“Bonny Wraith” by Oski XD Doski sounds like it was assembled from glitched out fragments of songs almost collage style to form a song that is at turns lo-fi indie rock, post-punk weirdness and psychedelic rock circa early Flaming Lips. The video has ghosts in frame, paintings of ancient Egypt, archaic cartoons, images of the outlines of the earth and all animated together. It’s obvious the song and the video were created organically and brought together with an analog sensibility in mind. Like the people in the band came up partly on old Nickelodeon shows and Liquid Television and had seen music videos from Residents and Renaldo & The Loaf. Musically the song and its coherent yet eclectic style has a flavor that seems akin to early Ween gone Neo Folk. It’s really does no justice to the uniqueness of the song to compare it immediately to anything else but fans of Sun City Girls may like this as well. Watch the video for “Bonny Wraith” on YouTube and follow Oski XD Doski at the links provided. Gotta appreciate a band using a meme emoticon in the middle of its moniker. The group’s new album Latency Issues released February 15, 2026.
Madeline Goldstein introduces “One Star One Body” with a harmonic, spectral washes over minimal percussion and establishes the dreamlike mood that permeates her forthcoming album Speaking to the Body (out April 10, 2026 via Artoffact Records). When Goldstein’s vocals come in with a soulful yearning she sings about uncertainty, desire and an ache to transcend human limitations but ultimately accepting them and thus oneself. The melancholic sheen of the first two thirds of the song gives way to great forward motion in industrialized beats transforming the vulnerable synthpop song into something darker and direct like the narration from the earlier part of the song is being channeled into action. The stasis and discomfort of the more introspective part of the song as gorgeous as it sounds is converted into the the will to tunnel out of a period of self-doubt, self-repression, oppression and needing to mask an authentic self. As an album closer it is particularly effective and makes one wonder what Goldstein will do next. Listen to “One Star One Body” on Spotify and follow Madeline Goldstein at the links below. The artist is touring the USA this spring in support of the new record.
The rapid-cycling, almost iterative aspect of storyinsoil’s “Spin Glass” with the intro has a minimalistic quality of early synthesizer music but as the track progresses the modulated, lower end tonal rhythm anchors the song. The circular bright tone increases in volume and brightness and then decreases giving a real sense of space allowing for other layers to express a more delicate emotional coloring from inside its framing. The percussive aspect of the more prominent sounds lends the song a tactile quality and the more subtle sounds one more melancholic yet imbued with a sense of wonder. Toward the conclusion the song gives way to a touch of more conventional melody as the rhythms fade out conveying a cinematic quality to the song like the closing credits of one of those existential science fiction and adventure films of the 1970s and 1980s the likes of which were typically soundtracked by the likes of Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh. This doesn’t feel like a homage to that era of synthesizer music so much as finding a fresh application of the way that music had an analog tonal quality that was as palpable as it was atmospheric. Listen to “Spin Glass” on YouTube and follow storyinsoil at the links provided.
International Druglords, photo courtesy the artist
International Druglords is the latest project from Vega Blackwell who has been a musician and collaborator with numerous artists including Trent Reznor, Jesus and Mary Chain, Jurassic 5, The Warlocks and Jimmy Cliff. The new single “White Lie” is accompanied by a video showing a rider who seems to be cast in cosmic colors and imagery and wandering interdimensional dreamscapes. The music is pulsing psychedelic pop with a driving yet finely accented rhythm festooned with swirling melodies and vocals that seem to be just keeping ahead of some peril but maintaining a calm in spite of everything. It’s a song about the illusions we live with that become tiresome and when we recognize them for what they are it becomes necessary to let your inertia of liberation from the low rent oppression break through them for good. Fans of Cut Copy and Big Black Delta will appreciate the fusion of rock and expert electronic pop production present in the crafting of this track. Watch the video for “White Lie” on YouTube and follow International Druglords at the links provided.
Jacob The Horse sound like they popped into the current era from the dawn of power pop in the 1970s on “The Black Hand.” But this celebratory-sounding song like some odd yet charming fusion of The Guess Who, Kiss, Cheap Trick and Big Star is infused with a working class political consciousness and revolutionary fervor. It’s not often you hear a party song that references The Black Hand, possibly a more than slight nod to the Serbian military society that is credited with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 or the organized crime groups in America, it mentions having Communist parties (lower case) and “Dancing and singing ‘bout workers’ rights,” as well as more than passive resistance to the ruling class. Musically it’s something you’d almost expect to hear on classic rock radio where few artists are singing so directly about a proletarian uprising with such joy unless that station plays a lot of The Clash and Billy Bragg. Listen to “The Black Hand” on YouTube and follow Jacob The Horse from Los Angeles at the links provided. The group releases its new album At Least It’s Almost Over on March 20, 2026.
Otracami was taking Adrianne Lenker’s School of Song class one winter while also reading Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez when the ideas and methods of songwriting came to her. The gentle elegance of the guitar work and the subtly shifting harmonics are imbued with the hauntedness one associates with the novel. But Otracami utilizes that mood in “Perfect Reach” to tell a different kind of story in impressionistic phrases of yearning and one’s own motivations in pursuing the path of that yearning and how what you think what you want can seem better at a distance and all the while not wanting to be trapped and defined by expectations. The song expresses a frame of mind knowing how what seems perfect and attainable can be elusive because no one and nothing can fully live up to the visions in your head and the assumption of fulfillment when you find it difficult to accept deviation from an ideal. And sometimes you’d rather not risk disappointment and preserve that perfect fantasy of the mind until it resolves in one’s imagination. The song’s melancholic, dreamlike melodies and the singer’s intimate vocal delivery hold empathy for the embrace of uncertainty, emotional complexity and a desire to avoid harming oneself and others emotionally. Listen to “Perfect Reach” on Spotfy and follow Otracami at the links below.
Piotr Michałowski puts a good deal of texture and percussive qualities in the layers of “Something Good.” Its bright, harmonics over pulsing drones in the beginning sounds like the rapid flow of clouds across summer skies if you could experience that in fast forward while your mind remains at rest and soothed by effervescent music. This part of the song flows into a movement where a distant piano intones a simple melodic figure in the background while a cycling rhythm keeps a steady pace and processed electronic strings like distorted violin cuts through it all with a nearly palpable quality. Toward the end a processed white noise breaks the tranquility of the piece like all along we’ve been hearing a secret radio transmission of a performance of an ambient song by a performer now being suppressed by the state and the feed is being interrupted just as the song fades to quiet. To combine the sublime with the unsettling in this way isn’t so common and that sets the song apart. Listen to “Something Good” on Spotify and follow Polish composer Piotr Michałowski at the links provided. The album The New Season released January 16, 2026.
Taroug (aka Tarek Zarroug) releases his new album Chott on March 27, 2026 via Denovali Records and the single “Najet” further embodies the German-Tunisian producer’s brilliance at fusing modern experimental electronic dance music and traditional Tunisian sounds. The dub-like beats and the echo of wind instruments before the flute takes forefront in carrying melody while vocals interweave throughout the track while scintillating patterns spin around the edges gives and clearly organic hand drums come into the mix gives the song a distinctly futuristic feel but one that embraces elements of the past that give it a new context. One doesn’t often associate the creative products with a link to Tunisian or Islamic cultures generally as something futuristic and that’s just what Taroug has done with the song and the album linking cross-cultural musical influences to create something new. Fans of the more electronic end of Muslimgauze or the more experimental, production infused releases by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan will appreciate Taroug’s knack for depth of layers and immersive soundscaping. Listen to “Najet” on YouTube and follow Taroug at the links below.
The Playground Ensemble, Eight Songs For a Mad King, March 8, 2019, Mercury Cafe
The Playground Ensemble is a new music group based in Denver formed in 2006. Composed of professional musicians, composers, educators and members of the local community dedicated to presenting modern chamber music not purely as a vehicle for performing classical music of centuries past. The group cultivates local composers new, up-and-coming and more established as a means of showing how music based in classical modes can be a valid and vibrant mode of expression. Operating in a multi-disciplinary fashion often collaborating with dancers, poets, spoken word artists, visual/multi-media artists The Playground Ensemble has also brought noteworthy artists to town that might not otherwise find an avenue for live performance in Colorado. From the beginning one of the leading figures of the group has been Conrad Kehn who came to more classical composition as a regular thing later in life than some other musicians. From Gehring, Nebraska, Kehn had a bit of a background in classical music but like any young person in the late 80s and early 90s he got into alternative music and by late summer 1992 he had moved to Denver and attended Denver University.
As happens when you have an interest in music you end up meeting people and he moved in with a member of a band called Pieces of Lucy. He and the bass player moved on from the project and formed Skull Flux. The band was too Goth for the metal scene, too hard rock for the Goth scene but anyone listening in retrospect would recognize the band as death rock band ahead of its time. The group played shows with the likes of Twice Wilted, Body of Souls and 40th Day, noteworthy acts in the broad realm of alternative music. Guitarist Greg Stretton would go on to a stint in industrial dream pop downtempo band The Siren Project and bassist Steve Millin in progressive folk group The Reals. Kehn formed the short-lived more industrial group Kallisti before shifting more into avant-garde and modern classical music as an academic, a place he has contributed to greatly locally and connected to globally.
The Playground Ensemble is celebrating its 20 year anniversary with a 20 hour marathon on Saturday, March 21, 2026. In ambitious yet accessible fashion with community outreach and goals in mind the event will include a morning yoga session with music, afternoon and evening concerts feature new music (in the modern classical sense) as well as a later night experimental music event with after hours improv. Sprawling from MSU’s Kalamath Building to Stanley Marketplace to the Holiday Theater and Glob it is an event aimed at highlighting various aspects of The Playground Ensemble’s legacy and ongoing goals.
Full schedule and details below. For more information please visit www.playgroundensemble.org. Listen to our conversation with Conrad Kehn on Bandcamp.
Spontaneous Team Composition Workshop (all ages and levels welcome) Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Kalamath Building 800 Kalamath St, Denver, CO 80204
Join Denver’s The Playground Ensemble as we celebrate our 20th season with a 20-hour MARATHON of new music.
The day opens at 7:00 AM with a yoga session and gong bath, followed by the Sound Bites breakfast meet-and-greet.
After breakfast, participants will be divided into small groups and given 90 minutes to collaboratively create a new work to be shared at the end of the session. Each group will be facilitated by Playground Ensemble teaching artists who will guide participants through the music creation process using hand gesture composition, graphic notation, structured improvisation, digital audio workstations, and musical story-telling to name a few.
Bring your own instrument and we will also provide a variety of electronic and found sound instruments to help ‘orchestrate’ and inspire creativity. The teaching artists will demonstrate how these approaches are adaptable to a wide range of educational contexts and are accessible to learners of all ability levels and musical backgrounds. The session will conclude with a performance of each group’s composition.
Afternoon at The Stanley Marketplace 2501 N. Dallas St. Aurora, Colorado 80010
Join Denver’s The Playground Ensemble as we partner with Friends of Chamber Music to celebrate our 20th season with an afternoon of music creation and community at The Stanley Marketplace. Each session highlights a different part of what makes Playground Ensemble the innovative organization that it is.
Family/Community Music-Making 1-2:30 PM: We invite families (grown-ups too!) to create their own instruments and compositions. Create your own compositions using colors and shapes and hear them played on the spot! Record your own beats at our electronic music station. Make tongue depressor kazoos, and play our collection of strange found sound instruments.
At 2 PM, Sing With Us! Meet us in the Stanley commons for a community singing of Pauline Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation. Using any vowel sound, sing a tone that you hear in your imagination. Listen for someone else’s tone and tune to its pitch as exactly as possible. Introduce new tones at will and tune to as many different voices as are present. Sing warmly.
String Quartet Concert 2:30 PM: In keeping with the spirit of Stanley Marketplace, the Playground String Quartet provides an eclectic sample of works by Latino, Indigenous, and women composers. Including works by Gabriela Ortiz, Raven Chacon, and Caroline Shaw, this program contains the breadth of both Playground’s style and their mission.
Playground at 20! MCA Denver at the Holiday Theater 2644 W 32nd Ave, Denver, CO 80211
Hosted by MCA Denver at the Holiday Theater, this series of concerts is the heart of MARATHON.
The evening starts with Shane Courville (trumpet, electronics, composer) and Nathan Hall (piano, electronics, composer) presenting solo, duo, and improvised works on themes of freedom: freedom of nations and sovereignty, freedom to express our own identities, and the freedom of creative collaboration.
Up next join Leah and Josh for a 30-minute program of (mostly) contemporary art songs that recall childhood and gently remind us never to stop playing, even amidst the gloom and doom of life today. When you look through the kaleidoscope of your childhood, what do you see? Do the bright spots of hope, nature, and laughter stand out, or does darkness prevail?
After these two duo sets we gather for a celebratory toast to all that has been accomplished in the previous two decades while looking forward to the future.
At 8PM is the main event, The Playground @ 20!
This chamber concert features the first work we ever played, a new commission by Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez for bass flute and ‘ghost’ string quartet, and a new work by Playground Director Conrad Kehn for the entire ensemble.
The evening will also feature the Colorado premiere of Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Ithánali, about a Chickasaw woman astronaut who is designated to be the first human to set foot on Mars, aware of the irony of her own action – colonizing Mars – and how it compares/contrasts to the historic colonization of her own tribe.
We will also highlight one of our favorite works commissioned with I’m Waiting for Your Crip Cadence, a collaborative composition by Nathan Hall and performance artist MG Bernard that creates an auditory and visual experience of what it is like to exist in a chronically sick bodymind exploring ideas of the disabled experience of non-linear time, and the doctor-patient relationship through a visceral display of how she is bound to the medical industrial complex, dependent on uncomfortable relationships of care, and indentured to pain.
Late Night GLOB
Close out MARATHON at Denver’s DIY citadel, GLOB.
This underground atmosphere set will intersperse avant DJ sets by former Playground board member DJ i.lind before our Music of The Shining, a show based on music from the Stanley Kubrick (and Stephen King) classic.
At midnight Playground composer and board member Silen Wellington will lead us in Haunting, a ritual performance. This is followed by Loretta Notareschi performing How All’s to One Thing Wrought! an improvisational work for a custom-designed virtual instrument that uses the electronic transformation of a single cello low C to express the spiritual idea of an interdependent web of all existence. Luke Wachter will perform …and we are a collection of memory for solo vibraphone and still photography which juxtaposes the impermanence of improvisation with the immutability of static images, examining how identity is constructed in the mind by collecting and reinterpreting memories and shared experiences. Ryan Fiegl winds us down with an electronic music set with reactive video as his musical alter ego Severed Shadow.
The evening closes with an open invite community-improvised drone session carrying us into the early morning.
“Monopolar” by Jakarta, Indonesia’s Strange Fruit eases into motion with hazy harmonics and swelling and resolving textures and tones. The mood is like a downtempo band that got deep into blissed out shoegaze psychedelia. Yes, there is guitar but the whole songwriting aesthetic is more like electronic music and fans of Seefeel, Black Moth Super Rainbow and the more experimental end of Verve will appreciate the most. It’s like a musical break from the overwhelming turmoil of world events which we could all use a little bit of now. It feels like what the late 90s did in the underground music world with a sense of mystery and an ambient hopefulness. Watch the entrancing video for “Monopolar” on YouTube and follow Strange Fruit at the links below. The group’s latest EP Drips, its first release after about a decade-long hiatus, drops April 3, 2026 via Gentle Tuesday Recordings.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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