MIIRORS has its roots in a happenstance meeting between Brian McSweeney and Shawn Rios in 2001 on an airplane that sparked a long friendship around music that lead to the formation of a band. The group started with the aim of creating an album rather than working toward a debut live performance giving it the ability to develop and grow organically from a recording project duo into a full five member bend that it is today with the inclusion of Dmitri Rakhuba, Andre Miller and Patrick Riley. During the early pandemic the band had no pressure to be a live act and made it even more practical to germinate the material so that the debut album Motion and Picture (released March 24, 2023) emerged as a fully realized work of ambitious songwriting that reflected influences of sonically detailed shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive and experimental art rock/pop outfits like Broken Social Scene and Lake Trout. Cinematic in the scope of its soundscapes Motion and Picture explores the full range of amplified emotions we’ve all experienced the past several years and is now available on digital and vinyl. And in the wake of the release of the album the group has been playing live shows throughout the Midwest.
Listen to our interview with McSweeney and Rios on Bandcamp and follow MIIRRORS at the links below. Also included below are the band’s music videos released as another dimension of the expression of the music.
Ghost Canyon Fest organizers (L-R: Brian Dooley, Cory Hager, Jeremy Brashaw and Sean Dove), photo by Tom Murphy
Ghost Canyon Fest is “A Boundary-Pushing DIY Music Festival” that runs August 11-13 across three venues. The event germinated as an idea among friends in the bands New Standards Men, Moon Pussy and Almanac Man who attended and/or performed at events like PRF BBQ, Caterwaul and No Coast and felt there was enough interest and enough mutual connections among bands well outside of Denver to hold a viable, like-minded festival in the Mile High City. In year’s past Denver hosted multiple festivals of strongly focused curation like Goldrush Festival, Transistor Festival, Denver Noise Fest, DAD Fest , Ultra Metal and in Boulder Communikey among others but left field sounds are largely not included in most other festivals in Denver. Ghost Canyon Fest in its inaugural year of 2023 goes to some length to shine a light on those sounds in a more high profile way including a mention in a recent issue of The Wire as a festival of note. If you go, expect to see stars of local and non-local noise rock, post-metal, noise and experimental dance and drone including BIG|BRAVE, Quits, Masma Dream World, Big’N, Church Fire, Pleasure Venom and of course the projects of the event organizers. For a full list and a schedule of events please and to purchase passes for the weekend or single nights visit the Ghost Canyon Fest website. At the site you can link to curated playlists created by various artists performing that weekend. This interview includes a conversation with Jeremy Brashaw (New Standards Men), Cory Hager (Moon Pussy), Sean Dove (Almanac Man) and Brian Dooley (Almanac Man).
Listen to our interview with the organizers on Bandcamp and look for our interviews with various artists performing at Ghost Canyon Fest in the coming weeks.
Charming Disaster is a “goth-folk duo” comprised of Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris based out of Brooklyn, NY that has since 2012 written high concept songs that explore themes of human exploration of the natural world and the ways our attempts at explaining the world and our lives weave their way into culture in fascinating ways that are often hidden from contemporary society. In its songwriting Charming Disaster uncover these secret and often merely neglected connections and turn those paths of curiosity into fascinating narratives for its body of work. The project’s latest album is Super Natural History, a musical cabinet of curiosities in which each song is a curio and oddity of our collective mythological heritage in the form of stories of witchcraft, monsters and the underworld and where our ideas of magic and science intersect in alchemical fashion. The music is rooted in a sense of wonder and strong songcraft that renders the sometimes unusual subject matter accessible and immediately relatable.
Listen to our interview with Charming Disaster on Bandcamp, listen to Super Natural History below where you can also purchase the album digitally, on CD or vinyl on the group’s own Bandcamp site and follow the adventures and exploits of Charming Disaster at charmingdisaster.com.
Isadora Eden started as a solo project in a more indie singer-songwriter vein but even the early releases were imbued with an imaginative flair and an ear for deeper emotional coloring. As Eden brought on board collaborators to help flesh out the sound in the newer songs she was writing the music evolved into a darker, more sonically rich sound that was a bit more like something one might expect to hear from a songwriter like PJ Harvey or Mary Timony but more darkwave, more flourishes of atmospheric sounds both guitar-rooted and electronic akin to the stranger end of shoegaze. This creative period has resulted in one of the more fascinating records of 2023 in forget what makes it glow, the debut full-length for the project. Eden’s deeply evocative voice guides you through an introspective set of songs that are melancholic, reflective and in the end cathartic. Like the kind of dream pop record with some grit and edge, willing to wax noisy in moments as if to embody the way life and our subsconscious experiences are analog and meaningful, intimate, in a way pristine digital and curated experiences rarely are. The album will be available on vinyl and digital and for more information on finding group’s releases, social media and upcoming shows please visit the band’s website.
Listen to our interview with Isadora Eden and main songwriting partner and drummer Sumner Erhard on Bandcamp and catch one of the album release live shows listed below.
The Royal Arctic Institute, photo by Charlotte Hysen
The Royal Arctic Institute calls itself “an instrumental, post-punk, cinematic jazz quintet” and is currently based out of New York City. Its compositions strike one as soundtrack music for coastal noir with the hard to define sense that part of its sonic DNA is nearby large bodies of water and the ways sunrise and sunset ripple across the ocean. There is the mood of day into night as though the music was conceived and written for a time between an active workday and night time plans. The elegant melodies and percussion rise and resolve with an intuitive grace and evoke emotional states like the musicians have in mind creating imagery with luminous layers of tone and sonic shading. In 2022 the group released the From Catnip to Coma EP and in 2023 a companion EP From Coma To Catharsis perhaps charting and processing the long stretch of the early pandemic and its effects on life and the psyche. Both records were recorded and produced by James McNew of Yo La Tengo fame in the historic Neumann Leather Factory in Hoboken, New Jersey. The band consists of veteran musicians drummer Lyle Hysen (Das Damen, Arthur Lee), guitarists John Leon (Roky Erickson, Summer Wardrobe, Abra Moore) and Lynn Wright (And The Wiremen, Bee And Flower, Shilpa Ray), bassist David Motamed (Das Damen, Two Dollar Guitar, Arthur Lee, Townes Van Zandt) and keyboardist Carl Baggaley (Headbrain, Gramercy Arms) whose musical chemistry is obvious across the project’s recorded output. On August 4, 2023 Already Dead Records and Tapes will release a full length album on 12” LP vinyl of the two EPs combined as Catnip to Coma to Catharsis.
Listen to our interview with Carl Baggaley on Bandcamp and follow The Royal Arctic Institute at the links below.
REZN is a heavy psych band from Chicago whose forays into evocative and haunting music incorporate the aesthetics of doom, shoegaze and cinematic ambient to create dynamic soundscapes that capture a sense of the cosmic and of the deep mystery of nature. The group recently released its new album Solace. The record’s cover looks like something one might have expected on an old Rainbow or Hawkwind record of windswept mountains and the sunlight breaking through a raging storm. The music within is not unlike that expectation set of epic journeys and existential catharsis through finely sculpted and orchestrated volume and majestically accented rhythms. If Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock had somehow collaborated on a dark science fantasy trilogy in the modern era this is the music for that story—menace, spiritual contemplation and transcendence.
Listen to our interview with bassist Phil Cangelosi on Bandcamp and catch REZN on tour now (dates, streaming music and more information available at rezn.band) including a stop at the Hi-Dive in Denver with local doom legends Oryx on Friday, July 7, 2023.
Stinking Lizaveta is a trio from Philadelphia that formed in 1994 creating instrumental rock with roots in prog, jazz and cinematic music. The style the group has developed from the beginning has been summed up with the descriptor “doom jazz” because its sound has often combined heaviness with a musical complexity and elegance. Stinking Lizaveta establishes a mood early in its songs and its compositions vividly express ideas and emotional nuance that engages the listener’s imagination. The band’s sound has evolved and explored ideas and concepts across nine albums including its new record, 2023’s Anthems and Phantoms which features some of Stinking Lizaveta’s most unvarnished compositions and some of its most fully realized. Fans of bands like Earth and Hermanos Gutiérrez will find much to appreciate about the Stinking Lizaveta catalog and in particular the left field paths it takes on the new record into deeply evocative soundscapes. We were able to pose some questions to guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos about the his band’s history and the new album. Currrently Stinking Lizaveta is on tour with a stop in Denver at Hi-Dive on July 6, 2023 with Telekinetic Yeti, Somnuri and Hashtronaut.
Stinking Lizaveta at Bender’s Tavern in Denver, March 30, 2007, photo by Tom Murphy
Tom Murphy: When you formed this band it was the beginning of the end of alternative music as a force in mainstream music. How did you come upon the idea to do an instrumental band with some heavy sounds and jazz in the mix at that time? What kinds of sounds inspired you? I think back and my brain lands on stuff like what the late Peter Brötzmann was doing with Last Exit, or Naked City, Don Caballero and the like being in the vein of what you have done. Maybe later on stuff like Zs.
Yanni Papadopoulos: Initially we were inspired by Black Flag’s Family Man album. One side was instrumental rock, and the other was Henry reciting poetry. Greg Ginn also had an instrumental band called Gone. I never saw them or even heard their music, but I ran into a couple of guys that loved their show. They said something like, “ Man, those guys just came out and ripped it up!” Another friend of mine named Frank said he saw Gone play on the street in Philly, and it was intense! It was a tradition for bands to have an instrumental track on their albums. So we decided to just make that the whole thing. We were also into progressive rock, out jazz and soundtrack music, all of which gave us the idea that people will like what we do.
How did the band go over early on and where did you find a niche either in clubs or DIY type spaces? Were there other bands that you connected with in the early years of your own group?
Initially we connected with Pittsburgh PA, where Don Caballero was laying the groundwork for underground rock, and we made a deep connection in Richmond VA, where “mathrock” in the form of King Sour and Breadwinner was turning people on. In Philly we made friends with Dysrhythmia Flay, and Ninefinger (Mike Dean of COC’s band). There was also a great connection with an instrumental band in New Orleans called Spikle, and we even played with Clearlight at Check Point Charlie’s. In DC we made friends with Spirit Caravan, and years later Wino took us to Europe with his band The Hidden Hand. Our identity really started to form within the Emissions from the Monolith Festival in Youngstown OH. We played with tons of great bands there like Keelhaul and Mastodon.
What do you feel that instrumental music allows you to express or in general to communicate that might be more challenging if you had to include vocals with lyrics?
Vocals and lyrics tether the music to an image, make it more terrestrial. Instrumental music can occupy a deeper space in your imagination. If I want to write a song, I’ll start with a lyric. If I write a riff, does it need a lyric? I don’t have time for that kind of homework.
The new record, Anthems and Phantoms, continues with the kind of surprisingly clear and energetic lines of music that was there even on …Hopelessness and Shame. But it’s even more sonically spare yet intricate than say the psychedelic sound of Sacrifice and Bliss. Was there anything that helped to inform the different sonic direction of this new collection of songs?
During the Sac and Bliss period I was using a wah pedal, a delay and a tremolo, and I really got into that vocabulary. You can also hear it on 7th Direction, and Journey to the Underworld. On Anthems I put the effects away and just plugged into the amp. That’s how I’m playing live now, and will be for the whole tour. I don’t want any pedals now, not even a tuner, just chord into the same Mesa Boogie amp I bought by accident and have been using for 30 years.
It seems that there are implied themes in song titles that you explore without defining that for your potential listeners throughout your career. Titles like “The Man Needs Your Pain” is so on point and evocative and cultural references like “Zeitgeist, The Movie” and “A Day Without A Murder” from Sacrifice and Bliss seem to point to larger themes of human society and civilization. What sorts of themes do you think run through Anthems and Phantoms?
Anthems feels like an emergence from the dark, a movement into light from uncertainty. There are more major chords. Tunes like Let Live and Serpent Underfoot want to be uplifting without taking too much of your time. It wouldn’t be a Stinking Lizaveta album if we didn’t get down with tunes like “Blue Skunk” and “The Heart.” “Heart” has a little bit of a Manchester vibe for me, and “Skunk” is cracked blues, we go there.
The cover art for the new album is striking and mythological in a way that resonates with your previous record Journey to the Underworld. Who did the visuals and how do you feel it reflects the mood and themes of the album with the squid-legged Medusa type creature with crab arms holding the boat, floating over the world?
The art is done by Alexi’s son, Mike, with no direction at all from us. He just graduated from art school and banged out a good one. We have indeed become such a mythical beast as a band.
There’s a great deal of diversity in the sound palette on all of your records so the descriptor of Stinking Lizaveta as doom jazz while good as shorthand for what to expect seems to be something you’ve outgrown. What new areas of musical expression do you feel like maybe came more to the foreground on the new record?
I’m always trying to answer the question of what is missing from the music that hits me. We see so many bands every year, and when I pick up my guitar I try to be the one that joyfully participates in rock music, but also redeems it from its shortcomings. Not everyone will get us, it takes me years to even listen to my own music, but I’m usually pleasantly surprised once I get some distance from it. Keep finding new things to practice and get out of your comfort zone. Stinking Lizaveta is our life’s work, that’s how we approach it.
Bestial Mouths, photo by Elemental Eyes Photography
Bestial Mouths began in 2009 as a band that early on might be considered post-punk but even its debut EP, 2009’s Stabile Vices, had elements of noise and industrial set to ritualistic rhythms with tribal percussion. All along, vocalist Lynette Cerezo who has a background in fashion and design brought to performances a striking visual presentation that drew upon the imagery of mythology and dreams in a creative interplay with the music. Cerezo’s lyrics have always explored issues of gender, identity and personal liberation and whether combined with the performance or not, certainly enhanced by the live experience, meant as a conduit for mutual inspiration and uplift by challenging arbitrary societal notions of “proper” social roles and behavior and aesthetics. A Bestial Mouths show and the music embodies aspects of the subconscious and what has traditionally been relegated to artistic darkness and the feminine, the intuitive and the supernatural. Cerezo through the practice of her art reclaims all of that as a source of power and dignity by demonstrating how it isn’t negative, that it is a part of a complete human life and that such things can be harnessed to the benefit of the self and all.
More recent Bestial Mouths records starting with the new arc of music since the project has been mainly headed by Cerezo since 2018 has reconciled the early post-punk and Goth sound and noise completely with the more mystical and non-Western experimental sonic ideas and rhythms that have been a feature if not the focus of the music since the beginning. But in 2020’s RESURRECTEDINBLACK, the first Bestial Mouths record crafted with Cerezo at the creative helm it’s all there for a listening experience not unlike the psycho-mystical depths of a Dead Can Dance album but darker and more harrowing and cathartic. The new album R.O.T.T. (inmyskin), with the acronym standing for Road of Thousand Tears drops on August 11, 2023 and continues the path of its predecessor but with the songs seemingly emerging from the murk that seemed entirely appropriate for a set of songs from a time of great uncertainty and treading new musical paths. Those appreciate Diamanda Galás’ elemental catharsis, psychic fearlessness and avant-garde sensibilities might find a great deal to appreciate about Bestial Mouths as will those with a taste for the political industrial punk of ADULT. and Jarboe’s deeply emotional and unfettered vocal performances but while in Swans and since.
Listen to our interview with Lynette Cerezo of Bestial Mouths on Bandcamp and catch the group perform in Colorado on Wednesday, June 21 at Vulture’s in Colorado Springs with WitchHands and eHpH and on Thursday, June 22 at Hi-Dive in Denver with Church Fire and DJ Shannon Von Kell as well as other dates announced on the band’s website (linked below) where you can find more information and links to listen and purchase music and merch.
Atmosphere is a hip-hop duo from Minneapolis, Minnesota comprised of rapper Slug aka Sean Daley and DJ/producer Ant aka Anthony Davis. Slug and Ant have been influential well beyond their own remarkable work as artists as co-founders of the respected Rhymesayers Entertainment imprint which has long been one of the torchbearers of underground and alternative hip-hop going back to the mid-90s and releasing not just the work of Atmosphere but that of Aesop Rock, Brother Ali, Eyedea & Abilities, Dilated Peoples, Grayskul and others. Including its debut album Overcast! (1997), Atmosphere has released thirteen full albums and ten EPs up through the new record So Many Other Realities Exist Simultaneously (2023) making the project one of the more prolific acts in hip-hop. In its various lineups and incarnations Atmosphere has consistently paired sensitive and thought-provoking lyrics with a sonically rich and diverse production ranging from some more classic hip-hop sounds to the clearly experimental and avant-garde all to deliver powerfully evocative music that engages the imagination and the heart. In the live setting Atmosphere create an intimate and inviting energy that creates an environment of the shared experience as Daley’s lyrics aim to not just tell relatable stories with roots in his own direct experiences but with resonances for common experiences and emotional spaces we’ve all known. On the new record the songs take us through a journey through unrest and hope, the latter the primary feeling Daley hopes to convey to everyone that shows up to an Atmosphere show because it is hope that lingers and can carry you through trying times into those that are better.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom MurphyYeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom Murphy
The evening spring downpours in the Denver metro area took a break for the duration of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show at Red Rocks but something about the atmosphere seemed to enhance a dream-like ambiance to the performance.
Perfume Genius at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom Murphy
Opening act Perfume Genius turned the stage into something of a Broadway show set with a backdrop like a large theater curtain or a massive pipe organ. But whatever the exact nature of the image it enhanced the expansive power of Michael Hadreas’ operatic and impassioned vocals and commanding presence as he and his band performed a broad selection of ten songs from his most recent four albums including ending the set with a rousing version of “Queen” from 2014’s Too Bright, one of art pop classics of the past decade.
Perfume Genius at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom MurphyYeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom Murphy
Yeah Yeah Yeahs are no strangers to Red Rocks over the years but how would the trio, a quartet for this tour, manifest its music for this concert? As someone who had only ever seen Yeah Yeah Yeahs once in 2002 when the group opened for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion after Liars did a mind melting set opening the entire show only to put on the kind of charismatic feat of rock and roll theater that has cemented the band as one of the greatest live acts of all time I had high expectations. Until recently reading Meet Me in the Bathroom and seeing the documentary of the same name I had more or less checked out of the band for the past twenty years but when Cool It Down came out in 2022 I’d hear singles randomly in public places and really got into those songs even though what I heard felt more mellow than I had been expecting from the group that put out that debut EP and Fever to Tell. A friend had gifted me an old promo copy of Show Your Bones awhile back and listening to that it was obvious I had missed out on years of music from one of early 2000s indie rock’s best bands through my own life’s inertia and following other paths of contemporary music.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs with Michael Hadreas at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom Murphy
So how did Yeah Yeah Yeahs measure up 23 years into their existence? Brian Chase, Nick Zinner and Imaad Wasif walked onto stage in the beginning to set the mood. No big props, a projection screen mostly minimal until later in the set. When Karen O walked onto the stage she had an outfit like some kind of glam rock superhero mixed with Sun Ra (but what’s the difference there, right?). Opening the set with the opening track to Cool It Down “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” was an emotionally electrifying and epic swing into a generous selection of songs going back across all the full-length albums. Michael Hadreas joined Karen O center stage for his vocal contributions as he did on the studio record and the two singer’s keyed into each other and played off each other like old collaborators. And it was in that melancholic song that a sense of sustained joy coming from the musicians that permeated the rest of the concert.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom Murphy
There was a spontaneous energy to every song and you could see the band performing like they hadn’t been doing some of these songs for years, like they were playing this music at a small club but enjoying the large scale of the show and feeding off the energy of the collective moment. Karen O had the kind of on stage energy that’s impossible to resist and not be swept up into the music and share in her own excitement. You could see how the musicians all played off of one another and contributed to the momentum that coursed through from first song through the encore but in her movements and gestures and the enthusiasm she exuded, Karen channeled that to the audience and then back to the rest of the band in the kind of audience and performer interplay you hope to see but rarely experience at a large concert. So many of the songs are intimate and personal and that translated perfectly somehow to Red Rocks because Yeah Yeah Yeahs in this minimalistic stage set up put the focus on the human performance with projections like the spacescape later on and the streaming colors earlier accentuating the mood and providing atmosphere more than an inherent part of the appeal of the stage show itself.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom Murphy
There was no skimping on the energy, everyone in the band put their all into what they were doing and it was obvious that they wouldn’t rather be doing anything else but this thing they love that fortunately for them lots of other people love as well. When you’ve seen some of modern music’s greatest frontpeople for over 20 years it was perhaps more obvious this time out than it was in 2002 that Karen O and her combination of humor, exuberance and imaginative and unconventional style is one of the greats and that without the context of Zinner’s and Chase’s own passion and ability to sync with each other and connect with the people that showed up with such immediacy and affection none of this might have had the same impact. Evidently nine years after the previous Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, these now legends of NYC indie rock have plenty of new ticks up their sleeves and the ability to deliver the goods with one of the most captivating sets in a large venue in a decade.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom MurphyYeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom MurphyYeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks 6/5/23, photo by Tom Murphy
Yeah Yeah Yeahs Set List for June 5, 2023 at Red Rocks Spitting Off the Edge of the World Cheated Hearts Pin Shame and Fortune Burning Zero Wolf Soft Shock Lovebomb Blacktop Sacrilege Turn Into Gold Lion Maps Heads Will Roll
Queen City Sounds and Art 
You must be logged in to post a comment.