Tom Nelsen – Queen City Sounds and Art

Church Fire in December 2021, photo by Tom Murphy

Ahead of the release of its newest album puppy god, Denver industrial darkwave dance darlings Church Fire are setting forth a couple of music videos. The first is a collaboration with Tom Nelsen of Echo Beds and Sense From Nonsense and a video for the song “fear my bad time.” Nelsen’s gift for inspired, micro world building and futuristic horror filmmaking seems particularly apt for this particular Church Fire track. The video displays the band in distorted pixelated form, explorers virtually exploring a desolated alien landscape as though using avatars through early 1990s technology. The song itself is a rush of rhythm and burnished, glitched out harmonics charging and then floating over a stream of pulsing rhythm. It’s a song about deeply baked in commodification of even the very basic essentials of life and finding ways to subvert that power dynamic, a theme that Nelsen helped to express through the use of archaic aesthetics to reclaim the means of expression as a path to bypass oligarchic colonization of our creative impulses in showing Church Fire operating on the edges of the ruins of the near future like the post-apocalyptic Max Headroom rebels we can all be. Watch the video for “fear my bad time” on YouTube below and go catch the Church Fire album release show for puppy god at the Hi-Dive on October 15, 2022 where the trio will celebrate the new record and sharing the stage with Xadie James Orchestra, Dragon Drop and Sell Farm. For more information on Church Fire visit its Instagram page and to download the album on release day visit the Witch Cat Records Bandcamp also linked below.

Denver-based electronic rock band The Drood has long tapped into the dark side of society and the gloomier places in the psyche for inspiration. Its entrancing soundscapes travel that line uniting ambient soundscapes, art rock, psychedelia, noise and what these days might be called darkwave. Its latest offering is the single “It Must Needs Wither.” The music video represents the first full collaboration between The Drood and Tom Nelsen of Sense From Nonsense and industrial post-punk legends Echo Beds. An abstracted figure seems to sing in the video like a hologram from an ancient civilization delivering a warning to a future society that might imagine itself invulnerable and tough and blinded by hubris to the limitations of the source of its power and the efficacy of what it perceives to be its ability to take on unprecedented challenges. The song was inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello with a dedication to the memory of the millions of people who have died in the last two years of the pandemic thus far largely due to the folly of the collective ideological orientation of most world leaders and those in power and of those who have adopted the values those who see them as lazy, cogs in the world machine and otherwise a drag on the rapid transfer of wealth to the one percent of the one percent even in the face of global disaster. The song has a gentle energy and expresses a despair at the situation as it unfolded and now stands and the visual representation as crafted by Nelsen uses the imagery of dystopian science fiction to bridge the gap between the dissociation of the need to get through these times and the deep emotional impact that has worn on and continues to weight on the psyches of people worldwide. Watch the video on YouTube and follow The Drood at the links provided. Also linked below is the Instagram for Sense From Nonsense where Nelsen has been sharing his creative short films each with a unique soundtrack.