Music Festivals

w/Julie Doiron Saturday, October 20 at St. Matthew’s Church, 1479 Barrington Street, 8pm, $25 Al Spx knows that a Cold Specks show can be heavy, full of slow-burning songs that grow from small flames to boisterous wildfires, with lyrics weighed down by questions of faith, loss and doubt. Which is why sometimes, like at her […]

w/Ampersand, Like A Motorcycle, The Pack A.D. Saturday, October 20 at Reflections Cabaret, 5184 Sackville Street, 8pm, $20 Saskatoon’s Shooting Guns’ aim is true: to fill your head with sludgy, unadulterated doom metal riffs, providing a sweet musical high to coast on for awhile, complete with cool-looking pentagrams, psychedelic melodies chugging away and heavy as […]

Thursday, October 18 at the Marquee Club, 2037 Gottingen Street, 10pm Megan James’ long, curly hair is freshly cut in preparation for Purity Ring’s Halifax gig. The singer’s mane had four months of tour growth, and her bangs were driving her crazy. The 24-year-old wanted to look like a prairie girl, and she does. We […]

Thursday, October 18 at Reflections Cabaret, 5184 Sackville Street, 8pm, $10 Remember that scene in Tropic Thunder when Robert Downey Jr.’s character has a career retrospective with Ben Stiller’s character, telling him to “never go full retard”? Well, there’s a way in which El-P (Jaime Meline), the Brooklyn DJ, member of Company Flow and co-founder […]

w/Sea Glasses, Doom Squad, Demetra Thursday, October 18 at The Company House, 2202 Gottingen Street, 8pm, $10 “Music is mystical,” says Sari Lightman, vocalist and songwriter in Tasseomancy, the Eastern European-inspired ambient-folk band she plays in with her twin sister Romy. After releasing the Tasseomancy EP in 2008 under their old moniker, Ghost Bees, the […]

w/Metalheart, Dumpster Mummy, Black Moor Friday, October 19 at The Pavilion, 5816 Cogswell Street, 6pm, $10 Some of our brightest leave the Maritimes for Canada’s bigger cities, with dreams of stable employment and stronger economies. It’s in the news all the time. But how many move away to drum in a traditional heavy metal band? […]

“We sit in this middle ground where really hardcore avant-garde people probably think we’re The Backstreet Boys,” says Stephen Lyons, founder and frontman of Fond of Tigers, “while people who love pop probably think we’re a sonic assault squad sent to torture them.” The Vancouver septet returns to the east coast for their first show […]

Susanne Chui, soon-to-be artistic director of Mocean Dance, has been working hard with three contemporary dance artists choreographing six pieces by nationally-recognized jazz guitarist Geordie Haley. A novel performance for the Halifax Jazz Festival, Threnodies unites music and dance to give shape to the mood that the music inspires. Drawing on blues, Threnodies laments the […]

Onstage, Alejandra Ribera is fierce and focused, her giant voice overtaking whatever room she is in. So it’s surprising to hear that Ribera gets nervous, saying a prayer and removing her shoes before she performs, worried her shaking will cause her to fall over. “I don’t remember performances,” she says. “I sort of black out […]

Shara Worden has no shortage of musical training. A multi instrumentalist as a child, Worden went on to study opera at the University of North Texas. However, it was when she branched out from her formal studies, learning to play guitar and penning lyrics, that her career began to blossom. “Doing classical music in my […]

Percussionist Mark Adam has had a career-long relationship with experimental American composer Steve Reich’s work. When Adam wanted to assemble a crew to start rehearsing Reich’s 2008 piece, 2×5, in his Wolfville barn studio, it wasn’t hard to find other musicians who were equally excited about the project. “It sounded too fun to pass up,” […]