Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E14: Chew

Chew is a band from Atlanta, Georgia whose music defies simple categorization. Until late 2023 Chew had been a trio is now a duo comprised of Brett Reagan who plays sampler, synth bass and guitar while running strobe lights and Sarah Wilson who plays drums and bass lines with a drum sample pad. The project has toured the US and Canada extensively with three European tours under its belt. Because the outfit’s music is so unorthodox it’s music spans and often in the same song the realms of psychedelic and noise rock, ambient, noise, industrial and electronic dance music. Fans of the likes of fellow travelers of eclectic weirdness like Guerilla Toss, Black Moth Super Rainbow and The Spirit of the Beehive will find an immediate connection with the music Chew has been crafting since its inception. Its 2022 album Horses resonates with recent releases by Jockstrap and Sextile without the inspiration of either to feed into its stream of inspiration and influences. In addition to the music Chew’s surreal album covers and inspired song titles suggest more than a passing familiarity with esoteric knowledge and other obscure and niche realms of knowledge as well as a knack for clever wordplay. It all adds up to an uncommon depth of creative development that rewards anyone taking in the music and its presentation beyond the surface level.

Listen to our interview with Brett Reagan of Chew on Bandcamp and follow Chew at the links provided Chew performs at The Skylark Lounge on Monday, March 25, 2024 with local noise rock phenoms Moon Pussy and legendary industrial dance trio Church Fire. Doors 7:30 p.m..

Marina Yozora’s Deeply Melancholic and Wistful Dream Pop Single “Watermelon Pink Blue Skies” Resonates With the Emotional Essence of Heartbreak

Marina Yozora, photo courtesy the artist

Marina Yozora’s dream pop single “Watermelon Pink Blue Skies” finds a particularly poetic counterpart in the video shot and edited by Shoma Shibata. The color palette reflects the title of the song and captures the lonely beauty of the song. Yozora’s guitar sketches an organic rhythm that loops throughout the song while a second guitar intones an abstract, melancholic mood. Yozora’s voice nearly whispers in expressive arcs a reflective set of lines evoke the feelings of heartbreak and regret that come out of looking back on a time when one’s love dissolved and left in its wake confused feelings and a lingering longing for what once was even if it doesn’t always make logical sense in your mind or in a way you can easily articulate. In Yozora’s vocals you can hear a depth of feeling and an elegant refinement of emotion sensitive enough to express precisely those feelings in a way that’s resonant and moving while being self-aware enough to know that sometimes how you feel isn’t always in search of a solution or of being fixed because sometimes you just have to feel that moment to make sense of it all long term. Watch the video for “Watermelon Pink Blue Skies” on YouTube and follow the Tokyo-based songwriter at the links below.

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Chopper’s “Living for the Night” is a Post-punk Glam Pop Shaking Off of Modern Malaise

The video for the Chopper single “Living for the Night” shows gritty scenes from the night time with vocalist/songwriter Jonatan K. Magnussen sitting in a bathtub commenting on the conflicted acceptance of youthful nihilism. All while his other self travels the city at night smoking a cigarette in the back of a car and getting to a nightclub bathed in lurid lights and the kind of hedonistic fun one supposedly found at the legendary Manchester club The Hacienda in its heyday. But the song with its mélange of Madchester sleaze and what might be described as psychedelic darkwave glam juxtaposes that mood with the hyper-reality of modern desperation and malaise at what seems like a hopeless situation in the world and embracing getting in some enjoyment rather than be drug under by a despair that serves no one but those that benefit from the twenty-first century’s dystopian slide. Chopper leans into a different kind of spirited resistance even as the song uses a decadent aesthetic to shake off the doldrums. Watch the video for “Living for the Night” on YouTube and follow Danish post-punk/glam/avant-pop artist Chopper at the links below.

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E13: Cellista on Élégie

Cellista, photo by Yellow Bubbles Photography

Cellista is a Los Angeles-based performance artist with roots in the Bay Area and Colorado and over the past several years she has created what she calls stage poems which are narrative multimedia works after those of artist, filmmaker and writer Jean Coctea drawing together seemingly disparate thematic elements and modes of expression. In 2021 she performed at Lincoln Center and she has worked with Tanya Donelly, John Vanderslice, Troyboy, Don McLean, Casey Crescenzo of The Dear Hunter, Van Dyke Parks, Toni! Toni! Toné and Pam the Funkstress. Her work has been heard and scene on film and television and she has appeared as an extra on the TV shows Better Things and Will & Grace playing cello. In fall 2021 her stage poem Pariah explored themes of othering and exile within communities and it featured a companion book by philosopher Frank Seeburger. In 2024 Cellista is unveiling her latest stage poem Élégie. Directed and performed by the artist, Élégie is a one-woman show for cello, static trapeze and cinema. Choreographed by Cellista, Kennedy Kabasares and Joel Baker with film editing by Jennifer Gigantino and cinematography by Bryan Gibel, the one hour piece stars Cellista as the titular figure, a blackbird who shape shifts into human form and back. According to the press release for the stage poem, “Élégie awakens one day in her magical tree outside the walled off city of Cloture to find its entire population has disappeared. In their departure, the citizens have left behind a city of altars, decorated with unlit candles; each containing the memories and mementos of the banished citizens. Élégie shape shifts into human form to find out what happened to Cloture’s disappeared. In her journey she finds serenity.” As with Cellista’s previous stage poem the performance will be a uniquely evocative experience that brings those in attendance deeply into the story with visuals, music, spoken word, the choreography and the event’s baked in literary dimensions that blur the lines between all mediums involved.

Listen to our interview with Cellista on Bandcamp and witness the event yourself at one of the upcoming performances listed below. Links to all things Cellista also included further down.

March 23rd, 2024 – Boulder’s Dairy Center for the Arts
Cellista debuts Élégie
Prologue by: The Drood
Dustin Schultz (Skinny Puppy) and Hilary Whitmore
7:30pm Tickets: $10-15

April 13th, 2024 – San Jose’s Anno Domini Gallery
Élégie
Cellista live loop set followed by Élégie
7:30pm open to public

April 27th, 2024 – Santa Monica’s Highways Performance Space
Élégie
Prologue performance tbd
7:30pm Tickets $15-20

June 7th, 2024 – Jacksons Lane in London
Élégie
Prologue by Hilary Whitmore

Cellista on Instagram

The Video for talker’s “Easygoing” is Like an Elevated Horror Short About Being Fine With Having Zero Chill in Love

The video for talker’s new single “Easygoing” may disturb you or be eerily relatable (either in the moment or at some point in your life). There’s blood, obsession, scenes of anxious attachment taken to the extreme and yet there’s no denying it’s compelling like an Ari Aster short on a lower budget suiting the subject. And the song with its upbeat and earnest melodies serves as a great contrast to frank lyrics about real feelings in the moment and some of where they come from. When talker sings “I wish I could be easygoing/But that’s not me at least I know it/I’ll wear you out til you get holes in your sleeves/I wish I could be easygoing” it is clearly melodramatic but honest with a touch of self-awareness. When we see talker chase the object of her affections after she accidentally (was it accidental, though?) injures herself in an outburst of emotional excess and unself-aware expression of love looking like a maddened and driven stalker who immediately reminds one of the scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd’s character smears on her lipstick in a desperate pantomime that in her mind probably feels like some measure of normal. In this video the chase scene seems ridiculous as well yet somehow funny though some may disagree. Whatever one’s interpretation, “Easygoing” is a well-crafted, indie pop song with poignancy and like the bombastic music video its unique charms linger with you.

“Jomon (Preservation Rework feat. Armand Hammer)” by Hatis Noit Synthesizes Shamanic Vocals and Spiritual Hip-Hop Poetry

Renowned producer Preservation (MF Doom, RZA, Mos Def) felt a connection with experimental composer and vocalist Hatis Noit’s audio and visual aesthetic and heard a resonance between her work and that of NYC hip-hop duo Armand Hammer. The result was a rework of the single “Jomon” originally found on Hatis Noit’s 2022 album Aura. This new version of the song takes out of regular time and place to a realm where shamanic vocal soundscaping and rhythms and streetwise poetry can intermingle and inform one another in a brilliantly syncretic musical fusion. Preservation certainly heard the way the simple percussion of the song suited Armand Hammer’s spoken word style and elevated poetic meter and how Hatis Noit’s hypnotic and transporting mantra-esque delivery threaded through and around Armand Hammer’s vocals could give each other an emotional resonance and context that probably no one else was thinking of combining. It’s a powerful piece of music that links the primal, instinctual places from which the creativity of everyone involved in the project stems. Listen to this rework of “Jomon” on YouTube and follow Hatis Noit at the links provided.

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Ariane Gabriel Reconnects With Her Sensual Impulses on Sultry Synth Pop Single “i wanna have sex”

Ariane Gabriel, photo courtesy the artist

The title of Ariane Gabriel’s song “i wanna have sex” seems simple and straightforward and in a way it is a song about erotic desire. It’s ethereal synths and Gabriel’s confident yet vulnerable vocals carry with them a feeling of rediscovery and wanting to enjoy the titular experience in all its pleasurable possibilities including the feelings surrounding it. But in the tenor of the song one picks up on the undertones and backstory of the song and a prolonged period of self-denial and accepting sex as a normal and desirable human experience. Gabriel had been abused and it zapped her sex drive for a long period of time when even the thought of sex was traumatizing. Trauma can linger with you for a year or a lifetime and everyone processes it in their own way and on their own schedule but in Gabriel’s vibrantly soft toned synth pop song one hears the sound of someone who still remembers how things were yet doesn’t want to let that limit her joy of life. Rather, fully embracing it with a refreshing frankness. Listen to “i wanna have sex” on Spotify and follow French pop artist Ariane Gabriel at the links below.

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Neil Foster Graces Us With a Bit of Unstructured Time With the Immersive Ambient Track “Kite Dreams”

Neil Foster, as he often does, offers a composition that is so minimal and rich in sonic detail that it eases into your conscious with gentle textures and tranquil melodies that stretch out into endless vistas of sound. “Kite Dreams” includes field recordings of birdsong in the Irish woodland likely in or near Killyleagh where the track was composed and recorded. Shimmering, abstract bell tone echo, a slow roiling drone weaves together with string arrangements embody the dynamic grace of kites in the sky on a sunny yet partly cloudy day. Assembled together the song evokes a pastoral image of having the free time to spend flying kites, a perhaps quaint pastime we often chalk up to the careless days of childhood, and taking in the sounds, sights and sheer physical presence of nature without needing to mind the intrusion of the demands of regular life. The song embodies the concept of unstructured time even though it is of finite duration and built on the elegant mathematics of song and these days we need more of this kind of experience even if we can sometimes only get from indulging a song. Listen to “Kite Dreams” on Spotify and follow Neil Foster at the links below.

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Bad Flamingo’s Americana Noir Song “Fast” is a Tale of Life on the Edge and Outrunning Boring and Tamed Normiedom

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

It’s really remarkable at this point how Bad Flamingo can take similar instrumentation with guitar, some percussion, banjo, maybe some mandolin, bass, synth and nearly whispered vocals and arrange it in endlessly different ways with a seemingly deep well of material that is the personal mythology of someone who is living on the edges of society as a rebel storyteller who is caught up in melodramatic tales with the gritty feel and sense of underlying menace in a kind of urban Americana noir. “Fast” finds the band offering evocative couplets with the construct like the lyric “I’m a fist waiting for a fight” and “I’m a wolf waiting for the night.” We hear about money hidden in a mattress that is rapidly running out and yet our narrator and their companion seem to run just ahead of the negative consequences of a life lived outside the bounds of straight society. This time out the music gets some rush of low end atmosphere to heighten the sense of danger and that just renders the song yet another great entry in the duo’s consistently growing body of work that remains distinctive yet not completely classifiable which seems to suit the vibe of what the band is about.

badflamingomusic.com

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Blondfire Dives Headlong Into Love Once Again on Immersive Synth Pop Single “Foolish”

Blondfire takes a dive off the deep end into love once again on “Foolish.” The title of the song might sum up the spirit of the songwriting and the impetus behind it but it also speaks to a a self-awareness and a trust in one’s own instincts rather than the second guessing that can keep you from doing something or being involved with something or someone that might be good for you even if just for a little while. When you know you might be acting foolishly it gives you a certain thrill unless it goes tragically sideways. And sometimes even then. But Blondfire goes all in with the commitment in the lyrics and in her willingness to cast aside the fears and insecurities that can cause you to stumble. Musically the rich and glimmering synth melodies and Blondfire’s own commanding vocals have echoes of Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good.” But rather than it seeming derivative it resonates with the romanticism of that song and taps into feelings of nostalgia without needing to look back on some fondly remembered time, rather, the rush of inexplicably warm feelings that can propel you forward into a good mood perhaps reconnecting with your ability to completely giving yourself up to moments of sustained passion and affection. Listen to “Foolish” on Soundcloud and follow Blondfire at the links below.

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