The eighth and final edition of Communikey Festival gets underway starting at 1 p.m. on Thursday, April 16th beginning with Colorado-based ambient artist Radere performing a DJ set at eTown Hall in Boulder. The music and visual art offerings for this year’s festival seems to be something of an amalgam…
Luke Thinnes has had quite the developmental musical arc since he got out of high school just a few years ago. One of his old bands, the avant-garde As I Call “Triumph!” Into the Sun, was a promising act. The drone/atmosphere-driven sleepdial was always compelling. But with French Kettle Station,…
The guys in Homebody pulled into Boise, Idaho, for the Treefort Music Fest on Wednesday, March 25. On paper, the drive from Denver to Boise is roughly eleven hours, but it really takes more like thirteen-plus if you choose to take I-70 instead of I-25 out of Colorado. Why make…
Colorado Springs is just over an hour by car from Denver, but that has often been enough to prevent too much cross pollination in music between the two cities. Still, anyone willing to make the trip from Denver to check out shows or to catch a Springs band knows that…
Sitting on State Highway 105, Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts in Palmer Lake, Colorado is like a well-appointed community arts center in any small town. With its tastefully painted exterior and a sense of having been part of the community for years but never neglected, it reminded one of something…
Brittany Gould, a Berlin-based artist, is perhaps best known in Denver as a musician with the art-punk band Mannequin Makeout who created the solo, ambient project Married in Berdichev. As a visual artist, Gould has cultivated an aesthetic that combines abstraction with a tactile quality characterized by the use of geometric…
One of the finest and most well-respected ambient music projects going, A Winged Victory For the Sullen is performing tonight for the first time in Colorado at the Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts. Formed in 2011, AWVFTS is a duo comprising Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran, along with supporting musicians…
This Friday, March 27th, the Japan Nite! tour comes to the Hi-Dive featuring Tsushimamire, QUORUM, The fin. and mothercoat, representing a small sliver of what underground music in the Land of the Rising Sun has to offer. Over the years, several Japanese bands have found a larger following, or in…
CJ Boyd has basically been on tour since 2008 with some lengthy stays in various cities around the United States including Denver. Despite his nomadic lifestyle he has also been a prolific songwriter and musical collaborator with an impressive discography. But the affable musician recently made a decision about one…
Ben DeSoto became the label manager at Greater Than Collective on February 2. Greater Than Collective is a record label/music organization backed by Illegal Pete’s. DeSoto had originally talked to the operation’s co-founder Virgil Dickerson in 2014 about the label, as one of his bands, Ark Life, signed to the…
Although the warehouse venue at 2126 Arapahoe Street continued to be called Monkey Mania well into 2006, and fondly continued to be referred to by the name even as it was re-named Kingdom of Doom, the last show when it was run by the Josh Taylor, Amy Fantastic and their…
Judi’s House is a non-profit that provides programs for grief support for children and young adults ages 3 to 25. On March 2nd, the good people in the Denver band SPELLS released “Bustin’ Out” as a single on their Bandcamp page on a pay-what-you-like basis with all proceeds to benefit…
The people behind Communikey Festival just announced that the 8th edition of the experimental music and art festival in Boulder will be its last. Team CMKY asked itself what it can do that goes beyond the traditional festival format and to challenge itself to consider the possibilities of what can…
Longtime Larimer Lounge booking manager James Irvine moved to New York City on March 1st to take up his new position as a booker at The Bowery Electric. Irvine grew up in Evergreen, Colorado, a small city that has produced more than its fair share of artists and figures in…
While Ryan Scannura was getting his degree in biology in Springfield, Illinois, he started making house music. For a while, he was involved in a club night called Bit Crushed. When he graduated, in 2010, the job market was not encouraging. So Scannura, like many students, decided to pursue an…
DJs and producers increasingly have to find a way to stand out that goes beyond their music. Dillion Francis is all about cats and tacos. Bassnectar’s logo has become a world-wide emblem. Pretty Light’s cats have 48,100 followers on Instagram, Deadmau5 wears a giant mickey-mouse like head. For the swedish duo Dada Life, bananas…
It’s nothing new in hip-hop at this point for a line-up to include the musical influences of multiple cultures as that style of music absorbs ideas from around the world more easily than most others. Nor is it unexpected to hear multiple languages in a hip-hop show. But from the…
Church Fire and Morlox, both from Denver, might seem like unusual collaborators on a split cassette release. The two acts don’t have much in common at first glance: Church Fire could be considered a synth-pop act, and Morlox is more in the realm of IDM. (Each side of the tape…
Doro Pesch is performing this Wednesday, March 11th at the Bluebird Theater. Pesch got her start as a rock and roll singer at the age of three when she started singing Little Richard’s “Lucille” around the house. It was a perfect start for a woman who would go on to…
The Sloths will make its Denver debut on Tuesday, March 10th at the Hi-Dive. Early purveyors of California garage rock in the mid-1960s when its members were teenagers, The Sloths in its earliest incarnation released a two-sided 45 of “Makin’ Love” and “You Mean Everything to Me” in 1965 and…
Witch House started as a kind of joke between Travis Egedy of Pictureplane and his house music producing friend Shams in 2009. It was a reference to the darker electronic music that they and artists like Salem and Crystal Castles were making. Though, truly, the music wasn’t necessarily dark and…
Before essentially disappearing from live music in 2012 and quietly releasing its most recent album, Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time, in 2013, Candy Claws was one of the few bands around on a small budget that managed to create a genuine sense of the otherworldly with its music…
