An unlikely icon has burst onto the EDM scene. Brandon Wisniski, known eponymously as Wreckno, creates earth-shaking bass drops, raps about pulling up on your dad and refers to himself as a “FULL TIME BUSSY BOPPER” on Twitter. He may be the biggest, loudest, gayest producer the bass scene has ever seen, and he’s just getting started.
Wisniski’s music melds together the aggression of old-school gangster rap with the manic energy of bass music and the glamour of a drag show. It’s a perfect fit, but it has never really been done before.
A motet, in Western classical music, is a composition, diverse in form and style, dating all the way back to medieval times; a polyphonic form described by scholars as “a piece of music in several parts.”
Today, we might call such a conglomeration simply … a jam. Maybe that’s where the head of drummer Dave Watts was in 1998 when he founded what would become one of Colorado’s (and the world’s) most well-loved live bands: The Motet.
Always laying on a fresh coat of funk, rock, soul and jazz, the band is known for surprising their die-hard audiences with top-tier special guests, but have other tricks, and indeed treats, up their sleeves too, especially for Halloween.
For Coloradans, the name Covenhoven has become synonymous with intimate and heartfelt yet cinematic and powerful folk music. Over the course of three previous full length albums, Joel Van Horne, the stalwart man behind the timidly convicted voice around which the music of Covenhoven swirls, has unflappably delivered expertly crafted, immersive music which seems to speak directly from his heart into our ears.
Ragtime World, the new album from Boulder, CO’s Augustus mixes their psychedelic rock sound with classic rock vibes and folk, giving listeners no expectation of what will come next. After releasing several full-length records, with Ragtime World Augustus can take pride in keeping their music fresh.
There is a cultural, dad-inherited fondness for flipping through AM radio channels while driving late at night. The Crooked Rugs’ new LP, THAT! is what you’ve been searching for on that AM dial all of these years – something that manages to sound otherworldly and familiar at the same time, drawing from every era of psychedelic rock.
Even when he’s in bed, trying to calm his crazy mind so he can sleep, Tech N9ne keeps his phone within reach. He never knows when the next lyric will come, and when it does, he wants to be sure he gets it down.
“I hate to lose my ideas,” Tech N9ne said in a phone interview with BandWagon. “My mind races. I have that kind of torment. I can see things behind my eyelids.”
That’s the kind of devotion you’d expect from a rapper who’s recorded 14 albums — with a new one on the way soon — but it’s also the kind of work he has to put in (even as he’s about to turn 50) for his record label Strange Music.
