Live! MUSICA Stories
Erin Costello brings the past into the present: Classic Soul in her personal voice.
This is a pile of contradictions, thanks entirely to Erin Costello. Imagine her new album being downloaded via email from Pigeon Row Records, not really existing in another form in this humble reviewer’s domicile; just a 21st century digital musical promotion. But the music on this release was not only recorded On Tape (really: on reels of magnetized plastic strips dragged over small glass and metal charging units) in . . .
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Having fun: Tom and the Orchestra still defy East Coast classification
In the best interviewing tradition, the first thing I do when speaking with Tom Fun Orchestra’s frontman, Ian MacDougall, is remind him that I offended his sensibilities in our first conversation (following the Orch’s first CD tour in 2010). At that time he responded to my simplistic interpretation with, essentially, ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ kitchen party!’
Essentially.
“I don’t think I’d be nearly so (concerned) about it now,” he says on the phone, while wandering the streets of Vancouver during their current tour last week. “I don’t even think I was then.”
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Reggae at the Stampede? A brilliant mix in the heat of summer
Yup. Not exactly the standard fare for the ‘Greatest Outdoor Show On Earth,’ but you have to admit if there’s a music that belongs outside in the popular psyche, it’s Reggae. Does anyone even listen to reggae inside?
Except in Canada, of course. Otherwise there’d be an 8-month hiatus every year from the rasta riddim.
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Soundwalking With Hildegard Part 1: The depth of Acoustic Ecology
What would you do if you were sitting in a formal concert hall, dressed for a night of highly educated performances by acclaimed composers, and you began hearing a cricket, very clearly, and no-one seemed particularly perturbed, and it began to develop harmonically and chronologically, transforming into something quite beyond the normal sound of a single cricket, developing rhuythmically and musically until it swims through your awareness like a goldfish? Or a horse-sized cricket.
Losing your mind? Acid flashback? Another dream like those you’ve been having while driving (I’ll just get out here, if you don’t mind . . .)?
Or, Hildegard Westerkamp’s famous “Cricket Voice” (1987), intended to draw your awareness to the subtleties of sound and silence which most urban dwellers …
