Deep Club Hopes to Change Dance-Music Culture in Denver

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…

Nocturne Is a Beautiful Addition to RiNo

By definition, “nocturne” is, “a short composition of a romantic or dreamy character suggestive of night, typically for piano.” The Nocturne Jazz & Supper Club epitomizes this definition. Located at 3130 27th Street, across the street from Meadowlark and diagonal from Cold Crush, Nocturne is the latest addition to Denver’s…

Maria Kohler and the Reinvention of Kitty Crimes

The R&B crooner Kitty Crimes is not to be missed. One moment, she’s getting low to the ground, throwing one hand in the air as she cups the mike with the other; the next, she’s serenading every face in the crowd as she makes her way across the stage with…

Witch House: A Denver Joke That Became a National Movement

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…

Listening to Records With Funk Genius Joshua Fairman

Joshua Fairman and Jordan Linit have been playing music together since they were thirteen. In middle school, their parents would drop them off at Blues Bars with state-issued papers giving the teenagers permission to play music in an adult venue. Then, the boys would go home and listen to their…

The Mighty Blue Rider Hones its Old-School Rock and Roll

When keyboardist and singer Mark Shusterman, bassist and singer Rhett Rogers, guitarist Alex Eschen and drummer Scott Beck first formed the Blue Rider four years ago, the band was doing a lot of covers of soul and R&B songs from the late ’50s and early ’60s, with some psychedelic stuff…

Gorinto Helped Unify the Denver Experimental Music Scene

When Cory Elbin started Gorinto in April 2010 at The Mercury Café, it was already an extension of his life as a cook at the Denver institution. He had also played in various experimental bands prior to that time and wanted to have an event that would incorporate the worlds…

Voivod Brought its Prog-Rock-Inspired Metal to Denver

Voivod is set to perform on Wednesday, February 25th at Summit Music Hall sharing the bill with Napalm Death, Exhumed, Phobia, Iron Reagan, Black Crown Initiate and Vimana for the Through Space and Grind Tour. Inspired in part by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, punk, 70s prog and…

Pitbull and His Pelvis Outshine Enrique Iglesias in Denver

It makes no sense to me that I love Pitbull so much — he’s this lizard-like pop star, a dude who, over the last decade, has made a name for himself by throwing gnarly verses about not-very-consensual-sounding sex acts with women into the middle of mindless, often bland club-bangers. Yet…

A Cancer Diagnosis Convinced Amy Kress to Share Her Music

Amy Kress played music secretly for years. But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she decided it was time to share what she’d written. It was a nerve-wrecking for her to tell people about her music, let alone perform in front of others. Many of her friends didn’t even…

Meet the Couple Who Got Married Onstage at the Borgore Show

Last week, Chris Banks, a.k.a. Jackal, and Amelia Coen got married at a Borgore concert, and it was totally legal and totally planned. Banks and Coen have been together for four years, and they’ve been ready to get married for some time, but they needed one more thing before they…

Drinking the Worst Beer We Could Find With Red Fang

The members of Portland’s thunderous, riff-happy Red Fang don’t necessarily regret documenting their unquenchable thirst for really cheap beer in a series of music videos. They certainly weren’t subtle about it. In the video for “Prehistoric Dog,” for example, the band builds armor out of discarded Miller High Life and…

How Denver Almost Lost One of Its Best Songwriters in Kat Ellinger

Kathyryn Ellinger wrote the Sleepers’ excellent new album, Drive, following the most harrowing decade of her life. On it, she appears to have reached the full potential of her considerable songwriting range. Ellinger, who goes by Kat, has played piano since she was a kid and has been a part…