Author: Sheldon

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Hillbilly Highway – Jay Aymar rolls through town

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by Sheldon Birnie

Toronto based troubadour Jay Aymar is hitting the road for his fourth cross-Canada tour, making an early stop in Winnipeg at the Folk Exchange on Friday. Aymar has been writing songs for over 20 years, going hard at it in the 90s before applying the breaks a bit until a song of his jump started his performing career a few years back. With a keen eye for the details of everyday life, and a storyteller’s approach to the narrative form, Jay Aymar is a great Canadian songwriter slugging it out on the Hillbilly Highway. He checked in with us just before hitting the road on Tuesday. Continue reading “Hillbilly Highway – Jay Aymar rolls through town”

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An Interview with From Giants

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by Victoria King

Good people eat good food. It’s a simple fact of life. Those who are miserable munch on things like “low-cal waffles” and “fructose-free popsicles.” After grabbing some dinner with three quarters of the local folk outfit From Giants, their plates said it all: One order of pad thai, one veggie burger, and a mango smoothie later, (which ended up coming out purple, so let’s hope it was just an accidental “Very Berry”) I had a good feeling about the music they were making. Continue reading “An Interview with From Giants”

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Blue Hawaii :: Untogether, Together

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By Adrienne Yeung

Blue Hawaii are Alex “Agor” Cowan and Raphelle Standell-Preston, who live in Montreal and play electronic music. If their sound can be described as dream pop, then their first full length album Untogether is a dream neither nightmare nor sweet, but introspective and amorphous. It’s a dream lit by strobe light, where people from your past flicker in and out of the narrative of your subconscious. Untogether sounds like the kind of dream which you wake up from, lie still, and think about.

Instrumentalist Agor and vocalist Raph wrote Untogether in physically separate spaces – and the sound of many songs are likewise disjointed, drifting, pensive, and fragile. Stylus was curious about Blue Hawaii’s songwriting process, so on a spring day in Winnipeg, drinking coffee and wearing three sweaters, we called Agor (who at the time was in San Francisco record store “Amoeba” watching label-mate Doldrums play an in-store show) to chat. Continue reading “Blue Hawaii :: Untogether, Together”