Queen City Sounds and Art

Madebit’s Synth Pop Dance Song “Island Vibes” Creates a Sense of Those Special Vacation Times All the Time

Madebit’s use of expanding bubbles of tone and layers of sequenced melodies in Island Vibes initially gives “Island Vibes” a wistful tone like it suggests a feeling of missing some good times on an island and of saying goodbye for the season to a beachside resort, the kind that’s a little rustic and open to most people regularly because it’s not a tourist destination so much as just a cool place to which the people in a nearby community avail themselves to get away for a weekend or a holiday. The kind of low key relaxation offered is the energy that runs through the song. Musically it balances a pop song for a dance party and an experiment in establishing a mood with a blend of collaged electronic moods and a subtle rhythm track that nevertheless keeps up a brisk but not urgent pace. In the background we hear the sound of an occasional breeze and in the end the sounds of tides coming in. What is most interesting and unexpected overall is the sly borrowing of the staccato arpeggio of electronic melody from influential 1972 version of Gershon Kingsley’s synth song “Popcorn Song” as done by Hot Butter. Out of the typical context it just adds a layer of playfulness to the track that gives a tonal coloring to the line about “Island Vibes on another level now” so that the best of that feeling can go with you wherever and isn’t limited by the end of a season or vacation or some other temporal inconvenience. Listen to “Island Vibes” on YouTube and follow Madebit at the links below. The new Madebit album An Alien Among Us is due out later in 2023.

Madebit on TikTok

Madebit on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E36: Weird Al Qaida

Weird Al Qaida got off the ground in 2008/2009 when Eric Peterson and Ingvald Grunder formed the experimental project with the aim of being able to explore whatever musical ideas came to mind. Both had been in bands in and around the Denver music scene for years prior with Peterson having played in power pop/punk pop group The Barrys and Grunder having spent some time in Orbit Service. Weird Al Qaida doesn’t fit nicely into any Denver subscene not being quite noise enough for that world though elements of musique concrète, ambient and noise are elements of its songwriting and not quite psychedelic folk or jazz enough for a more mainstream version of that. But its fascinating body of recorded work including the 2011 seven inch Psychic Wizard, 2016’s Plastic Family and now the 2022 record The Dog & The Deer showcase imaginative soundscaping and arrangements that expand categories of what music can be while remaining essentially accessible.

Listen to our interview with Weird Al Qaida on Bandcamp and connect with the duo at its website linked below. Weird Al Qaida performs at Mutiny Information Café on Friday, February 17, 2023 from 8:30-9:30 pm and with any luck we’ll get further chances to catch the band in person now that live music is back to being more regular.

weirdalqaida.com

Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E35: Mark Bingham

Mark Bingham got an early start in the music business when he was signed with Elektra Records at the age of 17 in 1966 and released a single on Warner Bros. before returning to his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana to attend university. At the time he started Bar-B-Q Records and in 1975 he relocated to New York City and started the band Social Climbers but also got involved in recording some of the city’s more adventurous artists like Glenn Branca, MX-80 and in particular Bush Tetra’s 1980 single “Too Many Creeps.” Bingham moved to New Orleans in 1982 and started The Boiler Room recording studio and in 2001 opened Piety Street Recording but ended operations with the studio in 2013. Across his decades as a producer, musician (studio, live), composer and recording engineer, Bingham has worked with R.E.M., Ed Sanders, John Scholfield, Flat Duo Jets, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Faithfull, Elvis Costello, Allen Toussaint, Korn, Dr. John, Pretty Lights, Dave Matthews and countless others but is perhaps less known for his eclectic and vast body of work that is his own music. So from 2022-2023 Nouveau Electric Records is releasing Bingham’s collected work in 22 albums. The series began with the release of Mushroom Crowd and Goo Seneck on Friday, November 18, 2022 with albums released every two months through September 2023 including the recently issues William Blake in Bakersfield.

Listen to our interview with Mark Bingham on Bandcamp and please visit Bingham’s own Bandcamp below for more information on the producer and the aforementioned series of releases.

Lucas Thijs Elicits a Sense of Breaking Mundane Life Limitations on “Waterhole Web”

Lucas Thijs evokes a sense of the cosmic from the very beginning of “Waterhole Web” before the song launches into its main piano melody splashed with a halo of sounds: side melodies that echo and fade, textural swells and glitches of white noise that serve as informal percussion and filigree of dramatic 80s rock guitar. But the song gives us some breathing room from the way it takes us in its embrace for passages that feel like what it must be like to be able to float into space through a column of starlight. Forget hardware, this technology as manifested in the music requires no equipment bur rather an unlocked inborn ability to transcend normal laws of physics and our own human limitations. And the song and its spiraling drift of blissful sounds embodies the impulse to that kind of liberation from everyday limitations. Listen to “Waterhole Web” on Spotify and follow Lucas Thijs at the links below.

Lucas Thijs on Instagram

Lucas Thijs LinkTree

Chromadescent’s “Saturate” is Like the Bright and Warm Sound of Summer in Winter

Chromadescent, photo courtesy the artist

Chromadescent’s “Saturate” is brimming with shimmery sounds that swirl together with bell tones giving it solidity and rhythm before the saturated synth, piano and more vivid rhythmic and textural elements enter and transform the song into something that has an expansive fluidity. But over halfway through the it drifts into the ether once again anchored by a distant piano melody, percussive accents and lingering notes like being immersed in a virtual world where EDM, IDM, flamenco co-inform each other in a fully synthesized style. It has an energy like a modern version of Balearic Beat – incredibly calming but stimulating to the imagination in elevated emotional resonances. It’s a song that sounds like summer in the winter. Listen to “Saturate” on Spotify and follow Chromadescent at the links provided.

Chromadescent on TikTok

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Chromadescent YouTube

Chromadescent Instagram

Bad Flamingo’s “Devil and the Deep Blue” Channels Private Anxiety Into Moodily Transformative Americana Art Rock

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

Bad Flamingo has crafted a typically unpredictable song with “Devil and the Deep Blue” beginning with a brooding bass line lead and the most minimal of guitar accents. Then the vocals come in sounding very focused within a narrow yet expressive range compared to some of the duo’s songs of years past but within the style of its more recent songs. It just makes it feel like the words are being given to us in confidence with a direct focus. Later in the song acoustic guitar and electric come in to give some sonic shading and detail with the electric ringing out like a briefly echoing thunderclap before the song returns to its simple, rhythmic elements that are more percussive than melodic giving the song a bit of a 1980s Tom Waits flavor circa the weirder end of Swordfishtrombones. It shouldn’t work but it does and breaks standard songwriting forms. At times the song is reminiscent of the sort of thing Barry Adamson was doing on his 1996 opus Oedipus Schmoedipus through inverting jazz tropes to make something that sounds like it isn’t beholden to anyone else’s established style while remaining accessible and with a vibe of hushed immediacy. The song seems to be about one of anxiety and urgency but coping through channeling the nervous energy away in almost tribal, ritualistic rhythms. Listen to “Devil and the Deep Blue” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

Bad Flamingo on Facebook

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Bad Flamingo YouTube

badflamingomusic.com

OR/ANA’s “Burned Down” is a Moody Dream Pop Song About Personal Transformation Through Devastation

OR/ANA’s “Burned Down” has a simple structure and not a lot in the way of lyrics but what is there is layered and arranged in such a way that gives the song an atmospheric spaciousness and depth of mood laid out like a cinematic listening experience. A distorted synth tone pulses urgently as melodic sparkles stream in the backdrop of your hearing as vocalist sings about how “everything is falling apart” but “what a beautiful farewell.” And the first what we might call act or chapter of the song is like a mantra to this concept. Of familiar structures and habits coming apart to make way for something new even if it can feel scary and unmooring at first. Then near the midpoint of the song the distorted pulse drops away and we are carried off into a billowy field of ethereal sound that yield’s a second chorus of “I’m so down, everything’s burned down” like a statement to self of acceptance of change while mourning what was lost. In the last roughly third of the song the elements from the first third return but in a form that sounds in an urgent kind of disarray and as the final set of lyrics with “All you see in flames, running after me” and “there’s a fire in my house and it burns down.” This suggests the way in which we can see the chaos and discord affecting other people as things going south and bemoaning it but when it comes to your own situation how does one deal with societal and world events when they can no longer be abstracted with a kind of dissociation. Perhaps it’s not a metaphor for the uneven impacts of inequality, climate change, social upheaval, a global pandemic, environmental destruction in pursuit of short term profits and the effects on health and society but it works for that too. OR/ANA gives that experience a gorgeously affecting soundscape here without hitting you over the head with obvious symbolism in casting it in personal terms like a journey of growth and transformation that can apply deeply personally or far beyond one’s immediate experience. Listen to “Burned Down” on YouTube and follow OR/ANA at the links below. The Expansion EP was released in 2022 and can be heard on Spotify.

OR/ANA on TikTok

OR/ANA on Instagram

Father Baker’s “The Downhill Chill” is a Hip-Hop Poem and Mantra of Resistance to Complacency

Father Baker imbues “The Downhill Chill” with an air of bravado in the face of resignation in bracing for the inevitable turn of fortune in one’s life, especially in the long term and the limited time we all have in life to attempt to do something meaningful or at least truly desirable with our lives while we can. The production by CEE GEE and Camouflage Monk of Griselda Records loops a haunting guitar part and swells of strings and a hypnotic beat really cloaks the track in a sense of menace and anxiety. And yet Father Baker’s refrain of “chill the fuck out and breathe” is like a mantra out of focusing on inevitable cycles that you see coming when “all the shit flows downhill.” The sample that closes out the song wherein a speaker talks about the social conditioning we receive in life and how individuality, and really creativity and imagination, are discouraged and often beaten out of people in various ways and that most people “don’t have enough so you become watchers of game shows and things like that.” This song appears to be an attempt to at least remind the artist and listeners that it doesn’t have to be that way even when headed into middle age and beyond and that awareness is one of the first steps to change and establishing better habits of mind. Fans of Anticon projects like Deep Puddle Dynamics and early Atmosphere or the likes of cLOUDDEAD or Hymie’s Basement will find much to enjoy here. Listen to “The Downhill Chill” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the recently released Towers EP and follow Father Baker at the links below.

Father Baker on Facebook

Father Baker on Instagram

fatherbakerknows.com

The Audio/Visual Dept.’s Cathartically Ambient “Healing Happening” Soothes the Jagged Places in the Mind

“Healing Happening” is the fourth track from The Audio/ Video Dept.’s latest album …it all felt so real (which dropped December 9, 2022). Though part of a larger larger project involving saturated tones and elegant use of space and musical texture the song stands on its own as an expression of the release of fixed energy into a billowing flow. Chimes, metal and wood, sound in the entrancing swirl like a slow moving frequency that works out the stubborn jagged spaces in your psyche that sit there as bad habits of mind upon which one’s ability to move on to greater fulfillment can get snared. The sound sounds also like a great and gentle untanglement. It’s echoing ripples and expansive dynamic is not merely tranquil, it flows into and out of the mind leaving clarity in its wake. Listen to “Healing Happening” on Spotify and follow The Audio/Visual Dept. at the links below.

The Audio/Visual Dept. at Instagram

The Audio/Visual Dept. on Apple Music

David Curington’s Sprawling, Plunderphonic Ambient Piece “Assured Listening Experience” is Like a Creative Deconstruction of the Constant Media Content Bombardment of Everyday Life

David Curington, photo courtesy the artist

“Assured Listening Experience” sounds like David Curington paired various clips of radio theater programs, corporate training videos, industrial and scientific data audio, the news and random conversations with short bursts of white noise, animal samples, synth drone, oscillators, field recordings, perhaps movie dialogue, segments of a random piano work and an array of sound effects. All throughout the first portion, at least, a voice is heard reciting various playing cards and their suits. Later facts and figures in the same deadpan voice. Is there a pattern to the cards? Significance to the numbers and figures? Probably but decoding that might take the attention to detail and associations of a savant and at any rate it fades out or well into the background like the ghost of a numbers station. The oscillating drones that periodically change in pitch might have a pattern with an intended psychological effect in the layers of voices and sounds like the ghosts of a thousand BBC transmissions into space pooled into the collection of a listener and curator on a distant world pulling these sounds together to make some sense of what put together might seem like chaos but which at one time each had its discreet context but in this new arrangement takes on an amalgamated new significance as disembodied and de-contextualized artifacts of culture. By the time the 26 minute track comes to the conclusion of its three movements it’s like an avatar of the background, constant stimulation of everyday life so that such an array of signifiers becomes its own kind of ambient art piece that hits with an alienness in its familiarity. Listen to “Assured Listening Experience” on Soundcloud and follow David Curington at the links below.

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David Curington on Bandcamp

David Curington on Instagram