Date: 2010 — Earliest installment of the Fantasia series. Tom Murphy’s 2016 Westword preview frames the series’ launch as an Alphabets album-release showcase with a ‘rich visual element’ — consistent with this year’s 18-track fantazia2010 archive folder + soundtrack subfolder being a release artifact rather than a flyer-driven event.
The earliest installment of Colin Ward’s recurring Fantasia series. Confirmed by the archive folder _Documentation/Music/alphabets/fantazia2010/ which contains 18 original tracks plus a dedicated fantazia2010soundtrack/ subfolder.
Format hypothesis (updated 2026-05-13). Tom Murphy’s September 2016 Westword preview of Fantasia 2016 frames the series’ origins as an Alphabets album-release showcase: “When the event launched, it was a showcase for the release of an album by organizer Colin Ward’s musical project Alphabets… The 2011 incarnation of Fantasia was as a video-art show, and in 2012 the event evolved into something more.” The 2010 18-track folder is consistent with this framing — Fantasia 2010 reads as an album with a visual component rather than the larger multi-room installation event that the 2012 → 2016 incarnations became. The fantazia2010soundtrack/ subfolder (containing N[ext]L[evel] MUSICVIDEO1.mp3 and invincible 3.mp3) further supports this — the event had a soundtrack-style audio layer, suggesting projected video or a film component.
Archive evidence
The fantazia2010 folder holds 18 MP3 tracks specifically labeled for the event:
- beginner birds
- pogo rabbits hop games
- amphibians dance teams
- dewey grassbugs flying teams
- buzzd ostrich boxing fight
- centaur parties
- griffin parties
- beep beep computers
- talk talk machines
- invisipears
- tiny mollusk
- shields
- crackd munky tree jumps
- moving bear octopus
- robo goats howl and bang
- pond fish swim teams
- style finder bile mouse
- fawn kids woodblocks
The fantazia2010soundtrack/ folder contains two additional tracks: N[ext]L[evel] MUSICVIDEO1.mp3 and invincible 3.mp3 — likely soundtrack material for a video or multimedia component of the event.
Context
Fantasia is Colin Ward’s recurring large-scale interdisciplinary event in Denver, blending live music, visual art, video projection, and interactive installation. The first textual reference to “fantasia” in the archive is the track “run it run it fantasia mixx” on the NOV09 album (November 2009), suggesting Fantasia began as a concept in late 2009 and was first staged in 2010.
The full Fantasia chronology, with dates resolved Session 19 from primary Westword sources:
- 2010 (this entry) — Album-release showcase format; venue uncertain; pre-Rhinoceropolis era for Colin.
- 2011 — Video-art-show variant; smaller-scale than 2012+. See Fantasia 2011.
- March 24, 2012 — First fully documented installation event at Rhinoceropolis. See Fantasia 2012.
- (no 2013 installment — confirmed by 2014 Westword piece which calls 2014 the third edition after 2011 + 2012)
- June 6–7, 2014 — Two-night event at Rhinoceropolis. See Fantasia 2014.
- (no 2015 installment — Tom Murphy’s Sept 2016 Westword piece calls 2016 the “fifth installment” which counts: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016.)
- September 9–11, 2016 — Three-night event at Rhinoceropolis + Club Scum + Glob. See Fantasia 2016.
Archival note
The animal/creature-themed tracklist (beginner birds, pogo rabbits, centaur parties, griffin parties, etc.) is consistent with the broader alphabets aesthetic of that period (2009–2010) — the June Monsters 09 album and the July-August 2009 archive use similar zoological naming conventions.
Sources
- Archive folder:
_Documentation/Music/alphabets/fantazia2010/(18 tracks) - Archive folder:
_Documentation/Music/alphabets/fantazia2010soundtrack/(2 tracks) - Upstream reference: track “run it run it fantasia mixx” in
_Documentation/Music/alphabets/NOV09/(Nov 2009) - Westword — Fantasia Returns to Rhinoceropolis This Weekend (2016-09-09) — Tom Murphy’s framing of the series-launch shape
Research gaps
- Confirm or rule out a venue for Fantasia 2010. Candidate venues: (a) the Lincoln Park-neighborhood house Colin and Stephan ran in winter 2010, (b) Rhinoceropolis as a guest event before Colin moved in, (c) another Denver DIY space.
- Was Fantasia 2010 a public event at all, or a release-party format closer to a record drop than a multi-room installation? The 18-track folder + soundtrack subfolder is consistent with either reading.