National radio program The Moth will land in Denver tonight for the inaugural Denver Moth StorySLAM, an open-mike storytelling competition. Hopeful storytellers can put their names in a hat, and ten lucky people will be chosen to take the stage, where their stories will be scored by judges from the…
Ambassador Wolf is used to playing to an audience of massive roaring engines, with the buzz of industrial lights above them. The band, which started as an after-work ensemble for three engineering Ph.D. students, performed in the lobby of their workplace, the Powerhouse Energy Institute in Fort Collins, last weekend…
Boulder-based Big Gigantic — the instrumental livetronica, hip-hop, jazz and electronic duo — took the Red Rocks stage this weekend for its third annual “Rowdy Town” show. The group collaborated with Denver-based funk band the Motet to do a full band set each night. Dominic Lalli, saxophonist of Big Gigantic…
Last weekend, Skylab, which featured headliner Tiesto, brought some 10,000 people to the Denver Coliseum. Among those were approximately 150 members of the online rave community Colorado EDM Family. A few of the “EDM Fam,” as they call themselves, saw a young girl fall to the ground outside the venue…
Brennan Bryarly, founder of the Hundred, put on his first festival this weekend, Cloak and Dagger, which was held in the Golden Triangle at City Hall and Vinyl and featured almost thirty electronic producers and DJs. The festival was in the works for two years. But when Bryarly first tried…
Earlier this week, the popular Boulder based electronic and hip-hop music blog, ThisSongIsSick.com announced that Soundcloud, the audio distribution platform has temporarily suspended their account, which blog creator Nick Guarino said gets approximately 1.5 million listeners every 24 hours…
The Mishawaka was homesteaded in 1916, which makes it one of the oldest venues in Colorado. It sits 23 miles from Fort Collins, in Roosevelt National Park, nestled between the raging Poudre river and a canyon wall. It has hosted legends such as Leon Russel, George Clinton, Bela Fleck and…
The Mishawaka is tucked between a mountain face and a river in a canyon west of Fort Collins, where it has stood as a music hall for 96 years and an outdoor amphitheater for close to thirty. Despite its storied history, the venue often referred to as the Mish has…
There was in interesting policy on trash over the weekend at Fort Collins’ biggest music festival. More on that later. Bohemian Nights is a three-day Fort Collins music festival featuring around a hundred local performances and several national headliners, all free to the public, funded by the Bohemian Foundation. It…
Although Derek Vincent Smith, also known as Pretty Lights has played Red Rocks five times before, this weekend’s show was different. The unique set up, featuring not only live band but also thirteen members of the Colorado Symphony, was the first time Smith has included a full string section in…
Shatterproof’s Up In Smoke tour could be a sequel to National Lampoon’s Vacation. The rock band, based out of Fort Collins, started planning its first tour in March. By mid-July, Shatterproof was ready. Its bus, named “ShatterBus,” was not…
Sarah Slaton can’t stop saying yes to Colorado music. In addition to her avid support of the scene as a fan, she performs in the band Edison, works for the Vinefield Agency as a manager and recently accepted a position as artist development director for SpokesBuzz. We spent some time…
Christopher Michael Richard, known as Crash on stage, has been a singer and percussionist with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros since the beginning of the band in 2009, following a four year career with the Deadly Syndrome. He has embarked on his own solo project and played his second…
Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation planned his summer tour months and months ago, with one major gig request: to play in the mountains. That wish was granted when Thievery Corporation headlined the Ride Festival over the weekend in Telluride. But just playing in the mountains wasn’t enough. He wanted to…
Lily Fangz bounces on the balls of her feet, looking out on the crowd from the stage at Red Rocks. Her long hair flows past her shoulders. She raises the mic. It’s time to go. Fangz, aka Lileana Krenza, is a rapper and hip-hop artist, and she’s diving into reggae…
Monika McMahon goes to a lot of concerts — hundreds each year, by her estimation. And although she doesn’t remember the specific show she first put in ear plugs, she remembers the last show she didn’t. It was a Bad Religion show at the Fillmore which caused her ears to…
Real life stops at Ride festival . Sheer rock faces in the distance and a heavily forested backdrop for the small wooden stage make it easy to feel a sense of escape for a weekend. No wi-fi signal, no cell phones out, with the focus on music and the people…
I love music. I really do. But I need to get something out in the air: I have been guilty of not giving all genres of music a chance. Because of that, I have never been to a serious metal show before. That all changed a few weeks ago when…
Shaley Scott’s performance was the one of the last on the Road 34 stage, and she didn’t even know it. The Fort Collins singer-songwriter played for the first time at the venue on June 6, and at the time it didn’t seem like it would be the last. “The door…
Jukeboxes are hard to come by in the digital age. But Devo founder Mark Mothersbaugh brought one with him when his band played in Denver last week. And it isn’t just any jukebox; it’s one made more than fifty years ago by AMI Music and filled with sixty vinyl records…
Editor’s note: Backbeat contributors Bree Davies and Mary Willson were at Red Rocks last week when shots were fired at an SUV whose passengers included Schoolboy Q. On Tuesday, we shared Davies’s story. This is Wilson’s account. Before being stuck in a parking lot at Red Rocks a week ago…
TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design brings sixteen local leaders innovators and entrepreneurs to Ellie Caulkins Opera House tomorrow for an independently organized TEDx Mile High event. The theme is “Emergence” — of new ideas, thinking and technology — which will be threaded through the presentations. Educators, musicians,…
