Queen City Sounds and Art

Titwrench kicks off its 9th Edition tonight at the Mercury Café with performances from experimental and underground musicians from Denver and around the country. The festival is a community focused celebration of “women and LGBTQIAP artists and musicians and other underrepresented/emerging artists pushing the boundaries of genre and form.” The event will also feature workshops, crafts vendors, food and drink, tarot card readings, a yoga session on Saturday morning and much more. That’s what it is but if you go you will see the kinds of music that probably isn’t on the radar of any mainstream publication or news outlet and thus maybe, if you’ve never been, you’ll get to experience something refreshingly different.

Titwrench cultivates emerging artists in the community while featuring significant artists from the Rocky Mountain region and elsewhere. For instance, atmospheric sound collagist/sculptor Laura Ortman from New York performs on Friday as well as melodic doom punk “glam insect metal” band Chicharra, from Albuquerque and Denver’s own dream folk genius MIDWIFE. Saturday the performance art/sound experience troupe Milch De La Maquina will deliver another unforgettable performance and should not be missed. RARE BYRD$ will bring an example of hip-hop from the future and Shooda Shook It will provide the soundtrack to a No Wave funk dance party. But all of the artists are worth your time. Below is information and a program of events copied and modified from the Titwrench #9 page. We will be sharing interviews with Laura Ortman and Marisa Demarco of Chicharra and Milch De La Máquina later today and tomorrow as well as photos and observations post festival.

Friday August 25 and Saturday 26th 2017
Decor by Secret Love Collective
Music and local artisans/vendors from 4:00pm-2:00am both nights
At Mercury Cafe Denver
(ADA accessible venue)
2199 California Street
Denver CO 80205
–
All ages + All welcome
With your favorite Mistress of Magic Piper Rose guiding the way all weekend long

Tickets at this link.
* sliding-scale pricing
10% of all funds raised go to the sustainment of grassroots programs byWEBS of Support!
—
Workshops happening Saturday August 26th include:
DIY Marketing and Branding for Working Artists
Beat-making for Beginners
Performance + Vocals 101

SCHEDULE of music and performance: 

FRIDAY AUGUST 25 
400pm doors open with DJ Avalon (Denver/San Juan)

500pm Girls Rock Denver (bands TBA)

530pm Giraft (Denver, CO)
moody minimalism

600pm Emily Frembgen (New York, NY)
third wave americana

630pm Pearls and Perils (Denver, CO)
mad medicine for crazy hearts

700pm yesol (Denver, CO)
sweet harp and strums by Cory Feder

730pm The Molly Growler Project (Denver, CO)

800pm Prism Bitch (Albuquerque, NM)
turbo rock n’ soul punk

830pm K.O. SOLO (Seattle, WA)
electroimprovisational ambience

900pm Litter Brain (Albuquerque, NM)
bratty hardcore punk

930pm Cthulha (Albuquerque, NM) experimental solo piano and surprises

1000pm Nizhóní Girls (Albuquerque, NM) desert surf punks

1030pm Laura Ortman (New York, NY) solo experimental violin/meditations

1115pm Chicharra (Albuquerque, NM) glam insect heavy rock

1200am MIDWIFE (Denver, CO) delicate drone-pop anthems by Madeline Johnston

1:00am – 2:00am we dance it out with DJ Avalon!

SATURDAY AUGUST 26th (morning)
1000-1100am
Community yoga led by Piper Rose w/live music by Annastezhaa (Aurora, CO)
dreamy harp and vocals
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WORKSHOPS all afternoon on Saturday 8/26 – check our Facebook for details!

SAT AUGUST 26 (evening)

400pm doors open
with DJ DYNAMITE

430pm Girls Rock Denver

500pm Buried Moon (Denver, CO)
dark psyche

530pm Glitter Vomit (Albuquerque, NM)
like a unicorn wandering in the forest

600pm The Maybe So’s (Denver, CO)
from the brilliant minds of Bianca Mikahn and Jenee Elise

630pm Esmerelda Strange (Denver, CO)
one woman man band

700pm Bonnie Weimer (Denver, CO) banjo rambler

730pm kismet&dough (Denver, CO)
collaborative project by patrycja sara
a question. an off-kilter lullaby asking you how much your dreams cost

800pm EBONY & ERMINE (Albuquerque, NM)
wordseamstress magic

830pm R A R E B Y R D $ (Denver, CO)
sonic freak queens

900pm RAMAKHANDRA
(Denver, CO)
progressive hip-hop featuring Annastezhaa

930pm Dance Break w Erin Stereo (Denver)

1000pm Milch de la Máquina (Albuquerque, NM)
desert bird performance art troupe

1030pm Glassmen (Madison, WI)
indie experimental folk rock

1100pm PRETEEN OD (Denver, CO)
avant-garde classical weirds

1130pm Mirror Fears  (Denver, CO)
industrial dark wave

12:00am (Midnight) Shooda Shook It  (Tucson, AZ)
disco funky punks

12:45 Get Along (Denver, CO)
indie glitter dance pop

and then we dance it out some more with Erin Stereo! ♥

Join us on Sunday August 27th for brunch at Mercury Cafe, followed bySlutWalk Denver 2017 from 12-3pm at Civic Center Park!

Psychic TV, photo by Drew Weirdermann, interview/story by Tom Murphy

Tonight, Psychic TV will perform in Denver at the Mercury Cafe with Rotties and DJ Tocsin uniting a Denver institution whose existence dates back to the late 70s and an original location off of 13^th Avenue and Pearl Street and a band that had yet to get its footing in the USA until Denver concert promoter Tom Headbanger got PTV into its first tour bus and from there into a kind of cult following that resulted in a more cultural institution to spread esoteric and spiritually evolutinary/revolutionary knowledge into the world at large with network of likeminded communities and seekers under the umbrella of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Those worlds come together again with this show at the Mercury.

Ahead of the show we were able to speak with the band’s leader, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to discuss the still powerful and abundant ability of creativity and imagination to transform at least the world around you and to impact the world beyond. We will publish the conversation in full in the next few days. In this first section we discuss Gen’s early projects and how they lead in part to the founding of noteworthy modern music label Dais Records, which not only made the early Worm and COUM Transmissions recordings widely available but is also a proponent of music by artists touched by the continuing legacy of the strain of music operating outside the mainstream pioneered by Gen and their collaborators in creating a parallel culture.

Queen City Sounds and Art: Psychic TV kind of got its start here with a bus provided by Tom Headbanger.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: We used to love that bus so much. We had so many amazing times on that bus. Then when we moved to New York with Lady Jaye we discovered you’re not allowed to have a bus in New York so we gave it away to some hippies in California as a gift. Apparently a year later they got very stoned and burned it.

T: You’ve long been a keen observer of society and culture. Right now we’re at an interesting/dangerous point internationally. But I think we can act on the local level with creativity and affect the larger world. As a teen you did the ‘zine Conscience and then later in your late teen years and early 20s, COUM Transmissions.

GBP-O: There was an exhibition in Howden, Yorkshire in January that was a retrospective of COUM Transmissions and Spydeee [Gasmantell] was there. I hadn’t seen him for decades so that was really nice. We’re corresponding again now. He’d done an issue of Conscience after we’d gone off to university and got expelled from the school for it. So the last issue was seized, banned and he was expelled for and that was the end of Conscience. We started one at the university we called Worm.

T: That was a band as well?

GBP-O: It was going to be. We did that one record and we disbanded and forgot about it. But that was one of those amazing stories when the Tate Britain decided to buy my archive we needed people to help us catalog everything. So we got these people who volunteered to come in. One of those people was Ryan Martin who came to me one day and said, “Gen, what are all these reel to reel tapes in this box?” “Oh, it’s just stuff we were doing when we were young. It’s rubbish. Don’t listen to it. Forget about it.” He said, “What does it sound like?” “You don’t want to listen to it, it’s not important.” “I think it is important and that people would like to hear it. Even if it doesn’t sound great it’ll show people your thinking about sound from an earlier age.” So we said, “If you think it’s so interesting, why don’t you go and do it?” Then he went off to start Dais Records with his friend Gibby [Miller] and now Dais is celebrating it’s tenth anniversary this month. It has released records by eighty different people all because he nagged me about this old, reel-to-reel tape. He released Early Worm and [The Sound of Porridge Bubbling, Sugarmorphoses and Home Aged & The 18^th Month Hope from COUM Transmissions]. We like that something done that long ago can trigger someone else into changing what they do in life. Suddenly it’s become this energy attractor and makings things possible for lots of extra people. In a way that’s what we’ve always been trying to do—come up with ways of looking at things or perceiving things or just shifting the point of views so that new opportunities and ways of analyzing society can happen.