{"id":3159,"date":"2012-01-13T12:02:09","date_gmt":"2012-01-13T18:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=3159"},"modified":"2012-01-13T12:02:09","modified_gmt":"2012-01-13T18:02:09","slug":"15-minutes-with-chad-vangaalen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2012\/01\/13\/15-minutes-with-chad-vangaalen\/","title":{"rendered":"15 Minutes with Chad VanGaalen"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nBy Victoria King<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Chad VanGaalen may refer to himself as a \u201cjoke\u201d of a singer-songwriter, tour relatively little, and gain the reputation of being a \u201cnotorious homebody,\u201d he\u2019s still working with one of the biggest and best record labels in the world. After the success of his 2004 release Infiniheart on Flemish Eye Records, Sub Pop jumped on board the crazy psycho-eclectic and talented musical train of VanGaalen and they\u2019ve been going steady ever since.<\/p><\/div>\n


\n\u201cIt\u2019s funny. Every time I go there I\u2019m like, \u2018Really? You guys still wanna keep doing this?\u2019 And they\u2019re like \u2018What are you talking about?\u2019\u201d he explains over the phone, on one special Friday afternoon of Now Sounds<\/em>, the radio show I host on CKUW<\/a> with Kyra Leib.<\/div>\n
\n\u201cI feel like the entertainment business in general can get pretty creepy pretty quick,\u201d says VanGaalen. \u201cThere are a few labels out there that are still running their businesses properly. And I think Sub Pop is one of those. They still take me out to dinner every once in a while.\u201d<\/div>\n
\nWhile his own self-entitled discography is stand-alone impressive, his alias projects are equally as enthralling. Black Mold is a CVG alter ego, more electronic and less singer-songwriter.<\/div>\n
\n\u201cThe Black Mold record that came out was a pre-ejaculation on my part, and me being really excited to kind of represent myself.\u201d As it turns out, Black Mold isn\u2019t the only thing Chad\u2019s got going on. \u201cSub Pop and Flemish Eye have agreed to let me have my own sort of cassette label. So this month I\u2019m putting out 13 records of my own stuff. There\u2019s one Black Mold album, but most of it is electronic-kind-of-synth music. There\u2019s one hip-hop record… There\u2019s gonna be a download code for all the cassettes, and they\u2019re gonna be super cheap. You can go get them off the website and it should be up in the next week. I\u2019m just putting on all the finishing touches on the album art.\u201d<\/div>\n
\n\u201cInvention of Science is a hip-hop group that I\u2019ve been in for a long time, and that\u2019s a \u2018best of\u2019 record of sorts. It\u2019s funny cuz we\u2019ve never put out a record, but it\u2019s ten years in the making,\u201d VanGaalen explains as Kyra and I try to grapple with the idea of 13 new records.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d let each other fall asleep, and then wake each other up. Someone gets a beat ready and then the person who\u2019s just been woken up has to freestyle about what they were dreaming about. Sometimes it works out really well, and sometimes it\u2019s horrible. It\u2019s a collected work from the past ten years and I\u2019m super excited about it.\u201d<\/div>\n
\n\u201cAs we\u2019re speaking I\u2019m finishing up all the track listings for all my delicious new tracks,\u201d VanGaalen informs us, and goes on to list a few: \u201c\u2018Jumbo Tanto,\u2019 \u2018Rebel\u2019s New Hit,\u2019 and \u2018Gargantuan Truffle Digestion\u2019 . . . \u2018Creepy Circus\u2019 is probably the best one on there. Or \u2018Debbie Lindox Trabs Cam\u2019 is pretty good too.\u201d<\/div>\n
\nKyra asks, \u201cOne thing I\u2019ve always wanted to know from listening to your music concerns \u2018JC Head on the Cross.\u2019<\/a> At the end of the song, it sounds like there are little kids talking to someone. I was always curious as to what or who that was?\u201d<\/div>\n
\n\u201cThat was a snippet of stuff from my uncle,\u201d VanGaalen tells. \u201cMy uncle lives out in Victoria and used to work at Vic West Elementary School. He used to have the kids over for a pancake breakfast every Monday. One day I was groggily waking up and made my way downstairs. My uncle is like the best uncle in the world by the way, in case you couldn\u2019t tell. He was just entertaining these kids. I had a saxophone there at the time, so we were jamming out on the saxophone and this kid was saying weird stuff about Jesus.\u201d<\/div>\n
\nAnd when asked about his visuals, Chad admits that art school didn\u2019t do too much for him. \u201cI did go to art school. I went there for printmaking. My dad was really into watercolors. He was also into underground comic books, like all the Zap <\/a>stuff and Freak Brothers…<\/a> I taught myself by looking at comics. And bugs and stuff. I really liked bug books. I still like bug books. But yeah, Art College was more like day camp for adults… It was a failure.\u201d<\/div>\n
\nWhat wasn\u2019t a failure was Chad\u2019s latest tour in Europe, lasting just over two months. \u201cCopenhagen. We had a really awesome show in Copenhagen,\u201d he recalls. \u201cWe\u2019d never been there before, and people were singing along. It\u2019s pretty cool to show up to a place you\u2019ve never been to and people were singing your songs. It was weird. But in a good way. It could have been weird. It was a good weird… London was good. I got to get drunk with some friends, and they took me out for dinner. It was a crazy gourmet dinner, and I just ended up getting French fries. Which I thought would be funny, to make them make me French fries at a crazy gourmet restaurant.\u201d<\/div>\n
\n\u201cThat\u2019s so North American of you,\u201d Kyra teases.<\/div>\n
\n\u201cNo, I love French fries though. It was good times for sure. Oh! We played at a hippy fest in a German forest, and there was, like, a body temperature lake, and like, Germans were getting nude, so everyone was like nude and stuff… \u201d<\/div>\n
\nOur 15 minutes with VanGaalen has nearly come to it\u2019s close, as he says modestly, \u201cLike, I don\u2019t sell records. You know? They just have me around… I\u2019ve had a lot of good luck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Check him out at the West End Cultural Center tonight, January 13. Tickets are $20 at the door or $17 in advance.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Victoria King While Chad VanGaalen may refer to himself as a \u201cjoke\u201d of a singer-songwriter, tour relatively little, and gain the reputation of being a \u201cnotorious homebody,\u201d he\u2019s still working with one of the biggest and best record labels in the world. After the success of his 2004 release Infiniheart on Flemish Eye Records, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[178,915,1093],"class_list":["post-3159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","tag-chad-vangaalen","tag-sub-pop","tag-west-end-cultural-centre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}