it? I think that’s pretty universal.”
“Chick’n” appeared on the group’s 2016 debut full-lengthJurassic Punk, a record filled with exuberant songs that offer a perspective looking to encourage the transformation of the present into a better future by critiquing regressive mindsets and behaviors with humor and psychological insight.
Since all the members of T-Rextasy are currently enrolled in college in different parts of the United States, it has undertaken sporadic touring and took some time off in 2017 to go on a bigger tour. And in summer 2017, the band took time out for a kind of songwriting retreat to compose its sophomore album, as yet unnanounced, due later this year on Danger Collective.
“We stayed together in New York for four days or something like that and wrote songs and relaxed,” says Fidoten. “Some were songs we had pieces of or almost songs. Some were completely written while we were there. All those songs we wrote together. It was very collaborative, all of our songwriting is. I can’t imagine us writing songs remotely and sending each other parts. We operate as a unit. Half of the songs we had before and the other half are from that writing experience.”
The new record contains much of the striking and affecting lyrics one would expect as well as songwriting that could never be truly pigeonholed with the confessional, personal quality of the best pop punk and eclectic use of sound including bits of ska.
“I’m a big ska fan so I think the formula for what a ska song is we can sprinke into places to spice them up a little,” says Lyris Faron. “When we do covers, we can do an instant ska cover, bass on the 1, 5, 8, guitars on the off beat, super easy to spice it up lke that and make it recognizable and give it a kitschy feeling.”
Whatever its exact alchemy, for certain, T-Rextasy’s version of punk is not only good but good for you.
When Yvette Young of math rock band Covet started posting videos of her guitar sketches on Facebook and then on YouTube and other online outlets several years back she didn’t necessarily see herself doing music professionally. “I started posting those songs as an incentive to finish songs and share them with friends,” says Young. “There were a lot of cool communities on Facebook of people that liked the same music I did. I posted the videos just to keep track of my progress. I did it for the same reasons I post riffs on Instagram—to incentivize finishing them.”
Young earned herself a well-deserved reputation as a guitar shredder on par with the math rock inspirations in bands like Don Caballero, Pelican, TTNG, Tera Melos and Enemies. But her musical technique has never been done for its own sake and never really learned to merely show off technical skill. Young is also a visual artist and views musical technique in the same was she does artistic technique.
“I see technique as a tool kit,” says Young. “The more technique you have and applications you have for guitar—for instance two handed tapping, picking chords, tugging—it’s like a painter’s toolbox , [to use] the visual artist analogy. To me music is sonic painting and I want to transport someone with my music. I want as many colors and as many tools as I can. That’s my incentive for figuring out my technique—to get to the closest to what I want to achieve. For a lot of people they hear stuff in their head but their hands aren’t there. You have the potential to do this thing but you don’t have the tools so you have to learn the tools.”
“I write with my ears and then I find it on the guitar,” continues Young. “Usually I don’t know how to play it yet or how to do what I heard. I know where the notes are but I don’t know how to connect it all yet. So I’ll keep practicing until I get it down. That’s how I get my technique. I try doing stuff I think is impossible and once I do it, it feels good. Then I can apply that technique to any other song I want to write in the future. I always write songs I can’t play yet. I don’t go to comfortable shapes, I always try to push myself to do weird stuff that is uncomfortable at first. That’s a good way if you want to break out of your routine. Change your tunings so you can’t do those shapes anymore. Totally disable yourself so you have to use your ears and you’ll be able to write stuff that sounds totally natural because you end up having to write with your head and not just with technique itself. You can’t just do an arpeggiated sweep, the shape is gone. So you have to find something that’s much more creative.”
Young’s music is like her drawings and paintings—diverse, rich in style and evocative power. She does the artwork for all of her albums and there is an element of what Young refers to as “escapist” or fantastical, intended to transport the viewer to another place or another time in their lives. Whether it’s the albums or the artwork Young has shared on various online outlets, her development as a visual artist is seemingly in parallel with her development as a musician. The group’s new EP, 2018’s Effloresce, is Covet’s most fully-realized work to date with an appeal beyond what might be immediately to the taste of connoisseur’s of math rock. As Young discussed earlier, her method of learning and employing technique is a bit unorthodox but which has resulted in music that steps creatively out of what one might expect of the genre or of what Covet has done before.
The EP is named as a kind of tribute to British post-rock band Oceansize and its own debut full-length, Effloresce. “It kind of means to bloom and flour and in chemistry it means to dry up to a point to powderize and disappear,” says Young. “I like the idea of blooming. I feel this is a departure from our last album production-wise and songwriting-wise. We all have different influences and we want to take all our passions, influences and backgrounds and mesh them into one sound. This album is like a person with a bunch of flowers as a face because we’re growing.”
At moments the songs on Effloresce employ the familiar, elegantly melodic guitar tapping compositions and other techniques Young has mastered but Covet never seems to get stuck in a particular technique across the EP’s six tracks and the inventive creation of atmosphere and dynamics take the music beyond math rock and beyond rock itself into more experimental musical territory. The tracks “Glimmer” and “Gleam” in particular all but cross over into the realm of ambient music at points.
“I’m fascinated with how much you can push a sound and how many different genres you can [combine],” says Young. “Also, on a practical level, it makes touring a lot easier. I think metal is a cool genre but is unfortunately a niche genre. There’s only so many huge metal bands and you end up going out with the same kinds of bands all the time. If you are more like a chameleon you open yourself up to more touring opportunities. I don’t write to open up more touring opportunities, I write because I really enjoy multiple styles of music and I want to do all of it in one.”
Yvette Young may have initially seen a career for herself in the sciences, at least according to what she hints at in her refreshingly candid interview with Sidewalk Talk in May 2018, but for now she has carved out for herself a life as a professional musician.
“Essentially I became my parents’ nightmare but it’s working out,” says Young in typically humorous fashion. “I might as well join a gang.”
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2012, photo by Tom Murphy
Titwrench travels to Stockholm Sweden for Titwrench Stockholm, which happens this weekend running Thursday June 14 through Saturday June 16 (find details here). The festival, which celebrates experimental music and art created by female identified people and LGBT folk, has been going on since 2009, usually in Denver, Colorado. The edition in Stockholm starts off with will include European and US artists including the likes of Denver’s Rachael Pollard, R A R E B Y R D $, Church Fire and Mirror Fears as well as Albuquerque artists Cthulha, Weedrat, Chicharra, Bigawatt and performance troupe extraordinaire Milch De La Máquina. The US artists in particular could use your help to defray the costs of performing at the festival and you can contribute to the cause here or to the individual artist funds linked above.
Before Titwrench last happened in Denver in August 2017, we had the chance to speak with Marisa Demarco of Milch De La Máquina, Chicharra and Bigawatt. Demarco has long been a significant artist and journalist in Albuquerque and we spoke with her about becoming involved in DIY and underground music and art and her evolution from pop/rock musician to noise and visionary avant-garde performance artist.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2017, photo by Tom Murphy
Queen City Sounds: You grew up in Albuquerque, is that right? Or did you grow up elsewhere?
Marisa Demarco: Yeah, no, born in Farmington, NM but lived my whole life in Albuquerque, NM.
How did you become aware of underground and DIY culture growing up?
I was performing in just like a regular pop-rock band or whatever called Ya Ya Boom since I was in high school. I was in that band a long time when I was really feeling like I wanted to stretch my ability level and my creativity a little bit. So, I saw this ad on Craigslist where they were looking for players for Cobra Game, which is a game invented by John Zorn. I’ve heard it described as somebody who’s flipping a radio really fast through the stations. I don’t think that’s totally exactly it but that’s maybe the quickest shorthand. So I joined Cobra as a vocalist, which also I didn’t realize at the time was maybe kind of odd. I don’t think there were any other vocalists in the group at that time.
From there, I just kind of met a lot of people who became big experimental players down here and the Cobra group eventually became Death Convention Singers, which is still something that I’m involved in. It no longer performs necessarily John Zorn’s compositions or John Zorn’s game, Cobra, but it does perform compositions, like contemporary experimental compositions. We also are an art collective and do installations and that’s over many years. So, I think I joined [that] Cobra group when I was 25 and I’m 36 now, so it’s over like 11 years I kind of evolved with those other performers and through them kind of found all the faces that in Albuquerque pop up for experimental noise music and performance.
For a long time, what was happening out here was like a space would open up and be around for just a little while, like maybe a year, until, I don’t know, cops start showing up or something, and then we would go to another spot. So for a while it was just a migratory DIY scene culture out here. We also did performances that were not in established venues at all, like we did this one performance on top of the abandoned courthouse in downtown Albuquerque. You know, we were just trying things in different kinds of spaces. That’s kind of how I got connected to all that stuff.
That’s really interesting, I had no idea. I remember Ya Ya Boom played up here I believe. At Glob or someplace like that?
We played at Glob. I think the first place we played was at 3 Kings and I think there’s still a sticker in the bathroom, of our band. [Titwrench founder] Sarah Slater recently took a photo in the last 5 years or something and showed me that it was still in there.
Did you know Raven Chacon from early on?
Yeah, Raven was in the Cobra group. I think he’s one of the two founders of the Cobra group or maybe the founder and he turned it into Death Convention Singers. And there’s another offshoot of that that happens periodically, called Dirty Birdies, which is this kind of long form improvisation with many players. So there’s Dirty Birdies, Death Convention and Cobra group and those are all kind of part of the same tree branch I guess.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
One of the best things that happens at Titwrench every year is Milch, of course. Is that something that you kind of got going to play that, or is it something you do there, as well, in Albuquerque?
Yeah, we started it – I mean, I gathered performers together when I even just heard that Titwrench was maybe a possibility. I didn’t even know if it was for sure happening or what but Raven Chacon, who you mentioned, actually sent me Sarah Slater’s contact info and was like, “Hey, I think she’s thinking about doing a festival.” And so I sent her an email and I was like, “Hey, I would super want to come up there to that” and so I kind of got a few friends together to make a group to play Titwrench. So we formed to play the festival. And then every year since then we’ve played every single one of them. We also always do the set here at home in Albuquerque and sometimes we’ve done even more elaborate versions of the set we do up in Denver. For instance, one year Milch did a set that I think had 6 people in Denver and then we came back here and I managed to rope like 30 people into performing it. Just cuz it’s easier to travel with 6 people than it is 30.
Is it “Milsh de la Makeena,” am I pronouncing that right?
Milch de la Máquina (with emphasis on the first a in Máquina)
Pardon me for not knowing, but what’s the meaning of that name?
It means Milk of the Machine and the name is in German and Spanish. The reason is because that very first group of people that I gathered together to head up to Titwrench included a woman from Germany and also, you know, lots of people in New Mexico are bilingual and I think a couple of our members at that time spoke Spanish and English so that’s why the name is in German and Spanish, making it really challenging for just about anyone to pronounce it or understand but, you know, what are you gonna do?
Every year is a new performance and concept?
A different performance every year. There’s some people who’ve done most of the sets. I think I’m the only person who’s done all of them and I actually randomly just listed all the sets today, which I’ve never looked back and considered what each one was but I did it today because I was hunting around for some photos for something else like, “Oh I can see what all the different sets have been through all the 9 years,” you know?
You had a characterization or an idea or a concept behind all the performances you’ve had?
I was just even trying to remember all the things we’ve done and built and who was in it, what we were working into, what was going on that year. I think a lot of times Milch is sometimes intentionally and unintentionally informed by whatever’s happening in the city. There was one year, the one that’s the dress piece, the great big dress.
I remember that, at the Mercury.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2011, photo by Tom Murphy
Yeah, all these areas around Albuquerque were on fire. There were big wildfires and we were in the middle of this super intense drought and then at night the smoke would settle all over the whole city as if the city was on fire and the moon was this crazy red color, you know? And we just ended up writing a lot about drought. Initially, not on purpose, like not in a really intentional way but in more of a subconscious way and then as the smoke continued for weeks we were writing about it pretty directly. So that dress piece I always think of as having a lot to do with water and drought and fire. Everybody remembers the dress but there were also waterproof microphones that we had in these big jugs of water that we were using to generate a lot of the sound.
Oh yeah, okay. I didn’t make that connection when I saw that back then. I remember the frames, like the illuminated picture frames or whatever they were from another year.
Yeah, the light frame pieces, yeah.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2012, photo by Tom Murphy
The Living Bird thing from Titwrench 201. I don’t know if you want to call it that but the performers were wearing hoods or something, and I had the impression you were simulating taking off in flight.
There was a big parade puppet, the Albatross, that’s the first one I think.
Milch is not necessarily a musical thing, it’s more like an experience in sound integrated full with a visual component.
Yeah, and it’s not like we’re like, “Hey let’s do a sound piece that includes a giant puppet” or something, it just all kind of came together that way. And I remember we were at Titwrench, the first Titwrench, and I was just like, “Aw man, did we bring something totally weird that no one’s going to understand or like?” You know what I mean? As it was getting closer to our time to perform I was like, “Did we just, like, venture way out there? Like, go too far?” You know? So I was nervous as heck that first year that we were just in some other – just not on the right trip, you know? And then we did it and it was great and everybody was really great about it. We kind of flew that really big Albatross puppet out of the building, and I remember people followed us! And I was just like, “Okay well let’s keep going until they stop following us” and we were walking down the street and it was cool, it was one of those really cool experiences, and formative for me for sure.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2010, photo by Tom Murphy
I was really surprised by how interesting it is every year. I don’t really see anybody doing anything like that. I don’t know about you, but maybe that happens in Albuquerque a lot but around here, no, not at all. Nothing like that.
No? I don’t really see stuff like that out here too much, either. Although, a lot of really creative people perform all kinds of different ways, you know?
Had you done anything like that before, even remotely, performance-wise?
Like the first Milch set that happened at Titwrench?
Yeah, that kind of performance art.
Yes, the set I was telling you about the show that happened on this rooftop of this old courthouse in downtown Albuquerque. So it was supposed to be, I think, everyone performing a really quiet piece. Albuquerque’s experimental noise community worked toward really small quiet pieces and I built this rig where I was wearing all hand-built little microphones and I put my sister in all these, kind of, speakers, and theoretically the idea was, and I don’t know how successful it was ultimately, but the idea was that when we were closer together we would be feeding back and then when we were further apart we wouldn’t be. So we developed this whole choreography and system around our proximity to one another and wore these robes and face paint and did it on top of the roof and I think I was just kind of inspired by the idea of being on a roof. That was before the first Milch set and I think Raven, who you mentioned earlier, kind of considered that to be the first actual Milch set, was the one that popped out on the rooftop before I had even ever heard of Titwrench or anything.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2017, photo by Tom Murphy
You and your sister Monica are in Chicharra together and somewhere the band is described as insect metal or something or other?
Glam insect metal.
That’s great. It’s pretty difficult to describe something like that.
Yeah, it sure is. I super hate describing things, which is funny because I’m also, like you, a writer and a reporter, you know? I find music to be so challenging to describe. I feel like we have a million adjectives that are about visual concepts and relationships and we have like, I don’t know, about 30 about sound. I’m just hazarding a guess again but sound is so hard to put into language so glam insect metal is imprecise.
Chicharra at Sister Bar in Albuquerque, NM, February 2016, photo by Tom Murphy
It evokes a creative image that kind of fits the music.
Yeah, so mostly I just describe [it by saying] that the instruments are all basses so they’re all using low frequency and then we organize more intricate vocal harmonies up top. And then we have either two drummers or one drummer. For Titwrench this year we’re just going to have one, unfortunately. We thought we were going to manage to get them both up there but somebody has a work conflict. But our single drummer, Chris Newman, is amazing and does the job quite nicely. We’re going to play tracks from our album [Let’s Paint This Town in Craters] that’s coming out in October [2017] so it’ll be a lot of newer material that is different from what we played last year.
You have a solo project called Bigawatt. Is that something that you haven’t done in a while or is that something you do pretty regularly?
I did a Bigawatt set on Friday night. It’s the name of my solo project, which has always been really heavily influenced by R&B and hip-hop and also noise. But I interpret that quite a bit differently than a lot of the things that I’m hearing right now that are defined also as being like noise hip-hop. So, sorry to say I don’t know if those are great descriptors for Bigawatt now, either.
In an era when any musician, regardless of talent or ability, can release whatever, figuratively speaking, falls out of their head with no quality control impeding its release, Meet the Giant is a bit of an anomaly. The rock trio formed in 2009 and released its self-titled debut album on May 29, 2018. Most bands wouldn’t incubate for that long in any way. “Our first album from the beginning is basically ten years,” says bassist/vocalist Micaela Naranjo. “But we’re not on anybody else’s agenda. It’s tempting to fall into the traps of doing a genre based approach or marketing to people. But it’s not for us.”
“We were of the mindset of let’s just make music for us,” says guitarist Erin Cisney. “Keep it in the basement.”
The group germinated initially when drummer Lawrence Snell, whose shoegaze-rimmed Americana band Colder Than Fargo had recently split, talked to his friend Cisney about jamming for fun. The two would get together from 1 to 3 p.m. with electronics rigs set up facing opposite walls. In Colder Than Fargo Snell had triggered electronics as well as played drums and Cisney had extensive production work under his belt having worked for a label in England that did reissues and released albums by classic bands in their later era in which, say, the lineup might only include the original bass player. After several sessions jamming and creating some of the threads that would become Meet the Giant, Cisney mentioned he had a friend who was a bass player that might be interested in coming in to play. Naranjo heard some of the recordings, liked them and the three formed a band with no stated or unstated intention of making music to share with anyone else.
Meet the Giant, photo by Tom Murphy
The English connection was something Cisney and Snell had in common. Cisney was born in Salida, Colorado but grew up in Littleton and had played in local bands like Whirling Dervish and Vena Cava before getting a production job overseas. Snell grew up near Leicester, England in a working class family but one that had an appreciation for music. Snell’s father was not into the Rolling Stones so much as American songwriters like Buddy Holly, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. Though Snell’s family sold potatoes at nearby music festivals including one memorable year at Reading when the 1986 headliners were Killing Joke, Saxon and Hawkwind.
“My dad said the first night is going to be the punk rockers, the second night is going to be heavy metal and we’re going to have trouble,” recalls Snell. “The third night it’s going to be all peace and love. But people were on acid and they robbed my mom and dad’s potato wagon and lit the speakers on fire.”
Soon after, though, Snell was taken with American music in the form of hip-hop and Public Enemy and the art pop funk of Prince. It was a heady time in the late 80s and early 90s and Snell found himself swept up in the momentum of the cross-Atlantic musical co-influence as New Order borrowed hip-hop production techniques and the Manchester “Baggy” scene synthesized the aesthetics of dance music and post-punk. That music was in all the pubs on jukeboxes in a way that might seem odd to Americans. Britpop became almost ubiquitous. “ Everybody had that first Oasis album in their car,” quips Snell. “:Even your grandma had a Liam Gallagher haircut.” That monocultural wave is what made Snell appreciate America’s proclivity for regional scenes that weren’t so closely connected. Especially at that time when not all music and culture was so easily accessible as it is now.
Colorado in the 80s and 90s seemed pretty far removed from centers of culture in general. But as with many places so relatively isolated, idiosyncratic creative endeavors develop in spite of having not much support from the immediate culture and government. Cisney played in a band starting in high school called Guru Picnic that played pep rallies and football games. But after a few months that project dissolved and Cisney formed Wasteband, which recorded an album in 1989 at Freewheelin’ Recording Studio where Denver New Wave band The Corvairs had recorded its five song demo a decade prior.
It was during his college years in Boulder that Cisney played with Platypus and shared stages with the likes of Fat Mama and Chief Broom. Boulder funk/jam/rock band The Motet was just starting up. Soon enough Cisney joined Vena Cava and his circle of friend bands would play The Fox and come down to Denver to play The Bluebird thinking it was a common occurrence within the reach of any band. But he was soon disabused of such notions.
“One show it was half full and we thought that was a shitty gig,” says Cisney. “I’ve never had a gig like that since.”
Naranjo was later in life getting into bands than many people. Coming in and out of town during colllege, Naranjo became involved in what was called the “Broken Mic Scene” which included the venues The Bank, The Park Tavern and The Flying Dog. Naranjo, who grew up in a musical family but never considered themself talented enough to be in the music scene, joined The Late Jack Redell and played with Garrett Carlin, now in art noise rock band Jane Doe. Naranjo found playing with the band comfortable and that gig led to playing in other bands like Fallout Orphan, Legendary Beep Beeps and Penelope Project. “For me being in the local scene is more about people who have the same malfunction you do,” says Naranjo.
Around 2015, Meet the Giant had written and recorded various songs occasionally sharing them with close friends and the trio felt some momentum in the band that inspired an interest in playing a debut show. The proper environment for doing so came with two shows at Rocky Mountain Sound Garden, a now defunct recording studio and rehearsal space. It seemed safer to do that more DIY type of show before heading back into the waters of bar and small venue shows that is the common experience of most bands in any city. The opportunity to break that egg was a barbecue show on a Sunday at Larimer Lounge where Meet the Giant played after a jug band and a Christian worship band.
“I like getting on a bill like that to get exposed to different sides of the scene but sometimes its a shitshow,” says Naranjo. “We chased everyone out of the bar quickly.”
But Meet the Giant persevered and found appreciative audiences in the metal scene because its own sound has a bit of grit and heaviness to it despite being atmospheric, melancholic music. Then again, bands like Kylesa, True Widow, Emma Ruth Rundle, Myrkur and Chelsea Wolfe have a crossover appeal in that way. In fact, Bart McCrorey of Throttlebomb, offered to do some recording for the band at his Crash Pad studio where he is best known for recording hard rock, punk and metal records including the fantastic 2017 Weaponizer album Lawless Age.
“The metalheads were good to us on the scene,” comments Snell. “To me they’re the last people that are genuinely into music. It’s like ska, reggae, two-tone and punk. Different music but the same ideals.”
Meet the Giant, photo by Tom Murphy
For the new record, the band recorded two tracks with McCrorey and others with Danny Ke at Orchid Studios and Dave Schleitwiler at Sunnyside Recording Studio. But the whole album was mastered by Brad Smalling who assembled the various recordings into a sonically cohesive whole at Evergroove Studio, the place where enigmatic, experimental, instrumental band Itchy-O has been recording of late. And it is with Smalling in a studio in Taos, New Mexico that Meet the Giant recently recorded its follow-up album prior to heading out on its first tour in spring 2018 spanning June 3 through June 8.
After years of playing in bands and spending over half a decade developing its music, Meet the Giant has no illusions of rock stardom in the making or hitting it big in the local scene either. Its dark, lush, sometimes scrappy music doesn’t fit in an easily marketable genre box. It reflects a hybrid rock and electronic aesthetic that happened naturally given the band’s musical interests going in. In fact, the group has an electronic side called Shadow of the Giant that is all electronic that it may someday unveil.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the rock and electronic blend in the dark, atmospheric way that Meet the Giant does so well was out of style in a climate where entirely too much dry earnestness. Modern takes on classic rock, garage rock, garage punk and pretty but not really mind-altering psych rock seemed fairly trendy not just in Denver but nationally. Odd for Denver which long had a tradition of moody, brooding, majestic, heady bands. Given the growing popularity of bands like Black Marble, Drab Majesty and Wye Oak those tides have been turning for a few years and Meet the Giant may be emerging in the right climate for its sound.
“We’re really into the Bristol scene and common elements and retrospectively there’s probably this sort of emotional expression that’s consistent in the music that we like,” says Naranjo.
“What we’re writing is dark, for the most part. There’s an introspection and tenderness there that we all like,” says Cisney. “The spectrum for us is typically on the sadder, darker side of things but we have some throw your fists in the air rockers.”
“We’ve been together nine years,” says Snell. “We’ve been through deaths, break-ups and a myriad of stuff and the thing that has kept us together is the music, even though that’s a bit of a cliché.”
Meet the Giant’s debut album is available digitally through the usual outlets including Bandcamp, iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and Amazon. The band will have a vinyl release show on August 10, 2018 at Syntax Physic Opera where it will celebrate the occasion sharing the stage with Church Fire and The Patient Zeros.
Kevin Richards of Equine circa 2017, photo by Tom Murphy
Tonight, May 26, 2018, at 5 p.m. (and running until 11:15) several of the Denver area’s most sonically adventurous musicians will assemble in the basement of Bar Max for 102 Wires. The event was organized by Kevin Richards who is known in local underground music circles for his most recent experimental guitar and electronics project Equine, which has been very prolific of late with the release of a handful of 2018 albums so far including White Majick, Der Howling, Equencing and Twins. In years past, Richards brought his knowledge of jazz chord theory to the too-post-hardcore-for-noise rock/too-weird-for-post-hardcore band Motheater, the quasi-performance art Hogsplitter, noise project Epileptinomicon and solo guitar drone band Temples. We recently sent some questions Richards regarding 102 Wires, it’s inspirations, aims and what Richards hows will be the aftermath.
Queen City Sounds: What inspired doing an event like this? Have you seen anything like this before putting the event together? Perhaps one of the late Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra events.
Kevin Richards: I don’t know that I’ve actually seen something quite like this before, although I have heard of somewhat similar festivals. The large ensemble aspect was definitely inspired by Branca and Rhys Chatham. Generally speaking, I was hoping to gather as may atypical guitarists (or guitarists doing something atypical for themselves) in one room with minimal instruction and see what happens. This fest is curated in a form, but has been intentionally fairly hands off as far as what people are bringing to the table. Hopefully this yields surprises for us all.
What will the show look like/be like and what kind of logistics and gear did you need to bring together to make it happen?
I am hoping to have people around the perimeters of the room performing, and the audience in the middle. there may be people performing solo sets, Steve Reich repertoire, original compositions, perhaps some prepared guitar, ambient loops, large ensembles, and some things that even I don’t quite know what they will be like. This should be six hours of guitar-centric musical fascination. As for the gear, I will of course be bringing multiple guitars and amps. We have performers who don’t generally play guitar and so there is a bit of borrowing happening. Logistics wise, this came together much more smoothly than I had anticipated. Max at Bar Max was great about letting us use the space for the event and all of the performers are putting in a decent amount of work to help this thing all come together. So in the end I can barely take credit for this team effort, as it should be.
With a diverse set of talents, skill sets, aesthetics and so forth, did you put any rules on how things will go and if so why so?
]The general concept/rules of the things were one, you must do something either atypical for how the instrument is generally approached, or you had to do something a bit out of your wheelhouse. Two, as much as possible this should be guitar only, so no drums, or other instruments. I think this event will for the most part adhere to both of these rules, with a couple well-reasoned exceptions. I tend to like working within musical restrictions myself as a means to foster creativity, and I was hoping this had a similar effect on others in this setting.
Why did you think bringing together a broad spectrum of musicians and guitars and whatnot would prove interesting?
How could it not? I have a certain love of the creative chaos that this type of gathering could bring. The joy from this will come from all of the things I didn’t anticipate.
What do you hope is the outcome of this show for both the people there and what might happen in post with you and other participants?
I hope that the primary outcome of this show is that we all gather together and enjoy each others company and creativity. I do hope that this gathering spawns other creative endeavors among the participants. Many have never met each other and may not even know the other exists in the same town, so that aspect should foster some interesting encounters at the very least. For the audience, I hope they see something that they have never seen before, and leave rethinking the instrument in some way.
The official schedule of events
Drew Miller 6-6:30
Large ensemble 1 6:30-7:00
Russ Callison 7:00-7:30
Large ensemble 2 7:30-7:45
Julien Miller/ Kevin Richards collaborative set 7:45-8:15
Stakes-8:15-8:35
Vahco Before-Horses 1 minute set 8:35
Sean Patrick Faling doing Glenn Branca memorial solo set 8:35-8:40
Large ensemble 3: branca memorial ensemble 8:40-8:55
Farrell Lowe 8:55-9:15
Aleeya Wilson 9:15-9:9:35
Joe Mills 9:35-10:00
Never Kenezzard Lite with Ryan Peru 10:00-10:15
Jacob Isaacs 10:15-10:35
Shawn Mlekush10:35-10:55
Equis Sub Templum – 2 large ensemble compositions 10:55-11:15
Daphne Willis and Dave Tamkin, photo courtesy Big Fish Booking
Songwriters Daphne Willis and Dave Tamkin will share a bill tonight, Friday May 18, at eTown Hall (for more information and to buy tickets click here). The two veteran musicians, who met twelve years ago playing local clubs in Chicago when both were living in the Windy City, have recently released songs with themes related to mental health and issues of self-care. As artists who have or still are involved in heavy touring, Willis and Tamkin have witnessed issues of mental health and addiction firsthand and the tone of their music seems grounded in experience rather than an abstraction of real life struggle. With their music both artists aren’t just trying to raise awareness but to humanize issues that can seem overwhelming and insurmountable.
Right out of college at DePaul, where by coincidence Willis also attended several years later, Tamkin found himself carving out a live music career tapping into the National Association of Campus Activities circuit and performing at colleges and towns across the country for eight years before meeting his future wife, Anne, and asking her to have a drink one night but she told him she didn’t have time for that because she was moving to Boulder. The couple has now been married for a decade. And Tamkin found, around that time, that he had to retool his music career considerably when changes in digital marketing were coming his way.
“Business marketing was my major and I was pretty good at getting people to Myspace at the time” says Tamkin. “Even with your website, owning those emails was your career—being able to have contact with your audience at any time. As soon as Myspace went away, I think I had thirty-thousand fans at the time, my whole career changed. I had to start over and it’s still taking me some time. So I’ve spent the last eight years not touring and rebuilding. So it’s nice to get back at it with a different point of view and I’ve been humbled. I appreciate every gig and audience I get in a way that maybe I didn’t back then.”
Tamkin found that not touring constantly forced him to reevaluate how he related to other people and himself not being on the road for six months at a time. Finding himself intimidated by the talent he found in Colorado, Tamkin took a number of years to get hooked into a local music community. And now, as a talent buyer for The Walnut Room through Homevibe Presents, Tamkin has connected with the local music world that he finds “welcoming and kind.” He also discovered Love Hope Strength Foundation, a group whose “Get On the List” campaign seeks to expand a registry for bone marrow donation and other efforts linked with music to try to help those living with cancer. Around that time he lost his father-in-law and Tamkin has encouraged his fans and peers to contribute to Love Hope Strength to give hope to people in a way that Tamkin couldn’t do for his father-in-law.
Tamkin also wrote the song “May” that was featured on Videos That Matter to address the opioid crisis in America. The brightly moody and uplifting song shines a compassionate light on what leads to abuse of opioids without romanticizing or demonizing anyone’s circumstances.
Willis has been collaborating with songwriters around the world since 2015 through her deal publishing deal with Sony/ATV. The versatile songwriter, whose work seems to know no genre boundaries, got her professional music life started early when her first acoustic EP, released when she was nineteen, got picked up for sublicensing through companies that place music in retail outlets and, at one time, through airline music channels. An executive at Vanguard heard her song on an American Airlines flight when his iPod wasn’t working and subsuently signed Willis for two albums. While that story is the dream of many a songwriter, Willis currently still self-produces much if not all of her own work.
Like everyone in America paying attention, Willis has been aware of issues of mental health and addiction for most of her life. With her father in the music industry for over thirty years in the sales and distribution wing of Sony/BMG, Willis grew up in a musical family and as a professional musician she undoubtedly saw the downside of self-medication and mental health struggles among peers and, it turns out, her own family. She wrote about this vividly and with no small amount of sensitivity in her 2017 song “Somebody’s Someone.”
“It’s autobiographical and it’s about my brother and myself,” says Willis. “It’s about every family that struggles with these issues—which is to say every family in the country has someone that struggles with depression, addiction, ADHD, PTSD [and other issues].”
Willis aimed with her songwriting to bring a more realistic perspective to a problems that seem mysterious and impenetrable to many people, especially thouse caught up in the embrace of psychological issues and addiction for whom the stigma might prevent actually getting help or treating before they become a larger problem.
“It’s become a bigger issue than it should be largely because of the stigma,” says Willis. “These issues are not like they’re not preventable or treatable. We as humans are perfectly capable of supporting each other and healing each other through all these things. But because of the fear and stigma that exists toward all of these things there’s a big barrier and we’re not able to do that. The idea of the song is to create a conversation about it. The point of the song is to take our experiences of these things to make it so basic everyone can understand it and relate to it because everyone has been there or know someone who has. People have been writing about this stuff for centuries. But I feel people have been less direct about it.”
While both Willis and Tamkin have written plenty of songs not about such dire subjects, it’s a testament to their talent, humanity and self-awareness that they’re bringing conversations into the creative zeitgeist. Doing so also highlights their insight into what makes a song work and have resonance not just for themselves but for their audiences. Witness it for yourself tonight or any other time you have a chance to see Willis and Tamkin in their element live on stage.
Red Aunts are headlining Fem Fest at the MCA Denver on Saturday, May 12. While the punk band, formed in Long Beach, California in 1992, isn’t as well known as some of its contemporaries, it was certainly one of the most original and beloved by those that came under the band’s spell of chaos and playfulness before it split around 2001.
The last time Red Aunts performed in Denver was on July 17, 1998 at the Bluebird Theater. The band had already come through Denver and Boulder in early April of that year playing with King Rat and Necessary Evils at Lion’s Lair and Electric Summer at Club 156. At the Bluebird show, the roots punk King Rat and the garage rock Down N Outs warmed up the crowd with impressive sets of their own. But when Red Aunts took stage, the group had an excitingly unpredictable quality that perfectly suited its its unique sound, a kind of blend of noisy punk and garage rock. Then, at one point in the set, either Kerry Davis or Terri Wahl broke a guitar string and announced, “You’d think that in seven years of being in a band that I would have learned to change my strings but I didn’t. Is there anyone that can come up here to help me with that?” Someone did. Perhaps that moment, that likely happened periodically in the band’s career, struck some as unprofessional, but to others it showed that you didn’t need to have complete expertise or mastery of all areas of one’s art all at the same time in order to do it with credibility or at all. Clearly the members of the Red Aunts weren’t letting what some might perceive as shortcomings get in the way of being a band. “Oh yeah, nor did we care,” says Wahl. “I think that was more the thing. We just didn’t give a fuuuck.”
That creative spirit liberated from the confinements of conventional thinking was part of the band from the beginning. Wahl had moved to Long Beach from Anaheim, after a stint in Fullerton, with her vintage clothing business. But she’d always loved music and as a teenager had seen and been inspired by the likes of X, Social Distortion, The Mau Maus and Christian Death.
“I would sneak out my bedroom window and drive with my friends from Anaheim to Los Angeles to see bands,” recalls Wahl. “That’s what opened my eyes to punk rock. But I didn’t start a band until ten years after that.”
In Long Beach, Wahl came upon the idea of starting her own band with her friend Debi Martini, who was already doing a music ‘zine with her now ex-husband, Edwin Lecher, called Read Life In The Big City. The latter helped put the fledgling band in contact with several other musicians around the world over the years. Before starting Red Aunts, though, Wahl and Martini had already been around musicians but decided not to be bound by the same perceived barriers to entry in starting a band.
“We all had boyfiends that were in bands and we’d end up at these parties and all they could do was talk about their stupid bands,” says Wahl. She decided she would play guitar “because it’s the coolest” and Martini said she would play bass because she thought her boyfriend had one. A friend told Wahl that his friend Kerry was moving to Long Beach from New York and wanted to be in a band as well. With the addition of drummer Lesley Ishino, Red Aunts was born, a band formed by people who hadn’t really played music before. Developing chops and honing of craft in a traditional and creatively stultifying way before getting out and playing shows was not to be part of the history of Red Aunts. “We wrote songs and learned to play our instruments as our band was going,” says Wahl. “It was awesome.”
Red Aunts wasted no time in playing live, “Right off the bat, whether we should have or not,” quips Wahl, and one of its earliest shows was with respected 80s and 90s Illinois punk band The Didjits.
“They were coming through town and the venue that they were going to play at got shut down and we were like, ‘Oh, let’s have the show in Debi’s garage and the Red Aunts will open for you!’” recalls Wahl. “It was on the Fourth of July. The only reason I remember that is that I found a miniskirt made out of an American flag and I was like, ‘Oh! That’s what I’m wearin’ for the Fourth of July! That’s the perfect outfit!’ Because you always have to pick your outfits too. That’s half the fun!”
Red Aunts live 2017, photo courtesy Red Aunts
Early on, though, Red Aunts, like most bands, played a lot of local shows and mostly with all male bands some of whom, especially then, even now, were skeptical of an all female band, especially one like Red Auints who made no bones about their emphasis on creativity and songwriting over technical prowess. Long term having its own sound and aesthetic worked out for Red Aunts but its early peers perhaps didn’t give it the respect it would eventually earn. “In my opinion I don’t think they received us well because we couldn’t play very well,” says Wahl. “And so they were just like, ‘Oh, stupid girl band.’ As soon as we started going and touring we became way more popular than them. That ended a lot of relationships—marriages and others.”
As in much of music, many musicians forget that some of the most interesting music is made by those who are not cognitively or culturally bound by the “rules,” especially the supposedly anarchic roots of punk rock and rock and roll itself. The willingness to play and write songs without having classic skill is often key.
“Punk rock made it okay to not have to play that well,” says Wahl. “We always used that as, like, ‘Well, who cares, man? Close enough for punk rock.’ Then, as we were touring for months out of the year we got really good at playing—we got really good at our songs at least. We also got more confident and it was fun.”
Fortunately, Red Aunts found support in the local community and the larger punk scene. Some of its early releases were put out by Long Gone John on his Sympathy For the Record Industry imprint, which was then based in Long Beach. “[John] gave us that first chance of actually putting something out and he was really supportive and just a really good guy.”
Within a few years Red Aunts had built up enough of an audience and reputation to draw the interest of Epitaph Records and signed with the imprint before the release of its third full-length, 1995’s irreverent #1 Chicken as well as its subsequent records, 1996’s Saltbox and the 1998 swan song Ghetto Blaster.
“[Signing with Epitaph was] when thing really happened because being on that label meant we could go on tour because we got tour support,” says Wahl. “We took full advantage of that and we went out quite often. How you became popular was touring a lot. Before then we didn’t tour nationally. We would go up the coast a little bit but when we got on Epitaph, that’s when were able to really get out there.”
In the second half of the 90s, Red Aunts were inspired by the noisy punk bands that were signed to labels like Amphetamine Reptile, Touch and Go, Thrilljockey, Estrus Records, Empty Records and In the Red Records. At that time, as now, indie labels were the home of music that probably wouldn’t be given the time of day by major labels, especially after the early 90s when the music industry snapped back to a more conservative mode of operations rather than take chances as it had when alternative music forced a sea change in the early 90s. Certainly a band with a gift for noisy punk, wild energy and an irreverently surrealistic sense of humor like Red Aunts wouldn’t have fit in with being groomed for mainstream stardom.
One of the main ingredients in the Red Aunts sound was its willingness to throw together seemingly disparate ideas in music and lyrics, written by various band members, and make them work even when the styles and ideas seem to clash. It’s a method that has more in common with the avant-garde than punk but in itself more punk than a band making music trying to fit into someone else’s formula. For example, from #1 Chicken, the song “Detroit Valentine” sounds completely insane in the best way and its lyrics shift between cartoonish violence and romantic obsession.
“That was about Mick Collins,” says Wahl. “We became really good friends with him. Kerry had a crush on him, on his voice, you know? It was called that because he was from Detroit. Debi’s part of the song ‘I’m bound for Black Mountain me and my razor gun I’m gonna shoot him if he stands still and cut him if he run.’ I don’t know what she was talking about. But the part Debi sings and the part Kerry sings are about different things. The part Debi sings she wrote and the part Kerry sings she wrote and we just kind of jammed them together. That’s how a lot of our songs are, actually. That’s why there’s so many time changes and weird progressions and changes.”
While this method of songwriting came naturally to Red Aunts, the band, Davis and Wahl in particular, were big fans of noise punk legends Pussy Galore. “Their songs were so weird with so many time changes and chord progressions,” says Wahl. “We wanted to be like that.”
When Red Aunts split up near the turn of the century it wasn’t a dramatic blowout. Davis and Martini moved to New York and Wahl decided to focus on her catering company, which prevented any kind of touring. Wahl pretty much stopped playing music but Davis and Martini continued to play music, Davis notably as Two Tears, and Ishino went on to perform in various bands including Alaska! from Los Angeles.
Then in 2016, In the Red Records head Larry Hardy issued a “greatest hits” compilation called COME UP FOR A CLOSER LOOK subsequent to which the band approached Hardy to play the label’s 25th Anniversary Festival on July 15, 2016. Wahl had to re-learn how to play the bands songs from the group’s friend and guitar tech Zack Malner but the show proved to be so much fun that Red Aunts decided to continue and play occasional dates, life demands permitting, including, as mentioned previously, at Fem Fest in Denver on May 12, June 1 at Boot & Saddle in Philadelphia and at Rough Trade in New York City on June 2.
It’s difficult to say if Red Aunts have been directly influential on other bands but one hears that spirit of faith in one’s inherent creativity to guide one’s art as well as a wild noisy punk in the likes of Atlanta, Georgia’s The Coathangers, but certainly the band has been a good example of how originality will always be more interesting than following the beaten path. For her part, Wahl is finding satisfaction in this new chapter of the band’s history.
“I kind of feel like we’re better now,” says Wahl. “It could just be me. We’re not as drunk and I’m just having a lot of fun.”
The latest edition of LEAF (or Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival) happens this weekend on Friday, April 27 and Saturday, April 28 in Lafayette, CO. LEAF is a showcase for the synthesis of technology and art and each iteration of the festival has featured some of the most innovative creative people in the field. The Spring 2018 event will include performances from ART391A2, John Gunther/John Drumheller, Trace Reddell, Jason and Debora Bernagozzi and Phillip Sterns with demonstration from Branger_Briz. On Friday night, after the performances, DJ Crix Madine will generate repetitive beats and abstract patterns in conjunction with live video from one of Denver experimental music’s go-to video artists, orchidz3ro. What makes the festival so worthwhile is that it humanizes the art and the technology and makes it accessible in an intimate setting.
Things kick off on Friday at 7 p.m. with the music/performative shows at the Colorado Music Festival Center For Musical Arts building at 200 East Baseline.. On Saturday the festivities continue 9:30 Saturday morning at The Collective Gallery at 201 North Public Road with the “Data Safari” demonstration showcasing the pervasiveness of data flowing through the air and the manner in which it does so from our devices and public and private broadcasting devices. Saturday evening beginning at 5 p.m. there will be a short film festival at Grimes Hall room of the 200 East Baseline location mentioned prior. For more information, please visit the LEAF website.
Crix Madine, photo courtesy LEAF
We recently ran some questions by festival curator David Fodel about the current edition of LEAF.
Queen City Sounds And Art:Why did the theme/concept of Pattern Language suggest itself to you for this edition of LEAF?
David Fodel: There is a well-known book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander that describes and catalogs various successful patterns in architecture, urban planning, and generally community building, which has also been quite influential in the software development world too. I find this idea of hybridity and cross-pollination, of “synthesis” rather than specialization to be an important quality in art, music, design and engineering and wanted to give the festival a theme that was far-reaching, while at the same time could simply relate to repetitive beats or sequencer music, which I also love.
You have a number of artists who combine their art with computer programming and heavy technical skills. That’s not unique to this iteration of LEAF but why do you think your attention was drawn to artists who combine those skill sets at this time?
Well really all artists have specialized technical skills, and the most interesting art for me is when people explore emerging technologies, and get playful with it, seeing what happens when they combine things in ways that should not be done, not necessarily on purpose even, but because they may just not know any better. Discoveries happen sometimes, and sometimes it’s terrible, but it’s that iterative process, what’s called ‘design thinking’ that can lead to interesting new forms and refinements. A lot of the work in this year’s LEAF has deep roots in historical artistic and musical experiments and explorations, but have been refined to push those forms forward. Some of the artists have been doing this type of work for decades, and some of them are super fresh to the whole notion of making art with technology.
Phillip Stearns, photo courtesy LEAF
The Data Safari part of the festival seems especially relevant and interesting for people’s everyday lives in a way they may not be aware of. Can you tell us about how you came to be aware of Branger_Briz and that sort of, for lack of a better word, performance or demonstration? Why do you think that sort of thing is important for people to know about and what kind of awareness and change do you think having that knowledge might engender?
I have known Nick Briz for a number of years now, and have presented his work in the past here in Denver at a show called “The Emperor’s New Aesthetic.” It straddles art, activism and design and as you mentioned, it is especially relevant now due to the data breaches at Facebook. Branger_Briz is a design collective based in Chicago and Nick has deep roots in that whole kinda Midwest Glitch scene along with Jon Satrom and John Cates. They all teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which has a long history of embracing new media art forms well in advance of other institutions. I got to know those guys when I was at a Live Cinema Summit in Chicago back in 2008 or 2009. They embrace the notion of technology as a potential disruptive force for change, and potential source of authoritarian control, depending on how we guide it and the social structures that enable its dissemination.
The Data Safari is yet again one of those playful ways of using technology to draw attention to bigger issues like privacy and who controls our data. The underlying artwork, called “ProbeKit” is on display at The Collective, a new gallery in Lafayette as part of the first LEAF visual art exhibition called “Machine Language.” Branger_Briz is joined by a handful of other artists that each explore the notion of the “machine” in art and I would really encourage you to check that out. The show runs through May 5th.
It’s often been said that art leads culture and society. Do you feel that to be the case?
I think it’s more accurate to say that art is part of a complex of entangled forces and expressions that manifest emergent forms, systems and behaviors.
It seems as though all the artists you have for every edition of LEAF has brought a creative use of technology to make creative work that synthesizes science and art. Why do you think showcasing that kind of art is important beyond it just being interesting to you personally?
Science is a powerful methodology and technology is a powerful tool. It’s important that we don’t leave those things in the hands of people with no sense of humor or love of nature and humanity.
Trace Reddell, photo courtesy LEAF
Trace Reddell is a science fiction author/creator. The idea behind much of science fiction is that it’s commentary on today even when it’s projecting into the future. What do you think Trace’s contribution as a commenter on current culture and civilization is especially interesting?
Well Trace has a very unique angle on science fiction and sci-fi cinema. His work really explores how sound and language form this hybrid kind of matrix that can structurally change our brains. His work for LEAF is a performance lecture format where he will be mixing and mashing up cinema, spoken word, psychedelic music and literature to not only communicate a message, but to induce consciousness changes directly.
Sharone & The Wind, photo by Nic Smith Photography
On Friday, April 13, Denver based hard rock band Sharone & The Wind releases its sophomore album, Enchiridion of Nightmares. That the record is coming out on Friday the Thirteenth is fitting given the horror themes as metaphors for life’s horrors contained within. The album is all but formally structured as a kind of horror anthology, literary or cinematic. The project fronted by Sharone has come a long way from a rock band borne out of Sharone’s 2016 solo EP to the current lineup which has turned a promising early version of the band to a confident outfit with theatrical live shows that might remind some of a much smaller scale sort of thing Alice Cooper does with his own concerts.
The band’s 2017 debut album, Storm, sounded like a songwriter speaking her truth for the first time in a way that got her out of the solo, sort of singer-songwriter presentation of the music. Though, to be fair, Sharone’s 2016 solo EP and performances of those songs struck a chord with people that got to see those shows at Seventh Circle Music Collective and other places Sharone found to perform. And the incarnations of the band that existed during the writing, recording and performing of the songs from that album helped establish Sharone as a performer who not only sang but played keyboards and guitar until she was able to recruit musicians to play those instruments toward the end of that phase of the band’s life.
By early 2017, Sharone & The Wind, as it had been, was no more and the suddeness of that loss and the way in which bands often dissolve left Sharone feeling angry, sad and fearful of the future of her ability to keep doing music. But the split ended up forcing Sharone to move forward as an artist and finding a new lineup of people who believed in her vision. The result was a darker, more confident sound with Sharone’s vocal range expanding in pitch and dynamism, which manifested strikingly on the new record. It also meant live shows that more closely reflected what Sharone had been imagining for her band from early on.
“As soon as the lineup change happened I felt more creatively free and open to express myself artistically,” says Sharone. “I’ve always had these ridiculous ideas like bringing a lifesize coffin on stage and have demons dance on stage with us like we did at the Halloween show [in 2017]. I was never in a situation before to bring those ideas to life, I always felt judged. I just feel very comfortable with the current lineup and any crazy idea that comes to mind they’re all about it.”
While the band was coming together, Sharone kept writing music and the emotions haunting her paralled her interest in old horror movies and horror fiction. “Basically all the emotions people get from reading horror books or watch a horror movie or go to a haunted house,” says Sharone. “Because I was going through those feelings in my life and because I was interested in horror at the time it fit very well together [because] I was as afraid of what was going to happen in the future as I was afraid of what was going to happen to the little kid in the house in a story.
The writing and recording of the record with a new band was “like one, long therapy session” that Sharone desperately needed. It also lead to a cooperative transformation of the band to have a genuine image to present to fans to stir the imagination and for Sharone it freed her from her early inhibitions as a songwriter of promise to one comfortable in her own body and abilities.
“[Writing and recording Enchiridion of Nightmares] let me step from this very timid, vulnerable place with Storm and come to the other end of the spectrum with all these angry feelings and horror themes,” says Sharone. “Personally having done these two extremes I’m figuring out where I stand with what The Wind is and the direction I want to go from here. The last few weeks I’ve been writing new stuff that’s very open, raw and wearing no disguise of any theme, just honest.”
In March the band released a video, produced by photography, Nic Smith, for the song “Demons” in which each personal demon portrayed as taunting the various band members, “represent mental illness and how people express them.”
“I think it’s a song a lot of people can relate to in a lot of different ways because we all have internal demons with which we struggle,” says Sharone.
For the show at The Marquis the band will debut live the songs “Cursed,” “Exorcist” and “Death of a Clown” and you are invited in to share the catharsis the music brings to Sharone & The Wind.
Most people have never heard of The Residents. The band has had no commercial hits and arguably its most famous, iconic song is a cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” a 1953 novelty hit by Jimmy Kennedy and Nat Simon. Founded in 1969, from the early days, The Residents have performed in various costumes—most notably wearing giant eyeball masks with a top hat. The speculation on the identity of the members of the band have included people “knowing” Frank Zappa, Les Claypool and Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo are members of the band. There is a rumor that Homer Flynn, the band’s longtime art director, and designer of most of the album covers, is in the band as well. All of which has been denied or ignored by representatives of The Residents.
Whatever the identity of the band members or its relative obscurity, its deconstructing and reconstructing of American popular music has given the world some of its most unusual, fascinating and brillint music of the modern era. For example, The Residents have done albums dedicated to American composers like John Philip Sousa and George Gershwin. The Residents have reworked songs by Elvis and James Brown and, as on its 1978 classic Duck Stab, traditional songs like “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” as a warped and spooky song called “Farmers” which weaves in “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Three Blind Mice.” By following their creative instincts, The Residents, whether as interpreters of song, a long tradition in American music, or in crafting original songs, have established themselves as one of the most original and unusual bands on the basis of their recordings alone.
Live, The Residents always incorporate multimedia elements from costumes to video projections and stage sets if the tour, such as the disastrously expensive 1983 The Mole Show tour whose production cost and execution nearly did in any other touring for the band.
“They lost so much money and it was so difficult they said they would never tour again,” says Homer Flynn. “They definintely ranged it back, otherwise they wouldn’t have lived this long. That idea, though, has always been part of their planning for a show.”
The most elaborate shows Flynn says require a more stable setting with a production company coming in to help with the execution in a setting that wouldn’t really work for a touring show. But even the more scaled back presentation is striking and on the highly theatrical 2002 tour for Demons Dance Alone and even the more modest set of 2016’s Shadowland tour it was obvious that you were witnessing a band whose storytelling and persona mythmaking involves a rich creative exercise that most other bands don’t undertake.
The Residents have several high profile fans including their friend Penn Jillette, Simpsons creator Matt Groening and the aforementioned Les Claypool whose band Primus has covered Residents songs including “Sinister Exaggerator” on the 1992 Miscellaneous Debris EP. Even though such deeply imaginative music and shows rarely result in mainstream success, The Residents remain a much respected group to those who have had a chance to delve into any of their albums and seen a show. In an age when there seems little mystery left in art and music, The Residents have retained the mystique and not just because the identities of the members of the band remains a public mystery.
No one writes albums quite like 1988’s lurid yet mystical God in Three Persons or any of The Residents’ several story style albums since the 80s. In the mid-90s few adopted new technology and utilized it as fully as The Residents did for the 1994 CD-ROM edition of 1990’s Freak Show. Podcasts are a common thing of the past several years but The Residents released a noir story album as a podcast in 2006 with The River of Crime. In 2015 a documentary film about The Residents called Theory of Obscurity told the band’s story using previously inaccessible archival footage and interviews with Flynn and other partners in The Cryptic Corporations as well as many of the band’s fans, famous and otherwise.
Currently the band is in the middle of its In Between Dreams Tour making its live debut in Denver at The Bluebird Theater on Saturday, April 14. We had the chance to talk with Flynn about the band, its inspirations in some of America’s most flamboyantly theatrical performers, how The Cryptic Corporation was essentially saved by fans of the band and Flynn’s early experiences with finding music in suburban Shreveport, Louisiana, where the band started before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Queen City Sounds and Art: Did you have access to non-mainstream music or art when you were growing up?
Homer Flynn: Basically, no. I grew up in pretty straight, white, middle class suburbs. I was always a music fan and I was always seeking out new music. At that time radio was really the best exposure that you had. So I had a handful of stations that I would listen to. Back then there were certain stations you could listen to late at night. It has something to do with atmospheric conditions after a lot of other stations signed off. I would listen to stations like WNRE in New Orleans that I listened to regularly. Also WLOS in Chicago and XERF, which was Wolfman Jack, from Mexico. For me that was the only way I could get exposed to new stuff. There was a very mainstream culture at that time.
Some people take for granted that didn’t exist back then like any viable alternative kind of radio station. Although, until the early 90s, late at night some stations relaxed their control over what DJs played so you could hear a very different kind of programming than the normal faire.
Exactly. When I first came to San Francisco it was wide open. It was just as FM was starting to take off. The reality is that the corporate powers that be hadn’t figured out how to make a lot of money at it yet. So you would have a DJ that would be on for four hours playing whatever seemed cool. In a lot of ways FM at that time was kind of like how the Internet is now—more open with a lot more stuff available.
What prompted you to make the move
There were two things going on for me. One, those were George Wallace times back in the South—the original Trump. Most of the people I knew at that point had escaped or left. For me, I’d always said that I was ready to get out of the South. The main thing upon leaving is that you have to have a landing spot. I had a good landing spot in the Bay Area. If I’d had a landing spot in New York I could easily have gone there.
The Residents have deconstructed and reconstructed Western popular music for much of its career. Overtly with stuff like The King & Eye from 1989, [1984’s George and James and “Farmers,” with traditional songs. Why was that important to the band?
The Residents have always had a great love for music. All kinds of music. Even though they’ve been mainly marketed as a rock act, their taste has always been much broader than that. Things like the American Composers series allowed them to stretch out in ways that weren’t necessarily expected.
Many of The Residents’ albums from the 80s going forward seem like fascinating and imaginative works of fiction presented in a multimedia format rather than through prose.
I think that’s true. I think for The Residents they always felt like there were stories inherent in the lyrics. The lyrics would be sung by characters The Residents had in mind and those characters would have a whole story. As they matured, they started developing those stories more and more. In a lot of ways that became more full with their CD-ROM stuff in the mid-90s which offered so much in the way of presenting that storytelling.
One person that influenced them is Sun Ra. I got to see toward the end of his life and found out about him around the same time I learned about The Residents. Did you get to see Sun Ra perform?
I was a huge Sun Ra fan and the first I saw Sun Ra was at the Berkeley Jazz Festival sometime in the early 70s. This was at a small amphitheatre in Berkeley and he blew that place off the planet. Everyone else seemed like they were totally straight and going out there playing their jazz stuff and improvising or whatever. All of a sudden Sun Ra came out and it was like the whole stage levitated. I saw him several more times. I’m a huge Sun Ra fan but I can’t say I’m a huge fan of all the recordings because some of these recordings sound like, “We just did a gig, we’re all high so we’re going to go back to the hotel room and play some more and turn on a cassette recorder in the bathroom.” While a lot of that music may have been great if you were there with them it doesn’t translate well to the recordings.
Definitely. I remember seeing him on an episode of Sunday Night with David Sanborn hosting that a friend had recorded and shared trying to convince me to go to the show in Chicago and thinking, “Who is this guy? He looks like a wizard throwing glitter!”
Right, and wearing a hubcap for a belt buckle.
You have to love that. Why do you think he had such an impact on The Residents?
One of the things that had such an impact on The Residents, and I could say exactly the same thing about Liberace, not many people would compare Liberace and Sun Ra but the cool thing is that they’re both incredible showmen at a time when so many people felt like, “We’re a band and we’re going to go up on stage with just our blue jeans and t-shirt on.” And they’re indistinguishable from the audience. The Residents felt that if you’re a performer you should look like a performer. Nobody ever mistook Sun Ra for a guy that came up out of the audience and got behind the keyboards.
For the Demons Dance Alone tour in 2002 it seemed like there was a lot of production for that show and then for the Shadowlands tour was a smaller scale production. Now it’s a four member band rather than that three-member?
They’ve kind of reconstituted the current version as a classic four-piece: guitars, drums, keyboard and vocals. It’s almost like a modern retro. It’s all very electronic, as you might expect, the drummer who is an excellent drummer is playing electronic drums. He looks like he’s playing drums but they’re really MIDI triggers and can make any sound in the world.
On the Shadowlands tour in 2016 there was an object on stage like a sculpture or sphere-topped pedestal on which to project images. Has 3D mapping become part of the show?
No, I don’t think they’ve actually done any 3D mapping. They’ve done several projections the last couple of [tours]. There’s nothing particularly unusual about the projections. Probably the most interesting thing is that for the “Talking Light” show they used a small, handheld projector and they had three circular screens on stage. So the singer would kind of go to one of those circular screens to another projecting mainly short videos of stories told by the characters. Various characters told ghost stories on those three screens. What was nice about the three screens is that the light people love them because special light things could happen when there’s not a projection so it becomes another nice visual exclamation point on the stage.
The Ghost of Hope was from 2017. Are most of the albums put out through Cryptic Corporation these days?
I had a partner, a guy named Hardy Fox, that I worked with for about forty years. He and I kind of formed the Cryptic Corporation together with a couple of other guys. Hardy decided he’d had enough and wanted to retire a couple of years ago. So ultimately he wanted me to buy him out but I couldn’t afford to do that so I had to look for new partners. I found two new partners, one was MVD, Music Video Distributors. We worked them in the 80s, they sold lots of Residents VHS cassettes in the 80s, DVDs in the 90s and CDs and LPs more recently. I talked to them two or three years ago saying I was having these problems with figuring out how to do it and they said they might be interested in doing it. They said they had another partner that might be interested, which ended up being Cherry Red Records in London. Each of them bought half of Hardy’s half of The Cryptic Corporation. I still own 50%. Most of the product that is coming out at this point is being created by Cherry Red and being marketed and distributed mainly by MVD in the United States and Cherry Red in Europe. The real stroke of luck in the whole thing is that there’s a guy there named Richard Anderson who’s a project manager at Cherry Red. Turns out Richard is a huge Residents fan so it’s been a real pleasure working with him on the new material and all the back catalog that’s coming out. Richard brings a huge amount of care to the product so things are going really well at this point.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
You must be logged in to post a comment.