Johnston Farrow

One glance at the man on stage—strange electronic noise-making boxes in front of him, frizzy curly hair in all directions—and it’s easy to understand why Todd Drootin, AKA Books on Tape, gets more than a few looks. It’s especially true once the sounds start. The cold and steady drum machine, the odd snippet from a […]

A dance floor filled with throbbing, sweaty and pink dancers. No, it’s not a case of food colouring exploding under the disco ball. It’s what organizers of the Chicks with Decks event want to see this weekend at Club Rain. The bill features the best female DJs in Atlantic Canada as well as national talent […]

The love song. It is the single most powerful form of expression in musical language. Don’t believe me? Case in point: Chris Martin, a lanky, crook-toothed Brit fresh out of university transformed into a sensitive heartthrob with “Yellow,” a cleverly sappy song that compared the colour of the stars to being in love. From your […]

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know about Andrea Curry. The shy, soft-spoken 25-year-old admits that she’s been under the radar on the local singer-songwriter scene. But that could change after the East Coast Music Awards take place later this month in Charlottetown. The Cape Breton-raised, Halifax-based musician is up for three awards: female artist […]

The Halifax hard rock scene just got better. After a line-up shuffle, various part-time jobs to pay for recording and years of songwriting, the members of Big Game Hunt are set to unleash their debut of accomplished, riff-filled stoner rock, The Gods Drink Whiskey, on an unsuspecting public this Friday night. “The boy bands when […]

Admit it: you wish Leslie Feist was your girlfriend. One of the big stories in Canadian music in 2005, Feist did not just succeed in her native country, she conquered the world, with her face plastered on and music reviewed in any and every trendy magazine from France to Japan, the United States to Australia. […]

Apt Also known as Dave Plowman, MC Apt left Halifax for greener pastures in Toronto this fall to attend sound engineering school. The intellectual rapper officially released the semi-concept album Canvastripper — inspired by reading Dante’s Inferno as a university student — early in the year. Apt has been back in Halifax for shows in […]

The members of the Maynards have an enviable relationship. Guitarist Heath Matheson, bassist Kristina Parlee and drummer Chantal Tardiff are the kind of friends who always one-up each other’s jokes, finish each other’s sentences and almost look alike. Perhaps not coincidentally, all three wear black-rimmed glasses. The Halifax indie-rock band has been together for five […]

Mike Feuerstack, singer-songwriter of Snailhouse, can’t wait to play before a Halifax audience—that is, if a heart attack doesn’t slow him down first. The 33-year-old is a busy guy, playing in numerous bands, recording several albums worth of material with those bands and under his Snailhouse moniker, all the while holding down a full-time office […]

Probably more than any other genre of music, the singer-songwriter lays the most on the line. Sift through the annals of music and it becomes apparent how solo artists use their work as a way to make sense of the world around them. Johnny Cash tried to reconcile his own flaws with music that did […]