The recent Soundscapes of Japan performance at Lone Tree Arts Center featured a rare performance by Kakizakai Kaoru, who is a master of the shakuhachi — a wooden flute that dates back to the seventh century. Back then, Zen priests used the instrument as a path to enlightenment. For the…
When Wesley Davis decided to reboot his Textures: Ambient Music Showcase in 2013, after its 2009 to 2012 run at Gypsy House Café, he wanted it to take place at a venue that might expose that music to people who weren’t necessarily seeking it out. He found the perfect venue…
Yoko Ono is a towering figure in the twentieth-century art and music worlds. She was one of the main artists behind the Fluxus movement, and her performance and visual art and sound experiments had made her famous before she ever met her future husband, John Lennon of The Beatles. Lennon…
Chastity Belt, due to perform this Friday, June 26, at Dryer Plug Studios, is now based in Seattle. But the band got started at Whitman College in Walla Walla. There, the fledgling group played impromptu street performances, before going on to play house shows. Without a music scene that the…
Electric Ladyland: Women In Electronic Music Night debuts this Thursday, June 25th, at the Walnut Street location of The Walnut Room. The event showcases the talents of some of the women in the local music world and beyond that produce and perform electronic music. Dream Council is a dream pop…
There’s a better way to enjoy music than getting into a narrow range of music in your teens through your mid-twenties and checking out, figuring nothing new has anything to offer you. Even those bands you get into during those years likely came from somewhere and had a stage of…
Wave Racer (a.k.a. Tom Purcell) has come a long way since getting a controller and a basic version of Ableton Live five years ago. Appearing at the Westword Music Showcase this Saturday, June 20, at 2:40 p.m., the prolific producer early worked with a sample-based approach to composition and made…
Anklepants will make a rare Colorado appearance at Glob this Friday, June 19, alongside Killd By, Lanx Borealis, Julien and Trisicloplox. The solo project of Reecard Farché, Anklepants is an amalgamation of Farché’s interest in electronic music going back to the late ’90s, as well as his background in making…
Set to perform at The Summit Music Hall on Thursday, June 18th, The Sonics from Tacoma, Washington are, outside of Dick Dale, the oldest, most influential rock band still touring today. All garage rock as we know it stems from what The Sonics innovated at their inception in 1960. The…
Sunday, June 14th, KOOL 105.1 hosted its annual KOOL Concert. This year, the featured artists were stars of ’80s New Wave pop with Tears For Fears, B-52s and Berlin. Sometimes a line-up with an appeal to nostalgia can have some essentially one-hit wonders but not so for this show, as…
Cheap Trick, performing with Peter Frampton at Red Rocks on Tuesday, June 16th, occupy a unique place in the history of rock music. Its music was almost definitively power pop, while it also often rocked a little harder than its peers stamped with that genre designation. Its raucous live shows…
It’s a rarity that any band lasts ten years and remains interesting up to the end, much less a band of people who have played music together since the members were in middle school. Fissure Mystic started in 1998, when Taylor Evans-Rice, Fernando Guzman and Andrew Elkins were in middle…
The nightly rain of the past month in Denver spared the Violent Femmes at Red Rocks. When Colin Hay opened the show, there was a sprinkling, but it went away quickly and a patchwork of clouds in the sky that promised a potential downpour that never really arrived. As evening…
For its first Denver show since 2004, veteran indie-pop group Belle & Sebastian will collaborate with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra for an expanded presentation of its signature storytelling style. It’s a songwriting method with creative roots in the years that bandleader Stuart Murdoch spent more or less bedridden due to…
Tonight at Red Rocks, Denver avant-garde improv group Animal / object will join Violent Femmes on stage for the improvisational sections of “Black Girls” and “Confessions.” Since the early days of the Femmes there has been a horn section called Horns of Dilemma whose membership has included, at various times,…
Nneka (who will make a stop at Lost Lake Lounge tonight) may be one of the most famous international artists who is mostly unknown in America. But if perseverance and talent are any indicators, that won’t be the case for long. Born Nneka Egbuna in the Niger Delta region and half-German…
Quintron and Miss Pussycat were probably kids in the 70s and witnessed/were subjected to/were fascinated with/were disturbed by some of the creepier Sid & Marty Croft shows. Like Lidsville, H.R. Pufnstuf and Far Out Space Nuts. Somehow those phantasmagoric and psychedelic TV shows were deemed worthy faire for Saturday morning…
The fourth annual Mile High Festibowl took place in April across three venues in central Denver. The festival featured more than sixty bands and over twenty visual artists, and its success was remarkable for several reasons, starting with the fact that the Mouth Bomb collective behind it lost its home…
As an endcap to the coverage of the tenth anniversary of Rhinoceropolis it is only fitting that we share some video footage of events at the venue. There are far more than fifty videos that you can find on YouTube alone that were shot at Rhinoceropolis but collected here are…
When Trevor Yawner moved into Rhinoceropolis in 2012 he brought some of his connections in the then on the rise garage rock underground movement to Rhino and along with John Gross’s long-running involvement in noise locally and far beyond, Rhinoceropolis had some of the key elements needed to bring something…
If you haven’t been to Lost Lake in a little while, it’s very different inside. Where once the black-walled room and the small stage stood is the bar with a shelved wall lit up with small lights where the bottles of alcohol sit like they would at a place that…
On Wednesday, May 27th, The Decemberists perform at Red Rocks with Spoon and Courtney Barnett. In certain circles, it’s de riguer to refer to Portland, Oregon’s the Decemberists as a pretentious hipster band. Let’s first dispense with the term “hipster.” Hasn’t it lost its currency as a criticism at this…
