Queen City Sounds and Art

Lori Goldston Infuses the Grief of “We Miss You and Wish You Well” With Grace and Elegance

Lori Goldston, photo courtesy the artist

Lori Goldston expertly elicits a textural tone to bring us into the open spaces of “We Miss You and Wish You Well.” The video by transgender filmmaker Clyde Peterson gives us shots of clouds in real time and views from above snow enshrouded mountains as if from a plane taking off from the winter climate for parts as yet determined. Goldston’s string work on the cello feels like both the ties that bind us to the environs we know and the pull to new places and experiences. The ascending lines soar and level out with the music trailing off and returning with greater force and energy only to float off into the distance again. In the last minute of the song Goldston’s bowing brings forth a sound of conflicting forces reflecting feelings similarly at odds within one’s own mind but in the end settling into the tranquility of acceptance of a decision made. The title of the song says much for the instrumental piece and as part of the new album High and Low, with the “High” part of the album being a series of solo improvised pieces as memorials for Goldston’s friend and Canadian artist-musician the late Geneviève Elverum it expresses well the fragile intensity and delicacy of feeling and the inner turmoil that can strike you when you think on your friend again in bursts that seem manageable if you don’t allow yourself to be crushed by the immensity of it all at once but how that never quite works out. But Goldston tries and gives that expression of heavy emotion some grace and elegance in the execution. Watch the video for “We Miss You and Wish You Well” on YouTube and follow Goldston at the links provided. High and Low is available now via SofaBurn.

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E24: No Age

No Age at Glob Aug 28, 2013, photo by Tom Murphy

No Age is a noise rock/art punk duo based in Los Angeles, California. Drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist/vocalist Randy Randall had been in a band called Wives from 2001-2005 that had been a staple of the underground/DIY music world at the time. But Spunt and Randall scrapped the name and took their then musical ideas and recast their efforts as No Age with their first shows under the new moniker in early 2006 with their second show at the legendary DIY space The Smell in April of that year. From the beginning there was a refreshing lack of pretension and exuberance in the sound of No Age. Like a fusion of The Ramones at its most raw and the lo-fi experimentation and tape collage aesthetic of The Microphones. Within the often grainy and charmingly unvarnished early recordings one could hear a joyfulness and embrace of lived experiences that could contain and express a broad range of emotions and ideas in a manner often spirited and tender. There was always an element of vulnerability to No Age’s version of punk that transformed the music into something immediately accessible, like an unspoken invitation into a shared experience of thoughts and feelings it’s easy to think of going through alone and in isolation. No Age as artists and as a band have always approached its music and its operation as a band with a community spirit and that underlying ethos is something one an hear and feel in all of its albums and at its live performances. The group’s 2007 debut full length compilation of its early EPs and singles Weirdo Rippers (FatCat) is a fantastic introduction to the core No Age sound with a title that captures what you’re in for hearing, that is to say exciting music for people who embrace being different from mainstream expectation. From 2008-2013 No Age was signed to SubPop which helped to push the band to wider audiences. The most recent No Age album People Helping People (Drag City, 2022) is one of its most daring to date and bringing into the mix more fully the musique concrète element heard from its beginnings with gorgeously dream-like tape collages set alongside its signature vital rock songs. It may be the most fully realized No Age album to date and sonically among its most arresting.

Listen to our wide ranging interview with Randy Randall of No Age on Bandcamp and connect with the group at the links below. No Age performs at the Hi-Dive on Wednesday, November 16, 2022 with John Wiese and New Standards Men.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E23: Masma Dream World

Masma Dream World, photo by Giorga Liguori

Masma Dream World is the solo project of multi-disciplinary artist Devi Mambouka that incorporates elements of Butoh, drone, theta frequency and ambient music. In 2020 the debut Masma Dream World album Play at Night (now out no Northern Spy) but likely didn’t get a proper airing to a wide public because November 2020 was in one of the depths of the ongoing pandemic. The record is a mesmerizing listen that taps into parts of your brain that feel like a direct connection to the subconscious and one’s ancient ancestors. The use of percussion and unconventional tonalities and shamanic vocals creates a real moment throughout the recording as Mambouka makes sacred psychological space with the music opening a path to a mindset that exists outside the usual and unrelenting considerations of narrow materialism and demands on time at every moment from multiple sources. The music is a journey into a headspace that is always there for you to access but which can seem blocked from your conscious mind by habits of living that prioritize the needs of a corrosive economic system rather than what fortifies your life for real and that of everyone else and the rest of the world generally. It’s a therapeutic listen that exists outside the bounds of musical convention.

Listen to our interview with Devi Mambouka on Bandcamp and connect with the artist at the links below. Masma Dream World is currently on tour with an appearance in Fort Collins on November 15, 2022 with Kenyan-Ugandan industrial grindcore duo DUMA, Knife Band and at The Coast.

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Masma Dream World on Northern Spy Records

KIN CAPA Puts an Existential and Cinematic Spin on a Classic Question With “Who Needs Love?”

KIN CAPA is back with his signature glam rock and pop sound on “Who Needs Love?” On the surface it’s simply a catchy song asking the perennial question people often ask when things go wrong in dramatic fashion in their love life, asked almost ironically to purge the hurt feelings while desperately wanting the thing being rejected. Then there is the existential phase of this consideration in the song where the unspoken answer hangs in the air because clearly everyone needs love on some level in so many areas of their life in different forms and some of them even not particularly personal which can feel confusing if you have a monodimensional understanding of the concept and how it manifests in your lived experience. The simply guitar riff that runs through most of the song coupled with Lee Capa’s uplifting and spirited vocals is reminiscent of T. Rex but the structure of the song, even though it’s just three minutes twelve seconds long, feels like a short film in three acts and to set these sections apart. Shortly after the first minute there is a moment when little flitters of what seems to be a sound effect like the part of a movie where something random happens to move the plot along in a new direction. Around the two minute mark there is a bit of a musical interlude where the tone and the melody and rhythm itself shifts and then toward the end of the song back into the main riff. A lot happens in the span of roughly the average length of a modern pop song but that’s been Capa’s gift as a songwriter, putting more content into his compositions than one might expect keying into his undeniable hooks. Listen to “Who Needs Love?” on YouTube and follow KIN CAPA at the links provided.

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Yedi Kat Yabancı Aids us in Appreciating the Process of Becoming Who We Are Rather Than Be Trapped by It on Retro Synth Pop Single “DEVON”

Yedi Kat Yabancı, photo courtesy the artist

The title track to Yedi Kat Yabancı’s 2022 EP DEVON employs sequenced loops and distorted synth washes to draw you into a song about reconciling conflicting emotions and uncomfortable memories as a means of processing the ways those wrinkles in the psyche can trip up your full development as a human. The nostalgic tones are entrancing and hearken to educational videos of the early 80s in which the filmmakers used then new modes of making music to craft the soundtrack often unwittingly making melodies that suggest an open future of expansive possibilities. Think a more beautifully haunting version of the Cannon Pictures theme music but drawn out like a musical path to a better tomorrow. That’s the vibe of “DEVON” and the music video for the song is a visual map of the flow of thoughts and imagery in the mind that you mull over in moments of calm when you can feel relaxed enough to revisit memories that may have seemed painful and complicated at one point but which now you can look back on and appreciate the layers of those memories and the people that were a part of making them and appreciate the context more and how it’s helped to shape the person you are today in the positive and not so wonderful sense but in the process of attaining that perspective one also acquires the ability to accept a process of becoming rather than being trapped by it. Watch the video for “DEVON” on YouTube and follow the Istanbul-based artist Yedi Kat Yabancı at the links below.

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E22: Holy Fawn

Holy Fawn from Phoenix, Arizona is a four-piece that has been exploring and evolving a sound that brings together an introspective ethereal soundscape with a heaviness of mood that reflects a depth of feeling found on all of its recorded output. From its 2015 debut EP Realms to its 2022 album Dimensional Bleed one hears in the music of Holy Fawn expansive melodies and tonal brightness paired with a textural grittiness that feels like a cathartic and transcendent journey into deep emotional spaces. In that sound one hears echoes of obvious influences in realms of shoegaze, post-rock, black metal and the more atmospheric post-hardcore and emo with lush swarms of intricate guitar and intertwining rhythms. But there is also an element of musique concrète to the songwriting bringing in field recordings and tape collages to augment a sense of layered meaning and lending Dimensional Bleed in particular a cinematic quality that can create a rippling shift of sonic focus in every moment of a song. Without attachment to a specific style of music, Holy Fawn is able to deftly navigate and even embody multiple genres at once as suggested by the title of its new record.

Listen to our interview with Alex Rieth of Holy Fawn on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links provided. Holy Fawn performs at the Marquis Theater on Sunday, November 13, 2022 with SOM and Grivo.

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Asbest Seethes Against Society’s Perpetual Cycle of Self-Consumption on “Autodigestion”

When “Autodigestion” begins one might expect a more straightforward, noisy post-punk song from Asbest with the repeated guitar figure and the menacing bass. But when the vocals come in with Robyn Trachsel sounding a bit like Will Shatter in terms of desperation and on the verge of breaking through in some random emotional direction from the internal pressure and Judith Breitinger carrying an ethereal melody alongside it giving the song a quality both visceral and otherworldly. Jonas Häne’s drumming seems to cascade down, accenting the dire pronouncements with a tribal conviction. When the song ends abruptly it’s like a faucet has been turned off to the caustic tones and depiction of a civilization consuming itself, giving greater weight to the metaphor in the lyric “We are trapped in the body of a snake” that opens the and closes the vocal section like the endless cycle of the Ouroboros but casting it like a never ending cycle of disappointment, oppression and low key self-destruction. But in expressing such pain and sorrow at this state of affairs one hears a will to break the pattern. Listen to “Autodigestion” on YouTube and follow the Swiss post-punk band Asbest at the links provided.

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“I Only Wonder” by S M O T R I T v L E S is a Gentle, Deep Dream Pop Song About the Importance of Moving Beyond Your Bitterness Before You Get Old

S M O T R I T v L E S, photo courtesy the artists

S M O T R I T v L E S puts a lifetime of introspection and regretful wonder in just over two minutes with the single “I Only Wonder.” A slow breeze of acoustic and electric guitar and keyboards trace a flow of emotions while vocals that set a scene rooted in the kinds of sensory experiences that trigger deep memories buried over by the detritus of life in forward motion. It’s dream pop and has that kind of airy and spacious quality that allows emotions to open up in a way that makes the potential pain put away easier to process. But the song for all its expansiveness has a density of musical ideas from the instrumentation and the way each stream works in sync with each other in a loose dynamic that makes a song that seems to be about wishing one could go back to a time in a relationship when things didn’t get convoluted, a desire to perhaps travel back in time and live in that moment knowing that you can only live in today. And acknowledging that somewhere in your hear you’re stuck on some ridge, some wrinkle of emotional turmoil that makes it hard to move on from that moment where things headed in the wrong direction but knowing that one must find a way to lift oneself off that thorn in the psyche before you get old and aren’t as concerned with these trifles because so much of your life has been bled off holding onto something that someday won’t have as much significance. It’s a deep song about letting go but feels gentle and uplifting. Listen to “I Only Wonder” on YouTube and connect with S M O T R I T v L E S from Belarus at the links below.

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Rapt’s “Last Night In Exile” is a Gorgeously and Tenderly Unsettling Atmospheric Folk Depiction of a Haunting Homecoming

In setting the hushed vocals, some lines in falsetto, in an elegantly detailed series of repeated acoustic guitar lines and the ghost of synths in the background, more prominent later, Rapt craft a bleak yet deeply evocative scene with “Last Night in Exile.” It’s reminiscent of an even more pastoral and desolated Fairport Convention of solo Richard Thompson in using intricacy to weave a mood more than simply an unconventional melody. Jacob Ware’s vocals complement well Demi Haynes’ leads and both serve as a guide through a song that appears to capture the conflicted feelings of coming back to a place that was once your home and the sense of displacement changes can impose on your memory as memories of all the good times and bad come drifting back in waves that can feel too intense to take in all at once and threaten to overwhelm your heart not with the most poignant of feelings but the kind that haunt and linger and erode your sense of an identity you built outside your old contexts. But the song’s gentle spirit in the end suggests how this is merely a feeling no matter how powerful it seems and that you can wade through its shadowy energy and face the way the world you once knew has changed and take it on its own terms and on your own new sense of self. It is a song that is the inversion of nostalgia and the warm feelings that come with it and it is precisely that which gives it a depth beyond the obvious masterful composition and nuanced atmospherics orchestrated to tug at the parts of the mind we often try to avoid. Listen to “Last Night In Exile” on Spotify and follow Rapt at the links below. On Bandcamp the very limited edition of the full album Wayward Faith vinyl (with a section called “Diaries” that is a copy of a two part diary/journal that Ware kept during the making of the album) and cassette are also available shipping from Slovakia or France in early 2023.

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E21: Nora O’Connor

Nora O’Connor, photo courtesy the artist

Nora O’Connor is a singer, songwriter and prolific musical collaborator from Chicago who has made a name for herself as go-to talent for greatly augmenting the recordings and performances of other artists. People like Mavis Staples, The New Pornographers, Iron & Wine, Jakob Dylan, The Decemberists, John Wesley Harding and Neko Case (with whom she has recently been a member of the touring band) have benefited greatly from O’Connor’s gifts and ability to listen well and become a noteworthy part of the work at hand. But for the last few decades O’Connor has occasionally released records under her own name including 2022’s My Heart (Pravda Records). The beautifully eclectic record hearkens to country rock of the 70s but also great folk pop artists like The Roches, Norma Tanega and Margo Guryan whose 1968 song “It’s Alright Now” O’Connor covers for the new album. My Heart, song for song, showcases O’Connor’s vibrant voice, her keen ear for songwriting nuance and ability to evoke a broad range of complex emotions.

Listen to our interview with O’Connor on Bandcamp and connect with the artist at the links below.

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