Archives : all posts by Sean

Sandro Perri - "Futureactive Kid (Part 1)". Sandro Perri is a leaning genius. He sways, tilts, slips. His Tiny Mirrors was one of the best Canadian albums of the past ten years. It was easy-listening and also free, starry folk-jazz unfixed from precedent, metronome, physics. Impossible Spaces is his new record, and now his music is touched by humidity, 80s soft rock, dying young-adulthood. It recalls Richard Youngs, Bread, Bon Iver, Fleetwood Mac's "Sara". Hear squelching bass, snare, flirting synths, bass clarinet and horn. There are songs about "openness and solitude", transformation, the hesitating Wolfman.

For much of "Futureactive Kid (Part 1)", the music is nebulous, even gaseous, seething under Perri's straight-ahead. He sings like a singer, unobscure. But then he steps aside, lets prowl the guitar, crunch, low woodwinds. The song's beauty is a kind of illusion; there are more shadows here than lights. Not dawn, not dusk, these are sounds for the mingling greys in the middle of the night.

[If it's not already clear, this is an album of an album. Don't just listen to one song. Buy it from Constellation.]

When Saints Go Machine - "Kelly". If every song sounded like this, if every song was this good, we would all age faster, and be happier, and scowl less at the radio in the coffee-shop. We would stroll with our lovers, blissful, dying twice as quick. I am not sure whether it's our hearts that would go, or whether it'd be something at the cellular level. (I am not a scientist.) Just that we wouldn't be able to keep it up. Too much, too soon. Before we knew it, we'd hit the fade-out. [buy / thanks steve]

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Extra Happy Ghost - "Mercy, Mercy". Stewart is in love with a submarine captain. Her name is Ida and she has hair the colour of her periscope. Every day, an admiral marches into Stewart's little room, gives him a message to transmit: 120 degrees aft, bear 320.1 to Bluetown / Deploy undersea probes, Jettison 7 / Return to HQ, six knots, 0800 hours. Stewart keeps his finger on the lever; sends the message in Morse dit dit dot. Sometimes, on lucky days, the submarine is near the surface and he can send the message by voice, leaning into an old cold microphone. The admirals never call Ida Ida. They call her Captain Suffolk. Captain Suffolk, Stewart sends through the air, bear 320.1 to Bluetown. But what he wants to send is, Ida, come here. He wants to send, You have eyes the colour of riverbeds. He can send these things only in subtext. In the pause between Morse-code messages, in the break and emphasis of his voice. It is a subtle wooing. But no subtler than the medium itself, radio signal slipping among clouds, through water, between coral. The question is simply whether Ida hears Stewart's love. Whether she hears it, or thinks it's simply noise.

[this story does too little credit to Extra Happy Ghost's splendid Modern Horses, produced by Chad VanGaalen. It's out this week. Hear more at SoundCloud.]

Joakim - "Forever Young (extended afro mix)". Summer's not quite running out, but it's taking a deep breath. Quick, while the humidity's looking somewhere else, slip in another jam: "Forever Young" is one part woodblock, two parts LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great". Its sophistications are each kludgey, slightly obvious. Arpeggiated backbrush, synths shimmering on pause, vocals for coaxing slo-mo dancestuff. But I love the duskiness in this track, the solemnity of its rising cloud. This is July, this is August, fields of strongly-coloured flowers and ten thousand shrilling bugs. [more on SoundCloud]

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David Bowie - "Sound + Vision". We lived on a deep island, so we made deep boats. Just a deserted dot in the middle of the Atlantic, sandy and palmed, one albatross-flight from an oil rig. One big rock, a hole beside it - a stepladder that led down to a slide, a slide that led to a spiral staircase, and then a series of escalators and elevators, each curling deeper into the ground, where we lived and played and held dance parties. We called the island El Magnifico, because it was magnificent; the El stood for Little. It was the deepest island in the entire world. I lived with my wife, the most beautiful woman in the world, and her two children, from a previous marriage. I taught them the foxtrot and blackbottom. I taught them morse code and semaphore. I treated them as my own kids, growing up on El Magnifico.

Yes, we had boats: deep, deep boats. Boats like glaciers. From the surface of the sea, they seemed like little trawlers, tugs. From underwater - upside-down skyscrapers, plunging. We made them using the steel we dug up as we burrowed into El Magnifico. We filled with boats' interiors with mirrors and flashing lights, with clean new kitchen suites and private bedrooms. The idea was that we could give them away to famous rock stars. I wanted to meet Mick and John and Dave and Iggy, wanted to introduce them to my gorgeous wife and our kids. Since it is difficult to attract the attention of rock-stars, to get their managers' to return telephone calls, we built these boats. Deep boats. Then we assembled little promotional packages, folders filled with photos, sent these to the agents. We waited. One day, David Bowie arrived in a helicopter. He had one blue eye and one silver eye. He had red hair. He wore a shiny green polyester suit and carried a saxophone. He was very friendly. He sat with us beside El Magnifico's big rock before we went underground. I remember thinking that his English accent sounded so good that it seemed fake.

"So what gave you the idea for these boats?" he asked me.

"I wanted to meet people like you," I said.

"Yes but why these deep boats?"

I shrugged. "You never see them."

He nodded with a frowny face that said that sounds reasonable.

"What gave you the idea for the riff in 'Sound + Vision'?" I asked.

"The macaw," he said.

"The macaw?"

David Bowie took his wallet out of a pocket in his shiny green suit. Inside the wallet was a folded magazine photograph. He smoothed the creases on his knee. It looked like this:

[buy Low]

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SAPPYFEST CONTEST

Oh jeez this is getting last minute but things ran away from me. In one week and one day, it is the fight night of SAPPYFEST SIX. This is a music festival in the tiny town of Sackville, New Brunswick, toward the northeast corner of North America. It happens to be one of the greatest festivals in the entire world. It is a festival of vast hearts and beautiful sounds, curated by steady, dedicated hands. One big stage, a few very small ones. Moments for great softness as well as rock'n'roll. A sense of community and shared purpose. Also: great slogans. In 2009, the slogan was A FIRE STORM FROM THE 5TH DIMENSION. In 2010, the slogan was SWAMP MAGIC. This year, it's WITH OR WITHOUT YOU.

This will be my third year attending the festival, where I write SAPPY TIMES, a daily journal that is distributed around town. (For a sense of Sappy, read previous years' editions: 2009 / 2010.) I will also be reading at the zine fair. But mostly I will be going to feel feelings, to see swans, to high-five friends. To listen to music from a remarkable line-up, the best line-up I have seen of any Canadian festival this year, probably the festival's best-ever.

Here are some of the names, in descending order of my excitement: Sandro Perri, The Weakerthans' John K Samson, Shotgun Jimmie, Nat Baldwin, Owen Pallett & les Mouches, Charles Bradley, Julie Doiron, Pat Jordache, Greg MacPherson, Snailhouse, Little Scream, Grimes, Bonjay, Hidden Words, Ladyhawk, Chad VanGaalen, Jim Bryson, Jennifer Castle, Hooded Fang, GOBBLE GOBBLE, Burning Hell, Drumheller, the Sadies, Pat LePoidevin, the Acorn and the Mekons' Jon Langford. Plus a dozen more that I've never heard of - and yes oh shit yes this is one of those festivals where you fall in love with strangers.

But listen, Sappyfest is soon. July 29-31, 2011.

So I'd like to give away one pair of tickets really fast.

Are you thinking of going? You should go. Make a roadtrip. Book a room at one of Sackville's university dorms. Or bring a tent. It is the best place to be. (I really mean this.)

Tickets normally cost $99.99. We're giving a pair away for free. But only quickly.

You have until Saturday noon EST - yes that's about 48 hours - to enter. To enter, you must leave a comment on this post. In your comment, suggest a name for a ship that could set sail from El Magnifico. Yes, it is a silly contest.

I'll choose my favourite and be in touch on Saturday. So you have time to make your Sappyfest plans. Maybe we could meet for a milkshake at Mel's. I hope you'll come.

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Adam & the Amethysts - "Walls (Gordon Lightfoot)". Not every break-up is steeped in bile. Sometimes things end without acid, without smoke; they end with the weakest sugar-water, just sadness. This kind of ending is the ending sung in "Walls". Adam & the Amethysts sing it without irony, without bitter subtext. I'm not ashamed to try, they murmur, to be your friend once again, and they mean this. It is not a way of saying its opposite. There is creak, echo, resignation. There is longing, sorrow, and the smallest, smallest, smallest new flowers. I can't seem to find / any words to change your mind / because I left them all behind. You hope this is a song you can sing together, quietly, with the person you no longer dream of.

Digits - "Changes (Phil Ochs)". Toronto's Digits makes it seem like he has a cellar full of closed cases, a hundred closed cases in leather and matte black steel, with clasps, that are filled with coloured discs. He can fit these discs over streetlights, chandeliers, moons, can fit them over your eyes, like glasses, or into the birdwatcher's binoculars. He can change the light, adjust the tenor of your day. Darker now, lighter now, rosy or stormed. Ten thousand ways to change each change. Call in the expert.

[Both of these songs are part of Herohill's free Lightfoot compilation, Turning Back the Pages of My Sweet Shattered Dreams. Download the whole thing here. / more of Adam & the Amethysts / more of Digits]

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Noir Désir - "Le vent nous portera". On 27 July 2003, the man who sings this song murdered his girlfriend. This is not a fiction. Bertrand Cantat attacked Marie Trintignant and three days later she died in hospital. He spent 3 years in prison. In 2010, Krisztina Rády, the mother of Cantat's two children, the woman he left for Trintignant, committed suicide. Cantat was inside the house. An autopsy found that he was not responsible.

Long before these things, in 2001, Noir Désir released the song "Le vent nous portera". The wind will carry us. It features guitar by Manu Chao. There is clarinet and vibraphone. The question is this: Can you hear the evil here? And this: Can you hear the despair? I hear a band playing a hypnotic song, playful and solemn. France's U2, making something intimate and strange. I do not see a death's-head, I do not see the horror. The wind will carry us. I cannot think of a more terrifying thing.

[buy, if your ethics allow it]

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Today is the last day to donate to Said the Gramophone's 2011 Funding Drive. At midnight, absolutely nothing will change. We'll continue doing what we always do. But we won't let you give us money any more, not for a whole year.

If you haven't already donated, in these waning hours, please consider showing your support for the site. Our donor gifts - the first Said the Gramophone book, a secret 7" record, and our mixtape subscription series - are still available.

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Blue Belt - "Anymore". Never supposed to hear them tryin'; never supposed to see the strings. And so what of a hip-hop track where there's effort manifest, fingers playing with knots, two rappers clenching notebook-papers and nodding to themselves, Right, yeah. What of it? Listen to this, you'll see - it doesn't matter one bleeding bit. Blue Belt's song is lightfooted lovely, blueberry jam, every smudge an improvement. The namedrops are more bookish than thug - Oscar Wilde, Rufus Wainwright, Star Trek - but there's nothing namby-pamby in the setup, nothing nervous in the execution. And more than anything - the beat! oh, the beat. Nina Simone and the neatest of flute samples, perfect topiary, ah-ah-ahs that make me wish I was in a rap crew, just so I could invent something new. [Blue Belt are from Brooklyn - debut album july 26?]

Arthur Krumins - "Turned Away". I wonder sometimes if my bicycle is flirting with me, the way it squeaks. I pedal; it squeaks. I brake; it squeaks. I bump over the curb and it gives a happy, wheezy hiccup. Sometimes I bounce on the seat, I ring the bell, in a sort of reciprocation. Not because I'm "interested" in my bicycle, nor because I want to taunt it. But I want to encourage my bicycle's squeaky heart, its rusty longing. I want it to keep searching, in every shift of gear. Because one day my bike will glimpse its true love: a six-speed on a street-corner, with a basket at its front. And even if that other bicycle glides away, down a different boulevard, the years of squeaks will have been well-spent. They were not mistakes. They were investments in something true. [Arthur Krumins' music is free to download]

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Elsewhere:

It's already all over the Canadian blogosphere, but Kai Nagata's Why I Quit My Job is not only an eloquent attack on Canada's mainstream media - it's an inspiring provocation, asking: What do you want to do with your life?. (He has since posted a short follow-up.)

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Eternia and MoSS - "The Half". Eternia and MoSS's At Last was my biggest discovery from the Polaris Prize long-list, and sadly (somewhat inevitably) it's absent from the 2011 short-list, unveiled yesterday. The best of the nominated records are by Colin Stetson, Destroyer and Arcade Fire; Austra and Braids show a lot of promise, but their debuts aren't treasures. I'm sad that there isn't more variety among the finalists, but then again my complaints can only go so far: my own ballot was mostly indie rock. The thing is this: we all live in our own little worlds. I look to the Polaris to expose me to some of Canada's other little worlds, the best of techno & r&b & hip-hop & punk & electronica & jazz & classical & reggae & all the rest. And for this, the short-list usually falls short. In fact, this year's only nod to hip-hop and r&b is the Weeknd's House of Balloons, the Canadian r&b album that has been marketed most heavily to indie- and art-rock listeners. "The best Canadian album" ends up meaning "the best Canadian album, according to critics who mostly listen to indie rock and folk". (And to be honest, I'm not sure if that can be fixed.)

Way, way, way better than House of Balloons is the fourth album by Ottawa-born rapper Eternia. At Last is officially a team-up with the producer MoSS, best known for a 2009 mixtape with Obie Trice. The record is barbed, pushy, confident, more Nas than Shad. It's braggadocio and storytelling, chin-up don't-fuck-with-me hustle. "The Half" is my favourite cut - angry and loving, pissed-off autobiography. Eternia's rapping a love-song for her half-siblings but she's still bruised from the origin story, furious at family dysfunction. It's rare you get to hear something so tough and celebratory; an insistent, growling This one's for you.

[buy]

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Elsewhere:

Kilian Martin is a zen, skateboarding Fred Astaire.

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