Dan Wilson’s single “Space Operator” makes great use of seemingly random tones in a steady beet to give a sense of being an entity monitoring interstellar communication networks and making sure the pathways of technology and infrastructure as yet unimagined up to the task of facilitating are functioning as designed and troubleshooting any anomalies. A disembodied female voice comments on the quantum phenomena occurring in this environment and otherwise the track proceeds at a great yet measured clip. Music it’s reminiscent of the Wire song “Ahead” but stripped of the formal rhythms and dynamics with other sounds more techno-flavored swapped in for the guitar, bass and the kinds of synths Wire would have used. It has that mysteriousness and momentum and a sense of moving forward boldly into the unknown. Think of it a bit like cosmic motorik disco. Listen to “Space Operator” on Spotify and follow Dan Wilson at the links below.
Ambient Music For Watering Plants is the latest EP from Past Palms. A clear nod to Brian Eno’s landmark 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports and possibly to Stevie Wonder’s 1979 soundtrack album Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” for the documentary directed by Walon Green (and based on the book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird), Past Palms utilizes textures and processed atmospheric elements with field recordings to produce a musical analog to replicate the emotions and outer life of fairly common household plants. The track “Meditation III: Philodendron” celebrates the qualities of one of the most popular and durable potted plants one finds in most homes that host such relatively domesticated flora. Its vaguely heart shaped, shiny leaves with gentle wrinkles from extending out from a central stem often found hanging over the edge of the pot in one version of the plant, a fern-like structure with distinct branches off the central stem in another. All lushly green without being overwhelming. Past Palms evokes how these plants bring a freshness to a room without being obtrusive with bright flowing tones and tactile arrangements that suggest ease and comfort. Listen to “Meditation III: Philodendron” and the rest of Ambient Music For Watering Plants on Spotify and follow Past Palms at the links provided.
You would be hard pressed to find a more representative slice of underground/independent industrial/darkwave artists with punk energy and aesthetics than the spring 2022 tour headlined by Detroit’s ADULT., who have been pioneering that sound since the 90s.
Spike Hellis at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom Murphy
Spike Hellis opened the proceeings with its kinetic industrial glitchcore sounds like Atari Teenage Riot. Its aggressive and urgent beats and eruptive dynamics delivered a sense of displacement and disorientation yet not confusion. The mood was very focused and present with that disruptive energy seemingly aimed at the complacency that has the culture stuck, repeating outworn patterns that seem comfortable but has society trapped in a psychological death spiral from which the music of Spike Hellis and its ferocious performance seemed like a counter to that emotional paralysis.
Spike Hellis at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom MurphyKontravoid at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom Murphy
Kontravoid’s set set a similar tone with a flood of strobes in sync with the avalanche of textured melody and rhythms. Wearing a white mask and black clothes, Cameron Findlay seemed to channel and resist the spirit of an era when we’re all encouraged to monetize our very lives and become yes a “Faceless” figure in service to an international corporate and authoritarian agenda that sees pretty much everyone as interchangeable and only useful insofar as they fit into the strategy of maximizing profit above all other human needs or concerns. But with this music Findlay gives a powerful form of dark dance music that makes it impossible to forget you have a body you live in and that the experience of it is very much your own and with vitality of the performance and the sonics of the music it felt like you were part of something while also not being subsumed by it. Kontravoid created a headspace outside of normal time with the strobes and when they shut down it felt like being eased back into ordinary existence and that effect is surely a gift.
Kontravoid at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom MurphyADULT. at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom Murphy
ADULT. had been on the road for weeks prior to this gig and anyone driving to Denver is coming from far away. Nicola Kuperus may have alluded to this fact early in the show while at the same time seeming pleasantly surprised that people showed up maybe more so than in the past in Denver. But no predictable complaints about the altitude and with little preamble Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller gave us a generously lengthy set. Kuperus used her two microphones like conductor batons in gesturing with the crowd and prowled the stage striking an array of ritualistic poses as one might have come to expect from the singer. But it never feels rote from this band. There was no phoning it in, rather, a performance that honors why ADULT. has been at this project for some twenty-four years.
ADULT. at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom Murphy
The set list sounded seamless in production style though mostly drawing from the group’s three most recent albums This Behavior (2018) including the brooding title track, Perception is/as/of Deception (2020) and the stellar new record Becoming Undone. There’s something instantly compelling when you can see that a performer is feeling the emotions that went into the writing the songs, as heavy as they can be with ADULT., all over again. It’s shamanic in its ability to induce a catharsis for the anxieties, fears, frustrations of living in a country and global civilization seemingly bent on overt and what is insisted is subtle self-destruction with the specter of climate change and environmental degradation neglected for so long politicians and corporate leaders blame the effects on personal choice over the way the economic system is organized and prioritized to maximize profits and push the costs of questionable choices and agendas onto the natural world including human life in aggregate. The weight of that pressure you heard in the way ADULT. crafted atmospherics and in how Kuperus evoked that no longer ignorable agony that the is subconsciously pervasive with most people and not at all subconsciously for many of us. The honesty of that expression extended a human solidarity that underlined the show thus making it beyond a signal of the endurance of live music and the hunger for it the kind of performance that might actually be good for you too.
ADULT. at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom MurphyADULT. at Hi-Dive 5/14/22, photo by Tom Murphy
The processional pace of “What Comes Around,” the title track from Leland And The Silver Wells’ forthcoming album (out June 3 via Rubia Records) is represented well in the music video directed by Larissa Jaks. The song is driven by a brooding piano line, finely accented percussion and Leland Ettinger’s bright, forceful vocals that shift effortlessly from powerful and direct to introspective and back. The theme of the song seems obscured except that Ettinger’s lyrics hint at past transgressions and guilt followed by an impending reckoning cast in religious terms with references to the sacrament, the devil’s screams haunting the narrator and the sounds of angels gathering for a crisis of the soul and answering for a mysterious sin. Watch the video for “What Comes Around” on YouTube and follow Leland And The Silver Wells at the links below.
“Panic Attacks In Love” by Ferguson’s Daughter is not a conventional song in form, in composition, in length. In the background one hears a raw and aching conversation between, presumably, two people in a relationship who are discussing one person’s insecurities coming to the fore at what could be a crossroads in that relationship where they’re making big decisions that could change everything about the bond like moving in together as a big step and the possibility of starting a family but not wanting to be a bad parent because one person doesn’t know if she’s up to being a parent before figuring herself out some more. After all parenting while offering the potential for other kinds of growth, puts a lot of personal growth on pause for years even if you’re engaged and don’t do the obvious things wrong. In the foreground throughout is a spacious and lonely piano line that evolves and breaks from expected progressions and melodies to reflect the mood of the piece with peaks of tonal activity and lingering chord progressions like your mood when you’re going through a messy spell in your brain. It’s nearly uncomfortably vulnerable in expression but in the end cathartic for anyone who has hit that time in their lives when your sense of self isn’t as strong as maybe it was or that you’d like it to be but you’re faced with important decisions you can’t put off and heavy conversations need to be had to try to get to a place where it doesn’t all feel like loose and frayed ends. Thus the title of the track is perfect because in the throes of a panic attack everything feels like its crashing in on you and that you could die any moment for a sustained period that amplifies every feeling to the point of being acutely overwhelming. The song is from Ferguson’s Daughter’s April 2022 EP Blissed Out Blues which isn’t short on songs that pair dynamic and evocative piano composition with highly emotional lyrics and vocal delivery although the other tracks aren’t so overtly experimental as this piece. Listen to “Panic Attacks In Love” on Spotify where you can also listen to the rest of Blissed Out Blues and follow Ferguson’s Daughter on Soundcloud.
An-Ten-Nae, west coast bass music producer, does something really unusual for “Raindrops On Roses (The Biggie Edition)” by doing a mashup of seemingly disparate elements that make sense in the logic of lateral thinking. He mixes together samples of childhood nursery rhyme songs, children singing Beatles’ “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” playful synth arpeggios and Biggie Smalls speaking words assembled together in the beat so that it sounds like he’s deftly referencing raindrops and mixing it in with mention of microdots. It’s a free association recontextualization of bits of music and ideas not unlike something you’d hear from Girl Talk or DJ Shadow but here more overtly psychedelic with Biggie living on not as a hologram but as the inevitable sample for the quality of his voice that brought to his own music a gritty authenticity. Sitting in the track as his voice does here it expands narrow notions of musical genre and really is this a hip-hop or EDM track? Too weird for either alone but something you could definitely hear in someone’s set when they’re chilling out for a moment before going hard again or whatever it is people say they do now. Listen to “Raindrops On Roses (The Biggie Edition)” on Soundcloud and follow An-Ten-Nae at the links below.
“43” rewards your patience as Dijomen builds the track from a melodic haze and fingers of tones flaring forth, voices heard in the middle distance and touches of sonic texture. It has a dynamic like slowly waking up in the early morning and a time lapse as full daylight is hitting and the outside world and the dream world overlap in your brain so that what could be the sound of a nearby playground and memories thereof triggered by those sounds blend together as a unified experience and a deep memory of being up in the morning excited for the day which too often isn’t the case in everyday adult life even though you wish it could be. But this song gives that experience back to you with its expansive energy. Listen to “43” on Spotify and follow Dijomen at the links below.
Colatura’s single “R U Content” mixes the gritty and granular sound texture with ethereal and introspective tones in an expansive dynamic that the trio augments with bends and accents. The result is a song that has a simple appeal but a great deal of variation that suits well the subject of the song which is the commodification of our lives in a very mediated age when most people with a modern phone or computer is on social media with the lure of instant, low rent gratification of engagement from friends, acquaintances and strangers. It’s not really living but the illusion, the projection of life. And that projection, the superficial data of our lives that we share knowingly or otherwise, is monetized and becomes part of a mass feedback loop and in another era would have been described in a way parallel to that of a psyop. The chorus of “Are you content, or are you just content, there’s no way of knowing, what are we doing?” speaks so well to a fairly sophisticated assessment to where so much of the culture is now in trusting large tech companies with the building blocks of our identity and allowing ourselves to be manipulated in ways we don’t full understand. The proof is in how conspiracy theories have spread in social media and how the algorithm can be set to prioritize content that is the opposite of what you might actually believe or need to see. And that question I the chorus of are we content as in satisfied with the situation as it is and can we consent for our lives to be content without compensation? Would we want it to be a product even if we could be compensated? Maybe if you’re an influencer you say yes but it has to be a bummer for anyone at some point. Colatura’s music is appealing in a broad sense of it being somewhere in the realm of shoegaze but with this song it’s like an experimental pop song in aim and execution. Watch the video for “R U Content” on YouTube and connect with Colatura at the links below.
Little Destroyer seems to invoke the loose structure and tonal strategy of “Kool Thing” by Sonic Youth on its song “hitman” with an undeniable groove with grit and a sense of menace flowing through it. In Connor McGuire’s video treatment for the song we see that rarest of devices in many cities now: the pay phone. But the song is told from the perspective of a woman who got beyond fed up with all the sexual harassment thrown her way through various means from verbal and not so verbal street assault and unwelcome DMs and attention from creeps who won’t take no for an answer. So what is a woman to do? Why be a hitman, of course, and that word specifically because she would invert the usual meaning a little and offer her services to take out the usual perpetrators of unwanted sexual contact or intent thereof. So people use the pay phone at Kingsgate Mall (in Vancouver, BC, presumably) to get in touch with the “hitman” who will take care of business because, the vocalist of Little Destroyer, Allie Sheldan, sings, “Everybody swears I’m the villain but everybody wants to hire a hitman.” While there is surely more than a tiny bit of irony in the story as a story but when clowns are out acting the fool someone should probably set that boundary in no uncertain terms sometime because, a wise, or at least hard boiled, man named Harry Callahan once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” This song is punk in the way maybe an early riot grrrl band would be but more like something you’d hear out of L7 like “Shitlist” or “Fast and Frightening.” All in all ferociously elegant. Watch the video for “hitman” on YouTube and follow Little Destroyer on Spotify linked below.
Donzii is a bit of a favorite among connoisseurs of underground post-punk and its new single “Rightway Highway” with its retro style VHS glitched music video by Domingo Castillo is fine example of where the band is going with its forthcoming full-length debut (out on Grey Market Records later this year). Danny Heinze’s bent and clipped guitar lines dub style, Dennis Fuller’s minimal yet intricate and driving bass lines and of course Jenna Balfe’s nearly deadpan but theatrical and expressive vocals running through a backdrop of what looks like an amusement park in south Florida from which the trio hails. Fans of Bush Tetras will appreciate the way Donzii handles its rhythm scheme and mutant melodies as well as the poetry of the lyrics discussing a desire to escape from a wack situation where a person who wants to give back and not just take doesn’t fit in as elaborated upon and summed up with the line “if you can’t find the right way save it for another day, I’m just a runaway looking for the freeway.” It’s string of words that captures the sense that maybe until you have your plan for making your exit you can hold in your heart the sense that you are fine with being a weirdo in a place that isn’t so welcoming of them and your opportunity will come. Maybe that isn’t the actual sense of the song but music like Donzii’s resonates with that of bands like Suburban Lawns, Lithics and Ganser because it isn’t trying to fit into the confines of a narrow style and that in itself suggests it’s music for non-conformists in general with words giving comfort to their kind wherever the songs are heard. Watch the video for “Rightway Highway” on YouTube and follow Donzii at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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