Open Music Session: High Fiction and Rob Drabkin at Open Media Foundation

In February, Open Media Foundation hosted its monthly free Open Music Session event, which featured musical guests Matt Rouch & the Noise Upstairs.

Before that, the December 2016 Open Music Session welcomed High Fiction and Rob Drabkin, a Denver indie-rock double bill. High Fiction is an unconventional power duo, with a trad-folk vibe that is very Denver. Both Gary Grundei and Amy Shelley are talented multi-instrumentalists, helping the band switch sounds from song to song.

The songs are often personal and poignant. "The Young Men," for example, is influenced by a tape of an interview that Grundei conducted with his deceased father for a school project and found years later. The samples of the tape that play intermittently are goosebump-raising.
Rob Drabkin, meanwhile, is a talented singer-songwriter with hair that is as warm and fuzzy as his earthy, mildly melancholy music. "Someday" found itself on some major Spotify playlists, which isn't surprising, because it's a gem of an acoustic tune.
About Open Music Sessions: Every month, Westword joins Open Media Foundation and Greater Than Collective to bring you Open Music Sessions, a video series aimed at introducing people to bands and providing context for their music. Every First Friday, we bring a band to the Open Media Foundation studio at Seventh and Kalamath and record a live performance. In addition to broadcasting the show live on the Denver Open Media TV stations (Comcast channels 56, 57 and 219), we edit the clips for certain songs, which you can find at westword.com. You'll also find additional information about the band and the recordings of individual instruments on select songs, which you are welcome to download in order to create remixes or simply to learn more about the way the music is constructed.