Tag: Zoon

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Sunglaciers Share Punchy Post Punk Ripper “Fakes”

Regular Nature, Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers‘ highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While the material sees the band further continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material also blurs the lines between auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism, through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strange of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays’ forthcoming third album was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue, while sonically seeming to nod at Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman. 

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

“We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’”“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

“We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’”

Late last month, I wrote about “Cursed,” a woozy dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk track that features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say. 

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

“Fakes,” Regular Nature‘s second and latest single is a Freedom of Choice-era DEVO and Remain in Light-era Talking Heads like ripper built around a relentless four-on-the-floor, angular chorus pedal-drenched baselines and squiggling guitars and atmospheric synths paired with Resnik’s punchily uneasy delivery and bursts of gossip and shit-talking. The song captures the inner monologue of someone struggling to keep up with appearances and with keeping up with others, while recognizing — with an excoriating sense of humor — that practically everything in our lives has a veneer of phoniness.

“‘Fakes’ is a song about performance, artifice, and image,” the Calgary-based outfit explains. “Partly a direct narration of a social scene, partly an inner monologue. It is about how our priorities have changed or are distorted. Instead of who we truly are, the importance seems to be on what we appear to be or how we act. Sometimes these intersect, but oftentimes are at odds. We are desperate to mold a certain self-image, a certain perception from the outside, despite what we really think about a situation. We run a risk of being seen as ‘all style, not a lot of substance.’ All social interactions are performative. We are striving to be seen as having a certain character, whether or not that’s who we truly are or how we believe we “ought” to be. ‘Fakes’ is like the subconscious taking over the controls of someone engaging in society (‘Don’t tell me your thoughts about the weather’), then abruptly turning its focus back inward (‘I’m anxious, always acting up’).”

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video is inspired and informed by 90s MTV/Muchmusic music video aesthetics, while also nodding at some of DEVO’s videos from the 80s. Featuring the band playing a sparse, white studio space, at points we see some uncanny mash-ups of their faces and bodies that seem startlingly real and unsettlingly weird.

“Everyone in the band grew up on the aesthetics of 90s MTV/Muchmusic, so it’s no surprise that many of our videos look like they belong to that era,” Resnik says. “When conceptualizing the ‘Fakes’ video, Mathieu (Blanchard) told me he wanted it to be our ‘Big Bang Baby,’ a music video by Stone Temple Pilots. I hadn’t seen the video in years, but the vibe is unforgettable. I freshened it up to fit our weirdness, and adjusted for our complete lack of budget. I tend to go off the rails during the editing process, so I spliced our faces to exaggerate the fakeness. And there are parallels to ‘Big Bang Baby’ that found their way in without my realizing (the old TV, neon colours in the bridge). I think Scott Weiland passed these elements to me from the great beyond.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Share Woozy and Aching “Cursed”

Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding members —  multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik.

The band’s full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies saw them crafting a maximalist approach that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentalism. The Calgary-based JOVM mainstays support the album with tours with the likes of fellow JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano. Adding to a growing profile both regionally and nationally, their material topped the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada.

When the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music in the early months of 2020. Those writing sessions birthed the material on their sophomore album, 2022’s Chad Van Gaalen co-produced Subterranea.

Subterranea saw the JOVM mainstays eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result was a frenetic, breakneck paced album of material that managed to never overstay its welcome. “The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik said. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

Regular Nature, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material sees the band blurring auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Through firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strand of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, Regular Nature was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue while seemingly nodding to Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman.

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’

Regular Nature‘s first single, the woozy, dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk-like “Cursed” features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say.

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video for “Cursed” is a gorgeous, hypnotic and nostalgia-fueled fever dream that makes the familiar — dusty, countryside roads, mountaintop vistas and more — seem surreal and otherworldly. And at its core is a sense of time passing by: The familiar growing smaller in the rearview, the mistakes and regrets looming larger with an unfamiliar and uncertain future in front of you.

“We spent a lot of time in the van this past year. On the tour where I captured the bulk of this footage, we drove over 15,000km in 6 weeks. There was a lot of time quietly spent looking out the window at these amazing landscapes flying by,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “All I had was my phone, but I had recently upgraded to a new-ish one with a great (to me) camera. I had a lot of time on my hands to play with perspective, and loved seeing these vistas in black and white. I was intrigued by the disorientation I felt when viewing rock formations upside down, and how something could look familiar and concrete, but also alien and abstract at the same time. That’s a feeling I wanted to explore in conjunction with our song ‘Cursed,’ which deals with regret, feelings of ‘what if?,’ and the nature of dream vs imagination vs reality. By the time we got home, I had a lot of nice footage to play with. Denice provided a wonderfully easy and interesting subject through which I could tease out a narrative arc of someone wandering alone through a melange of waking, dream, and memory.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Medicine Singers is an experimental collective that can trace its origins back to a chance encounter between the Eastern Medicine Singers, an Eastern Algonquin powwow group and Israeli-born, New York-based guitarist and producer Yonatan Gat, who invited the group to a spontaneous collaboration on stage at SXSW 2017 after seeing them play outside the venue he was about to play. 

That chance meeting led to a five-year live collaboration that saw Gat and the Eastern Medicine Singers playing festival stages across the US, Canada and Europe — and in many cases, those shows saw the Algonquin powwow group bring powwow to audiences and places that had never heard of it before. 

The collective’s highly-anticipated self-titled debut was released last year through Yonatan Gat’s Stone Tapes, an imprint of Joyful Noise here in the States and through Mothland in Canada. Their acclaimed self-titled debut saw the Medicine Singers expanding into a full-fledged experimental supergroup that also included Swans’ Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica, ambient music pioneer Laraaji, former DNA drummer and no wave icon Ikue Mori and the acclaimed trumpeter Jaimie Branch, who we tragically lost too soon last August, along with contributions from their co-producer and longtime collaborator Yonatan Gat.

Through their live shows and their debut album, the collective creates a spellbinding, mystical musical experience that cycles through a kaleidoscopic array of sounds including psychedelic punk, electronic music, acid jazz, spiritual jazz and a list of others. But, the genre-blurring approach is firmly rooted in the intense, physical power of the power of the powwow drum — and the Eastern Medicine Singers’ deep connection to their ancestral music and connections. The end result is material that lovingly honors and celebrates tradition while boldly breaking free from its restrictions — or in the words of Medicine Singers’ leader Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson: “These two cultures can work together, and blend together. We created something that needs to be out there in the world, to show people how we can work together and make something beautiful.”

To honor Indigenous Peoples Day, Medicine Singers share their latest single “Honor Song,” which features Sonic Youth‘s Lee Ranaldo (guitar), Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘s Timothy Herzog (drums), Swans’ Thor Harris (drums), Dean Running Deer Robinson (powwow drum) and Zoon‘s Daniel Monkman, a Canadian Ojibwe artist (backing vocals) — all of whom make their official recorded debut with the collective. Recorded live at famed Montréal-based studio Hotel2Tango, “Honor Song” was produced and mixed by Gat with help from Swedish electronics maverick and frequent Fever Ray collaborator Peder Mannerfelt and Josh Berg, who previously worked on albums by Kanye West and Earl Sweatshirt.

Building upon the collective’s groundbreaking approach to Eastern Algonquin powwow music by blending it with elements of spiritual jazz, psych punk and electronic music to create a wholly unique post-genre sound, “Honor Song” is a brooding song fueled by heartbreak, loss and remembrance. Shoegazer-meets-no wave guitar textures and swirling electronics are paired with the propulsive dynamism of the powwow drums and the Medicine Singers’ haunting cries. The song is meant to transport and connect both the performers and the listener to their departed loved ones wherever they may be.

“Honor Song” is a dedication to loved ones, who have passed, namely vocalist Arthur Red Medicine Crippen’s partner Kathleen, who he lovingly refers in a statement you’ll see below as Ms. cat, as well as their collaborator Jamie Branch. The track was recorded two weeks after Branch’s death, in a recording session she was scheduled to appear on.

On this, his recorded debut with the band, Lee Ranaldo remarked, “Joining the Medicine Singers, both in the recording studio and live on stage, has been a highlight of the last couple years for me. Breaking boundaries and stressing the shared similarities between indigenous music and more modern styles has been a profound, expansive experience. Recording sessions with Native Americans, Canadian First Nations and local Brazilian players, along with an amazing crew of sympathetic collaborators, has, I think, opened up new avenues and ideas for us all. I’m very happy that ‘Honor Song,’ sung so beautifully by Artie Red Medicine Crippen, joined by Zoon’s Daniel Monkman, is the first released example that includes my participation in the group. More to come!”

Medicine Singers’ Arthur Red Medicine Crippen says in press notes: “’Honor Song’ was given to me by my uncle Wayne Red Dawn Crippen. When my wife Ms. Kat wasn’t feeling well I used to sing it to her when she was in the hospital every night. Ms. Kat is from the Ramapo tribe of NJ and NY, she’s also Montauk, her name is Spirit Dancer. When we were in the KEXP radio station in July, that was the song that came to my mind – the ‘Honor Song.’ I didn’t know how sick Ms. Kat really was, until I came home and she passed away in August. This song lingers because we lost her since we recorded it. When I sing this song I think of her the whole time. It’s a part of my prayer, I end each day singing this song and I know she’s listening. ‘Honor Song’ is a travel song, when people leave this world they travel to another dimension, and songs like this reach them.”
 

Music Festivals by William Ruben Helms

Co-founded by three New York music industry vets and longtime friends, Lorimer Beacon‘s founder and head Mike Bell, Kanine Records‘ founder and label head Lio Kanine and Kepler Events‘ and Dedstrange Records co-founder Steven Matrick, The New Colossus Festival over the course of the past couple of years have featured a few hundred handpicked, emerging indie bands and artists from across Canada, the UK, the European Union, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the States.

By design the festival normally takes place about a week or so before SXSW; the festival’s co-founders have long viewed New Colossus as a pre-SXSW stopover that will give its lineups an opportunity to organically gain exposure, while filling a critical void in the city’s festival circuit.

Obviously, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Colossus wasn’t able to happen as scheduled but last year, New Colossus and 18th Ward Brewing hosted a live, outdoor concert series featuring local and regional acts at the brewery’s Bushwick location.

Thankfully, COVID and its known variants have been on the wane for a while now, and we can have the live music experience fairly safely. So, New Colossus is back y’all! Over 100 bands playing in six venues across the Lower East Side — Piano’s, Mercury Lounge, Berlin Under A East Berlin, Arlene’s Grocery and The Bowery Electric — over the course of four, breakneck days this week.

I’m looking forward to an insane four days of live music from a handful of JOVM mainstays and for some new discoveries. You can check out the lengthy New Colossus Spotify playlist, which features curated tracks by the artists performing this year. But personally, I’m looking forward to the following acts:

Badges are still available. And it’s truly a real bang for your buck. More information can be found here: https://www.newcolossusfestival.com