Tag: Caterwaul (festival)

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E20: Caterwaul Festival

Caterwaul is a music festival that showcases of paragons of the weird, loosely defined, in underground music. The organizers of the event have been steeped in left field music going back decades as musicians, bookers, record label employees, running labels and otherwise active participants throughout the ecology of the subculture. Since 2022 Caterwaul has hosted a finely curated and small scale event across two venues so that attendees can realistically catch every act if they so choose. This has meant lineups featuring the likes of Chat Pile, Multicult, Kal Marks, Big Business, Tunic, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, Moon Pussy, Animal Bite, A Deer A Horse, Big’n, Heet Deth and Cherubs. All of which represent not just representative of a spectrum of the best of underground weird music but also active participants in their local, national and international communities in keeping non-mainstream music not just a vital, viable but rewarding milieu in which to operate. Organizers Conan Neutron (Conan Neutron & the Secret Friends), Rainer Fronz (Learning Curve Records) and Melanie Thomas have all helped to establish and maintain the connections that make the festival possible but going through to its third year in 2024 when the event runs Friday, May 24 through Monday, May 27 at Mortimer’s and Palmer’s in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This year’s festival will include performances by Brainiac, Oxbow, Flooding, Whores., Part Chimp, J. Robbins Band, Couch Slut, Gaswar, Thrones, Ganser, Almanac Man, Quits, CNTS and powertakeOFF. For more information, the full schedule and to buy tickets please visit caterwaul.org.

Listen to our interview with Conan Neutron and Rainer Fronz on Bandcamp.

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