Queen City Sounds Podcast – Page 5 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E50: Captain’s Audio Project

Captain’s Audio Project, photo by Faerin Millington

Captain’s Audio Project is the solo project of Portland, Oregon band Trashcan Joe’s James Cook. The songwriter and mult-instrumentalist is releasing his debut album Waiting For The Moon under that new moniker on February 28, 2025 on vinyl LP, CD, digital download and via streaming services. Whereas Trashcan Joe is a full band known for including instruments made from found objects as part of its sound hearkening to early jazz, Captain’s Audio Project was built on a foundation of Cook’s vocals and a 1931 National Tenor Resonator Guitar with other instruments and guest musicians overdubbed to fill out the sound when it felt appropriate. But the core appeal of the new record is how it feels like a fusion of indie pop and chamber folk performed with an intimate feel like something sung around a campfire after dinner with friends sharing stories.

Listen to our interview with James Cook on Bandcamp and follow Captain’s Audio Project at the links below.

Captain’s Audio Project on Facebook

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E49: Extra Kool and Time

Extra Kool and Time, photo by Tom Murphy

Extra Kool and Time recently released their album The Grimies for streaming, digital download and limited green vinyl. The record represents the product of decades of working together playing shows and on each other’s respective tracks. Danny Vincennie aka Extra Kool and Chris Steele aka Time are two of the most gifted lyricists and rappers in Denver of recent years but their work has not often been championed in local much less national press and culture. Several years back they worked on tracks together in a project they called The Grimies with singles that appeared on obscure compilations now challenging to track down. But separately and contributing to each other’s work they have written poignantly personal and vulnerable, insightful, emotional songs about life and society that are vibrant and heartbreaking. Time has frequently released music with the brilliant producer AwareNess as the experimental hip-hop duo Calm. and along with Extra Kool and artists under the label umbrella of The Dirty Laboratory they were a force in alternative hip-hop in the 2000s. That world imploded or faded away in “commercial relevance” if not in impact in influence around the 2010s but the legacy of that time has continued in the more interesting hip-hop of today and certainly Time and Extra Kool didn’t stop creating powerful work just because the crumbling music culture wasn’t shining as much of a spotlight on alternative hip-hop for a long time. In September 2024 Extra Kool and Time finally released their fully collaborative album titled The Grimes. It’s full of vivid and emotionally resonant bars traded by both artists with tales of Denver and existential exploration of what endures in the mind and heart long term, the ghosts that haunt us, our communities and our various cultures. It’s a deep record with richly realized production from the likes of Fumes the Threat, AwareNess, Satyr and Preacher vs. Choir with contributions from Illogic. The record is rich with pop culture references used with a cleverness and poetry that makes the music fun and insightful even as it delves into heavier subjects.

Listen to our interview with Extra Kool and Time on Bandcamp and follow the artists at the links below. The vinyl can be purchased on the Bandcamp or at select Denver record shops.

Time on Instagram

Time on Bandcamp

Extra Kool on Instagram

Extra Kool on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E48: Oryx

Oryx is a trio based in Denver that has been evolving its evolving its unique style of heavy music since forming in 2012. When the band emerged it’s grittily colossal metal sound fit in well with the then ascendant doom metal underground with roots in sludge rock and grindcore. Early Oryx shows and releases showcased a band seemingly able to balance a precise musicianship with a wall of sound that felt spontaneous and on the verge of collapse. It suited well the band’s lyrics that evoked the precarious place the world has been in due to the effects of human civilization under the yoke of rapacious capitalism driven by greed and the accumulation of wealth into a few hands at the expense of all.

Some of Oryx’s early music had a thrilling density of frequency and rhythm but something about their shows have felt cathartic and liberating. That component of the group’s identity has manifested most fully in terms of songwriting on its new record Primordial Sky. The album doesn’t skimp on the beautifully brutal riffs and elegantly pummeling rhythms but also there is a wide open quality that while the lyrics describe a world on the brink of being post-human due to the hubris of societies that seem to be taking a casual attitude toward anthropogenic climate catastrophe and feckless approach to the rise of fascism and authoritarianism worldwide which have historically accelerated mass destruction. And yet the Oryx album doesn’t sound like it’s built on despair. Instead its poetic and mythical lyrics and the sound of the music come off as both looking at the world to come and looking back from another era when the current one we’re living in has passed. The band’s 2021 album Lamenting a Dead World seemed like an angrier affair but one with an accurate diagnosis of the state of things. The new album isn’t hopeful per se but realistic in its spirit of looking forward to a time when things can begin again without the toxic legacy of the world now to poison the possibilities.

Listen to our interview with Oryx on Bandcamp and follow the group at the links below. Primordial Sky is available on streaming, digital download and cassette from their Bandcamp page and on colored vinyl through Translation Loss Records.

Oryx on Facebook

Oryx on Instagram

Oryx on Bluesky

Oryx on Translation Loss Records

Oryx LinkTree

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E47: Luna Honey

Luna Honey from Philadelphia recently issued its latest work of musical alchemy with the November 22, 2024 release of the album Bound. Since its 2017 inception the group has been impossible to tag with a narrow genre designation not for lack of creative coherence but because it draws on disparate roots of influence and experiments with sound sources and organic and electronic production. But fans of the likes of late-80s and beyond Swans, Dead Can Dance and Live Skull will find a similar resonance in Luna Honey’s facility with channeling personal darkness into beautifully transcendent and cathartic pieces of music. The band’s sound is not limited to notions of post-punk, noise rock, tribal industrial, its albums span a range of tones and moods to serve a creative vision and impulse to make music that goes beyond mere entertainment and diversion from everyday life to get at something deeper. Luna Honey singer/guitarist Maura Pond collaborated long distance with former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg on the 2023 Luna Honey album Aftermath which was a meditation on and expression of loss and grief. Bound despite, or perhaps because of, its title feels like a reckoning, a coming to terms with, a struggling against arbitrary and artificial limitations and definitions that circumscribe and limit our lives. Pond’s expressive, ritualistic and at times operatic vocals and the controlled maelstrom of sounds like standard music forms stretched and twisted against standard tonality and structure make for a memorable listening experience.

Listen to our interview with Maura Pond of Luna Honey on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below.

lunahoney.com

Luna Honey on Instagram

Luna Honey on Facebook

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E46: Chris Greene

Chris Greene Quarter, photo courtesy the artists

Chris Greene Quartet released its eleventh album Conversance on October 19, 2024 on LP, CD, digital download and streaming via respected indie rock label Pravda Records marking it as the first jazz album issued by the imprint. Greene and his band based out of Chicago is a saxophonist whose talents have contributed to recordings by Windy City luminaries such as Steve Dawson and Nora O’Connor and he has performed with the likes of Common and Andrew Bird. Greene’s post-bop style incorporates ideas from funk and hip-hop but the methods and sounds are in that jazz ensemble vein in which each member of the band contributes in synergistic ways toward dynamic and energetic arrangements that establish an immediate and flowing mood. The new album reveals not just the Quartet’s musical creativity and prowess but also its knowledge of the history and legacy of the artforms that inform its aesthetic and craft.

Listen to our interview with Chris Greene on Bandcamp and follow the band leader and his band at the links provided.

chrisgreenejazz.com

Chris Greene on Instagram

Chris Greene on Facebook

Chris Greene on YouTube

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E45: Death Doula

Kerry Jones of Death Doula, photo courtesy the artist

Death Doula is a band based on Portland, Oregon that released its debut Love Spells on October 11, 2024. Its music might be described as shoegaze but its tones are a little darker waxing into the territory of moodier post-punk and its textures more complex and prominent. The band’s guitar work is a little noisier and at times more angular than the typical shoegaze band and its lyrics more rooted in a kind of poetic lyricism rather than standard pop songcraft. Vocalist Kerry Jones’ vocals are versatile yet elemental in expression with words seemingly informed by a perspective that looks beyond the surface level of everyday experiences. Death Doula’s sound bridges the ethereal and the heavier end of atmospheric music and infuses it with an expansive emotional intensity that lends the music an unexpected power. The albums was recorded with Adam Lee at Jackpot Studios in Portland and its noisy and uplifting maelstrom of creative ideas and colorful soundscapes defies easy categorization but fans of brooding yet noisy post-punk, Helium and the more mystically-minded shoegaze and space rock bands like Space Team Electra and Sky Cries Mary will find great kinship across the record’s nine tracks.

Listen to our interview with Kerry Jones on Bandcamp and follow Death Doula at the links below.

deathdoulaband.com

Death Doula on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E44: Ether Diver

Ether Diver aka Cory Casciato, photo by Tom Murphy

Ether Diver is the solo musical project of Cory Casciato who has been experimenting with making music for decades but didn’t until the pandemic era have a viable outlet for those impulses and the time to develop it. Casciato was a long time contributor to Westword, the alternative weekly paper based in Denver, as well as a city editor for the local edition of The Onion A.V. Club and lately he’s been delving back into music reviewing on his website under the “Other People’s Music” tab. The Ether Diver music is what might be described as ambient space music kosmische with clear nods of influence to 90s IDM, Hearts of Space artists and the more inspired video game soundtracking. His first release dropped on Halloween 2020 with richly atmospheric and aptly titled Haunted Space Object No. 1: Alien Music Box. Even then Casciato’s sense of tone and structure creates an almost tactile sense of space and mood. Since then he’s had a fairly prolific set of releases that have evolved his aesthetic gifts including the forthcoming album tentatively titled Mechanics of Mysticism. This interview discusses some of Casciato’s background in music and his music itself but it is also a deep dive into his experiences in music and cultural journalism with interviewer Tom Murphy who was his colleague at Westword and The Onion A.V. Club over several years.

Listen to our interview with Cory Casciato on Bandcamp and follow Ether Diver at the links below.

etherdiver.com

Ether Diver on Instagram

Ether Diver on Bandcamp

Ether Diver on Blue Sky

Ether Diver on Rave Nation

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E43: hackedepicciotto

hackedepicciotto, photo by Mara von Kummer

Berlin-based duo hackedepicciotto released its first live album on November 1, 2024. Titled The Best of hackedepicciotto (Live in Napoli) the album reflects two decades of collaboration and sound experimentation and the evolution of compositions as they have been performed live. The record, available as a limited double vinyl (which includes an exclusive signed print) and on digital, includes selections from across the project’s five albums. Each is an inspired reinterpretation of the original studio version as channeled through the lens of live performance over the last several years. The music combines electronic sounds, throat singing, spoken word, industrial beats, drone and psychedelic folk for a style the duo have called “symphonic drone.” Alexander Hacke experimented with tape loops in his early teens before joining foundational industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. Danielle de Picciotto was one of the founders of Berlin Love Parade in 1989 as well as the singer of The Space Cowboys. She is also an acclaimed multimedia artist, writer and graphic novel artist who has documented pivotal cultural moments in the Berlin and international music and art world. Together Hacke and de Picciotto have established a consistently fascinating body of work that transcends standard musical categorization with a cinematic and dramatic sensibility that fuses concepts of performance art, music theater and film. The new live album performed entirely by the duo at Auditorium Novecento in Naples, Italy is a rich culmination of the project’s music practice as organically developed.

Listen to our interview with hackedepicciotto on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below.

hackedepicciotto.de

danielledepicciotto.com

hacke.org

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E42: The Old Ceremony

The Old Ceremony, photo by Michael Benson

The Old Ceremony formed in 2004 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina fronted by Django Haskins. From the outset the band was conceived of as a group that could realize more orchestral pop arrangements. The latter style served well the literary leanings of the songwriting and pop noir sound lending the music a great range of dramatic and dynamic expression. Borrowing its name from the 1975 Leonard Cohen album New Skin for the Old Ceremony the band has released seven full-length albums including its latest Earthbound (available October 17, 2024 on streaming, for digital download and limited edition CD and vinyl). The story is that Haskins wrote some 115 songs during the pandemic and eleven of those made it onto the album. But each of those songs is a rich story in itself and worth exploring on their own with sly cultural references including name checking would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas. Its a sonically diverse set of cinematic pop songs that it’s clear underwent a good degree of development and set together with other songs that as a whole create a sense of a world that’s gone and missed and coming to terms with the world in which we currently find ourselves and moving through the next set of life challenges reminiscent of what we’ve seen before.

Listen to our interview with Django Haskins on Bandcamp and follow The Old Ceremony at the links below.

theoldceremony.com

The Old Ceremony on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E41: In These Trees

In These Trees (Binnie Klein), photo courtesy the artist

The Quiver is the debut album of In These Trees & Tartie. A collaborative effort between two women who live in nearly opposite ends of the world (Hamden, Connecticut, USA and Melbourne, Australia respectively) the album is the product of a chance encounter between Binnie Klein and Tartie when the former chose the latter’s song “Winter’s Girl” to play on her WPKN radio show from the bevy of submissions she received each week. Something about the song struck Klein, its passion and authenticity, and Klein asked Tartie about putting a melody to one of her poems. Klein had been writing poetry for years and had been told they might make good song lyrics and something seemed to make sense resulting in exchanging ideas and Tartie lending her vocals to the project with contributions from Jeff Pevar, John Andrews and Jerry Marotta with production by David Baron. The Quiver, which released March 19, 2024 for digital download and streaming, became available on CD in September has a spacious, orchestral quality like one of those great late 80s and early 90s college radio artists like Kate Bush, 10,000 Maniacs and Tori Amos with more than a little musical sophistication and grace but lacking none of the vibrant emotional resonance.

Listen to our interview with Binnie Klein on Bandcamp and follow In These Trees at the links below.

inthesetrees.com

In These Trees on Instagram