Queen City Sounds and Art

Dominic Sen’s “Prayer” is Like a Luminously Melodic Modern New Age Pop Casting of Hopeful Intentions Into the Universe

Dominic Sen’s luminously melodic single “Prayer” from the album Apparition (released) June 9, 2023 embodies the nature of prayer itself rather than a statement on its efficacy or lack thereof. An intention cast into the universe or to a divine being without a guarantee of fulfillment of the wish. And in the song the vocals seem to spiral outward and float on a spiraling drift of tone over shuffling, textural percussion like New Age music for a cosmic waiting room in an elevator to any number of life outcomes in some kind of strange virtual reality RPG. The song ends as it started without full resolution which is a little like life itself. But the song itself has its gorgeously beautiful aspects and sustains a hopeful spirit like something that might have been a proper sequel to something from Enya’s 1991 album Shepherd Moons. Watch the lyric video to “Prayer” on YouTube and follow Dominic Sen at the links provided.

Dominic Sen on TikTok

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Dominic Sen on Twitter

Dominic Sen on Instagram

dominicsen.com

AUTORHYTHM’s Entrancing Layers of Synth on “Substantia Nigra” and the Songs for the Nervous System album are Like the Soundtrack to a Lost Utopian Science Fiction Epic

AUTORHYTHM/Joakim Forsgren, photo by Mohamed Mire

AUTORHYTHM’s “Substantia Nigra” from the project’s latest album Songs For the Nervous System (2023) is driven by a low cycling pulse as rhythm as it seems points in a network flash and flare in tones and percussive textures as the track builds to a distorted melody that bubbles with an urgency like an entire network of a factory coming online or a deep space colony in great sleeper ships activating a series of protocols to bring its cargo out of stasis in order to explore the possibilities of a new world and hopefully not exploit it and extract it to extinction with outmoded habits of human civilization. Halfway through the song’s near eleven minutes the tenor changes and low crackling white noise enters the field of hearing and a distant metallic beeping like a signal coming through the intergalactic haze. A sound like a dopplering alarm ascends and drops down back into the earlier theme of the distorted melody. It’s like the soundtrack to science fiction film or novel about a real sense of wonder at the unknown and not one that frames scientific discovery and exploration as an act of extending archaic notions of conquest but rather as mutually beneficial comprehension and an authentic attempt at expanding knowledge. Listen to “Substantia Nigra” on Spotify and follow AUTORHYTHM at the links below. Fans of Mort Garson’s Journey to the Moon and Beyond and other works of the great synthesizer pioneer will find a great deal to appreciate here.

AUTORHYTHM on Facebook

AUTORHYTHM on Bandcamp

AUTORHYTHM on Instagram

Georg Óskar’s Video For Melancholic Downtempo Breakcore Song “I’m a Failure” is a Portrait of a Rebounding Life in a State of Collapse

The video treatment for Georg Óskar by Andy Heck Boyd serves the shuffling downtempo song well. Its washed out colors with all the warm colors seemingly keyed out or de-emphasized highlight the figure slumped on the ground seemingly helpless while lyrics about being a failure and how everyone knows it and life keeps delivering losses and how that can get one into a cycle of thinking one is a failure, “a big, big failure.” The video looks like some bleak footage of life in the 1970s like some Super 8 documentation of a life that has tedium of debased existence and melted expectations. Yet the processed bell tones carrying the melody and even the eccentric vocals suggest the quality of irony and sitting in the feelings of lingering defeat as a way of working through them without setting unrealistic expectations. Its a piece of music that provides an example of morose downtempo breakcore that is too energetic to get trapped in a down mood. Watch the video for “I’m a Failure” on YouTube and follow Norwegian composer Georg Óskar at the links below.

Georg Óskar on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E08: Ghost Canyon Fest

Ghost Canyon Fest organizers (L-R: Brian Dooley, Cory Hager, Jeremy Brashaw and Sean Dove), photo by Tom Murphy

Ghost Canyon Fest is “A Boundary-Pushing DIY Music Festival” that runs August 11-13 across three venues. The event germinated as an idea among friends in the bands New Standards Men, Moon Pussy and Almanac Man who attended and/or performed at events like PRF BBQ, Caterwaul and No Coast and felt there was enough interest and enough mutual connections among bands well outside of Denver to hold a viable, like-minded festival in the Mile High City. In year’s past Denver hosted multiple festivals of strongly focused curation like Goldrush Festival, Transistor Festival, Denver Noise Fest, DAD Fest , Ultra Metal and in Boulder Communikey among others but left field sounds are largely not included in most other festivals in Denver. Ghost Canyon Fest in its inaugural year of 2023 goes to some length to shine a light on those sounds in a more high profile way including a mention in a recent issue of The Wire as a festival of note. If you go, expect to see stars of local and non-local noise rock, post-metal, noise and experimental dance and drone including BIG|BRAVE, Quits, Masma Dream World, Big’N, Church Fire, Pleasure Venom and of course the projects of the event organizers. For a full list and a schedule of events please and to purchase passes for the weekend or single nights visit the Ghost Canyon Fest website. At the site you can link to curated playlists created by various artists performing that weekend. This interview includes a conversation with Jeremy Brashaw (New Standards Men), Cory Hager (Moon Pussy), Sean Dove (Almanac Man) and Brian Dooley (Almanac Man).

Listen to our interview with the organizers on Bandcamp and look for our interviews with various artists performing at Ghost Canyon Fest in the coming weeks.

Ghost Canyon Fest website

Laura Wolf’s “Homebody” is an Avant Indie Pop Collage on Taking the Time Out of Everyday Life

Laura Wolf seems to have channeled her background in classical music into creating truly unique pop songs for her latest album, Shelf Life (out June 2, 2023 via Whatever’s Clever). A particularly striking and poignant example of this is the single “Homebody” and the stop motion collage video by Renata Zeiguer that seems like the perfect cognate of the way Wolf has assembled and orchestrated samples of sound, loops, processed noises, strings, guitar, electronic noises creating various textures and white noise as drone to create a sense of the private and the intimate one hears in Wolf’s vocals. It sounds and with the video looks like a group of snapshots of childhood projected into the adult mind and adult concerns but filtered through a childlike sense of play and aesthetic lens. It’s a song about being stuck and the self-imposed urgency to move on yet an impulse to enjoy the moment of not having to deal, for a while, with the demands of your everyday life and the song embodies that liminal moment in a delightful and captivating way. Watch the video for “Homebody” on YouTube and follow Laura Wolf at the links below.

Laura Wolf on Facebook

Laura Wolf on Twitter

Laura Wolf on Bandcamp

Laura Wolf on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E07: Charming Disaster

Charming Disaster is a “goth-folk duo” comprised of Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris based out of Brooklyn, NY that has since 2012 written high concept songs that explore themes of human exploration of the natural world and the ways our attempts at explaining the world and our lives weave their way into culture in fascinating ways that are often hidden from contemporary society. In its songwriting Charming Disaster uncover these secret and often merely neglected connections and turn those paths of curiosity into fascinating narratives for its body of work. The project’s latest album is Super Natural History, a musical cabinet of curiosities in which each song is a curio and oddity of our collective mythological heritage in the form of stories of witchcraft, monsters and the underworld and where our ideas of magic and science intersect in alchemical fashion. The music is rooted in a sense of wonder and strong songcraft that renders the sometimes unusual subject matter accessible and immediately relatable.

Listen to our interview with Charming Disaster on Bandcamp, listen to Super Natural History below where you can also purchase the album digitally, on CD or vinyl on the group’s own Bandcamp site and follow the adventures and exploits of Charming Disaster at charmingdisaster.com.

HEAR ME OUT Leans Into the Ebb and Flow of Powerful Feelings While Processing the Experience of Abuse on Post-punk Song “Meaning Less”

HEAR ME OUT delves into a complex emotional space on “Meaning Less.” Its gentle guitar work, often like glimmerings of tone on the edge of the song, spare but strong percussion propels the song along as the vocals shift from introspective tones to a swell of emotion like you might when thinking back to the ways you’ve been treated and mistreated as suggested in the song where it sounds like someone who was used and abused for their body with their humanity discarded and the way that experience can stick with you even after you revisit it in your mind, even if you write a song or make a creative work with that energy behind it and informing its creation. But this song that seems equal parts post-punk and indiepop feels like a moving through those feelings to the other side of personal grief. Its blend of tenderness and intensity is reminiscent of the likes of Porridge Radio and leaves one feeling exultant in the moment rather than defeated. Listen to “Meaning Less” on Spotify and follow the German band HEAR ME OUT on Instagram.

Anna Rose’s Majestically Vulnerable “Pray To The Trees” is Song of Reclaiming Your Dignity and Strength in Challenging Times

Anna Rose brings to “Pray To The Trees” a sense of intimacy and mystery. Following the spare opening of minimal guitar accompaniment, Rose’s warm and clear vocals shine through a menacing soundscape of processional rhythms and roiling, ambient noise that borders on the industrial. Burbling, chaotic synth in the background at one point sounds like systems breaking down as the song transitions back to the vulnerable and unadorned passages of music with Rose’s vocals becoming more impassioned as she sings about not being someone’s savior and that that person is their own. This after showing her own vulnerabilities and words about being “broken in places I can’t talk about” and “pills I’ve taken to carry the load.” And having “questions worth asking when you’re on your knee, pray to your god, I’ll pray to the trees.” It’s a song that feels weighty and existential suggesting that we all have burdens and demons and limitations but we are perfectly capable of working through these issues while making our way in a troubled world and that you’re never completely on your own in feeling the pressure and looking for a source of strength outside of yourself in the most pressing of times. Listen to “Pray To The Trees” on Spotify or any of the services from the LinkTree below where you can listen to the rest of the Already Gone EP (released June 29, 2023) and follow Anna Rose at the links provided.

Where to Stream “Pray To The Trees”

Anna Rose on Facebook

Anna Rose on Twitter

Anna Rose on Instagram

Anna Rose on YouTube

annarosemusic.com

DeFi Rock Band’s “Funny Things” is a Sweet and Gritty Love Song of a Garbage Man for an AI Cyborg Girl

“Funny Things” by DeFi Rock Band is a song about the love of a city garbage man for an artificially intelligent cyborg girl. Which could be merely gimmicky but there’s something charming about how the song’s driving, grunge-y guitar riff with the steady percussion carries the intentionally gritty lead male vocals and the processed voice of the cyborg as they harmonize in the most unconventional way you’re likely to hear in a song for awhile. Little pulses of synth accent the song all the while and the melody is reminiscent of something out of early punk as influenced by 1960s girl groups. It shouldn’t work, or it should fall apart at some point but just like a near future of decayed civilization and a hodgepodge of technology and street level existence that is going to be there no matter what the tech bros in their pampered and fragile towers of privilege insist is the manifestation of their detached dreams of posthuman existence. Listen to “Funny Things” on Spotify and follow DeFi Rock Band from Barcelona, Spain at the links below.

DeFi Rock Band on YouTube

DeFi Rock Band on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E06: Isadora Eden

Isadora Eden started as a solo project in a more indie singer-songwriter vein but even the early releases were imbued with an imaginative flair and an ear for deeper emotional coloring. As Eden brought on board collaborators to help flesh out the sound in the newer songs she was writing the music evolved into a darker, more sonically rich sound that was a bit more like something one might expect to hear from a songwriter like PJ Harvey or Mary Timony but more darkwave, more flourishes of atmospheric sounds both guitar-rooted and electronic akin to the stranger end of shoegaze. This creative period has resulted in one of the more fascinating records of 2023 in forget what makes it glow, the debut full-length for the project. Eden’s deeply evocative voice guides you through an introspective set of songs that are melancholic, reflective and in the end cathartic. Like the kind of dream pop record with some grit and edge, willing to wax noisy in moments as if to embody the way life and our subsconscious experiences are analog and meaningful, intimate, in a way pristine digital and curated experiences rarely are. The album will be available on vinyl and digital and for more information on finding group’s releases, social media and upcoming shows please visit the band’s website.

Listen to our interview with Isadora Eden and main songwriting partner and drummer Sumner Erhard on Bandcamp and catch one of the album release live shows listed below.

Thursday 7.13 w/Mystee and SGRNY at The Lair (207 ½ S. 3rd) 7 p.m. Laramie, WY

Friday 7.14 at The Lyric Cinema 7:30 p.m. w/Safekeeper, Elke and Mystee

Saturday 7.15 w/Pink Lady Monster and Deth Rali at The Marquis 7 p.m.