Villa Villa Nola Download Records

SUGAR BOYS * BRUISED KNEES * KARAOKE * STEVE JR.

brendan — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:53:50 +0000

Thursday Jan 19th @ La Brique ~ 9m ~ Montreal

SUGAR BOYS (http://sugarboys.bandcamp.com/)
“tall and relaxed; towering and laid-back: heavy psych with cuss words”

BRUISED KNEES (http://bruisedknees.bandcamp.com/)
Toronto post-punk quartet featuring members of The Creeping Nobodies, rolls along like nobody’s business. A duet of talk singing vocals walk on top of dissonant guitar chords building in intensity, creating ever changing sound structures. Organ tones hum underneath shaking percussion. Erie songs that float around you, encompassing your every move in thick airy layers of guitar notes and drum beats.

KARAOKE (http://okkaraokeok.bandcamp.com/)

STEVE JR. (http://stevejr.bandcamp.com/)
“trying to eat lunch here”

PWYC ($8 Suggested)
BYOB

9pm

Quagmire * Matt Shane & Jim Holyoak

brendan — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:44:46 +0000

“Matt Shane and I have been drawing together for over a decade. Our current project, Quagmire, is on exhibition at the Triennale québécoise, in the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Unlike our previous collaborative installations, Quagmire features work made only by the two of us. As such it speaks much about our relationship as friends and collaborators. It also represents a place where our interests intersect. Matt’s solo work is primarily focused on urban / industrial encroachment and ghost towns, while my work is concerned with paleoecology and monsters. Our shared world is one at the borderlands of wilderness and civilization, the real and the imaginary, deep time and the present. Quagmire is informed by our entire history of collaborative drawing experience and will take our shared practice into a new, shared dimension. We are intrigued by collaborative art because of the twists it throws into individual patterns of art making, and for its visual documentation of relationships, blurring together the seams between art and life. Our way of drawing parallels music, in how musicians improvise, and instruments harmonize to play the same song. For the show’s entire three-month duration we are drawing on-site in a specially constructed room with curved walls, covered floor to ceiling in paper. The show will culminate with a finissage. A camera has been set up to take photos at various intervals while we draw, and the resultant stop-motion animation plays in a loop on a monitor positioned at the entrance to our drawing room. We began drawing in advance of the installation, at our Mile End studio. Those drawings were then installed in the MACM gallery along with bare white paper for us to continue to draw onto. Our plan is to draw as much as we can, hopefully 6 days a week, leading up to a finissage at the exhibition’s finale. We have been granted after-hours access to the museum, and expect to do most of our work at night. The video footage will document our nocturnal activities, and stand in for us during the day. In Quagmire, we are representing the swamp as a metaphorical site of disintegration and formlessness, but also of abundant life and regeneration. A swamp is in a constant state of digesting itself. So far, our mire-home depicts mangrove roots, vines, mud, bulrushes and lilies, as well as entire cities growing on the skin of a dead sperm whale. A ‘quagmire’ can also refer to a difficult or precarious situation. It is an apt metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in as a species, dependent on the fossilized remains of an unfathomable, ancient, swamp world. This swamp-world was the Carboniferous period of geologic time, 354 million – 286 million years ago. On land, the Carboniferous was the age of insects, ferns, and amphibians. Although trees had yet to evolve, there was 40% more oxygen than today. The swamp forests consisted of giant ferns, where dragonflies flew on meter-wide wingspans. The coal we now burn is the fossilized remains of these forests. In the ocean, coral reefs thrived, and much of the Earth’s oil is what remains of the Carboniferous plankton. Carbon, after which the period was named, constitutes both the material we use to draw (ink, graphite, and charcoal) and the basis of all living organisms.”

- Jim Holyoak

ONCE TOUCHING NOW

brendan — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:41:36 +0000

This video’s about want & need & the feeling during a particularly conscious instant: moments of discovery, rise to protest, personal needing, freeing, forgiveness, longing, or ultimate regret. There’s a microscopic sound painful to hear, seeking to hear, could we ever bear listening, were we even physically able to bear to hear. The video’s about an instant or moment, like a particle, an instant of PTSD, a cloudless explosion, a blast, something zoomed in on, the moment an STD’s shared. The main character of the movie (hand & eye) has been whispering their whole life. Then the child becomes a teen – in the video, they reach out for connection. When grown – in the video, everybody’s generally failing but in these blinding instants, the subject of the video, sitting in sound, can share feelings of liberation/satisfaction. The moment in the video, as in other promotional materials & products has been drawn out for pleasure’s sake.

Art Of Community September 23 > 25

brendan — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:21:37 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grimes

brendan — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:13:11 +0000

Grimes - Geidi Primes
“has a strange air of being created unconsciously…It is a vastly intriguing set of pop tunes highlighted by its amazing fifth and sixth songs: “avi” and “Feyd Rautha Dark Heart”, which are each frighteningly reminiscent of an unaccountable psychic experience…it touches on many different tones without exploiting any. It manages to be playful without being precious, clean without being sterile, cryptic without being obscure, and operates in a deceptively complex melodic structure without calling attention to the artistry therein… a small child, listening to adult contemporary radio in the back seat of your mother’s minivan when a special kind of song comes on. You are still maddeningly susceptible to the sympathetic rise and fall of a maternal voice, yet this is a different sort of mother, one more primeval and distant. Icily it falls over your entire body, begging for an escape you know you cannot give it… It calls to mind the glowering of a child king amidst the many vestments and decorations of his coronation.” - Arbutus Records

ON SALE here.

Grimes - Halfaxa
“…Grimes can be the soundtrack to a witch hunt and a tape dub from a night at Danceteria simultaneously. She harnesses dark and light…”Wereglid” opens with synths that sound like plates falling and disintegrating. This gives way to vocal pitching, ominous pads, delayed drum programming and, despite any sonic abstraction, could still be said to fit neatly within a traditional pop song structure.” - Arbutus Records

ON SALE here.

Listen to Weregild:

Jen Reimer + Max Stein

brendan — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 11:13:27 +0000

Jen Reimer + Max Stein create environmentally interactive soundscapes for horn and live electronics in public spaces. They will be releasing a compilation of their performances soon!
www.jenreimer.com

Jen Reimer & Max Stein- Saint Urbain underpass, Suoni per Il Popolo by jenreimer

Square Victoria Metro Installation Part 1-3 by jenreimer

Hotel Castle Ruins * Montreal

brendan — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:08:20 +0000

Everyone, this is a new project, it’s a DIY hostel here in my house @ St. Laurent & Fairmont in Montreal. I’m calling it Hotel Castle Ruins (http://www.hotelcastleruins.com). I have 5 sets of keys on attractive chains, 2 beds plus extra cots… There’s tea everywhere, good water pressure, heat & AC, a Wii with Zelda & the stereo downstairs has loud power.

Anyway, if you’re looking for space to stick extra friends, visiting bands, artists here for shorter stays: it’s a private room with great common space in an easy location for visitors.

For more info or to make reservation requests & payments, visit http://www.hotelcastleruins.com.
There are nightly, weekly and monthly rates, all flexible.

H.C.R. is also open for quiet shows, readings, art shows, interview taping? meetings & feasts.

I know this is funny, but if it might work out for visiting friends or acquaintances, send them my way as you wish!!!
Thanks!!!!!

B D R

Suoni Per Il Popolo 2011

brendan — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:22:15 +0000

Blue Hawaii * Blooming Summer

brendan — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 05:49:00 +0000

Blue Hawaii – Blooming Summer

$5 on VVN here.

Blue Hawaii is the blossoming project of Alex Cowan and Raphaelle Standell-Preston, a side project of her band BRAIDS. Their debut release, “Blooming Summer”, is a studio album which evolved in stages – each song being produced as vocal and melodic ideas worked closely with computer based applications. Given this, the warmth of the electronic element is shocking. Much care has been taken to ensure that no harsh taste remains from music arisen largely from software intended for dance music. Beautiful, haunting female vocal harmonies are layered upon a lush harmonic and rhythmic structure provided by synths, guitars and effected drum machines.

Listen to Floral (Bonus Track):

BRAIDS on BLACK LIGHT TIMES!

brendan — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:27:00 +0000

Braids inaugural interview posted on Black Light Times!! a new BLOG to capture bands and other artists in their perfect state! The premise & mission of the site is simple: film interviews under black light, have effects on the microphone. One will not hear & see everything but what you do hear & see will be under black light with effects on the microphone, like twins sharing thoughts and eyes!