If our quiet corner of the Front Range has seemed louder in recent years, that’s partly by design. Fueled by its beating black heart in Denver, the region’s extreme music scene has grown wings over the past decade — serving as a launching pad for some of the most renowned acts across the heavy spectrum, while attracting top-level touring bands making unholy noise around the country.
“When I was coming up and trying to bring bands to Denver for shows, I was emailing and begging them to come out here to the middle of nowhere,” Ethan Lee McCarthy, a longtime DIY music lynchpin best known as frontman of the somber and suffocating doom-metal trio Primitive Man, told Boulder Weekly earlier this year. “Now it seems like everybody comes here, and we don’t miss out on a lot of shit.”
McCarthy joins a deep and diverse bench of heavy-music purveyors who will soon descend on South Broadway for the inaugural Ghost Canyon Fest, three days of ear-splitting ruckus happening Aug. 11–13 at Hi-Dive, Skylark Lounge and Mutiny Information Cafe. He’ll be performing with his dark ambient drone project Many Blessings, alongside acts like fellow Colorado bruisers Church Fire, Austin post-punk outfit Pleasure Venom, Canadian noise rockers BIG|BRAVE and dozens more.
“I think Denver and the Front Range in general has gotten more open over the years to experimental music that’s sort of outside the bubble,” says festival co-organizer Jeremy Brashaw of local psych-rock act New Standards Men, who moved here from Chicago in the early 2000s. “One of the biggest things I’ve seen is an openness to a wide swath of heavy music, from doom and sludge metal to all these different variations. Seeing that [inspired us] to say, ‘These things can all work together.’”
This realization dawned on Brashaw and fellow musicians Cory Hager, Sean Dove and Brian Dooley during an inspired round of drinks at Denver’s TrashHawk Tavern in late 2019. After the success of a similar local showcase spearheaded by Brashaw and Dooley earlier that year, the friends hatched a plan to put together a larger-scale festival that scrambles the boundaries of esoteric subgenres while honoring a core commitment to extremity and experimentation.
“Music can sometimes be put into these boxes and commodified, and this is just the opposite of that. It breaks through all those rules you’re supposed to follow,” says Jennifer Koshatka Seman of Loveland art-rock trio Shiny Around the Edges, who kick off the festival with their Aug. 11 set at Skylark Lounge. “These are people doing the thing they want to do — sometimes it’s really harsh, or it’s just a completely different approach to music. … You might be shocked. Your ears are gonna hurt. But this is the kind of music that moves you.”
That last sentiment might sound like a metaphor, but the multi-instrumentalist and Metropolitan State University of Denver lecturer is speaking literally here. While each artist brings something singular to the diverse three-day bill, Seman says many of these disparate acts are connected by a shared physicality that registers deep within the body.
“You feel almost like your molecules shift because of the volume or the intensity of the playing. That kind of visceral performance is something I think almost all these bands have in common,” she says. “So if you want something different, and to really feel different, this is the place to be.”
ON THE BILL: Ghost Canyon Fest. Fri.–Sun, Aug. 11–13, multiple venues. Tickets here.
BONUS: Women to the front
Three can’t-miss Ghost Canyon acts fronted by people who aren’t dudes
Consider the stereotype of a heavy-music artist — from harsh noise to post-punk and points in between — and your mind’s eye likely conjures a burly guy with a beard. But as the inaugural Ghost Canyon Fest lineup attests, that limited vision of the scene and who it belongs to is in desperate need of a refresh.
“I’ve often been the only woman in the room at shows like this … but there are so many women in these bands, which I was not expecting,” says Jennifer Koshatka Seman of Shiny Around the Edges, who co-founded the Colorado-via-Texas outfit with partner and guitarist Michael Seman more than two decades ago. “You wouldn’t think that would still be a conversation in 2023, but it kind of is.”
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Masma Dream World (Brooklyn, NY)
“New Standards Men played with Masma Dream World when we were on tour in March, and seeing them was one of those life-altering shows. Once we started really talking about getting this fest going it was like, ‘Well, Masma Dream world has to play. It has to happen. This must be a thing.’” – Jeremy Brashaw, festival co-organizer
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Flooding (Lawrence, KS)
“The unrelentingly somber self-titled debut from Flooding — singer-guitarist Rose Brown, bassist Cole Billings and drummer Zach Cunningham — is catnip for fans of slowcore legends Codeine or Texan stone-gazers True Widow.” – Charlie Zaillian, Bandcamp Daily
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Shiny Around the Edges (Loveland, CO)
“I don’t think we fit neatly into a box, but when I listen to early Sonic Youth — like, Confusion Is Sex era — I feel like I’m channeling that balance of aggressive explosion and then restraint and intensity. … I feel like our music has space in it. There’s sometimes a lot of noise, and it’s always pretty loud. But there’s room for something to happen.” – Jennifer Koshatka Seman, multi-instrumentalist and singer
