“I was basically a DIY punk kid, but doing it through hip-hop music,” says Travis Egedy, aka Pictureplane, about his early days of making music. “It had the same energy and intelligence and sent the same type of message, and I was really into that.” Born in Santa Fe, Egedy…
The Fluid is the focus of High Plains Underground Archive’s second installment on Denver music reunion shows. To start at the beginning: Matt Bischoff and Ricky Kulwicki had been members of the Aurora, Colorado-based Frantix, a great punk band with irreverent humor and incredible energy, which became known for its classic single in…
When High Five came together in 2012, the collective comprised solo artists who pooled their talents and resources in order to create something bigger than their individual efforts — a creative model not unlike that of Minneapolis’s Doomtree. “That’s a very similar format to what we have in that they’re…
Typically a show billed as “An Evening With…” is something of a nostalgia trip for long-time fans. But that wasn’t quite the case with the Public Image Ltd show at The Gothic Theatre on Friday night. A third of the tracks from the set came from the group’s worthy latest…
Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein is likely best known for his stint in legendary punk band Misfits, which he joined at age sixteen to play guitar with his brother, Jerry Only, Glenn Danzig and a string of drummers. When Misfits returned in 1995 after a twelve-year break, Doyle rejoined the band…
The current musical era is not short on nostalgia and reunion shows; bands performing classic albums in their entirety have become commonplace for tours and for the Pitchfork Music Festival. In addition to the “classic rock” nostalgia circuit, many bands who had their heyday in the 50s-70s seem to embark…
John Lydon formed Public Image Ltd. in 1978, after the breakup of the Sex Pistols, the infamous and influential punk-rock band he fronted under the stage name Johnny Rotten. PiL wasn’t the first post-punk band, but it quickly became one of the most important — and adventurous. The 1979 album…
Nik Turner’s Hawkwind will be at Lion’s Lair tonight, performing with the progressive-rock outfit Hedersleben in a show that combines music and mythology for a space-rock extravaganza. Turner is perhaps best known as a founding member of the legendary, UK-based psychedelic rock band Hawkwind. From 1969 to 1976, and then again from 1982…
Growing up in Denver, Zach Reini liked to draw and got into punk, playing in such noteworthy local hardcore bands as Crawl, Dethbox and, currently, Citizen. His wide-ranging imagination also led him to explore experimental electronic music with his Data Rainbow project. But Reini never gave up on the visual…
Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Dave Preston recently released his first ambient album in five years. The luminously evocative In These Storms is Preston’s third ambient release, following 2008’s Be and 2010’s Soundtrack for Motion. Rather than the synth or beat-driven sounds often associated with the ambient style, Preston’s music features organic sounds…
On the first weekend of November, 2015, The Globe opened for business in the former home of Sidewinder, a longtime Globeville dive bar that later enjoyed a short run as a cozy little bar and music venue, after it was bought in 2012 and managed by Fernando “Fez” Guzman’s family…
Lulu and John Demitro got off to an early start in music. Growing up in Boulder, the siblings began playing classical piano before they were five. Through high school John played in bands, including the hard-rock band Bassline; Lulu, who is a year younger than John, played keyboards in that…
On January 12, 2010 an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 hit sixteen miles west of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, devastating the already impoverished nation and killing tens of thousands of people. In the wake of that disaster Haiti has undergone a slow recovery and displaced 1.5 million people who were…
Growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, rapper/producer Matt Brandyberry might not have made music his life’s passion if he hadn’t had to find something to do in a small city ninety minutes from Philadelphia. But it took a while to find his sound. Brandyberry wasn’t allowed to listen to anything but Christian…
Experimental and avant-garde music has been a significant part of the Denver music world since at least the early 1980s, despite a relative lack of attention in the press and certainly little airplay. Today, this city’s experimental music scene is far larger than you might expect. We’ve pulled together a…
Veteran music journalist and Denver-based author Steve Knopper, who will speak tonight at the Boulder Book Store, recently released his latest book MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson through Simon and Schuster. The current music-business editor at Rolling Stone, Knopper is a Colorado native and worked for several daily newspapers…
Philadelphia’s Beach Slang has spent the last few years writing songs that are so emotionally charged, raw, sincere and thoughtful that they transcend mere rock and roll. The name of the group’s latest record, The Things We Do to Find the People Who Feel Like Us, may be long —…
Noise rock/no wave band CP-208 split last month. While that development may not be big news to anyone who didn’t like the band (or didn’t even know about it), the dissolution quietly marked the end of a certain era of underground music in Denver — because the band’s membership and…
Flaural is releasing its debut EP, Thin King, tomorrow at the Hi-Dive. It’s a project that’s come together relatively quickly: Until last year keyboardist Connor Birch, drummer Nick Berlin and guitarist Noah Pfaff were members of the promising indie rock outfit A Band In Pictures and singer/bassist Collin Johnson was…
Live concert/performance DVDs and videos are hardly a rarity these days, but while documentaries about a band, a performer or a musical scene are relatively common for large cities like Los Angeles and New York, they are few and far between in Colorado. But they do exist, and here are…
One of the sounds that has long been part of the Colorado music scene is lush, atmospheric rock. Even though Colorado boasts more than 300 days of sunshine each year, many significant Colorado artists have an indisputable attraction to music that, if not exactly dark, suggests an inward expansiveness and…
The ’90s in Denver, as in much of the rest of the world, was a time of great creativity in music — and if not for the lack of a spotlight directed at the Mile High City, some of the local talent probably would have enjoyed national as well as…
