If you’ve ever caught freestyle rap action in person, there’s a chance you’ve been curious to try it out. The bigger names in indie rap, like New York’s Homeboy Sandman, Slug of Atmosphere, and Los Angeles’ Open Mike Eagle, have made freestyling a regular part of their live shows. It’s…
Colin Ward seemed to be an endless river of music. Ward wrote, played, recorded and produced more than forty albums between 2008 and 2013, releasing a new piece of work every three or four months through the Bandcamp page he held under the name Alphabets. But in late 2013, it…
Charles Joshua Ogzewalla, who went by Josh, died on the evening of April 10 from a combination of colon cancer and liver failure. Doctors originally told him he wouldn’t make it to February. “He had that tattoo on his arm that is the Dylan Thomas quote — ‘Do not go…
Slovenian industrial band Laibach return to the Gothic Theatre this Saturday, May 23rd for its first show in Denver in over a decade. The group, comprising cultural provocateur and multi-media artists will share the bill with Ministry. Whereas the latter came up in a relatively free cultural climate in Denver and Chicago,…
Widely considered one of the best live rock and roll bands going now because of its joyously exuberant shows, Diarrhea Planet does one better on the modern reinvention of classic rock without sounding like a specific band from the 1970s. Think more like Thin Lizzy impossibly influenced by modern garage…
Kyle King was a guy you’d see at several Denver shows up through his untimely death on August 24th, 2009. As a student at Green Mountain High School, King was an avid music fan whose unmistakable, loud, silly and infectious laughter is something everyone remembers about the King. That and…
Bob Domonkos’s plan was hazy, at best, but he knew one thing for sure: He needed rappers. So he posted an ad on Craigslist. “Need rappers for booty-centric rap,” it read. “I have a song I’d like to see get out there…I think this little ditty has great potential. It’s…
It’s almost 6 p.m. on a Monday night, and while the rest of the world is still recovering from the weekend, Eddie Barella, Jason Newcomer and Chris Barr are setting up for the 164th episode of their podcast, The Eddie, Jason and Chris Show. After more than thirteen years on…
From 2008 through 2010, the DIY space Rhinoceropolis and its sister venue Glob experienced their most active periods. The DIY touring circuit was still in full swing and many of the buzz bands in the underground made Rhino a stop along their route across America. I went to Rhino and…
Early this year, roughly a month after the members of Denver band Flashbulb Fires announced their breakup, former vocalist Patrick McGuire found himself back on stage, this time alone with an acoustic guitar and a new project: Straight White Teeth. He knew, despite being in an emotional place, that he…
Dan Deacon, who headlines the Bluebird Theatre on Tuesday, May 12, makes unclassifiable music that plenty of people insist upon trying to categorize anyhow. His latest album, Gliss Riffer, collects computer-generated music with a stylistic range that encompasses every conceivable genre, as well as some that don’t exist yet except…
When Rhinoceropolis opened its doors to the public for the first time in May of 2005 for an art show, it represented a continuation of Denver’s long tradition of DIY venues. From warehouses and the like for punk shows in the 80s, the Greenhaus of early alternative rock band The…
Rhinoceropolis opened to the public with an art show the first week of May 2005. It was founded by Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design students Harry C. Walters and Jeremiah Teutsch and musicians/artists Milton Melvin Croissant III (aka “Buddy”) and Warren Bedell. The four had spent plenty of…
Denver’s Ian Cooke spent the weekend in Fort Collins, armed only with his cello, his effects pedal and his voice, ready to convert new fans and meet with old ones. On Thursday night, he played a solo set on the roof of the months-old Illegal Pete’s. “That’s an honor, and…
Underground hip-hop was on the ascent by the early 2000s and reached a bit of an apex in its popularity by the middle of the decade. In that time, Chris Steele released his debut album Litterture in 2004. His clever wordplay and thoughtful, if irreverent, humor made his rap songs…
When Dweezil Zappa formed his Zappa Plays Zappa project a decade ago, one of his goals was to hip younger listeners to the music of his father, Frank Zappa, who passed away in 1993. But the first year he took the band on the road, a lot of people from…
Veteran songwriter John Common has been treating Denverites to well-crafted, imaginative songwriting since his days in alt-country band Rainville. Having worked with a handful of bands and projects since then, Common has demonstrated remarkable flexibility in both sound and performance. His collaborators over the years have included a number of…
Darren Kulback and Kevin Wesley had to be bored living in Parker, Colorado as teenagers. But both were aware of truly underground music from a young age. When Kulback was eleven years old he saw that legendary 2002 tour that featured Lighting Bolt, Arab On Radar, The Locust and Blood…
It began with a book: Girls to the Front, by Sara Marcus. After a fellow musician gave David Castillo the book, which chronicles the rise and influence of the riot grrrl movement, he was inspired to make a zine. The zine never happened, but the idea became a band called…
I met Felix Ayodele (aka Fast4Ward) through a small DJ circle when he moved to Colorado twelve years ago. Every week, fellow musician Jacob Sanders and I visited Ayodele’s music shack behind his house, and the three of us would seize whatever instruments were close by, huddling over an eight-track…
Writing a book is hard. Writing a book on something that happened thirty years ago when you’re half way across the world is harder. But for Bob Medina, finding a way to archive and share the Denver punk scene of the ’80s while spending most of his time teaching in…
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…
