In some ways Katie Stelmanis’ music hasn’t changed much from her solo project, but with a shift in image and more understated synthesizers, she’s suddenly poised to take over the world. The more mysterious-sounding Austra (“dawn” in Latvian) works Stelmanis’ solo material into something more developed. Feel it Break is an elegantly crafted darkwave album. […]
Laura Kenins
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The Provincial Archive make history
For a band like The Provincial Archive, archives aren’t a place to keep quiet, but a place to turn up the amps. Actual archives made the perfect pairing for the Edmonton indie folk band, currently touring the country playing a mix of shows at more standard indie rock venues, and in the provincial archives of […]
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Hot Chitz
Halifax in 1993 was a great place for music—according to critics all over North America—especially if you wore flannel. But outside of “the whole grunge thing,” as Derrick Hiltz calls it, the city’s small punk scene operated independently and produced the now-legendary Chitz. The band formed from friends who’d played in other punk bands, when […]
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Psychedelic Horseshit
Psychedelic Horseshit’s name and weirdo garage rock pedigree suggest a record that’s a wall of fuzzy noise, but Laced jumps all over the map. “Puff” is a mass of bleepy sine tones and launches into the industrial Skinny Puppy-like growl of “Time of Day.” The record strays into feedback-filled surf rock and then changes gears […]
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Steve MacIsaac’s Shirtlifter explores the gay male relationships
Like all good comic artists, Steve MacIsaac got into the form through a period of introspection and too much time spent alone. The one-time Haligonian took a year off from a design degree at NSCAD in 2000 to teach English in Japan, where he started drawing comics seriously, and never looked back. “My job was […]
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The truth about True Story
Four years of comic strips, and all Mike Holmes got was a local and worldwide following, friendships with big-name comedians, a new appreciation for narrative, and, this week, his second book with Invisible Publishing. The True Story book compiles the strips that have been illustrating Haligonians’ stories to Coast readers and online audiences since 2007. […]
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Wear and tear
NSCAD’s Wearable Art Show is a main event on the creative social calendar every April, and the organizers of this year’s show are looking to expand that by making it a full-scale gala production. Starting off as a small-scale show in the student lounge, the show has occupied venues from the Cunard Centre to the […]
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Giant Hand
Ottawa’s Kirk Ramsay pens lyrics that are frequently death-obsessed, end-of-the-line depressing, yet something in his delivery draws you in. “Every year I take another step down, and that’s another step closer to my home in the ground,” he sings, with a sense of honesty and intimacy it’s hard not to be swayed by. Ramsay’s songs […]
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Navigating Traffic
A four-gallery conceptual art exhibition hits the city this week, covering 15 years of artists from across the country. Laura Kenins takes a look at the form’s edgy, provocative history in Halifax. In 1967, the sleepy Nova Scotia College of Art was suddenly propelled to international fame as a centre of conceptual art. Ontario-born artist […]
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Jay Crocker’s music pot
Jay Crocker’s last album was recorded in a 10×10 backyard shed. With a background in improvised music, the Calgary producer and musician brought the improvisation to his studio. After having to move out of another studio space, Crocker took a half-built shed in the yard of his new house, finished construction and made the building […]
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Mark Berube and the Patriotic Few
Mark Berube’s orchestral jazz-folk recalls other instrument-happy musicians of the last few years like Beirut and La Strada, but the music goes beyond the orchestral sound. Berube’s arrangements are notable for the fullness of the sound, packed in with piano, cello, upright bass, drums and vocals. Though he played with larger bands on previous records, […]
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Gleaming the cube
Paul-André Fortier’s definition of dance stretches wider than a stage. The Montreal dancer was inspired for his latest production, Cabane, while spending 30 days dancing on top of a shack in a parking lot—the National Ballet this is not. Cabane, which Fortier has been performing since 2008, crosses lines between dance, installation art, theatre, and […]