“Somnia” is the culminating moment in Skycabin’s “waterfall series.” The single is steeped in the sounds of soul and R&B, with a commanding performance from acclaimed singer Denise Stewart, as well as 90s downtempo. The song has a defiant and striving tone but the lyrics are brimming with expressions of anxiety that most people living in the world and paying attention might feel themselves. And the chorus of “I’m living in a bad dream” has a hint that all of this chaos, conflict, static and desperate challenges feel like a moment in time that has been building for decades and longer from which we might find ourselves free if there was a collective shift in consciousness, a waking up, from outmoded and unproductive ways of thinking and being. For several years now it seems as though unfortunate and nightmarish events have been transpiring at an accelerating pace and it leaves little time for recovery so maybe you dissociate a little to survive the day but with the impending sense of what could come next. The song and its AI generated, Afro-futurist imagery suggests a hope against hope and a will to get through this period and shake off the collective human nightmare. One can only hope. Watch the video for “Somnia” on YouTube and follow Skycabin at the links provided.
DJ Tower aka Tim Alexander has been a fixture in the Denver music scene since the 90s. With early gigs and residencies in the Goth scene, Alexander has gone on to be one of the resident DJs with Lipgloss, the nation’s longest-running indie dance night run by founder Michael Trundle. As a teenage fan of heavy metal and synthesizer music it seems inevitable that Alexander would become fascinated with the nascent synthwave movement that emerged in the mid-to-late 2000s in France and Western Europe. The fusion of analog synth composition and bombastic rock guitar was also inspired by 1980s film soundtracks in the realm of action, science fiction and horror where artists like John Carpenter, Vangelis, Jan Hammer, Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre and Giorgio Moroder reigned supreme. Modern synthwave perhaps came to prominence outside of niche musical circles when Kavinsky’s song “Nightcall” appeared on the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding-Refn’s 2011 action noir film Drive starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. It cemented in many people’s minds the American past time of night drives and their attendant sense of romance and freedom. The track made its way onto Kavinsky’s 2013 classic album OutRun, a title that became a term closely affiliated with the genre. Alexander himself borrowed the name for his monthly synthwave night Outrun which has been a regular event every first Saturdays for nearly a decade.
Alexander also tried his hand at making synthwave music of his own as a member of the musical trio TetraKroma for a handful of years but has gone back to focusing on his ability to explore the art form and other styles of music and share his passion for the music with others via his DJ gigs. In 2023 Alexander lanched his inaugural synthwave festival Synthbanger’s Ball (a clear nod to MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball program) to be held Saturday, September 2, 2023 at The Oriental Theater in Denver, Colorado with Los Angeles-based headliner Droid Bishop as well as local synthwave stars Elayarson, Star Farer, Patternshift, Jacket, Bob Sync with between music pre-recorded music sets from DJs Tower, Jay, Eric and Niq V. In this interview we dive deep into Alexander’s roots in music, his entry into the world of being a regular DJ and how his fascination with synthwave came to be as a youth in the 80s when epic, popular heavy metal and synthesizer music were developing into the forms that would directly influence synthwave as well as the modern form and how it has evolved and continues to grow and thrive.
Dax and his collaborators, image courtesy the artists
Dax tapped ten artists from his TikTok open verse challenge for the Mega Remix of “To Be A Man.” For the ten plus minutes of the song the various artists take a verse and give a multiplicity of voices and thus a different emotional and musical take on the subject of what it means to be a man struggling with the pressures and expectations of the modern world and the ways one copes that leads to self-neglect and often enough self-abuse. For Dax his source of strength in his lowest moments has been his faith but also his belief that there has to be something better than the tools he’s been given by culture and society and in evolving flashes of personal insight throughout his career as a songwriter thus far it is feeling the hurt, sadness and disappointment rather than burying it, to be vulnerable and share those moments of perceived weakness because running from them is the path to actual weakness, undermining you from inside. By the end of this treatment of the song Dax and his collaborators have taken us through a song that is essentially an epic R&B confessional and given it moments of vibrant hip-hop, pop and even country because the core of the song with a much wider resonance even beyond the struggles of being a man because in this world living as a human with our limitations in a civilization that seems bent on mutual destruction can wear you own. Dax sees solidarity in that truth that we all feel and we can all benefit from some sensitivity and the strength of being able to be so honest. Watch the video for “To Be A Man (Mega Remix)” on YouTube (for a full list of contributing artists, see the video notes) and follow Dax at the links provided.
La Sécurité’s vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Éliane Viens-Synnott worked with Gabriel Lapierre to produce the music video for “Hot Topic” and give it the air of a choreographed, avant-garde dance piece. Turns out it’s an edited version of an original performance video by Viens-Synottt but it fits the angular post-punk song perfectly. Its driving bass line has a danceable fluidity like something out of a Bush Tetras song but its unconventional percussion part – an almost motorik beat mixed with a percussive keyboard figure intertwining with splashes of guitar and vocals declaring self-affirmative sentiments setting boundaries in no uncertain terms. “Is there something I can do/To make this any clearer for you?/I don’t wanna talk/I just wanna dance/I don’t owe you any answers/You can fuck off with your banter/Cut the crap, you’re not funny/I don’t need a drink/I make my own money” – those words and more in the rest of the song are the kind you wish you’d hear more often even beyond the context of a dance floor where some people, almost always men, think they can take liberties because they think the setting entitles them to doling out unwanted, often aggressive attention. This song pairs a whimsical melody like a casual dismissal of the nonsense with an edgy, pulsing rhythm and dark atmospherics for an unbeatable net effect of wit and strength. Watch the video for “Hot Topic” on YouTube and follow La Sécurité at the links below. The group’s new album Stay Safe! dropped June 16 via Mothland.
Sivan Levy brings you into “I Thought I Heard You Call My Name While You Were Sleeping” with ambient sounds of birds in the distance. You may wonder if it’s from the song or outside your window. But then her ethereal vocals come in on a steady electronic beat and resonate in drawn out repetitions at the end of a line of lyrics. The melody is formed out of those processed vocals and background drones so that the whole track has an introspective luminescence, the musical equivalent of soft lighting and fog. Which fits the song seemingly about buried and guarded emotions that Levy is trying to reach past to get to the feelings she knows are there but which life experience and socialization obscures with unconsciously adopted, expected behaviors. It’s a tender and unconventional love song in a situation that seems challenging without the sensitivity to navigate ingrained habits. Fans of Jenny Hval and Kelly Lee Owens may appreciate Levy’s command of atmosphere and nuanced emotional expressions in this song. Listen to “I Thought I Heard You Call MY Name While You Were Sleeping” on Spotify and follow Sivan Levy at the links below.
Mali Hâf not only employs a unique blend of rhythmic, textural and tonal elements to craft the song “SHWSH!” but she also sings in the Welsh language. In the music video we see her auditioning for the part of a “woman” in a dance studio and in a variety of outfits to the theatrical to those more associated with ballet. And it all represents the point of the song which is to encourage listeners to be their authentic selves in the face of cultural and social forces reinforced by media and social media images and narratives to conform to someone else’s standards. The music, which may have resonance with dream pop circa Cocteau Twins, New Age pop and IDM, invites you to take it and accept it on its own terms and for its part is imbued with an energetic dynamic and immediacy that facilitates that acceptance. In writing the music this way with this intention, in a seemingly exotic yet locally completely common language like Welsh, Mali Hâf conveys the message that these identities including gender identity is personal to the individual and that you should be free to express it because it is another facet of the human experience worthy of respect. Watch the video for “SHWSH!” on YouTube and connect with Mali Hâf at the links below.
Oakland-based noise pop group Figure Eight has a number of self-recorded tapes and demos out in the world but “Altar” represents its debut releasing a “proper” recording. But in doing so the band didn’t bother with taming its sound or smoothing over what some might consider the rough edges of its songwriting and performance. Rather, the bendy, distorted guitar riffs and ghostly, winsome vocals, melodic bass lines and generally flooding bursts of dense yet ethereal sounds are preserved like you’re listening to a band that dangled a single wide spectrum mic over its practice space to capture the essence of what it would be like to be there and experience that while of sound and its beautifully and blissfully disorienting quality. Immediate comparisons must be drawn with My Bloody Valentine because of the dreamlike noisiness of the song and its disregard for conventional song structure in favor of a more organic flow. In doing so Figure Eight has crafted a song whose influences seem obvious but whose sonics invite repeated listens because it hits with an analog charm that seems like something that when you see it live would be a little different every time because the musicians are letting the wild nature of the way the electric instruments process the signal go off the rails a little bit with every performance. Listen to “Altar” on Spotify and follow Figure Eight at the links provided.
The colorful urban backdrop to Manpreet Kundi’s music video for “salvage” establishes a mood of normalcy and the mundane while she walks in what looks like a park with trees in twisting shapes like she’s singing the painfully confessional song in a secret and protected haven. With a minimal piano melody and mournful strings tracing her resonant and vulnerable vocals, Kundi conveys a tender pain that comes through accepting that a relationship is over and that really it got to the point where there is no way to salvage what bond and connection there once was, even assuming there was one because in the song we hear the realization that all the real communication and genuine feeling came from one party and seemingly little from the other and somehow that hurts worse than if the split was born of a normal conflict or disconnect that develops out of points of incompatibility. What makes the song especially poignant and effective is that it comes from a place of resignation and not rancor and because of that it hits a little harder emotionally. Watch the video for “salvage” on YouTube and follow Manpreet Kundi at the links below.
John Gross at Rhinoceropolis in March 2012, photo by Tom Murphy
John Gross is one of the godfathers of the Denver noise scene since becoming active as a noise artist as a member of Page 27 in 1994 when he was still in high school. That project began as more of a trying a variety of sounds as a kind of live improvisational sound collage with a changing lineup and a wide array of instrumentation but by the end of the decade had evolved into the more electronic configuration for which it became known in the realm of noise. For a comprehensive lesson on what noise encompasses simply plug “Noise music” into a search engine and read the Wikipedia entry. Gross has been involved in making a variety of the forms of that music with analog and electronic devices and methods and as one of the most prominent practitioners of the art in Denver and beyond (primarily in Page 27 with founding member John Rasmussen but also as a member of projects such as Zoologist with Todd Novosad, Robot Mandala and doom band Burn Heavy among others) he has also been an advocate for other artists in noise in setting up shows and helping to organize the long running Denver Noise Fest. While his prolific recorded catalog can be challenging to track down as it’s often been on formats and limited editions that didn’t get transferred to streaming platforms you may be able to give a listen on performances uploaded to YouTube or on Soundcloud. After an extended hiatus with the onset of the pandemic, Gross has resumed performing under his own name and with Zoologist. Long affiliated with the DIY scene in Denver and elsewhere for pragmatic reasons as most venues don’t book noise as a kind of niche musical style that can alienate people with more conventionally-minded tastes, Gross lived in and helped to run Rhinoceropolis from 2010 to early 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen to our interview with Gross about his life and time in noise and getting into the DIY and noise scenes on Bandcamp and for more information on John Gross and his music, please visit the links below. Gross will be performing at D3 on Saturday, September 2, 2023 with Human Fluid Rot (FL), Many Blessings, Castration Pact, Whitephosphorous (TX) and Sounding and on Friday, September 29, 2023 at Seventh Circle Music Collective with Granular Breath (IA), Dead Hawk (Springs) and A Light Among Many. Doors 7pm for both shows. Typically asking $10 at door.
Rikalet de Lange of Wasabi Club, photo courtesy the artist
Wasabi Club establishes a delicate mood at the outselt of “Convergence” with the spare guitar figure echoing into a minimal soundscape. When the vocals come in they introduce an introspective element that floats in the lush haze over impressionistic beats. There is a tone in the beginning of the song that also sets up a dynamic of the melody curving back in on itself which is hypnotic and makes the repetition of themes work like the ebb and flow of memory. For a song that seems to be about people learning to relate to each other again or perhaps for the first time on a truly authentic basis and coming together to appreciate what each has to offer and reinvent and reconcile the bond with a gentleness of spirit that invites true intimacy. Fans of Beach House will appreciate the emotional nuance of the track. Listen to “Convergence” on Spotify and follow the South African shoegaze and dream pop band Wasabi Club at the links provided. The new Wasabi Club The Last of the Dreamers released on May 12, 2023.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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