This year’s Aurora Pride gets a healthy dose of punk rock. Whereas the entertainment at Denver Pride is mostly limited to DJs and drag performers, Aurora Pride has a few rock acts to spice things up, including Soy Celesté, Gila Teen, and the headliners, Plasma Canvas.
Fort Collins-based Plasma Canvas is one of our favorite bands here at OFM, and they’re excited to play their first city-wide Pride celebration. “It was usually something like punk Pride night, or underground Pride, or DIY, independent Pride, or something like that,” explains frontwoman Ren Ash about other Pride events they’ve played in the past. “We had never been asked to play the Pride event for the city of Aurora, for example, or Fort Collins Pride or Denver Pride. We’ve never done anything like that.”
Ash, a trans woman herself, finds herself always happy these days to play lineups of queer bands, but that wasn’t always the case. “It used to be a thing where I felt a little bit pigeonholed,” explains Ash, “because when it’s you and three folk punk acts, it can get a little bit weird. We don’t sound anything alike, and the only reason we’re here is because we’re all trans. But then I’ve really come to love and respect and appreciate, even if I had a lineup like that, just because of the way things are in society and the way fascism is taking hold of a lot of parts of society. I feel like any opportunity to be in a room with a bunch of queers is a beautiful, wonderful thing, and doing that in basements feels one kind of amazing, and doing it in a big room full of queers feels a different kind of amazing.”
Aurora Pride isn’t the only thing on Ash’s mind, as the Plasma Canvas frontwoman is in the midst of launching her new solo project, L13S, a glitzy pop side-project inspired by her forays into online sex work after struggling to find a job. “With this project, I set out specifically to be a hoe in a band,” she explains, “like a sex worker in a project, because finding so much positivity and liberation within my own skin that I felt I loved myself and I was beautiful, despite my body, despite this, despite that. It’s about celebrating the fact that my body is fucking hot, and there are people who want to see it, to pay me for it, and the confidence that that brings me is what allowed this music to come out, because it’s very heightened, it’s exaggerated.”
The resulting project is a character piece, with L13S embodying that sexuality in a very theatrical way. “It’s a character, and I’ve been able to do what Gerard Way did on their early records, which is become a superhero,” says Ash. “Become something that doesn’t have to be stamped with my name and said in earnest as myself, I can become something else and be whatever this person is.”
While L13S isn’t scheduled to make an appearance at Aurora Pride, you’ll be able to catch Plasma Canvas in all of their punk rock glory to celebrate a much harder rocking Pride celebration. As Ash says, “I am excited to celebrate the work in our band with the people who need to hear the music the most.”
Photo Credit: Finn Mcfarlin
