SAT, 8/13 Attempting to promote diversity and raise funds for the non-profit educational art program Destination: Artistic Activism, local poet Day Acoli has launched the first-ever Aurora Black Arts Festival. This lively benefit, beginning today at 10 a.m. and running through 7 p.m. tomorrow at Fletcher Plaza, 9900 East Colfax…
Amadeus Tonguefingers (who files his taxes under the name Dave Colberg) once described the wildly experimental sound of Robot Mandala as “a little to the left of techno, a little to the right of space rock, and right down the middle of sonic noise soundscapes.” While that’s a helpful aural…
Who would have thought that blackhearted Rob Zombie had a soft spot for honky-tonk? Then again, when you’re making a movie about flesh-eating rednecks, a taste for forlorn pedal steel seems oddly apropos. Enter Texas rockabilly veteran Jesse Dayton: Commissioned to write music for Zombie’s splatterfest, The Devil’s Rejects, Dayton…
Eric Sanko’s avant-garde rap sheet could damn near wallpaper New York’s Knitting Factory: In addition to collaborations with Yoko Ono, John Cale and Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll, Sanko spent seventeen years in the rhythm section of John Lurie’s acclaimed Lounge Lizards. Still part of the Big Apple’s subterranean scenery,…
The only child of country legends Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, Waylon Albright Jennings got the nickname “Shooter” for pissing on a nurse in the hospital delivery room. His ill-mannered ways continued in Hollywood as he chased the ghost of Axl Rose, partying 24/7 and fronting the hard-rock band Stargunn…
FRI, 8/5 “You don’t need twenty thousand dollars to start an art collection with one piece,” says Charmain Schuh of Boulder’s Dairy Center for the Arts. “If you can’t afford the original paintings, like with Warhol, you can always have them in your collection through the print media. Printmaking is…
Five months after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Cross Canadian Ragweed raised a few eyebrows when it performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Arlington Stadium on opening day for a packed house of Texas Rangers fans. Apparently a few freedom-lovers in attendance mistook the Oklahoma-bred roots rockers for maple-leafed hosers from…
For underground rappers landlocked in no-coast Missouri, the breakout success of Tech N9ne did more than lead Kansas City out from under the shadow of neighboring St. Louis, home to the likes of Nelly and Chingy. Because N9ne, now an L.A. resident and the driving force behind Strange Music Inc.,…
Yukster Ben Long juggles musical genres like rubber chickens on this amusing exercise in stylistic sleight of hand. Singing and playing every instrument (minus saxophone and pedal steel) himself, Long seems as comfortable rendering a breezy samba (“Strange Dreams”) as he does flirting with Southern boogie (“Dumpster Divin’ Debra”). And…
Over the years, prolific recording and publishing collective Sparky the Dog has issued everything from pirate- and dinosaur-filled comic books to Christmas- and Halloween-themed musical compilations. Founder Soapy Argyle — an alumnus of Mr. Tree and the Wingnuts, the Orangu-Tones, and Marty Jones and the Pork Boilin’ Poor Boys –…
While touring Nigeria and Ghana four years ago, Arthur Lee Land, a Boulder transplant, came up with the idea for Afrograss: a synthesis of West African percussion and bluegrass in a folk-rock format. Less indebted to King Sunny Ade than David Grisman (guest fiddle and mandolin ace Joe Craven is…
It takes balls to put out a DVD of your band superimposed over historic footage of the Beatles at Shea Stadium. But testicular fortitude has never been in short supply when it comes to Denver’s Wanker. Brains, perhaps — but that’s another kettle of one-eyed fish. On Saturday, June 25,…
After draining a fifteen-dollar bottle of cabernet sauvignon with Eddie Turner, it’s hard not to laugh when he jokingly refers to Park Hill as a “bluesman neighborhood.” Just blocks east of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the renowned electric guitarist shares an upscale home with his girlfriend, Terri,…
An insomniac’s dream come true, the Sleepers drift effortlessly between loosely structured pop and casually aggressive fuzz-core — a fitting tribute to what Bill Shakespeare once referred to as “the honey-heavy dew of slumber.” Gathered from the cast-off ashes of Denver’s Worm Trouble, this drowsy post-rock trio of songwriter/vocalist Kat…
Leave it to the Amsterdam underground to come up with a sleazy, hard-chugging duo that combines a bombastic and bellowing drummer with an abusive, psychedelic pump organist. Meet Bjrn Ottenheim and Daan Schinkel, bellower and organ bully, respectively, whose riotous live sets channel the less cornball antics of Jim Morrison…
Andrew Douglas’s art-house documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus gave David Byrne a good enough reason to expand his worldbeat label with a soundtrack. Accompanying troubador Jim White down the back roads of the ol’ Confederacy with a 300-pound statue of Jerusalem Slim in the trunk, this collection features Appalachian…
As Brave Combo founder Carl Finch talks about polka from an office phone in Denton, Texas, his passion for the multicultural art form knows no bounds. But get him going about the mainstream perception of his chosen trade (he plays accordion, guitar and keyboards and handles most of the singing…
Doing its part to improve Franco-American relations, The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower (right) flaunts a high-art conceit that includes performing in spooky, faux-SS uniforms. Subtle as a sledgehammer, the San Diego-based noise outfit is clearly out to shock the folks whom it doesn’t already hack off –…
It’s been more than three decades since hitmaker Al Green held court over secular soul — that is, since a former girlfriend, Mary Woodson, broke into Green’s home, poured boiling grits on him in the shower, then shot herself in an adjacent bedroom. With his baby-making music on indefinite hiatus,…
A complete list of the exotic instruments used on Ido Ziv’s followup to Afro-Melt wouldn’t fit into this space. Integrating Assiya’s international-music sensibilities with congas, djembe, dunduns, woodblocks, wave drums and all assortment of shakers, Ziv, a Boulder-based percussionist who hails from Israel, employs a rotating, world-class lineup of players…
During five years of relative post-millennial silence, Boredoms changed its name to Vooredoms, swapped out its guitarist and bassist for two more drummers and attached itself to sunny psychedelia like a rabid Rottweiler. Celebrating its eighteenth year of experimental surrealism, Lead Bore Yamataka Eye presents a pair of unedited, trance-inducing…
Poorly recorded in a converted chicken coop called Mud Bay (“not the rectum of the world, but you can see it from there,” Buzz Osbourne writes in the liner notes of this uneven effort), Mangled Demos From 1983 is the only document of the Melvins’ original lineup: guitarist/vocalist King Buzzo,…
