After their departure from Winnipeg, Alpha Couple conceived this album on the road. Driving/touring/vacationing/living/playing somewhat directionless, Jax and Wohlgemuth eventually ended up in Toronto, where they have both called home together before—when they created their Alpha Couple concept. Coincidentally, I didn’t listen to this album until I was on a road trip myself, entering the California border around witching hour. Gone are Stalingrad’s pop sensibilities, and (through oddly emphatic associations) it seems like there is no destination to these songs either—samples and vocals drift or wave or fly by, anchored around some loop, acoustic guitar, or piano riff. And in the exchange, AC have honed in on the haunting beauty that has been the driving force behind them all along. Most powerful is the behemoth-length album opener “A Walk Through Central Park” at nearly 15 minutes. Consisting of reverbed vocals, only three acoustic chords (if that), and samples from the radio and answering machines, the song is a testament to their self-prescribed label “tweenoise.” Two songs of reconstructed Stalingrad tracks marks Wohlgemuth and Jax (who, for full disclosure, is a Stylus writer) heading headfirst into noise/ambient territory. All in all, this is an eerier, darker release than their full-length—and up for grabs through the Free Music Archive. Worth the download for anyone wanting to get out of their comfort zone and experience some freshly charted areas of music. (We Have No Zen, wehavenozen.blogspot.com) Taylor Burgess
I know you’ve heard/seen Dj Co-op around town sometime, somewhere – perhaps DJing at Grippin’ Grain, or as half of the Co-op/Hunnicut duo. But less ubiquitous is the name of the man behind the turntable. Meet Tim Hoover and his most recent project, which is a huge departure from hip-hop beats you might hear him spinning on any other night. He’s created 60 minutes of richly layered instrumental music, stirring together lost-and-found samples with his own compositions. The day after his album listening party at the Planetarium, we got away from the heat and the traffic at Bar Italia to talk about recording under his own name this time to produce this totally different sounding album, More Napkins.
Stylus: You said the “real” title of the album at the show last night. What’s that?
Tim Hoover: It’s I Should Have Grabbed More Napkins. It’s just a thing that I’ve been saying for years. It should be on my tombstone. But it seemed a bit clunky for a full album title. I love napkins, but I never have enough of them!
It’s probably your best bet to take your hands out of the ground and get them on this album. Hands in the Ground is the first full-length release from local trio Bog River. Comprised of Carly Dow, Ben Hadaller and Dave Barchyn, the band released Lost in the Woods in 2010, a rough yet valiant five part EP recorded at Hadaller’s cabin in one day. The EP was a glimpse into the promise possesses – a passion that drives the three of them to work intensely together on a fokly sound that is not only unique but tight and arousing. This time around, the band is doing it right, having recorded this album over the course of a couple weekends while still choosing to record back at the cabin. They dabble in a wide variety of genres and instruments, from pure folk, to Dixieland and gospel on this album. James McKee of the F-Holes makes a trumpet and trombone contribution on tracks four and five, with Alex Campbell is at the piano on track five. Vocalist Carly Dow’s vocals on the album are raw, while Dave and Ben offer silkier alternatives. Hands in the Ground is muddy and simple contemporary folk, and delves into deep themes of family, love and roots. If you’re not already familiar with the band, stop by the WECC on October 13 to celebrate their album release party. (Independent, myspace.com/bogriver) Victoria King for Stylus Magazine
It’s a near perfect August evening – hot without being sweltering, vanilla ice cream in a cup and conversation about music, travel and inspiration with one of the city’s newest and arguably most talented groups, Bog River.
“In the ninth grade, I had a really awesome band teacher who just made me want to go to band camp every year. He just made me love music,” Ben Hadaller of the local folk trio tells me as the four of us sit around a picnic table at Sub Zero Ice Cream. Carly Dow, lead vocalist of the group, jokes that the extent of her family’s influence in her musicality came from the occasional inebriated family member banging on a piano at parties. On her left, Dave Barchyn, former associate at a music store, explains that, “If you work at a music store long enough, you end up owning a music store.” Continue reading “Bog River – Muddy and Simple”
For Cole Peters and Chris Jacques two years ago, it all began as an outlet to release their music but since Prairie Fire Tapes’ inception, Jacques has made seven albums under the name White Dog—some really cool and psychedelic, but most others approach horrifying parts of your brain. Since he’s going to be a performer at this year’s send + receive festival, both of his tape labels are releasing killer stuff, and his own music is taking wild turns, Jacques welcomed me up to his “East Berlin” office space which he shares with No List Records so we could discuss shit.
Mostly, I just wanted to know why his music is usually such a head-trip.
“It’s not meant to be creepy or dark or anything,” he said. It’s because of being a high school guidance councilor that he internalizes a lot of the darker side of the human nature. “I deal with people every day in their psychological needs and hear lots of crazy shit from kids and then their parents about what’s going on in their lives. My teaching has always dealt with people who are marginalized, or downtrodden, abused, and all that kinds of crazy shit. I’m a history student, so a lot of that stuff—things about rebellions and resistance come through as themes in my stuff a lot of time.” Continue reading “White Dog – Noise Below the Wall”
rock and roll. this is dirty, distorted and extremely unslick. i can hear traces of the cows, jon spencer and a little hot snakes. uncomplicated and joyously so. this is rock and roll in its truest form. nice to see it coming from a local act. do yourself a favour track this record down and crank it out of your car stereo driving through the suburbs. then go see them, raise a bottle of standard and bask in the sounds. “party with ghosts” and “come out! get in!” are standouts. (Independent, myspace.com/bwsgmusic) c.frsn for Stylus Magazine
By Taylor Burgess
“Their life was so rooted and so land-based,” said David Fort about some Hutterite farmers who they had come across during last year’s Assiniboine River Music Armada. This is the second year that Twin will be embarking on the tour, departing down the Assiniboine from Brandon, canoeing with their instruments and playing everyone along the river, regardless of who’s living or staying there.
“Remember that one gal,” Fort said. “After we asked they had said, ‘Oh, we have so much food.’”
Leslie Brown, Fort’s partner and fiddle player, chimed in, “We were talking about how we had taken some corn from the field, and she said, ‘Oh, did you see our garden? We wouldn’t have even noticed if you took it.’”
David Enns, who also plays guitar in Twin, said, “She just started listing all the things that were in season that would have been good to take.”
And on cue, singer and percussionist Ally Leenhouts erupted into her jubilant laugh which regularly echoed in the plant room of the Oikos Co-Op while I spent time with the full band and, from the sounds of it, is a regular occurrence with her roommates and bandmates, members of the latest band to uphold the lineage of reputable bands that have come from the so-called “Mansion.”
These four individuals make up the newest and most solidified line-up of Twin, which began as the solo acoustic project for David Fort, who’s better known as a writing force behind Absent Sound. He has played under his acoustic pseudonym for five years, but the line-up only solidified last year. “Really, I had an acoustic guitar long before an electric one. You could say it’s about time.”
Together they recorded a number of tracks of Sharing Secrets with Strangers, an EP which strikes at the core of human experiences and eschews timely references to string together proverbial tunes about life, death and love. Outwardly, the EP is a departure from Absent Sound’s recordings with its traditional folk instrumentations, yet it’s still totally enlightened by untraditional chord voicings and progressions. “In terms of the guitar-work goes, I’ll spend a lot of time on the mood,” says Fort. “I like to create a visual landscape— I’m getting pretty obsessed with things that don’t need to be there.” Lyrically, he says that his inspiration comes from internalizing characters, and take bits and pieces from his life and rearrange them. “To create a dreamscape that is a lot closer to reality than the dream realm, if that makes any sense.”
Before Dave Fort and Rob Menard played together in the Absent Sound, they kept crossing paths in Flin Flon and Saskatchewan. In Flin Flon, Fort says that he grabbed inspiration from whatever music was around, like music videos and TV documentaries about musicians, as well as taking trips to Winnipeg and Saskatchewan and blowing 200 bucks at record stores.
“Flin Flon was interesting enough that we would all appear at shows in community centres, little outdoor festivals, you know, shows at your high school. Flin Flon is a funny town. It wasn’t overly restrictive, not like when I hear about other some other small towns.”
Dave Fort had been canoeing since he was a kid, “fortunate to go to a camp with canoe trips.” But Fort probably wouldn’t have guessed that canoeing (alongside his music) would lead him to the L.A. River, and land him in a heap of trouble. But despite giving me the basic details of what happened to Twin on the L.A. River, Fort wanted to steer away from that in our interviews—there was much written about the event in California already and, as he pointed out, some reports had reduced the event so much that Twin wasn’t mentioned as a musical group so much as they were bulleted as a group of Canadian rabble-rousers.
What did happen was that Twin, with an L.A. filmmaker and his band, embarked on the recently declared “navigable” L.A. River, much in the same fashion as the Assiniboine River Music Armada, playing shows as they canoed down the river. “I was overwhelmed how beautiful the river was,” says Fort. “You would see these high cliffs that are falling into the river, or a tree growing with its roots sticking out. Then you’d turn a corner and run into 50 cows in the water. It was a really lazy river.”
The filmmaker, Danny Louangxay, had creative control to capture the trip as he saw fit, and Fort plans to soon screen the documentary here in Winnipeg. “He got great super 8 of the L.A. River, I’d say of about eight different micro-climates.” Without hesitation, Fort invited Louangxay to bring his band, Tiny Little, and they too joined Twin on the Armada. However, the documentary isn’t all nature-and-harmony, as their trip was stopped short by officials.
The group had canoed 15 of the river’s 51 miles and then were singled out by a police helicopter, which told the bands to get out of the river. They were given citations for loitering on the riverbed, which were written by two seemingly reluctant police officers, according to the band. All of this came despite the reason that Fort wanted to canoe on the L.A. River in the first place—that it was recently declared navigable by the Environmental Protection Agency, allowing people to swim and fish in the river once again.
“The initial inspiration for the canoe concept was finding the unifying factor for humans, which are life and clean water. You can’t argue with that. The essence of the idea being, having people around clean water, and how much more do you need?”
The band is set to appear in court again, but in the meantime, they’re focusing on the positive and going to be embarking on the Assiniboine. They’re inviting anyone who’s interested to join in on the trip, promising unforgettable sights and nothing but hospitality from wonderful Manitobans.
The departure happens on Friday, August 5 in Trees Blood Farm at Brandon, with stops in Spruce Woods Provincial Park, Fairholme Colony, Long Plains First Nation, and Portage La Prairie’s Island Park before landing in Winnipeg on Sunday August 14 at the Winnipeg Graffiti Gallery for 8 p.m. For more information, contact Twin at [email protected] or find updates at Twin’s Facebook page.
Twin has plans to write new material and record in the near future.
Some of this story takes notes from Long Beach Post’s “One Band, Two Canoes and Citations for Navigating the ‘Navigable’ L.A. River” by Greggory Moore, published February 28, 2011.
Cole Peters, co-founder of Prairie Fire Tapes, has created a real minimal affair with this cassette. Really minimal—the intro to “Ivory, Ether and Blood” is reminiscent of György Ligeti’s eerily terse two-note piece in Eyes Wide Shut, and the rest of this song is a primordial cesspool of ambiguous morality. Such a minimal affair—she touches his wrist when he reaches for his drink, and they both come and die a little inside, never telling anyone—that minimal. Peters, who’s normally doing his HNW (harsh noise wall) thing as Gomeisa, takes his guitar drone project Secret Girls away from the apocalyptic, and more toward the mystical—extraterrestrial overlords keep watch, waiting for the signals to impart infinite knowledge. There’s much tension and peace beneath the surface of In Hiding, and it is up to your conflicting levels of psyche to unearth it all. (Prairie Fire Tapes, prairiefiretapes.com) Taylor Burgess
Basham’s latest is dripping with Mortfell Oktorium’s goofy-yet-relatable character of humour and DIY production, in the form of some seriously up-tempo numbers. Seriously, no one can deliver a punch line like that of “Bad Mood:” A mermaid pops out of the river and makes a come-hither motion. “I wasn’t really in the mood / But I didn’t want to be rude! / She was quite the dish / And I wanna return that fish!” This is his third solo album as a follow up to Thick and Thicker, and he recently, to really prove that he’s serious, started playing with The Upsides and they’ve donned themselves The Girth. Unfortunately, length is seriously lacking here (none of these tracks break the 2-minute mark) but that’s not a problem as they certainly are thick with lightning-quick quips and proto-punk energy. “Seriously Not Serious” is the album’s “Marquee Moon” as the most serious number (or is it?!) with Basham analyzing his own talents and it ends with a palatable guitar duet in under a minute and forty seconds. (Independent, www. soundcloud.com/stevebasham) Taylor Burgess
The Absent Sound’s fifth release opens with “TV Song,” containing the simple and resounding message; “Talk back to your TV as if it had something to say.” The guys from Absent Sound have always put an astounding importance on community, having organized the semi-annual celebration of Element Sircus for years, and this album is a call-to-arms for those looking for more than a mundane electronic/escapist life. It’s obvious that Turn Them Off is the product of A.D.D.-free minds. Absent Sound negotiate these five-minute-plus songs in a pretty calm and collected (though energetic) headspace and the band’s songs turn slowly from start to finish, revealing more mysterious layers as they go along. The time signatures and tempos of “Occupying Home” shift prismatically like few other bands in the city (except maybe their peers Mahogany Frog) could replicate, and the self-effacing angst of “Stuck in Line” is for great dramatic effect. Closer “Hip Hop Knights” keeps its groove for a good seven minutes, making it a great ethereal pop song that closes the album and echoes off into the distance. (Independent, www.absentsound.bandcamp.com) Taylor Burgess
