Category: News

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M. digs SST?!: Winnipeg Folk Festival Day 2

M. Ward photo by Taylor Burgess

A handful of songs into M. Ward’s surprisingly electric set, indie folk singer-songwriter Matt Ward said, “We want to thank everybody for their hospitality. It’s a very beautiful part of the world that you live in. This is our first Winnipeg Folk Fest—and it’s quite the thing.” And then they quietly let the first notes of “Post-War,” the title track from his 2006 record, drop.

As humbling as that experience was, interviewing the guy earlier tonight was even more so. When I asked him about the impressive roster he’s worked with (including Conor Oberst, Jenny Lewis, Zooey Deschanel, Jim James, and more) he says that he mainly thinks about making records and making music, and tries to put distractions out of his head. When I asked him what his average day in Portland is like, he says (after taking time to marvel at a large dragonfly) that it includes spending time with friends and family, emailing, calling, playing guitar, going on walks, eating food, and… sleeping. When I asked him to define what today’s boundaries of folk music are, he says, “You know, I don’t really know what that means. I definitely don’t what indie folk means. So I think it’s better for you guys to define it, because you guys are listening to everything that’s out there, and I’m not doing that really.”

What music Ward was into, or at least what has shaped his songs, was playing Beatles songs, and then discovering their influences like the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry (M. Ward concluded their encore tonight with “Roll Over Beethoven”), Little Richard, and the like. What really surprised me was that he cited L.A.’s SST Records as an influence. “When I was growing up, they [released] Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. and the Minutemen, and so discovering them was another huge part of the equation.” His “high school band” Rodriguez were really inspired by Mike Watt, fIREHOSE, and the Minutemen. “We really tried to learn from them, and that was a great experience.”

And what about that other world’s-most-influential band—the Velvet Underground? “I love the Velvet Underground. ‘White Light/White Heat’ comes to mind as one of my favourite songs. My band and I used to cover ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ The way that the records sound, you know, the way they were produced, just is engaging and very interesting. I’m a fan.”

Ward kept singing “Post-War”‘s refrain of “Some lucky night” over and over, noticeably putting a number of the kids at the festival to sleep, and then they switched into “Chinese Translation,” one of his best-known solo tunes—a bafflingly poetic and contently simple tune. So I could go into abstract detail of how Ward’s internalization of non-traditional music make him “indie”… but I’d much rather hit the hay and save myself for day three.

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Getting Folked: Winnipeg Folk Festival Day 1

Jayhawks photo by Taylor Burgess

Heading to the Winnipeg Folk Festival on a Wednesday evening sure felt weird—probably because I’m not bro-ing down at the campgrounds right now—however, getting to the fest was really easy with the Winnipeg Folk Festival Shuttle provided by Winnipeg Transit. And though the sun was hot (quite hot) the line-up to get into the fest moved quickly shortly after six o’clock. Remember not to bring glassware or breakables, people.

The opening ceremony was rung in by Dave Courchene from Anishnabe Nation with some assuring words; “Music is universal for all of us. It brings an inspiration of messages which tell of peace. Tonight and through the festival we will see performers using their gifts for a future for our children.” He also talked about how the younger generations cry out, lamenting the people being who are being exploited, a sentiment which was quite a sweet shout-out.

Melissa McClelland then took the stage with her sweetie-pie roots. I was pretty far away, so I couldn’t tell that Luke Doucet was on stage until McClelland cracked a joke that she “married into Winnipeg.” Then it was obvious where the confident stagger that was backing her was coming from.

Despite some claims, my phone didn’t get any reception, so I couldn’t tweet about anything until I got to the media tent. And when I did get there, after submitting interview requests with M. Ward and Mountain Man, (stay tuned for those) I was told that West African afro-blues band of Tuareg rebels Tinariwen couldn’t get their visas, and, thus, won’t be playing the festival. It’s a pretty huge disappointment considering they’re the most hyped and exotic band playing the festival. Then again, maybe you’ll just have to check out Mighty Popo, Omar Souleyman, or Ordo Sakhna instead.

The rest of tonight was filled with the anything-but-exotic Jayhawks (from Minneapolis) and Blue Rodeo (from Toronto). The Jayhawks seemed promising, with their catchy Aughts alt-country, but they didn’t really raise their energy levels above a hearty simmer. As the night went on, the tunes got more and more syrupy (which I thought worked in their favour) and they finally closed their hour-long set with quite their most rocking number.

And to close out the night, Blue Rodeo played the entirety of their best-selling 1993 album Five Days in June. This was likely exciting for anyone who’s heard the band before, but the Blue Rodeo bug hasn’t hit me yet. (Har har har har.) But srsly, folks, they played really tight, and they genuinely seemed excited to be there, which, if I knew their music, would have been the recipe for a perfect show. Beats me why a bunch of Canadians would wax nostalgiac for ’90s Americana though. I’m just not feeling the Winnipeg Folk Festival buzz, yet!

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Azari & III grilled by Resident Advisor


Azari & III are definitely becoming one of the most globally-recognized Canadian electronic artists with their throwbacks to house music served with some solid deep dish diva. The Toronto quartet is on Resident Advisor’s Playing Favourites today, where they’re discussing some of their favourite tracks (which, like most classic house tracks, are pretty easy to find on YouTube) and bit about the members’ history.

If you haven’t heard anything from this fabtastic group, here’s the new, not-NSFW video for their “Hungry for the Power,” which was just rereleased with a handful of remixes on Turbo recordings.

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MEME Returns with More Int’l Flavour


About to begin its second year, Manitoba’s first electronic music festival is getting ready for four electric days and nights.

Starting tomorrow, June 23 and running until Sunday, the Manitoba Electronic Music Exhibition (MEME) features a slew of aural and visual talent. International headliners include Thomas Fehlmann (Berlin, The Orb) and Dandy Jack (Geneva) alongside national and local performers like Hitori Tori (Vancouver) and Winnipeg’s own Venetian Snares and LeBeato. Meanwhile, visual artists Amber Solstice, mrghosty, Rylaan Gimby, and jaymez, among others, will be busy keeping your eyes entranced.

Inspired by Montreal’s legendary Mutek festival, MEME’s free outdoor performances at Old Market Square and club shows are where people have the chance to be exposed to local and international talent they might never hear otherwise. And the festival organizers have injected more international flavour into the festival this year. “A lot of the music is dance music, but a lot of the songs are quite listenable,”says Nathan Zahn, producer and DJ. He’s also excited about the beer gardens and food stalls, which were absent last year. “It’s nice for people to come out on a warm afternoon and enjoy the sun, or in the evening, to come and dance, sit and hang out with their friends.”

The shows at the Zoo, Whiskey Dix and Alive will also be different from your usual club scene. Zahn is enthusiastic about showcasing music that’s not your standard Top 40 and projected visuals which will make for a more immersive experience. International and local VJs promise that MEME will be more than just a music festival. “A lot of them are cutting and pasting from classic TV shows, cartoons. The whole thing about VJing is that it’s not just some people putting on some cool visual show; they’re actually mixing different sources of visuals live, almost improvising,” Zahn explains.

This year’s event also involves two half-day workshops on June 24 and 25 on how to make electronic music, with presentations from performing DJs.

Visit www.memetic.ca to see what you’ll be hearing and where.

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Polaris Prize 2011 Nominees Announced


Hooray! It’s finally time for the music awards that we identify with—the Polaris Music Prize, awarding the Canadian and the creative.
About an hour ago at the Drake Hotel, the long list nominees were announced, and Twitter is already aflutter with who should have made the cut, and doling out congratulations to those who did make it. Of the nominees, Imaginary Cities is the only Winnipeg band to have made the cut, (No Alpha Couple? What a travesty!) and ex-Winnipeggers Neil Young and Luke Doucet are also on the list.
This excitement will last a good 20 days before the short list is announced on July 6, and then we’ll hold onto and bicker over those ten titles until the Polaris Gala on September 19.
Of the nominees, Stylus readers should recognize Miracle Fortress and Colin Stetson from this month’s issue, and Arcade Fire, PS I Love You, Diamond Rings, the Rural Alberta Advantage, Braids, and Women from previous print issues. There’s also a number of weirdo records that the Stylus crew has been talking about this year that are on the list, like Destroyer, Dirty Beaches, Tim Hecker, Little Scream, The Luyas, Timber Timbre, and Young Galaxy. Not to mention there’s been the inclusion of the indie-ubiquitous Buck 65, Black Mountain, Stars, and Sloan.
The rest of these albums should make a bit of a splash over the next couple weeks, but they’re from somewhere in Canada, and someone nominated them—so do check them out!
In all consideration, my money’s already on Braids’ Native Speaker, if the award isn’t preemptively  surrendered to Arcade Fire (who have already had world-charting success and a number of awards) in the next couple days.
List is after the jump. Continue reading “Polaris Prize 2011 Nominees Announced”

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Gorge on This Fine Art

What do you do with an evening? Do you spend hours online with all your buds, looking up pr0n and cooking up steaks? Or watch prime time television rom-coms (or porn), wishing they were really starring you and your friends? Sir or madam, you really need to get out this Friday evening, and get a dose of the real world.


Gillian King, 24, and Kara Passey, 23, don’t mind that their art might be a little hard to digest.
“Most of my work is about personal experiences that people don’t want to talk about,” says Passey, “like being in an abusive relationship, or just having body image issues. People think that you just need to shut up about it. But, why? These are problems that people should be discussing.”
The two women have even found some resistance from their families to support the topics they tackle: Passey paints nude and semi-nude and portraits of herself and her friends, and King portrays female bodies melded together with factory-farmed animals, which has been an active feminist observation since Carol Adams’ 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat.
King says,  “I’ve been a vegan since July last year, and a long-time vegetarian before that. As a woman and a vegan, I’m really interested in those similarities.” She says that she is getting more comfortable with the concept of feminism as she learns more about it, and she can relate it to her animal rights politics.  “I think animals are very oppressed, and hopefully in the future, that will change,” says King, “and people will view them in a different way and not something to be slaughtered or taken advantage of or tortured. And women throughout history have been taken advantage of.”
In her abstract paintings, King draws from slaughterhouse pictures and feminine images.  Racks of dead lambs and dead chickens are nearly indistinguishable from vaginas and long legs.
Passey says, “I like the idea that I’ve made paintings that have made people turn to me and say that they could connect with it because they had similar problems. It just doesn’t make sense to me to keep things quiet, when talking about it could end up helping somebody.”
Passey is inspired by the idea of thrusting private emotions into the public eye, and by the relationships between specific people. She also says that those inspirations have recently included feminism, sexuality, and performative gender.  And while much of Passey’s work involves showing off the beauty in everyone’s bodies, (like her nude self-portrait which graced the cover of The Manitoban, and the portrait of her boyfriend above) one of her new works is focused on the gluttonous: she dipped 12 cheeseburgers in wax. “I preserved these cheeseburgers in wax and it was symbolic of this person I had dated. I was like, ‘What was something about him that really disgusted me?’ And it was the amount of McDonald’s he ate.”
But the two are excited for their opening this Friday at the Edge Gallery, where they will being having a vegan potluck starting at 7 p.m. As Passey coolly put it to King, “Our colour palettes are going to look awesome together.”

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Cluster Festival Fries your Brain and Lightly Sautés your Ears

So, you think that you have it tough, loading up your drum kit, your Marshall stacks, and oh-so delicate guitars, and driving them off to some venue?  Well, you’ve never heard about sonic cuisine.

“Sonic cuisine one of the things that gave us confidence to do Cluster Festival,” says one of the festival’s co-founders, Luke Nickel. While he and Heidi Ugrin were attending the University of Manitoba for their music degrees, they were also members of XIE, the eXperimental Improv Ensemble, and wanted to organize a fundraiser for Amnesty International. “We cooked a meal for something like 60 people. And we cooked it for them, in front of them, live on microphones, while making music,” says Nickel. “Which is kinda crazy. Three of us cooked a meal for 65 and had a convincing performance of music at the same time.”

“Yeah, just think of all the onions you need to cut for 60 people,” says Ugrin. “We made a three or four course meal.”

“And the fact that the place we were in didn’t have a kitchen. We had to bring the entire kitchen,” says Nickel.

Needless to say, after that performance, and working together in XIE for some time, Ugrin and Nickel felt pretty prepared to organize anything they wanted to.

Cluster Festival’s second year will host a trio of events at the tail end of this week, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

The bar is set pretty high—last year’s festival included performances in Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall and 290 McDermot, including challenging (yet rewarding) contemporary dance, projections, art installations, and musical performances.
Within the experimental scene in Winnipeg (of which there’s quite a sizable one—what with the WSO’s New Music Festival, send + receive, and Groundswell), they recognized the need for more integrated arts, rather than multiple-disciplinary.

The difference between integrated arts and multiple-disciplinary arts is a semantic one, as Nickel notes, but still an important one. “You’re actually forming relations and collaborations within [the different art forms], and ‘multi-disciplinary’ doesn’t address that.”

Ugrin says that it means the artists are “not trying to slap on multiple disciplines for the sake of it, but only if works organically ask for different degrees of arts. It’s not just music and visual arts,” and she slaps her hands in different places to emphasize her point.

“Freyja Olfason, who is an intermedia artist,” Ugrin continues, “she is presenting her large, wonderful work Avatar, which incorporates dance, live video projection, webcam, Chat Roulette, music—that is basically our posterchild for integrated arts right there. That’s in the middle of our festival on Friday night.”

This Thursday, taking place at Crescent Fort Rouge United Church in Osborne Village, organist Alexandra Fol will be playing a number of pieces, half of which were written for the festival. And for the second half of the evening, Trio ’86 will be playing a set original works by Cluster’s creators.  “We’re going to be projecting images all over the pipe organ, essentially the front wall, as our way to transform the space.” Giorgio Magnanensi will also be doing electronic improvisations to start off both halves of the night.

And on this Saturday, the Cluster organizers are promising one hell of a warehouse party, with BLITZ. It’s going to be three open floors of beatnik poetry, DJs, Wallballs, and way more.

So the three nights of Cluster Festival should be interesting, to say the least. And what the festival creators have to share are nothing but thanks, and encouragement.

“I’m 22, and we’ve done this thing,” says Nickel. “People should think to themselves, ‘What does Winnipeg need?’ And then do it. Whoever feels that something is lacking, should go and create that venue for themselves.”

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DJ Aubrey scares up steals of deals

//covers//

Sick of top 10 lists? Frustrated by a sea of artists you loved this year mixed in with artists that you hated, mixed in with artists that you might love, but don’t have time to do the research on?

DJ Aubrey Beardsley’s Top 10 Free Albums of 2010 does the research for you. All you have to do is follow the links & click download. 100% legal downloads from 10 artists who want their mp3s on your harddrive – and who’s music deserves to be there – compiled by the house DJ at Freud’s Bathhouse & Diner.

Links from S4lem, Grimes, Lil B, Tri Angle Records, 2muchachos, & more. Music for every taste, from shoe-gaze to witch house; from Russian tweenoise to American folktronica.

Go get ’em before they’re gone:
2010: Something for Nothin’

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Venutres playing in Winnipegggggg!

Surf rockers, hold up those guitar necks! The Ventures are playing in Winnipeg next week, at the McPhillips Street station. Tickets are on sale for only $35 to see the classic guitar-band that wrote the theme to Hawaii Five-O and “Walk Don’t Run.” We will hopefully be sending a writer and photographer to cover all the twang and vibrato of the night.

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STREETZ gets their hands filthy

We’re not much of the hip-hop heads here at Stylus, but when two independent media personalities are publicly bashing heads and an army is being rallied via Facebook, it’s hard not to notice.

A boycott of STREETZ 104.7 FM is loosely being organized by local hip-hop group Filthy Animals, calling on fans to call or text in to STREETZ to send requests for their music to be acknowledged, and for fans to bombard STREETZ’s Facebook page with their love for the group. Member Jeff Bromley, who has had some notoriety in Winnipeg as host of music news and interview program “Signal to Noise”  on Shaw TV, wrote an “essay” detailing why this is all going down. Continue reading “STREETZ gets their hands filthy”