Queen City Sounds and Art

Pasocom Music Club Taps Into the Playful Sounds and Sights of Classic Pop Electronic For the Alien DJ-Themed Music Video For “UFO-Mie”

Pascom Music Club, photo courtesy the artists

Anyone with sufficient knowledge of the history of popular electronic music will pick up on multiple resonances from the fantastical and fantastic music video for Pasocom Music Club’s “UFO-Mie” (which means “UFO Pose” in English, surely slyly conceived title). Directed by ayafuji and produced by Toshikuni the video features a green alien who arrives in Tokyo on a flying saucer and then proceeds to show of his fine fance moves on the street, in pedestrial walkways, sidewalks, in front of a food stall, in a shelter for bicycles with graffiti on the walls and alongside construction zones, on a rooftop and in the often ignored or neglected pockets of the urban landscape. The song, featuring a high energy rap from The Hair Kid and modified vocals repeating the chorus of “My little green homie is a DJ” is reminiscent of 90s and early 2000s club hits from the likes of Daft Punk circa Homework and Fatboy Slim from You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. That playful use of rhythm and melody and unabashed mashing together of club music and hip-hop aesthetics. Even the visual sense of the video reflects that lineage and that of the more quirky videos of Aphex Twin. But Pascom Music Club updates the sounds, the production and the reference points to resonate more with the present. Yet it hooks you in with a similar appeal to fun strangeness. Watch the video for “UFO-Mie” on YouTube and follow Tokyo’s Pasocom Music Club at the links below. The project’s For The Aliens EP dropped October 27, 2023.

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Bad Flamingo’s “I Drink Alone” is a Song About Reserving Some Joys, Rituals and Moments of Vulnerability For Your Solitary Hours

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

Twinkly, moody keyboards and a drum click bring us into Bad Flamingo’s “I Drink Alone.” It’s an even further departure from the duo’s palette of sounds and to a certain extent the subject matter of the lyrics. Acoustic guitar slinks along and a spectral drone haunts the backgrounds of the song, maybe a bit of autoharp or hammered dulcimer near the song’s end alongside some nice slide guitar flourishes—all lend the song a hushed intensity befitting what sounds like the narrative of a person who acknowledges their own tempestuous emotions and passionate nature. We hear hints of former relationships and the boundary set, willing to share everything and give almost anything, but sparing the activity of drinking for a solitary experience. Why? That is left up to the listener to interpret whether in those moments or narrator feels most unguarded and open to suggestions and foolish acts better left to one’s own mind to inspire. When you’re someone who is normally so generous with your heart, your energy and your time sometimes you just have to carve out some space and some pleasures for your alone time. Listen to the dark, psychedelic, western folk blues song “I Drink Alone” (not to be confused with the George Thorogood song) on Spotify and follow the enigmatic songwriting phenoms Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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This is a Revolver Tears Into Demented Christian Sectarianism With Joyous Grunge Punk Single “Arrivederci!”

This is a Revolver, photo courtesy the artists

This is a Revolver rejects the corrupt, hateful, judgment and money-grubbing aspects of the Christian church in the joyful and pointed single “Arrivederci!” In the music video we see the band dressed to the nines as though going to some major service while spelling out a litany of the offenses committed by leaders, institutions and many of the followers of the religion including a level of unattainable purity expected, and in centuries past purchased by the wealthy, to which adherents and really everyone is expected to adhere or suffer eternal damnation, which is not the basis of a worthwhile faith. Considering recent right wing figures have called for the extermination of everyone in America and the world that doesn’t follow their narrow interpretation of faith as a nefarious echo of, say, the Catholic Church in the middle ages and during the Inquisition, this very unapologetic, grunge-fueled punk song tearing in efficient manner tearing into the hypocrisies and dubious foundations of the most violently oppressive end of Christianity is not just welcome but necessary. Going along to get along works when you’re dealing with trifling matters but not when a sizable group of people sees anyone that doesn’t align with their demented, sectarian beliefs as an existential threat to be eliminated. This Is a Revolver just made that kind of spirited condemnation seem fun with this song. Watch the video for “Arrivederci!” on YouTube and follow This is a Revolver at the links provided.

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Dead Senses Rages Against the Toxin of Contemporary Capitalism on Caustic Noise Rock Single “Strozzapreti”

Los Angeles-based, experimental post-punk band Dead Senses released its self-titled album through Already Dead Tapes and Records on November 17, 2023. To mark that occasion the group dropped a music video for the single “Strozzapreti” edited by the band itself using public domain footage to give the visual presentation of the song the same fascinatingly out of phase quality possessed by the song itself. The title means “priest strangler” or “priest choker” in Italian and one wishes that were the title of a modern, and return to enthralling and unsettling, Dario Argento film. But the term usually refers to a thick, ropey pasta except in the song it references, according to its press release, “a quiet, seething anger toward abusive authority, violence, and omnipresent demand for consumption and submission under contemporary capitalism.” A feeling presumably most of us share at this point even if some of us misguidedly overtly support the agenda and values of late stage capitalism because that support is so internalized it manifests in identifying with conservative politics or “centrist” neoliberalism transmuted into what is presumed to being a self-identified “moderate” with no sense of irony. Dead Senses makes no bones about dissolving those narratives in the song in style, structure, its use of imagery and in mulching cultural artifacts to repurpose into thrillingly furious agitprop.

The members of Dead Senses came out of the metal and hardcore scenes and “Strozzapreti” bears of the hallmarks of those roots with pointed, and aggressive rhythms and noisy guitar, bass, percussion and shouted, desperate blasts of vocals. But the production also feels like the people in the band has been listening to a lot of industrial music and other musical forms in which the aesthetic is heavily samples based to give the whole sound of the piece an intentionally stark and direct sound. The rest of the album reveals the group’s free use of atmospheric elements that flow into angular noise rock that fans of modern noise rock outfits like Meat Wave, Moon Pussy and Chat Pile will appreciate not just for the caustic and exhilarating sounds but also the righteous substance of what the music is about. Watch the video for “Strozzapreti” on YouTube and follow Dead Senses at the links provided.

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David Baron Envisions a More Benevolent Future in Analog Synth Piece “City of Nerves” From His New Album ARP 2500

Record producer, film composer, musician, arranger and engineer David Baron has amassed a large collection of vintage synthesizers housed in his Sun Mountain studio on top of a mountain overlooking Ashokan Reservoir just south of Woodstock, New York. One of his prized synths is the ARP 2500 used by the likes of Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Bowie, Faust and Vangelis and perhaps most dramatically utilized in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the device with which scientists communicated with the aliens. On November 17, 2023 Baron released his album The ARP 2500 via Here & Now Recordings and a perhaps beautifully subtle and evocative employment of the synth is on the track “City of Nerves.” Perhaps echoing the sentiments of Ray Kurzweil, Baron says the song is a product of his thinking about how AI will impact the future and that someday he believes “a city will exist using the best of technology and biology to make for a better life for all.” The song begins with some burbling electronic tone and then a smoothly unfolding melody as layers of rhythmic and finely textured sound converge to establish a mood that is progressive with gentle forward momentum and soothing at once as a reflection of an electro-neural infrastructure that might unobtrusively provide the network of services that benefit all without the harsh demands and consequences of the economic arrangements and environment ravaging energy technologies of today. One can hope. But Baron’s song is a welcome alternative to the dark and bleak vision of the future of a lot of art which, to be fair, is extrapolating on current trend. Baron’s piece is more of the hopeful, Utopian ilk and if one can imagine it, it may even be possible. Listen to “City of Nerves” on YouTube and follow David Baron at the links below.

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Sina Bathaie’s Hypnotic, Electro-Acoustic Downtempo Track “Tehran” Fuses the Traditional With and Ultra-Modern

The rapid pulsing low end moody oud figure of the beginning of “Tehran” by Sina Bathaie sets the stage for a musical journey rendered in direct human experience in the music video for the song. Saba Zameni provides some soulful vocals to draw us further into the song hitting a broad range of tones and gesturing in dramatic fashion in the video as Bathaie strums and plucks the oud over the developing soundscape, a calmer interlude to introduce some fine baglama lines to expand the tones and textures of the song. It’s somehow both lively and vital and hypnotic in its weaving of rhythms like the songwriter is drawing upon the rich cultural history of the title of the song from the more traditional instrumentation as well as modern production techniques that lend the song comprised of largely acoustic sources a resonance like a downtempo house track. It is a brilliant fusion of aesthetics that transcends narrow categories. Watch the video for “Tehran” on YouTube and follow Sina Bathaie at the links below. His Tehran EP was released via Windcatcher Records on November 16, 2023.

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Culture Pig Unleashes a Fractured Burst of Industrial Powerviolence on “Resurrection Machine” From Its New Self-Titled EP

Culture Pig started playing shows again in 2022 after a bit of a hiatus and on November 6, 2023 released its self-titled EP. The song “Resurrection Machin” is like listening to entire neighborhoods of broken sidewalks. It’s fractured structure, rapid starts and stops, its drill swell progressions, bursts of caustic noise, gouging guitar riffs that spiral into nervous catharsis is like if The Jesus Lizard was into powerviolence. Like the band got deeply into that early hardcore-adjacent Mr. Bungle music. It’s like industrial grindcore without the blast beats, it’s drumming more like something you’d hear in a weird thrash song. It’s noise rock hardcore without the tough guy stance. It is hard-edged and ragged yet lean and focused in its execution of its performance. So yes, if you’re into Amphetamine Reptile bands or the more raw and savage end of the Touch nd Go catalog, this is for you. Listen to “Resurrection Machine” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the EP as well and follow Denver’s Culture Pig on Instagram.

Donzii Playfully Deconstructs a Song About Lust and the Yearning For Real Connection in the Video For No Wave Post-punk Funk Single “Penetrate”

Jenna Balfe and Dennis Fuller of Donzii seem smeared in green makeup and in in green wigs in the video for the group’s new single, the title track to its new EP (which landed on November 10, 2023). The duo frolic about a stage and at one point what looks like a giant phallus of the kind used in Japanese fertility festivals is wheeled into view and used as a cartoonishly large pole to dance around and then later we see experiments of various kinds performed on the object tipped over on its side. It fits a song that seems to be about near insatiable desire but delivered by Balfe in a way that seems disinterested and playful at once. In typical Donzii fashion the No Wave funk bass lines and tropical disco rhythms amid ghostly synths and guitar work give the song a quality that is a deconstruction of expectations and building toward something more subversive. It’s frankly a welcome new direction for one of the most original bands in the larger world of modern post-punk where thin guitar tones and bedroom production rules the underground. Donzii, as usual, gives us more in the music and in its presentation thereof with the video directed by Trulee Hall. Watch that video on YouTube and follow Miami’s post-punk luminaries Donzii at the links below.

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E50: Julian St. Nightmare

Julian St. Nightmare (L-R: Sergio Castorena, Genevieve Fulton and Tan Garren), photo by Tom Murphy

Anyone that has been paying attention to the Denver music underground beyond a very superficial for the past two years has at least heard about Julian St. Nightmare. Its five members are a force with a bit of a mystique to their live performances and its music rooted in post-punk, darkwave, surf and garage rock, synthpop, shoegaze and the various styles of music most prominent in their collective youth in the 2000s and 2010s. The group formed in 2018 among friends including current members Chico Arellanes (guitar, bass, vocals) and Rudy Morales (guitar, vocals) who by July of that year invited Genevieve Fulton into the band knowing them from shows and their interest in being in a band only to discover that Fulton had a talent for keyboards, singing and guitar. Before the group could really get off the ground the pandemic hit. Yet in that first year of the pandemic Sergio Castorena (guitar, vocals) of Los Narwhals came into the fold as did drummer Tan Garren, both adding unique musical gifts and perspective that expanded the band’s sonic palette and performance style.

Julian St. Nightmare has since 2021 been a staple of the DIY and small club scene in Denver earning the respect of its peers. Opening slots for French darkwave pioneers Martin Dupont, Chicago post-punk luminaries French Police and NYC dark synthpop duo Tempers, Julian St. Nightmare seemed like peers of the more well-known acts. The band’s most recent shows revealed a broader sonic palette with a boosted confidence in its own powers and its show in July 2023 with now defunct shoegaze band Dream of Industry and EBM solo project Sell Farm made its own inclinations toward creative soundscaping more prominent. There is as yet no Julian St. Nightmare album but its songs can be found on the various streaming platforms and there is a new single due out by late winter or spring with production by Fulton. Alas, it is around that time that the quintet will call it quits with one final show in the works ending a run of one of the most interesting, engaging and powerful of modern bands out of the broad milieu of post-punk and darkwave precisely because it never adhered to the limitations of genre.

Listen to our interview with Castorena, Fulton, Garren on Bandcamp and follow Julian St. Nightmare at the links provided. You can catch the band’s likely second to last show on Friday, December 15, 2023 at Lost Lake on a bill with Cathedral Bells and Hex Cassette. Doors 7 p.m., show 8 p.m., $15.

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Amelia Coburn’s Psychedelic Folk Single “See Saw” Evokes the Eerie Surreal Quality of the Traveling Carnival

Amelia Coburn, photo courtesy the artist

Amelia Coburn taps into a sensibility of Vaudeville with her single “See Saw.” A simple, repeated guitar/ukulele figure repeats as she spins a darkly folkloric tale of life in a traveling carnival with some nods to Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1967 masterpiece The Master and Margarita, novel not published not even in Bulgakov’s home country of the Soviet Union until well after his death in 1940 censored for its supernatural elements and religious themes and for its satire of Soviet society and culture. Coburn’s sing-song-y vocals and Eastern European folk pop sound draws on a similar otherworldliness in crafting the mysterious imagery of the song which informs Michael Sreenan’s music video with its puppet theater stage props and dolls all in black and white. At the end of the video we see Coburn resisting being put into a travel case and something in the visuals and the old-timey sound of the song recalls the dark mysticism that seems to permeate a great deal of German Expressionist cinema. The clarity of the melody reminded Coburn of he production on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” by the Beatles who took inspiration from the traveling circuses in establishing the mood, the tenor of their own composition. Watch the video for “See Saw” on YouTube and follow Amelia Coburn at the links below.