Archives : all posts by Sean

Bernard Kabanda - "Nanankya". When someone tells you a story you do not understand, you are free to interpret it however you please. Understand it as the tale of two lovers, intersecting. As the story of the fox who met the sea. As a sage of wry rebels and their sundance kid. With a song like "Nanankya", it is not just the subject-matter you can adapt, imagine (and, admittedly, appropriate): it is the message. Make this song as wise or as inane as you please. Make it matter, or don't. Do what you will with the moment at 4:31 when the whole room bursts into applause. [Uganda's Bernard Kabanda released this song in 1999.]

TEEN - "Just Another". Iris pulls another lemon from the tree and tosses it over the wall. She has been doing this forever. It is a wonder there are any lemons left on the tree. On the other side of the wall, Iris knows, a boat is waiting in the water. Iris wonders whether it is full of lemons or whether it has sunk. [bandcamp]

(photograph courtesy of Michael P)

OG Melody - "OG Realness ft Felicity Williams". At first click, OG Melody are something irony-laced and mildly heinous. After all, Isla Craig and Thomas Gill are not Original Gangster. They are young, white, Torontonian. This certainly doesn't put R&B off limits, but their duo is um called OG Melody. This song is um called "OG Realness". When Craig sings, "I call up my OG crew / mixing jams old school," the first image in my head concerns strawberry, pectin, mason jars.

Despite this first impression, "OG Realness" is exquisite, gorgeous and sincere. It is bone-dry bedroom R&B, a song of love and friendship that tilts and pivots. It is full of cut flowers. The production - restrained, funky - is a perfect balance for Craig's voice. There is a vogue in chillwave R&B, but OG Melody have little of that drowsy mire. This is not a sibling of the Weeknd or How to Dress Well. It does not even feel influenced by the-Dream. Instead, this is jersey organ, bare snare, careful squonking solo. Look to the Neptunes at their warmest, or Cody ChesnuTT, or perhaps a little of the Notwist. Or rather, stop looking. Despite their look-here wink-nod band-name, despite the look-here wink-nod song-name, "OG Melody" feels utterly unconcerned with looking over shoulders, with winks or nods. It is what it is, free as indian summer.

[download at Bandcamp]

The Records - "Starry Eyes". Like running through a flurry of arrows, without any sign of the archers. Arrowheads gleaming, breathless zing, can't decide if it's jubilant bleeding joy or a death-defying sprint.

[thanks john! / buy]

(photo source)

YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN - "Queens". A messenger arrives form the future, in a time-machine the size of a bachelor apartment. It flicks into existence on the lawn of the White House. It makes a sound like someone slapping someone else. The doors slide open, metallic, reveal a woman. She steps onto the grass. She is scared, glancing. She holds up her hand. In the years to come, this gesture will be endlessly analyzed. Was it a greeting? A warning? Was it just the sun in her eyes? But she raises her hand and this is the moment the snipers shoot. The woman is pinioned by multiple bullets, like she is dancing around a maypole.

YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN are an art-psych band from Montreal and Toronto who stand in heavy water, weeds to their hairlines; they scythe through fields with wielded guitars; they recall full summer, apocalyptic winter, the heaviest bits of Espers and Besnard Lakes, Led Zep with the Boredoms. They call it Noh-wave. This is a clever joke. Other jokes that have a bearing on Y//ST: wasps, sparks, jellyfish, ice. This music is available on a white vinyl 12" record and I imagine using this record as a plate, a moon, a circular saw through forests of birch.

[buy/listen]

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Elsewhere:

Please read the beautiful, breathtaking speech by Slavoj Žižek at #OccupyWallSt, the best thing I have heard from this movement (and many times more sophisticated, yearning and true than the recent speech by Naomi Klein). An excerpt:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair--the only thing unavailable is red ink." And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants--the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

No Words salutes Bert Jansch.

I will be appearing as a judge at tomorrow's Literary Death Match in Montreal, alongside Jonathan Goldstein, Alexis O'Hara, Katrina Best, Byron Rempel, Jason Camlot and Zoe Page. This is also a launch for the new issue of Maisonneuve.

Later this week, I appear on Wednesday and Friday at the Montreal Improv Festival, as part of VENEZUELA.

(photo source)

Bert Jansch - "Courting Blues"
Bert Jansch - "Running From Home"

These songs are from Bert Jansch's debut, released in 1965. He was 22 years old.

Almost 50 years later, so much was still the same:

My love for Bert Jansch does not just stem from his guitar-playing, rightly celebrated. It is his singing - dry, level. His heart is hidden away - inside the chest of a man. So many songwriters show too much; for Jansch, the fact of the singing said enough. The words; the fingers on strings, like light on leaves; the melody that moves closer and then far away.

This music is not theatre, a performance for a crowd. You imagine Jansch alone in a room, singing to himself.

Bert Jansch & John Renbourn - "East Wind"

And then he could also do this, making an intricate house and unmaking it, like a wolf, blowing.

RIP.

[buy Bert Jansch / buy Bert and John]

Deloro - "Travelling Man". If there is an abandoned country, a man can walk the tracks, collecting rail. Imagine him, Old JR, his wagon full of rail. Imagine his nephew, Reed, riding beside. Reed has a plan: one day he will retrace the steps his uncle has taken, follow the same maps, and gather up all the pinewood ties. He will load his own wagon. Whereas Old JR's home is a thicket of leaning rail, rust-red, Reed's home will be a stately mansion made from weathered planks. He thinks of this as he rides in the wagon, chewing straw. Beside him, Old JR is walking. Old JR always walks. He does not look at his nephew; he already knows what he is thinking. When Old JR was a young man, he too imagined a house made of wood. He did not yet know the cruelty of the world, the enemies in the tundra. He did not yet know the value of a home, somewhere, on a hill, made of the same stuff as guns.

[Deloro is the singer Jennifer Castle, Dave Clarke & Paul Mortimer from $100, Dallas Wehrle from Constantines, and the artist Tony Romano. Their debut, with allegedly splendid artwork, is available now on Idée Fixe.]

Galen Hartley - "Raised Like a Glass". Biding time 'til the chorus, like the way we bide our time until the toast. Finally, we raise our glasses. Finally, the stream of wishes and hopes, cheer and fizz. Finally, that nimble guitar lick, handclaps, sloppy outcried "yeah!" This is a song full of swaggering slapstick, Hartley most of all, and while I am not always certain of the softshoe, I am certain about the messy clink of that chorus.

[Galen Hartley will release Good Dreams at Montreal's Inspecteur L'Epingle on Thursday Oct 6 / Buy or listen at Bandcamp]

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Elsewhere: Adam & the Amethysts skinny-dip through the video for their exquisite song, "Dreaming" (NSFW). Catch their Montreal record launch at Phonopolis Tuesday night - 6pm.

Emperor X - "Canada Day".

Canada Day is July 1. This is also my parents' anniversary. Every day is many things.

Emperor X wrote a song, crossed from Canada into Detroit.

First he played the tune on his acoustic guitar. Later he added electric bass. On bass, he tried to play "Canada Day"'s nervous system, to find its firing bump and jerk. He sang and re-sang the lyrics. I hear they're draining the lake now / I hear they're shutting the fountains off / They plan to alter the shoreline / They plan to make it all clean. He sang of defeat and persisting, relinquishing certain things and conquering others.

My favourite part of this song is not the finger-pick or the bassline, not the words or the message: it is the syllables he sings in the middle of the song, clipped and cooing. This moment has no meaning, intention, direction. It is a man singing um, oo and ee. It is like swimming in a river, riding on a bus, watching the fireworks fire in an unfamiliar land.

Emperor X - "Erica Western Teleport".

More than two years after I first discovered the marvels of Emperor X, he is releasing a proper album on Bar/None records. Something called Western Teleport. It includes "A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp," a track from that very first post. It includes a roaring song called "Allahu Akbar", which reminds me of Owen Pallett, Los Camepsinos and very early Bec. It includes autoharp. It also includes "Erica Western Teleport", wherein he seeks a kind of obliteration.

Don't think of her swimming sideways / Don't think of her, kicking at the topsoil / ... Don't think of her running in an old t-shirt / Don't think of her porous membrane / Don't think of her, reading on the L train / ... Don't think of her / Never think of her.

[pre-order Western Teleport / out October 4 / find one of his hidden treasure paks, concealed around the US]

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Elsewhere:

MProv, the Montreal Improv Festival, runs October 12 to 16. Terrific shows, with troupes from Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg. Includes performances by both of Said the Gramophone's main writers. Hope to see you there!

Montreal Improv is also organizing Impossible Montreal, an amazing, daunting, death-defying city-wide scavenger hunt, November 4 to 6. Register now.

At Length have a wonderful long interview with my friend, the video artist Julie Lequin. Thoughtful, hilarious, inspiring, with clips from her extraordinary upcoming show, Top 30.

Concerts à Emporter co-founder Vincent Moon needs money! With Petites Planètes humming along, he is seeking funding to finish several short films based on footage from All Tomorrow's Parties. Go pledge your support at Kickstarter - and come away with all sorts of thank-yous.

CANT - "Too Late Too Far". Sick for six days, eyeing the potted plants, feeling like their leaves are blurring into the wallpaper. Sick for six days, rashes on your legs, wrists, sides. Day seven, seeing the rash everywhere. It is spreading to the bedspread, to the carpet, to the waxen leaves of the potted plants. You rub your eyes, rub your eyes, cough phlegm into the wastepaper basket. The rash has spread to the wastepaper basket. You know this is a dream but you do not believe this is a dream. Something has cut the tether between knowledge and belief; you are still in your bed and reeling, sweating sick and dry as a stone. Did another person do this to you? Is there someone to blame? Was it another person's gorgeous eyes and the way they turned their back? [buy Dreams Come True]

Lunice - "Hitmanes Anthem (Noaipre remix)". I missed Lunice's Pop Montreal gig last night. The line was too long. Was this what I would have heard, inside? This, performed live - a band of three keyboardists, one baritone, a pistol loaded with blanks? I would have liked to dance to this. I would have held the keyboardists' eyes, inhaled the pistol's black powder. And if Lunice had been something else, if Lunice had played something else, I would have danced to this anyway. It would have been my secret, hidden, noisy and dumb. [buy the Stacker Upper EP]