Halifax artist Stephen Kelly’s kinetic sculpture and sound installation, WaveUp, isn’t necessarily about isolation and the loneliness of a remote location, though that mood pervades the experience, just below the surface of the work. Attached to mechanized and levered arms, speakers are mounted to walls and suspended from the ceiling. The arms move and the […]
Sean Flinn
Posted inArts + Music
Jerry Granelli lets go
JJerry Granelli is a man in motion. During conversation, he moves constantly, pushing hands, lifting arms, craning neck, bending and straightening core behind his desk. While making 1313, his new solo drum/percussion/electronics record (named for the address of his office and an adjoining performance space), Granelli powered through the four-hour, one-night recording session back in […]
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Temple Grandin
As far as movie titles go, her name needs no embellishment. Temple Grandin stands alone. Claire Danes plays Grandin, a renowned American author and scholar on the human-animal relationship who lives with autism. This is a memory play, with symbolic and illustrative animation used, more than it is a biopic. Scenes stand out and are […]
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Objectified
Regular people are seen but not spoken to—only about—in transitional shots and sequences from one industrial designer or design writer to the next. In this documentary about “our complex relationship with manufactured objects” we get the stories from talking heads, but none from average people who’ve developed a devotion to or reliance on this or […]
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Purge
Aliide Truu is an elderly woman living alone on a farmhouse in rural Estonia. When Zara, a “[m]uddy, ragged, and bedraggled” girl” fleeing her abusers hides on Aliide’s property, the two women intrinsically identify the other’s survival impulse and slowly recognize a shared history. The elder has survived historical occupation of her nation by Soviet […]
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Friendly Rich and the Lollipop People
On the whole, this sound—the central practice of collaging cabaret, ballroom, folk (from early 20th century North American to gypsy and klezmer), jazz, electronic effects and heavy-riffed rock and noise—has been done. Because this music is about big and bizarre gestures there’s little wiggle room. It’s already crowded by, to name just a few, Tom […]
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Blood Like Lemonade
Original vocalist Skye Edwards rejoins the Godfrey brothers (Paul providing beats and turntablism, Ross playing trippy, soulful riffs) for Morcheeba’s seventh proper studio album. Edwards is still a sleepyheaded singer and the Godfreys don’t want to disturb her. Their playing sounds like an attempt to remember a dream. Often they haunt these songs and it […]
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Swimming Ginger
In this suite of narrative poems published by Goose Lane, award-winning British Columbia poet Gary Geddes adds a dimension (of voice) to the Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll, an expansive and highly detailed 12th-century painting thought to be produced by Zhang Zeduan of Bianliang. The painting reproduced over several middle pages in the (8” x 5.5”) […]
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Land of Talk
Throughout much of its fifth release, Montreal trio Land of Talk trades its sharpened edge for a feathery one. Tempos are slowed. Vocal and musical tones are softer, with strings, horns and acoustic instruments present. The first three tracks follow a gentler, graceful arc until the fourth “Swift Coin” cuts across the sky in pursuit […]
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Aphasia
An independent music community has coalesced over the last couple decades in Taiwan, which has both borne the burden and resisted the weight of Chinese rule for more than 60 years. This is a collection of noise rock instrumentals from Taipei quartet Aphasia (a term for loss of speech, usually following head trauma or injury.) […]
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On the periphery
The day demands focus and clarity. Part of the world blurs, becoming peripheral. In Losing It at MSVU Art Gallery, three artists turn periphery into focal point. “This is beautiful,” offers Kirtley Jarvis, looking down at the cardboard sign, with its magic-markered message, in her hands. The textile artist, from London, ON, has selected it […]
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Hooked on Canadian Books
A journalist, teacher and writer, T.F. Rigelhof plumbs his undeniably deep knowledge of the CanLit canon to come up with his selections of “the Good, the Better and the Best Canadian Novels Since 1984,” as goes this book’s subtitle. (He covers 25 years of the Canadian novel, up to 2009.) Early on, Rigelhof defines these […]