ARTS ABSTRACT

An arts publication at the University of King's College, in Halifax.

[theartsabstract]

HODGEPODGE Interview w/ Emily Lawrence

Paper-maché, spray foam, pastel fabrics, pillow stuffing. These materials were processed laboriously to create artificial food that experiences a performed orgasm, stuck in time, cumming in the gallery. There is something innately grotesque about the lumpy scoops of ice cream, the furry snot dripping from uncannily large noses, the could-be-used cotton candy Q-tips—like accidentally being aroused by a yogurt commercial. Gooey enough to want to leave, but playful enough to stay.

HODGEPODGE is aesthetically an advertisement, materially, food in costume. It’s domestic and feminine, but playful and childish; it’s heated and seductive but disgustingly pornographic. An erotica cartoon dripping in popsicle sweat.

What led up to this exhibition?

I started making video again and wanted to get in the habit of sketching with video as a way to be making something. That turned into my last exhibition at Anna Leonowens in the summer called Mouthfeel, with Kylie Dyment. My work shifted nicely from Mouthfeel to this exhibition because the content is sort of the same. I wanted to see if the content from Mouthfeel could have the same effect in a 3D form. I feel like everything I’ve done up until this point has been “sketches” for this. Before this I did a mural at the Anna Leonowens gallery. It’s in a retro advertising aesthetic. I was also working at Eyelevel Gallery coordinating this event series called Food for Thought where we would host public picnics and record them for podcasts. We also did a couple artist talks with potluck lunches. Last year I co-curated with Ryan Josey the Queer and Feminist Exhibition which happens at Anna Leonowens every year in the winter. The show was titled Art and Drag. We put out a call for a group exhibition for works that went through a form of transformation. We were thinking of transformation as a queer methodology for surviving, and thinking about drag as a methodology for creating art work, thinking about how art can make a transformation in material, form, object. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past year.

That makes total sense. My notes about your work say, “pop-art advertisement colors, kitsch commercials, food in performance, drag.”

Food has been so important my whole life. My dad’s a chef and when I was 12 he opened a bakery. I immediately started working there as his apprentice. So I knew how to make bread before I knew how to do long division. It became so engrained in the way I look at things, especially in my sculptural sensibility. I remember being little and watching my dad pour batter into cake pans and being really mesmerized by all of the textures and processes of baking. You know when there are things in life that just get you, and you’re like “uhhh, it’s so good.” To me that was batter and liquids and mixing. It’s just something I’ve always loved. With this exhibition, I really wanted to figure out why I liked that so much.

There’s something really lumpy and sexy about being in the gallery with your work.

The work has all of these grotesque textures and goo and slime. It all looks like bodies. Something that I’m interested in is the connection between porn and food. I think that food is more pornographic and more performative than we give it credit for. Like the food network, if you compare it to a porno, there are so many similarities. There’s a host and they have like 12 cameras on them; one on their face, one on their hands, the camera gets every angle of the food. And at the end, they savor the dish mouthful after mouthful, you can hear the chewing and swallowing, and moaning with pleasure. It’s like the cum-shot of daytime television. I think everything we consume has a similarity with how we consume women, and marginalized bodies. It’s the same lens. I really want to take the lens that’s full of seduction and satisfaction and fetishism, and apply it to things like food to show that this is how we’re programmed to consume. We’re all synched into our phones, we need to be stimulated all the time. At any moment, there’s nothing that isn’t pleasing to all our senses. Everything is fast, there’s no room for anything that isn’t totally satisfying.

When I started getting into video again, I was editing in a way that was really patriarchal. I wanted it to be really fun to watch. I didn’t want it to be boring, so I was getting rid of everything that wasn’t totally satisfying, and stitching different video bodies together with a quick transition, and an arc of pleasure. I was looking at that thinking, this is exactly how porn is edited. And this is exactly what’s on the food network, or children’s TV. It’s all so amazing to our senses. So I wondered if I should not make work this way, because maybe it’s not a very feminist way to handle video. Or I can use those tropes and co-opt it and use it as a feminist tool.

With this work, I felt like because I was moving from a medium, video, that’s really fast and able to show the full progression of a motion, I wanted everything to be stuck in a moment that’s really hot and seductive. Like if the noses were having a snot orgasm, this is the moment they would be stuck in. [Emily points to three massive paper-maché noses affixed to the wall, with a pink wigs and fabric dripping from the nostrils.] Sometimes I feel like I don’t like sculpture very much, and I really prefer to work in video. But I was getting really comfortable in video, so I wanted to see if I could get the same effect in something that is still. Does something suspended in a moment like this, never going to move, have the same effect for the viewer as seeing the full motion?

I think there’s something anti-pornographic about your work, in that the viewer has to spend a long time with it.

Yes. But I also feel like sometimes the cum-shot is played on loop at the end of videos, and that moment is held for as long as possible because it’s the one everyone wants to see. And like, why does Martha Stewart spend so much time eating her food at the end of her cooking demos. The shots that are emphasized in food demos are ones that really mimic bodies, and those are the ones that are drawn out the most. Everything is held there for an infinite amount of time to reflect the pornographic gaze.

Are you attempting to re-appropriate the pornographic gaze?

Yes, I think that’s a goal. I think I’m working on it. It’s something that I notice when I sculpt and edit, and I hope it’s present here. But it’s something I want to keep working on.

HODGEPODGE ran November 1-5 at the Anna Leonowens gallery in Halifax.

— Greta Hamilton

[theartsabstract]

Creator, Destroyer Dan Bejar on his voice, his career, and solo performance

Dan Bejar has been recording and performing meandering, literate songs under the moniker Destroyer for over two decades. In that time he’s toyed with instrumental styles from MIDI to saxophone-inflected, 80s soft rock, but at the centre of Bejar’s project there’s always been a penchant for cryptic lyrics and a fundamental sincerity. He’s recently been touring solo across North America to dive into older corners of his catalogue and test out a handful of new songs. Brennan McCracken caught up with him ahead of his performance in Halifax to discuss his voice, solo performance, and how he sees Destroyer after 22 years.

Your last two records, Poison Season and Kaputt, are arguably the two most instrumentally diverse records of your catalogue and have very distinct instrumental styles. And yet, when you perform in Halifax in a week or so, you’re going to be performing solo. What does solo performance mean to you in light of these two records with such incredible instrumentation?

It means I’ll probably skip playing most of them. [laughs] Poison Season came out 15 or 14 months ago; it feels like a long time ago. So with the tour that I’m doing now, I already feel like that album is old news. There are a couple songs off Poison Season that I can bang out on guitar, and there’s one or two from Kaputt that I can as well. But it’s true that those songs were mostly written on synthesizer, or piano in the case of Poison Season. But I have to ignore all of that stuff, because the idea of me having to replicate what an eight-piece band does with my limited acoustic guitar skills would be torturous for everyone involved.

What I have been playing, because I played a bunch of solo shows last month in the States, I’ve been trying to focus on playing new songs as well as an assortment of songs from the last 22 years. When I go out with the band, the sets generally tend to solidify pretty fast and they’re usually based around a specific album. So this is a good chance for me to play the other 160 songs that we don’t normally touch.

And is that a reactionary move on your part? I know in other places you’ve said that Kaputt especially was the record that threw you into the world of music as commerce. Is touring solo and restricting yourself from some of those songs in any way connected to the more commercial side effects of those last two records?

Not at all. It just so happens that most of the songs that I wrote on the guitar happen to be songs that I wrote between 1995 and 2007. That’s just the way it goes, aside from this new batch—I’ve started playing guitar more and more in the last few months. But it’s not a reaction against anything. I kind of have this pattern of doing a solo tour once every three or four years for the last decade now, and within Vancouver I have a pretty long history of playing just me and a guitar starting from the very earliest days of Destroyer. So [solo performance] is not weird and it’s not even particularly special, it’s just a part of what I do.

The only strange thing is that I’ve never played new songs in front of people. This is the first time I’ve ever tried doing that, because I’m planning on going into the studio to make a record the minute I get home. So part of what I’ve been doing this fall by playing these songs in front of people is just forcing myself to kind of get inside the songs and really figure out what works and what doesn’t, what goes together. All of the stuff that usually happens after you make a record, I thought I’d try to maybe get to know [the songs] a bit before I made it.

What can you tell me about those new songs? Do you see them as differing from what you’ve done in the past?

They definitely feel different to me from the songs that I’ve been writing for the last few years, the Kaputt and Poison Season songs. The instrument that you use to compose actually affects a lot of the chords you choose and the way you phrase things. In my mind, the new songs have a kind of simple, loping, straightforward quality, or kind of almost even an earnest quality. But I could be completely out to lunch with that as well—I generally have no idea what is going on in this music that I make until much, much after the fact.

When you’re songwriting, then, is it always the words that come first?

It used to be that I would have a bunch of chords that I’d enjoy strumming, then I’d open up my notebook and pull out the most melodious-sounding lines and stick them into a song and sing them. I kind of worked like that from the mid-90s until the mid-2000s. Somewhere in the late 2000s, I started coming up with songs where words and melodies kind of came to me at the same time; I would just record a bunch of voice memos and that would turn into a song.

I’m not sure—I think the new songs are kind of a mix of the two [methods]. I don’t really keep notebooks anymore. But in my head I was thinking that I would try and do music first and come up with words afterwards, that being the most normal way that I think most songwriters work. But for me that’s totally backwards, so it seemed like a good experiment. I did that for two or three songs, but generally it makes me distrust everything.

Could you say more about that distrust?

I’m always worried about crafting something so that all that you get is the craft or the technique of it, especially if you’ve done something long enough that it comes pretty easily to you. What I generally trust the most is just words and melodies that kind of just descend from on high all at once, that are just given to you. That’s what feels the best and feels the most natural, but it’s also the hardest to come by.

And where does your voice fit into all of this? You’ve said a bunch of different things about your singing voice over the years, and especially in a solo performance that’s something that really shines through. Where are you in your relationship with your voice right now?

I’m feeling pretty good about it these days [laughs]. Maybe it’s something that I’ve been self-conscious of in the past and I would just drink my way through it or something. Now I feel like I’m not forcing myself, but trying really hard to sing in a measured, quiet, even way—which is not the way that I sang for the first 15 years of doing this. I’m still getting the hang of it, but I feel like there’s something about restricting what I normally do with my voice that feels more intense to me.

The shows that I play as just me are quite quiet, and I just try to deliver the words and the notes as purely as I can. The band, especially the band that I’ve been touring with for the last five years that recorded Poison Season and toured that record last fall, by the end of that tour we were a ferociously loud, in your face, eight person beast. That is really different from the mindset that I have when I go into the studio to record a song, or sit down to write one even. So it’s cool: that seemed very specific to that group and being on stage with the band, but it’s something that would be completely alien to what I’m doing on this tour. It’s good—it forces me to sing in different ways, it pushes me into different corners.

On the cusp of recording what will be your eleventh album, do you feel like you’re avoiding complacency?

No, I think I’m being so thoughtless. I have no real preconceived ideas other than that I’m trying to play as much of the music myself as humanly possibly, because I haven’t really touched an instrument since 2007 [laughs]. I’ll come up with little parts, and maybe feed a part to the trumpet player who’ll do a variation on that, or a part to someone playing sax or flute, or someone playing an organ part. But it’s been a while since I’ve actually gotten my hands dirty. I’ve been playing music more regularly just myself the last few months and it feels good, so that’s going to be a part of the recording process. And I think I just want to come up with shit that I like and not think of grand, overarching concepts, or feel the need to exist in some kind of filmic, widescreen mode. That’s kind of been the Destroyer vibe for the last couple albums.

Do you see your career or Destroyer as a project in those terms? Do you see your career as a sort of filmic, narrative kind of thing?

I don’t see my career. I mean I just don’t look at it, I don’t see myself in terms of one. I know that I’m 44 and I still manage to exist and support myself in the world though making records and playing concerts. But if you mean do I see the progression of one Destroyer album to the next as some kind of filmic style arc, the answer is no. I really see the records as individual things, especially because the circumstances change for each record—like different people playing on them. They change enough that each record feels like specific things unto themselves, each one. And I like that.

I’m also curious to know what you’re listening to, what you’re reading—what are things that other people are putting into the world that you’re into at the moment?

Hmm, I’m trying to think of new things [laughs].

Or old things that you’re returning to!

I heard the new Leonard Cohen record the other day and I thought it was really good! When I was travelling around by myself, I listened to the new Nick Cave record and I thought that was really good too.

Is outside inspiration something that you seek? Do you feel inspired by the work you see others doing or are you more in your own world taking things as they come to you?

No, I’m the exact opposite. I take deep, deep inspiration—necessary inspiration—from the world of film and music, and for a long time books. In fact, when things are too dry, when it feels like it’s been so long since I’ve encountered something that’s blown my mind, I feel a kind of mild depression and inertia. Those things are crucial.

I empathize with that so much.

Yeah, I don’t know if that’s the same with everyone, but for me that stuff—music and films and books—it’s just the air I breathe.

—Brennan McCracken

[theartsabstract]

Let Me In Basia Bulat, Daniel Caesar, and the revelation of the human voice

Basia Bulat opened her show at the Halifax Pop Explosion on a quiet note. She stepped onto the stage alone and, after a smile at the packed room, began gently plucking at her charango as she dove into “It Can’t Be You.”

It was a brave move: Bulat’s headlining set at the Marquee Ballroom found her in front of a chatty, energetic crowd that might not otherwise jive with subtle stripped-down folk songs. And most of the set that followed her opening song reflected this, as Bulat’s three-piece band joined her to give her songs rhythmic substance that many in the audience bopped, swayed, and otherwise danced along to. Bulat’s latest album, Good Advice, provided plenty of fodder for this upbeat tone, and songs like “Infamous” and “In The Name Of”—among the best in her catalogue—sounded better than ever in the context of a full band.

Still, the quiet “It Can’t Be You” was the song that set the tone for the night, and it’s no coincidence that it was the night’s most instrumentally sparse. The song allows Bulat’s voice to exercise its full range of motion, from lilting falsetto to impassioned yelps. Within seconds, heads turned back towards the front of the room and folks who had been chatting at the bar paid all of their attention to the notes floating up towards the chandeliers. It was all her voice.

And what a voice it is: an electric signal floating through the air, a burst of energy ambiguous in its source but joyous in its release, a beacon under foggy blue lights. Bulat’s voice has this effect. It’ll stop you in your tracks and pull at your heartstrings and wash away your cynicism. And she’ll sing to you about the deepest melancholy with determined eyes and a smile on her face.

It was in this early moment of recognition that my mind snaps back two nights, taking up memories from Daniel Caesar’s joyous performance at the Carleton on Thursday and projecting them into my experience of Bulat’s. There was a lot to love about Caesar’s performance, from his incredible band’s willingness to improvise and jam at Caesar’s command to the unbelievable energy that filled the packed venue. Still, as with Bulat’s performance, the clearest memories I have from his show are all connected to his stunning vocal performance.

The room felt as if it was filled with a different gravity, like the rising tone of his voice was pulling our bodies up with it. In my memory, I picture the way he danced with the mic stand and the way his mouth would contort following his voice’s command; I picture his vocal chords making a puppet out of his limbs as they danced across his terraced melodies. All of us in the room—including Caesar himself—were at the mercy of his voice. It felt good to be directed like this, to be held in the embrace of a sound that was so comfortable.

Certainly Bulat and Caesar have stories to tell with their voices and the appeal of their respective works lies in so much more than the tones that they sing. Still, I’d be remiss to see their voices as simply an instrument or a vehicle for lyricism. Yes, the voice can be both of these things, but what Caesar and Bulat showed at Halifax Pop Explosion was bigger than that: this was the human voice as a truly visceral force. I saw the voice as magnet, as an open hand, as a vessel for sexuality. And as I let their voices in, I felt more connected with these musicians than I have in a very long time.

— Brennan McCracken

[theartsabstract]

Get to know Vancouver’s Jay Arner “My tactic is to pretend the internet doesn’t exist and tour like it’s the 70s”

Three weeks into touring the album JAY II, the troop of melody makers found a smidgen of time to answer some of our questions, “straight from the ollllll honda odyssey,” as Jay put it. Cruising from Vancouver, they wound up here, in Halifax, to play Pop Explosion and to share a bit of their down-to-earth, 80s triggered, indie pop explosion with us.

AA: How many times have you been to Halifax and what’s is a highlight for you here?

JA: I’ve been to Halifax five times since my first album came out. That doesn't seem like a lot but I do live on the other side of the country... The highlight is always seeing my friends and their bands. A lot of them have moved away but it’s still one of the best music scenes anywhere!

AA: Tell us a little bit about your new album, JAY II. Where did you record and write? Is there a theme?

JA: I wrote it at home, and recorded it there except for the drums, which were recorded in our tiny practice space. A lot of the songs are reacting to being on tour for long stretches, seeing the world and getting a very visceral sense of how small I am in space and time. Pretty small!!!!!

AA: Tell us a cool fact about each member of your band.

JA: Jessica, our synthesizer player, has a very famous podcast called Retail Nightmares and is right now nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award. Adrienne, our bass player, has another band called Supermoon. It’s the best band in Vancouver. Evan, our drummer, bought a newspaper last week and read the whole thing and I have never seen anyone do that before.

AA: What shows are you most excited about for Pop Explosion?

JA: Ummmmm well I don’t know! I’m in the middle of a seven-week tour and haven’t had much time to think about anything other than y’know, when load-in is, where are we sleeping, stuff like that. But Monomyth and TUNS are playing a show and I’ll go to that, thank you for letting me know Facebook Events.

AA: Can you give us a 5 song playlist that represents the soundtrack to your tour?

JA: Madonna - Hung Up, Matthew Wilder - Break My Stride, Sparks - Tryouts For The Human Race, C+C Music Factory - Things That Make You Go Hmmm, Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).

AA: What, in your opinion, is the most important lesson learned while being involved in music?

JA: Oh wow that’s a large question. I think I should have quit my job and committed to being a musician full-time earlier. The lesson there would be if you’re going to do something, go “whole hog” which is a gross expression and I’m sorry about that.

AA: What is something you would change about the music industry if given the chance?

JA: It’d be nice if it was easier for non-famous bands to tour around, easier access to larger grants for smaller bands, and less visa business? This is so obvious I feel dumb saying it, but music itself is worth less to people now, so my tactic is to pretend the internet doesn’t exist and tour like it’s the 70s except with a nice minivan. 2003 Honda Odyssey, thank you.

AA: What are some things to look forward to in the near future?

JA: JAY II came out in Japan yesterday so I’m very much looking forward to touring in Japan asap.

— Josefa Cameron and Paulette Cameron

[theartsabstract]

Not You A Conversation with Rebecca Young

Not You is a new group comprised of local power houses Nancy Urich (Dog Day, The Burdocks) on guitar and vocals, Rebecca Young (Pastoralia, The Got to Get Got) on bass and vocals, Stephanie Johns (Moon, Stolen Minks) on guitar and vocals, and Meg Yoshida (Bad Vibrations) on drums. The post punk group combines haunting vocals that sit on top of dirge-y yet energetic melodies. They’ve only released one song online, but already have plenty of buzz.

The Arts Abstract talked to Rebecca Young about managing careers, music, and children.

GS: How did this band come to be—did you come together to accomplish specific goals, or fill a specific void?

RY: Nancy started it. Steph and Meg were next and then they asked me to play along. We are all old adults with careers and people who need us, so as far as filling a void I would say that band time definitely holds a special place in our schedules to balance all the other stuff out.

GS: Not You is like a supergroup—you’re all seasoned musicians who have played in multiple really great bands. What’s it like for you guys to be playing together—do you freak out for each other’s talent all the time?

RY: I can only speak for me but I know I’m in awe of everyone’s refined talents. Band practices are held in a seaside house in a basement with a woodstove, which seems cozy (and it is) but the rehearsing is airtight because we are all so busy with jobs and families. It is literally nothing like any previous bands I have been in. No fights, no passive aggressive garbage, and there are a hell of a lot of encouraging convos and major supportive attitudes from each other.

GS: Tell us about your collective songwriting process.

RY: I’d say that Nancy is the driver—so far the songs are of her mind’s ambition. Meg, Steph and I add in our skills, and then it’s pure magic, of course.

GS: Are you planning a record or tour that we can look forward to?

RY: We are playing a few shows this fall, then it’s back to the basement jams and recording times to get us through the winter. We would love to tour, although we will need a ride along nanny to wrangle the three small children that will have to come along.

— Grace Stratton

~

Check out Not You tonight at 11 PM at The Seahorse with Crossed Wires, The Yips, and White Lung.

Header image: copyright Seth Smith photo, Meg Yoshida design.

[theartsabstract]

Cheryl Hann is ‘allowing herself complexity’

Cheryl Hann is a force.

As well as drumming in the eccentric and bouncy post punk band Old and Weird, she takes care of the electronic drum and noise components in wacky pop group Heaven for Real. She has had significant success as a solo stand up comic, and as part of the comedy troupe Picnicface. And as if that wasn’t enough, she is also currently working on her PhD in Halifax.

The Arts Abstract caught up with Cheryl ahead of her appearances at Halifax Pop Explosion this week. Here’s our conversation about the artist/audience relationship, music, comedy, and gender politics.

GS: I keep hearing people say that stand up comedy is taking the place of music when it comes to cultural critique—being the voice of dissent. How do you approach working your political values into your comedy?

CH: I think comedy has a lot of potential social value, and if done well can be an amazing tool for cultural critique. Of course, not all comedy does this work. In the same way that some songs are literally just like, “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and express the worst parts of Western culture, some jokes are just about butts and penises and do almost no work at all. But a good comic can broach serious issues of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism in a comedy show, and can do so with relatively little difficulty because comedy has this great dynamic of trust and play.

When you raise a contentious issue, the audience trusts that you’re not directly challenging them, or making a moral judgement about them, so they are more receptive to difficult concepts. Then it’s like, if you can get a straight, white dude to laugh about the absurdity of a racist, capitalist patriarchy, then that means that in that moment, he has admitted to himself the truth of that absurdity. That is a powerful tool for pushing people to consider their own privilege and how it contributes to the oppression of others.

GS: Does one medium’s audience seem more receptive than the other?

CH: I find comedy is a far more effective medium for this kind of critique, if only because the nature of comedy requires your full attention and engagement. Comedy demands you focus specifically on the words being used, and that you process those words deeply, so you understand their complexity—so you “get the joke.”

Music doesn’t impose this kind of engagement on its audience. Participating in a musical performance is better if you give it your full attention, but it’s not required. You can go to the bar, talk to your friend, focus just on the drummer—you can miss the artist’s intention. This is a lot harder to do at a comedy show.

GS: When you joined Old and Weird they were already a band who had established themselves and what they were doing. What most attracted you towards them as musicians, and what made you want to be a part of it?

CH: Before I joined Old and Weird, I was already a big fan of the band. I was really drawn to the experimental, free-form nature of their music and the way the band challenged a lot of the more limiting notions of what or how a song should “be”. I appreciated then—and even more now—the way each member of the band approached songwriting, and how clearly their personalities came through in the music. Sometimes, it can feel like the artist gets lost in the attempt to produce palatable art. I felt like Old and Weird’s music was as challenging and complex as the people who created it. Listening to those songs made me feel closer to the artists who made them, rather than more distant. The more I listened, the more I was like, “Wow these people seem really funny and smart,” so when they approached me about joining the band, my decision to sign up was as much about wanting to become better friends with them as it was about wanting to play songs I loved, haha.

GS: Dealing with sexism and misogyny is obviously a very real part of being a female artist. I don’t want to ignore your work to make you talk about that, but at the same time, I feel like someone’s experiences in feeling excluded or not welcome can drive their practice, or even shape it—I know it absolutely does for me. Do you feel that your identity as a woman has become part of your work, and if so, how does it appear and manifest?

CH: I definitely feel that my gender influences my work, and the spaces where I perform it. I think I try to play a lot with the audience’s concept of gender, as well as my own. It’s tough sometimes, though, because as much as I use comedy as a platform to discuss issues of gender, I don’t want my perceived gender to be the foundation of my practice. Like, as a feminine comic in 2016, people expect that your comedy will be somehow an expression of your gender, or an outline of your thoughts on it. I don’t want to feel like I have to get up on stage and be a funny “woman,” when I just want to be a funny person.

Maybe that conflicts with everything I’ve said so far, but I’m going to allow myself that complexity.

—Grace Stratton

~

Catch Cheryl’s Pop Explosion sets at Art Bar: Thursday at 8 PM with Old and Weird, and Friday at 8 PM with Heaven for Real. She’s also doing a solo stand up set at the Halifax Public Library (Paul O’Regan Hall) on Saturday at 7:45 PM.

Header image: Michael Doucette.

[theartsabstract]

Nick Dourado on Halifax’s improvised music scene, mathematics for building community, and the impact of great teachers

The Arts Abstract sat down with musician, engineer, artist, and all-around incredible person Nick Dourado at the Khyber Arts Centre at the end of September to talk to him about his month-long residency, Harmonic Spaces.

The residency featured three weekly workshops, Sound Club, Math Jam and the Peoples Choir. Each one invited community members of varying experience in the respective three fields (improvised music, math, and choral singing) to the Khyber to learn from one another and challenge and unsettle themselves by improvising, asking questions, and collaborating. The following is an abridged version of our conversation.

AA: How is the residency going?

Oh it’s been so awesome. I’m running three different workshops each week and they’ve been a lot of fun. I have a key to the Khyber right now so I’ve essentially set up everything in my house except for my bed and the kitchen. So I have truly been here all day and night since the 10th of September, but it’s really awesome because I rented some fancy recording gear and I essentially set up a recording studio here.

AA: Cool. Are you doing Century Egg and Eddy stuff?

Century Egg is going to start recording tomorrow here and I’ve recorded a lot of my friends who do poetry or spoken word or play improvised music ... I’m doing all this because I was brought into an amazing tradition of improvised music that goes on here in Halifax. These are some of the greatest secrets of Halifax.

It’s impossible to know why they’re still secrets, but new music, creative music, and free improvisation and jazz have an incredible connection to Halifax, Nova Scotia. There’s not one but three totally different organizations devoted to creative new music. The people who are involved in them are internationally known as great masters. It’s crazy and it’s been like that for the last forty years here.

AA: How did you get involved in it?

Have you ever heard of a person named Tim Croft? He teaches the History of Jazz class at Dalhousie and when I was in Engineering school I got to take two electives and that was one of them, which is where I met him. So not only did he run a weekly drop-in music workshop, so did Suddenly Listen, which is also based in Halifax and run by a guy named Norman Adams. So at 1330 Hollis, both of them, for I think 20 or 30 years, ran weekly music workshops.

They’ve both been set up here teaching about contemporary music in a really deep and truly contemporary way. Through that I met a person named Jerry Grinelli who I wonder if maybe you’ve heard of? He’s a true-to-god living legend who lives in Halifax. His claim to fame in an unfortunate way is that he played the drums on the Charlie Brown Christmas records. He came from San Francisco, and went on tour with the Grateful Dead. He’s an enormously influential musician in the world. Although again, all the things I’m telling you are the wackiest things he’s done. He’s from the contemporary free music scene in San Francisco and he became a Buddhist and ended up in Nova Scotia and sort of teaches a blend of African American free jazz music cut with his Buddhist training, which is called the Creative Music Workshop. And so I’ve been involved with that for five-ish years now and it has totally changed my life.

Tim was Jerry’s student when Tim was 19 years old, 20 years ago. It’s amazing. It’s a living tradition of music in Halifax.

AA: So now that you’re doing this residency, what are you bringing to your workshops?

Well so, the Sound Club is straight up the Creative Music Workshop. The exercises that we do: the sitting, listening, clapping exercises—everything about that is just a continuation of that tradition. I do the Sound Club because part of that tradition is that you pass it on. So I’ve been doing that for about a year now. I started in March 2015.

I’ve had a lot of teachers blow my mind my whole life and I’ve always been curious about that tradition. I think that’s kind of what inspired this whole thing—wondering about how many kinds of ways can we do teaching and community practice? The teaching is part of how those traditions are maintained and passed on.

Most of what the Math club is about for me, is getting people to ask questions. I can answer every single simple math question. It’s just a tradition, right? And it’s a tradition that I’ve been very fortunate to be connected to. ... If someone asks me a high school math question that I couldn’t answer—which actually does happen all the time—it’s thrilling. I feel like all people who have higher math education should do some form of community care in terms of tutoring because we have such a problem with the literacy of math in our world, and it’s because of capitalism—because the only reason you wouldn’t want to share knowledge with somebody is because it empowers them and we do live in a world that seeks to take power from people so they can abuse them and it’s insane. It’s so insane. It’s insane that that’s the reason that math education is in such a bad state.

There’s an Assata Shakur quote that comes to mind:

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” — Assata Shakur

So many of the ways people hold power over us is by not giving us the literacy of numbers.

AA: Have you had anyone come to a math jam and just tell you that they couldn’t do an equation or a problem? Like, in the Arts community there are so many people who are terrified of math and refuse to go near it.

Well, that’s why I called it ‘Math Jam,’ because if I called it math class there would be less than four people there every time. Everyone I know says, ‘Oh, that sounds so interesting, I would love to do that,’ but don’t come because they’re terrified. Everyone who comes is mostly terrified.

Everybody has so many feelings around math, mostly shitty, horrible feelings. This is my personal philosophy, but I think they use math as a tool to belittle people in North America. Like, if you go outside of North America, they don’t have the same kind of relationship with math. It’s such a big problem. So many of the kids I tutor that hate math and have trouble with it—they think they’re super bad at it, but they’re usually great at it, but something was left out in grade five or something.

AA: So, part of your teaching through Math Jam is removing that hierarchy you’re talking about?

Yeah... when you’re working on anything or any other kind of tradition like math, you’re really working on yourself. What we worked with the most with my music teacher, Jerry, is fear and habits and the way that they make it impossible for you to play music, and I think that it’s the exact same way with math—or I guess that’s what I’d always sort of been feeling, because I had a great teacher who taught me how to deal with those things.

AA: How do you establish spaces for community learning? What do you think is key in making people comfortable?

Part of what you said was ‘a space to feel comfortable’ ... But workshops like this aren’t comfortable. It’s not a comfortable thing to do. Part of the tradition that I’ve accepted from my teacher is that you really can’t be comfortable, and it’s not necessarily ‘being comfortable being uncomfortable,’ but just like where does that desire to give comfort so much value come from? It’s just a part of the workshop, like can you learn and be comfortable at the same time?

AA: Even a distinction between ‘comfort’ and ‘safety’—like, you may not be able to create a comfortable workshop, but perhaps a safe space, especially for people who have much less access to these spaces.

El Jones once said something along the lines of, “There are no ‘safer’ spaces, just ‘braver’ spaces.” I’m not even sure if she coined the term, but I heard her once mention something about a “braver space,” like the idea that safe spaces are also kind of antiquated. But that we are personally accountable to each other and to acknowledge each other, ask questions, and have intention... I don’t even know if I even really succeed at that part. All I can really do is hold the space.

People who come to the workshops are unsettled in a certain type of way. A lot of people who feel really comfortable don’t usually come to the workshops. Many usually come with questions and insecurity, and then it usually comes up pretty much right away.

AA: What’s been challenging about the residency?

I have to sleep—it sucks. Having access to the space is so key. Just knowing that there’s a time limit... I don’t know, it’s kind of been nothing but blissful.

I had some dude at the last math club kind of like, argue with everybody and challenge them on the idea that capitalism has ruined the way that we educate people... He was arguing that it wasn’t intentional, like some people find that idea controversial, perhaps? It was a really awesome moment in that math club because everyone was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about,’ and that dude explained and we got to have a really polite but serious discussion about colonialism in my math class. That was awesome.

AA: When do you get to have conversations about colonialism in math class? Has that happened, like ever?

One of the teachers that I had that made me think the most critically about the world around me and about capitalism was a math teacher that I had named Guy Kember, who teaches engineering math at Dalhousie. He lives on a farm and makes all of his own stuff and comes into class and never has a book, never goes off of notes... He’s one of the coolest artists I’ve ever seen, oh my god.

It’s so weird being connected to an awesome tradition like mathematics and then turning around and seeing the way the rest of the world is taught to access it—because it’s a gift and a beautiful tool... That we hate it and don’t see it in our lives and never hear anything cool about it is wrong. It’s so weird and it has nothing to do with the essence of that thing. It really speaks volumes to the way we live in our world.

AA: It’s so weird to hear you talk about all of this because I feel like there’s such a distinction made between the arts and maths and sciences. That’s normally just a dichotomy made in society.

Yeah, fuck. It’s so hard to talk about this without expounding my personal philosophy about life, too. All of these things are just things we’ve inherited from white, supremacist, colonial institutions—like mathematics is one of the oldest human traditions, and it comes from brown and black people. The separating of maths and sciences has nothing to do with the original world.

Like, in Hindustani tradition, there is no distinction between math and science. They both work on such similar underlying principles. It’s also funny, because this has been my perspective the entire time, since I’ve been interacting with math.

—Allie Graham & Madi Haslam

[theartsabstract]

Frankie Cosmos On Vulnerability, Trusting Fans with Lyrics and Poetry

A few months ago, I sat down with Greta Kline, aka Frankie Cosmos (speaker to my 20-year-old soul).

We were in Amsterdam and both very far from home. The bike storage outside of the entrance to the show’s venue—a canal boat, literally a boat full of bikes on a canal—was a good reminder of that.

The New York-based musician was beginning the first of two European summer tours with her bandmates David Maine (bass), Lauren Martin (keys), and Luke Pyenson (drums).

After soundcheck, we rushed up a narrow and winding Dutch staircase to her dressing room to chat. Our conversation was a short one, about ten minutes, and soon after Kline was onstage as Frankie Cosmos.

“It’s fun being the only band playing the show because we can play everything we want and you can’t tell us to stop,” she joked to the crowd.

The Amsterdam gig was one of the few times Frankie Cosmos had played a solo set (it’s probably worth mentioning that the last venue they played by themselves was the Museum of Modern Art).

Kline is still getting used to her ever-growing following. Before the release of her 2016 album Next Thing and 2014’s Zentropy, she was posting her insightful indie-pop demos to Bandcamp without knowing if people would listen. For years, she had a much smaller, but equally devoted, cult of fans.

Kline still manages to keep the intimacy of those early bedroom recordings alive in her latest releases and live shows. There’s a sense of familiarity when she plays that doesn’t just come from having listened to her songs on repeat for an entire summer (though I admit it might have helped).

Her lyrics speak to you through little rushes of memory and observation. Listening gives you a warm, sad I-get-you feeling that makes you grateful to have joined the cult.

AA: Do you have a favourite song to play off of “Next Thing”? Are there songs you won’t play at shows?

FC: It depends. There are some songs I like to cut from the set because they’re hard for me to sing. If I feel like I’m doing an amazing job, I’ll say “okay, I’ll play it” because the band likes to. The band loves to play “What If” and I hate playing it. Right before we left, we had to change the key it’s in, so we’ve been playing it a bit more. I really like playing “Sappho,” but it’s also a harder one. It always depends on the crowd. If it seems like people aren’t really caring about the “Next Thing” songs, sometimes I’ll just skip em and go to Zentropy songs because people just want to hear “Birthday Song.” I said this before in an interview and people have been asking about it but “Too Dark” is one of the songs I refuse to play if people aren’t paying attention. It’s not like a punishment, but if people are talking I won’t play it since it has these totally silent pauses. My band gets so mad because I won’t make a set list and I’ll just tell them as we’re going based on how I feel [laughs].

AA: You’ve always written very candidly about your experiences and people in your life. Now that your music is reaching so many more people, are you finding it harder to write vulnerable lyrics or is it a part of your creative process that never changes?

FC: Yeah. I mean I really don’t want that to change because part of a reason why I write is to get stuff off my chest or deal with emotions. I haven’t been thinking about it when I’m writing but I do think about it when I’m performing now. Especially vulnerable lyrics make me kind of stressed out sometimes when I’m performing them. I don’t want it to affect the writing, but it is scary. To me it’s scary to have any sort of responsibility towards the audience. It’s scary that someone’s going to hear something I say and have it affect some choice in their life. It was really cool but I met someone who said they were going to get a lyric of mine tattooed on them and I was just like, “Oh my god. Don’t do that. That’s a terrible idea.” And I didn’t want to tell them what the lyric was about because it would crush them. What it’s about is really messed up. I could tell what they thought it was about. I don’t feel like an adult at all so it’s kind of scary to imagine somebody hearing a song and thinking something’s cool that isn’t cool.

AA: Yeah. But it’s also kind of cool that that’s what your music does for so many young people, especially young women: makes sense of something, even if it’s taken in a completely different context, and lets them find find meaning and comfort.

FC: Definitely. I like to think it’s not my responsibility to make a clear message, that I can write as vaguely or specifically as I want and people can hear whatever they want from it. I shouldn’t have to police that process. They can take whatever they want from it. But it is hard to hear something when it’s really personal – to hear someone make an assumption about what you’re saying—that’s horrifying.

AA: Were you thinking about that responsibility to listeners when you were just putting your demos on Bandcamp?

FC: Not at all. Not until really recently. I just started to feel that way on the last America tour because you meet a lot of people that have been affected by our music. And it was amazing and really beautiful hearing someone say a song meant so much to them and having specific stories about songs. They feel like they already know me and then when I hear their stories I feel like I know them. It’s so special to meet people that way. But it’s also scary to think, okay, something I wrote as a sixteen year-old or about being a sixteen year-old is affecting your life and that’s really intense. I think about when I took in music as a teenager, and especially when I met an artist I admired, anything they said I would have attached to. Just being a person and then having the idea of being a role model—that’s terrifying.

AA: Speaking of musical influence—you collaborate and tour with so many cool musicians and friends—especially all these cool women like Gabby Smith [who used to play keys in Frankie Cosmos and also fronts the band Eskimeaux] and Girlpool. Has that mostly influenced your music or the way you work in the industry?

FC: Everything. I think the people I choose to be friends with are really important to me. Their writing is really inspiring to me and also the way they navigate being on tour and in weird situations. I mean, I learned how to tour having Gabby by my side in the band. All the ways I learned how to take care of myself are from her and from Aaron [Maine], Girlpool, Yowler... all those tours. Watching them interact with people they don’t want to interact with, or deal with someone who is harassing you on stage. The way those people use their voice to affect a situation is really inspiring to me. They even just help me learn how to retain any kind of self-love on tour because it’s really difficult sometimes. It’s really nice to have strong role models who are my friends.

AA: I know you love Frank O’Hara. Do you have any other favourite poets?

FC: I think my maybe number one favourite poet is Elizabeth Bishop. I haven’t read enough of her poetry, but I’ve been reading a lot of novels by Margaret Atwood. I’ve been really inspired by that recently.

AA: Do you find your love and study of poetry affects your lyricism? Do you consider it when you’re songwriting?

FC: I don’t think about it too much, but I do write poetry and I see it as pretty separate from writing lyrics. I’ve been running this really small online poetry group where I just send in a poem every month and hope other people send in theirs. Almost nobody does it, but I think it’s a good exercise. It feels like a really different process to me. But I think reading a lot of poetry definitely affected my lyrics. I think Frank O’Hara’s poetry had a huge affect on the way I write because it’s just finding little moments and beauty in everything and just writing a ton of stuff. Just taking in everything all the time and always having a notebook on me. That was super influenced by his ideology.

AA: What comes next after this European tour?

FC: I’m really excited to be home for a month and a half. Then we’re touring again for four months. But we’re going to finish arranging our new album. I have some songs that I need to finish writing that I’m really excited to go home and finish. I can’t wait to have band practice. I know it’s a weird thing to say, but I can’t wait to go to band practice and work on new material because it’s really different than playing the same songs every night. And, of course, to spend time with my family and my boyfriend [laughs].

—Madi Haslam

Main header image: Brooklyn Magazine.

[theartsabstract]

ARTS ABSTRACT ~ ISSUE ONE ~ OCT 3 - 16

Like our dear old Wardroom, the Arts Abstract has finally decided to shrug off its summer haze and get back to work. Check out all these rad events and get in touch if you want to contribute!

Issue #1 The Arts Abstract Newsletter

[theartsabstract]

Brimming Hannah Epperson on spontaneity, sensitivity, and space

Hannah Epperson is a Utah born, Vancouver raised, New York based musician and singer-songwriter. Her music is its own genre, a unique style that’s hard to put into words. She uses her voice, violin, loop pedals, and fellow musicians in unexpected and beautiful ways, creating something utterly powerful—you don’t really just listen to her music, you feel it. One of our editors was lucky enough to see Hannah live in Montreal in early May, and caught up with her for a walk up Mount Royal and around the Plateau.

Ok—you were just saying how you’re a very critical person?

It doesn’t matter what comes in my direction, I will... Ok listen. I have a problem, this is why I think I’m sort of a crisis dependent person, because if I’m not having to react to something immediately, then I have time to criticize it, and once I start criticizing it, I cannot accomplish anything. This is how it was all through university, with academics, with all of my papers, I literally wrote every single paper in a state of complete panic and I would not edit, I would not re-read my essays, because once I re-read them I would completely destroy them.

It’s the same thing with music, I never practice, ever. The tour that I just did in Europe, I was working on a composition with this dance company the two weeks leading up to it, I got to Berlin for my first show, I was unpacking my gear, and I was like, Oh, I don’t actually know how to play my new arrangements, I’m going to have to figure it out tonight while I’m playing. So I was supposed to play a forty-minute set—I played for an hour and twenty minutes, because I would just keep improvising while I was trying to figure out how I was going to continue and conclude every song.

Do you improvise a lot at your shows?

For every song there’s a skeletal structure. Every musician is different in their approach to performance, and their reasons and their motives are different, and I value and respect them all. For me, I am so environmentally affected that I like to allow for space. It’s important for me to expand into this space of every different room that I walk into, it’s like, the energy of the people in the room, the acoustics of the architectural space that I’m in, the lighting, the conversation I had with the sound engineer before the show, how the food made me feel—all of these things affect the way that I experience the sort of unfolding that happens during a show.

I’m not sure that I want to be a musician... I wake up and wrestle with it, every day—how is it possible for this to be the right thing?

This is part of why I think that I’m so demanding of my audience, it’s like, I’m here, doing this with you, I can’t do this without you guys. I love that state of dependency, it makes me feel so present, and that’s why I do it, that feeling of presence and connection with other people. That’s what music is for, you know, it’s spatial, music moves through space and passes through your body, and makes crazy vibrations in the water content of your body. For me, that reactionary, improvisational, fleshy space around the skeleton is super important. Really really important.

When you say it’s like a skeleton, do you mean an actual skeleton, like a body?

Everything is connected, I definitely feel like I’m pretty attached to the material world, it’s the only place where you can agree upon a mutual reality. Everyone has their own super dense complicated internal reality, and that’s why we develop music, and language, because then we can find ways to negotiate those really complicated realities. The material world is like... That is unnegotiable—that tree right there—and so there’s this quality of sound that I really love, it moves through space, sound waves move through space and affect the body. I studied human geography in university, and it’s a very interdisciplinary discipline, it’s always about the connection between people and places and things, and for me the relationship between sound and space and architecture is very intriguing, it’s very compelling.

Do you see music as a sort of emotional communication?

It’s really interesting to me, a lot of African music is super polyrhythmic, very very very complicated, and I think it comes from a different experience, a cultural experience of space, like people playing music in a circle. In Western society we have the stage and the audience, it’s very linear, our time signatures are 4/4, there’s so much more organization. There’s this grid-like quality to a lot of Western music that echoes the grid-like quality of our transit systems.

Is that rigidness a bad thing?

No, I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I think it’s just one set of rules to play in. Creativity cannot exist without rules to break, that’s what creativity is, having a rule and figuring out how to break it. That’s why I think the most creative people take responsibility for setting really really really fucking cool parameters, and then they expand fully into those parameters. Yeah, knowing rules and breaking them, that’s pretty crucial in this life I think.

Your online presence and the way you use social media is super different from other bands and musicians, it’s so much warmer and more genuiune and human, is that intentional?

I think perhaps one of the reasons why my social media presence might be different from a lot of other bands is that I never made a distinct decision or move to be Hannah Epperson The Musician. My identity as a musician is one hundred percent conflated with just who I am. It’s all there, it’s only Hannah Epperson, and I feel like, for me, ‘as a musician,’ my responsibility is to reflect and synthesize the issues that I am observing and participating in. I don’t know what the fuck the point of being a musician is otherwise, it’s just indulgence otherwise. It doesn’t have to be explicit lyrics about like, Oh I’m really pissed off about the government selling this area to an oil company, that sucks, it doesn’t have to be lyrics but there’s a responsibility to participate, to emote.

Music comes from all of the things that we’ve experienced in this life, and so you have to experience as much and with as much intention as possible, that’s how you make good music.

I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here—I guess I just feel like, I’m not sure that I want to be a musician. It’s something that I will always have in my life, but as a profession, I wake up and wrestle with it, every day, because there’s so much shit going on in the world, and how is this—how is it possible for this to be the right thing? Some days I feel very confident about doing music, and about the conversations that I’m able to have with people day after day. Other days it just feels so fucked.

So ‘your music’ and ‘your life’ are pretty much the same thing.

The same thing. I think maybe what it is is that music and composition is the most refined tool that I have in my toolkit to process everything that’s going on around me, it’s just my best tool. Everyone has different tools, some people are really good at growing plants, some people are really good at writing political speeches, some people are really good at breastfeeding, whatever, there are so many good, important tools. Music is one that is pretty readily available to me, which is a really huge privilege and also a responsibility, I think, and so for me the most important thing as a musician, for my music, is doing everything else, everything else that isn’t music, being engaged in politics and in my community.

What makes that the most important thing?

I feel like when I play music or write music I’m not doing it in a calculated way, at all, it’s something that just... it’s a sensation, I feel like a lot of artists explain this, you kind of feel like there’s something that’s passing through, it’s beyond me somehow. The synaptic network in your brain is so complicated, it’s fucked, and music is this really engaging synaptic cacophony, and when you’re in the process of making music, there’s so much synaptic firing going on. You can’t even begin to comprehend how it’s all happening, but all of those firings come from everything, everything that you take in—the kid that you saw running through the forest, or the small memory of a chapter that your dad read out loud to you when you were twelve and vomiting, or whatever—music just comes from all of the things that we’ve experienced in this life, and so you have to experience as much and with as much intention as possible, that’s how you make good music! Also I mean... discipline, you know, practicing.

Yeah we can’t really do anything properly in isolation, because then it isn’t informed by anything.

No, it doesn’t mean anything. It lacks substance, and what the fuck is the point of this life—I don’t know. I don’t know! But it’s crazy to be alive! It’s really crazy, and I want to do it really well, because it’s miraculous. It’s miraculous! Anyway. That sort of got out of control. Coffee really punched me in the face I think.

~

A while ago we interviewed a Canadian philosopher, Jan Zwicky, and you remind me a lot of her. You seem really interested in and in tune with how things are all connected, you have a sort of ‘big picture’ attitude, which is really cool. I am by no means qualified to explain her philosophy, but what our conversation is reminding me of is her talking about gestalts, these wholes that are more than the sum of their parts, and gestalt shifts, where people suddenly briefly percieve this larger whole around them—the big picture. This idea made me believe in ghosts actually, thinking of them as a kind of big picture that some people are able to see and others aren’t. I don’t really know where I thought I was going here... does any of that resonate with you?

That’s a really beautiful way of understanding ghosts. That’s really wonderful. I mean this makes me want to launch into a discussion about religion... I never really thought about it when I was growing up which is hilarious because I was born in Utah and my parents were Mormon. My family was Mormon, and they were excommunicated from the church when I was quite young. Part of it was kind of my fault because I asked my parents when I would get the priesthood, like my three big brothers, and they were just like like, Uhh, well, we’re not going to answer that question, we’re just going to take you out of here, because this is wrong! So that was a huge thing, as I get older, starting to understand the dimensions of losing a faith.

You can find a way to relate to anybody in this world, if you just give them some fucking time.

For my father I think it was unbearable, so difficult and humiliating, to have brought his whole family to the Mormon church and then be like, Actually, no. He did his PhD in religion and he was a theology and religious history professor, and he’s one of these people who’s like, Read everything, just read everything, read baseball stats and read religious philosophy and read really good children’s books, because all of these stories are what we use to make meaning of this vast chaos. My dad just has this ability to talk—he has this sort of religious fluency—he can talk to anybody from any religion and he just gets it, because he’s able to engage on a deeper level. We have these words that people don’t really investigate that much or have a really shallow understanding of, especially when it comes to religion. People close off because they hear a word, and that word can actually mean tremendously more, and so when you were talking about the way you understand ghosts for example, it’s like Yes, that I agree with, you’re just using a different word. I feel like some of the most intelligent people I know are people who are wrestling with religion, because religion is basically just a system that we try to create to order morality and live in a moralistic, deep, appreciative way. I get really pissed off when people just shut down in discussions about religion. I get really bored by a lot of atheists and agnostic people because they’re just not bothering to spend time with the unanswerable questions. The unanswerable ones are the most important!

Is your music spiritual for you?

Again, the word ‘spiritual’ is weird because it’s used in so many weird contexts now, but yeah, for sure. I am a deeply emotional person, I feel things so, so enormously, I can’t contain it, that’s why I do music—I’m brimming! I need some receptacle for this! It’s too much, and I think I have to say I am so, so lucky that I grew up in the family that I did because I am an idealist, my parents are so loving and gracious and real, they’re so real. Talking about my parents makes me want to cry because they’re just the best humans, and I’m really fucking lucky because they created an environment where I felt safe to feel everything, you know? And share it and express it and feel safe.

Yeah parents are pretty fucking rad.

One of my brothers got kind of sucked into the mental health system, to his great, great detriment, and my mom just did everything, and took it farther, she’s working on lobbying to redraft mental health rights because the mental health system is so fucked in Canada. Like that’s how extreme my parents are, my mom’s getting involved at the provincial and federal level now, because she takes it seriously, and then you start to see how many other people are getting fucked over and who don’t have advocates.

So much of what my music is is just frustration with a society that was inhospitable to one of the best people I ever knew, and Nick’s not here anymore. And he’s the best, he’s the best human, so fucking sensitive and talented and kind and gentle, the most selfless person, and he just got fucked over, he’s just too... Our society is not kind to people that deviate from what we’re supposed to be, people who are truly altruistic get totally, totally fucked. I feel like Nick taught me everything that I know about music, every piece of music that I listened to until I was 16 was Nick playing it for me, he was a gorgeous cellist. Fuck we lost a really good one. And I have a responsibility now to have as many conversations and create as many spaces for people to feel safe and connected as possible. Like I have to. Because Nick’s not here anymore. I mean there’s that, and also I just care about... Ahh, that got really heavy really fast!

Wow, thank you for talking to me about this. It sounds like you’re doing something so positive and valuable with it, something that will really make a difference for people, which is beautiful.

I hope so. I really hope so.

What’s your favourite show that you’ve played, or space or place that you’ve played in?

I had a show in Dawson City, the Dawson City Music Festival, a couple of summers ago, anyway this place called the Palace Grand, it’s this old old building that had burnt down and they rebuilt it stitch for stitch basically. Dawson City’s pretty magical. Something about that show, it was kind of like the first time that I was like, I’m a musician, I’m getting paid well to play a festival and I got flown up here and I’m doing it.

The venue was unbelievably beautiful, and it was packed, it was one of the most visceral... usually when I play my eyes are closed, and I experience these really wild landscapes, like I’m just moving through landscapes, and this one was a particularly cool journey, and I remember after I went off the stage and I felt like I was puke crying, I just wept. It felt so good, I just cried because I felt a lot, it wasn’t like bad or good it was just like Wooaaahhh, I’m alive! Gah, that’s crazy! So that was helpful. I had a lot of good shows on this last European tour too.

I mean last night was really awesome, that was my fourth show with Steven Foster and we finally clicked. He’s a great friend of mine, I think we’ve just mutually respected each other as musicians for a super long time. Royal Canoe asked me to do these shows, and I was looking at the venues and was like, I need something a little bit more—Steven Foster, what’s your schedule like? And he was like, Oh I’m getting back from a two month tour the day before, and so we just finagled our way into a jam space at like 9:30pm the night before we started the tour, jammed for three hours, and then we started playing together. That was six days ago, so last night was like, Ohh sweet we finally get it, together, and it sucks because now I’m going to go do a month-long tour without him, and it’s going to feel so vacant.

Wait—you hadn’t played with him before this week?!

I’ve never played with Steven Foster before. I wouldn’t trust that many musicians, there aren’t that many musicians I would ask to do that, but I just knew he could do it, I was like, Steven the thing is you’ve got it, you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be great actually. And so last night it finally clicked, and my voice was so fucked but it was kinda fun, you know I was talking earlier about parameters, I felt like, Ok I have like three notes to work with, this is cool, I’m going to find a new way to use my voice now, and I kind of enjoyed it.

Amazing. What are some of your favourite bands or musicians right now, or some of your influences?

I listened to Bjork and Radiohead religiously growing up. I don’t listen to that much music, that’s what’s crazy, like I never look for music, and I also have just had the good fortune of being surrounded by good musicians, especially in New York. Some of my favourite bands right now are my friends’ bands, which is weird because I’m usually like the most critical. This band Big Thief, Steve’s project Omhouse, Royal Canoe, Aidan Knight, all of these guys.

And you were saying before that your musical influences aren’t really other musicians, they’re the people and things in your life, right?

That’s the thing, a big reason why I moved to New York is that I’m doing a lot of really immersive theatre, doing composition for dance, music composition, yeah. I just directed my first music video, two days before I came to Toronto, and it was the best. I was just like, I get how it all is supposed to be, this is the best. So that was fucking awesome, and my best friend in New York is a choreographer and I’ve done a couple of evening-length compositions for her company, and I love it. It’s so incredible when there are two languages, the language of music, the language of gesture, and they’re different languages and you just meet and explode in the place in between and around, it’s just the best, I love it.

Last night you introduced your song “Farthest Distance” as a fuck-you to hashtag culture... want to expand on that?

Yeah, yeah, well I wrote it the week that the Charlie Hebdo incident happened, and I was so freaking frustrated, because everybody... This really complicated event happened, a lot of layers of things going on when that happened, and within like a few hours there are people on the other side of the world just kind of throwing out the Je Suis Charlie hashtag, and it’s like, Do you even know... have you ever even heard of the Charlie Hebdo world at all? Do you even know what you’re saying? For the most part, no! So many people who are using this hashtag are just like it’s the hip thing to do and you’re showing your solidarity with something, committing yourself to this movement that you haven’t even given time to talk about or think about critically. I find that so destructive, I think it eliminates the space and time that’s needed to have conversations and dialogue. It’s really reductive, it’s impatient. I mean hashtags are really helpful for categorizing things, like shows in Montreal, #showsinmontreal, it’s great, it’s like an indexing tool, that’s not what I’m talking about, I’m not talking about the indexing capacity of hashtags.

Mostly, I’m feeling really sad with how impatient people are—life is so complicated, there are so many realities, and all of them are right in some way. You can find a way to relate to anybody in this world, if you just give them some fucking time. So that’s where the fuck-you comes in. That’s what I would say about that. I was also reading The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, at that same time, and so there’s definitely a certain kind of lyrical aesthetic that is derivative of that, sections of the poem. I was like this is so connected, like there’s that line “I can’t even find silence in the waste land,” you bring that into the context of social media and the cacophony of the pixelated world and it’s like—

Sshhhhh, please stop talking everybody! Just go!

Let there be some silence for a little while!

—Jacob Baker-Kretzmar

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April Showers... AA Playlist #9

April Showers Bring Dope New Releases From Canada’s East Coast. Damn right we’re still here in the summer!

[theartsabstract]

Hi! AA Playlist #8

Eight-oh-eight-oh-eight-ohbooyyyyy! (Mar 29 - Apr 10 issue.)

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ARTS ABSTRACT ~ ISSUE TWELVE ~ MAR 28 - APR 10

Journal launches, parties, last Wardy night, and more!

Issue #12 The Arts Abstract Newsletter

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I Wuz Here Interview w/ Evangeline Freedman

Evangeline Freedman is a second-year King’s student studying Gender and Women’s Studies and Early Modern Studies. She is an artist who creates comics and zines, and you can see excerpts of her comic I Wuz Here included throughout this interview. We spoke to Evangeline about her inspiration for her work, her current projects, and her thoughts on women in comics.

On her artistic work: I’ve done three zines called Wasteoid that are based off of graffiti on Gottingen Street. They’re about me, my life. All the work I’ve done up until now is really unplanned. Even when I’ve done those pages, there’s been no page planning. It’s mostly fragment. What I want to draw, I’ll draw. There’s no planned meaning other than what I want to reflect on. I made I Wuz Here to reflect on FYP.

Is there a storyline or a subjective progression in this comic? A lot of it is about personal relationships and mental illness. Before I was with my current partner, I was in a really shitty relationship, and the one I ended before I came to college was also pretty awful. So some of it is about working through the urge to go back and look at it and analyze it. And to go back through the harshness and the bad stuff that happened, the compulsive urge to check up on them — to do better and be better than them. It’s also a lot about feeling like a crazy person as a mentally-ill woman because I think the train of thought there is much quicker than for men. So it’s kind of a ‘hysterical broad’ comic. I’m really into reclaiming that. I think my next comic series is going to be called Dizzy Bitches because that’s what me and my roommate refer to each other as; “Oh man, we forgot to take the garbage out tonight, fuck we’re such dizzy bitches.”

Is your work a way of processing your life and creating a narrative, or is it mainly artistic inspiration? I used to really want to be an animator. I was interested in clear storytelling, story-boarding, fantasy and science fiction narratives which, as fantastical as they can be, are usually straight-forward in terms of timeline and clarity. All of the art that I’ve made since I’ve come to King’s has been fairly abstract and stream-of-consciousness. It is a processing, but I don’t know if it’s about creating a narrative because I don’t really agree with the idea anymore that life can be a real narrative. The idea that if bad shit happens to you, you continue to go up and at some point you’ll plateau and everything will be okay, I don’t know if as a person and a mentally-ill person, things really work like that anymore. [...] A lot of the time when I’m making shit I don’t realize what it’s supposed to mean until I can look back on it and say, Oh this is what I was trying to work through.

On women in comics: I’m doing a comic for the Purity Journal, an online literary magazine, about Julie Doucet. It’s about women and underground comics and how I feel that underground comics as a scene has tended to miss women. There’s been all these comics about women, for women, by women, about women’s experiences but they tend to be more linear, narrative driven, illustrative style, like Alison Bechdel. Things like women’s comics have had a tendency to go from the political to the personal, rather than the other way around. That’s totally respectable, but I just really want to see more female artists who are disgusting and brutally honest and portray life as gross and gritty. Julie Doucet does all that and I’m super inspired by her.

What is it about the graphic novel that is such an effective means of carrying women’s stories? I think illustration is a women’s medium and has been for a long time. More than that, the possibility to self-publish is really appealing. Female filmmakers have to edit or censor or not follow their original plans, but with comics all you really need is a Xerox machine, a pen and some paper. Especially with the internet, you can distribute your stuff super widely.

Her current projects: I’m working on a comic called “What happened to Ismene?” It’s a four-part story about Ismene from Antigone. [Bringing stories like hers to light is] a lot of what I want to do with my work, especially since coming to King’s and feeling the real burn for female authors and characters that aren’t included in the canon, but could be if someone just took the time to lift them up. So I want to lift her story up. She’s the last living line in this cursed family. All she does throughout the story is remain domestic and responsible and a caregiver to everyone around her. At the end of Antigone, she’s just left alive with no indication of what happens to her. Her entire family is dead, she has a curse on her bloodline and she has never stepped foot out of her domestic responsibilities. I’m interested in exploring what having things happen to you that you have no control over would do to a person. It’s four segments and different possibility for responses to that. In one of them she remains totally attuned to her domesticity. In another she burns down the tomb of her family. In another she’ll be living with a nice shepherd boy and moving on. I don’t know what to do with the last one yet, but I think her story needs to be explored. I really wonder about her curse in relation to my own family’s experience with mental illness. Sometimes it feels similar. There’s this bad thing that nobody really knows who started the cycle but it’s being passed down even if you didn’t ask for it or take any part in it. I feel like that’s really similar to having a curse on your bloodline and you have no idea why you deserve it.

Check out another one of her projects here!

— MH & HB

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ARTS ABSTRACT ~ ISSUE TEN ~ Feb 29 - Mar 13

The TENTH Arts Abstract this year -- released on a LEAP day -- in an American ELECTION year -- at 3:00 PM -- what does it mean??

Issue #10 The Arts Abstract Newsletter

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Cities, Life, and Art Interview w/ Sophie Wonfor and Izzy Jackson

Sophie Wonfor and Izzy Jackson talk art.. school... art in school... cities, life, and art.

Sophie Wonfor just designed a new logo for the Arts Abstract! So sik! She is Bread in Alberta, just finished snacking in Halifax, now seeking weeknight dinner ideas in Montréal. She studied printmaking and a muesli-mix of critical studies classes for two years at NSCAD, but makes a lot of work in resin, glass and plant material. She is moving to Montréal to finish her degree in Art History and Studio Art at Concordia. “(Recognizing that I actually have a practice is relatively new for me.) The space I wake up in and the space I work in are just as much my practice as the things I do and make while I’m there. The way I set up these spaces is as much my practice as the occasional beam of window-light on my desk, the people who are present, the conversations we're having, the houseplants around the room and the gardens outside. My work is from and about these environments: clipped, pruned, preserved, and arranged. Drawing is often the largest part of what I do, but there’s something about dipping hosta leaves in resin or arranging plant clippings that really fills me up. I hope to engage a conversation that acknowledges but diverges from the historically gendered use of plants, that looks into our inseparable relationship with them and does not represent them so much as employ their language.”

Izzy Jackson says: “I’ve always felt very attached to the past. And at the same time, I think about the future a lot. I think about what the present will look like for the future. So in my art I deal with tracing things. I have written over 100 diaries. I am quite obsessed with documentation, trying to give a good record of the now so that the future can look at something from the past. I am afraid of forgetting and of dying so I use art as a way of making something that can last...” Izzy asks a lot of questions with her art, such as what it means to love oneself, about the link between sexuality and communication, about her own sexual history and how it changed her. She also made paintings that were trying to find a ‘natural self’ through intuitive art and abstract painting. She is currently a student in the Foundation Year Programme, looking to return to studying the fine arts in September.

Why study art? By ‘study art’ i mean ‘why study art in university... why not study it in university...’?

Soph Wonf: I think all the reasons you should be encouraged to, are completely paralleled by why you don’t need to. Whether or not you want to study art in school, is so dependent on what you think you need and want to do. Art doesn’t really fit into a school so much as it happens between the structures of the school. The conversations that happen after or between classes are no less valuable than those that happen during class. Slightly outside of the structure of school is where a lot of students might feel the most comfortable to fully engage in their practice, or in conversation. I have definitely been there, but I also love being in school. Through NSCAD I found a community of likeminded people with similar motivations, with shared cares and concerns for art. They might have been harder to find outside of school, but surely not impossible. I’m hard pressed to believe you could spend even a semester at an arts university and not leave somehow changed, but how does that change compare to a semester spent studying or practicing art outside a university? I can’t imagine either being so much better or worse, as long as it’s where you want to be.

Izzy Jackson: My thoughts on this have evolved over the years. I started out, near the end of high school, wanting to have complete and total freedom. My high school, Etobicoke School of the Arts, gave me a taste for conceptual art that made me want only that. After that, I took a year off to work and make art on my own. It gave me lots of time to experiment but the freedom I had ended up stressing me out a lot. Since art is such a broad topic, it can be a bit overwhelming to try and practice on your own, with so much freedom.

How has your degree changed your relation to your art practice?

Wonf: Being at NSCAD allowed me to actually understand that I do have a practice. In my second year my video professor asked us to “pay attention to what you pay attention to.” I think that kind of sums up what made it happen for me. Giving validity to the fact that I am paying attention, thinking, reading, recognizing ideas, and choosing to really work with some of those ideas has been huge. Where I previously had felt I wasn’t “legit enough” to even apply or submit work anywhere, being at school gave credence to my practice, allowing me to make a lot of work I really wanted to make and show. I also finally understood that I really can’t make art alone. Even if I do (and need to) spend a lot of time on my own, if I didn’t have people to talk to about what I’m thinking and doing, I wouldn’t actually get very far at all and my work wouldn’t be where it is. Collaborating with other people was new to me this year too, and turned out to be one of the best experiences I think I’ve ever had at NSCAD. It was so exciting to finally be able to seriously connect and create with other people, and I don’t think I knew how much I was missing that. (Kind of the complete opposite of Joni Mitchell’s sentiment in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’: I didn’t know what I didn’t have till I got it.)

Jackson: At the small arts course I took in Berlin, I was given a lot of freedom. This was really great for me at the time because I was able to explore whatever I wanted with feedback from my weird and smart mentors. I explored all the things I wanted to before but didn’t have the space or motivation to before, like animation and installation. I met really great people there who all had different interests. The woman I shared my studio with, Harriet, made realistic drawings and paintings. Realism was something I had lost my respect for when I was introduced to conceptual and abstract art in high school. I thought “what is the point of recreating what already exists”. But as me and Harriet became closer, I felt things new when I saw her drawings. I think having a close friendship with her made me open up to realism. Now I have an interest in drawing what I see, especially the people I know. It feels very different from drawing from my head. So yeah, I think art education can open you up to new ideas and techniques. I think the relationships you make are the ones you can learn the most from. I haven’t gone to a normal art university yet so I am still not sure if it is for me. But I know that even if I don’t like the school, I will learn at least something from it. I want to go to Concordia University next year because they have so many different facilities where I can learn they ways of new mediums like print, fibre arts, ceramics, and much more. Instead of exploring them on my own like I did in high school and Berlin, I will have the guidance of teachers who have a lot of practice in the specific medium. I will have to go by that teacher’s specific opinion and technique but that will give me a strong foundation for it which will open up the possibilities for what I could do with it next. I will leave school knowing the “right” way of these mediums and will then be free to do whatever I want with them. I want to leave school with as much knowledge of what the “right” way to make art is so that I can then choose to follow that or not. The benefit of arts school is that it opens you up to possibilities of art.

What is the critical art community like in Halifax? Do you feel you are pushed here? Why or why not?

Wonf: In my experience Halifax has been far more encouraging than it has been critical. Criticism, however, definitely exists. I have found it mostly surfaces within conversations that are happening between friends, so it is always within an atmosphere of respect and support. To the same degree, I think it is the people I know that have pushed my practice the most. Halifax makes it possible to actually meet, engage and even become friends with a person whose art/music/skills you admire, which seems pretty distinctly special to me.

Any words on what the larger creative/art community has going for it here?

Wonf: Halifax feels like it might be the most transient Canadian city - people are constantly coming and going - while there is also a sense of something solid, and established. Not necessarily permanent so much as established. That duality seems to have created a nice little crux where Halifax’s creative community has found its niche.

What led you to decide to leave / change up your scene?

Wonf: I had a really challenging semester (it seems most people do in their third year) and was feeling overwhelmed and like I couldn’t really tackle the questions that were filling up my head (which have been the focus of this interview, haha). I think the only reason I didn’t completely withdraw from classes was because of how much I cared about finishing them. To me, it would have been symbolic of me giving up on art and that wasn’t what was happening. I wrote one of my classes a break-up letter (addressed to fine-art printmaking): there were a dozen lithograph prints of my handwritten letter on the table, and during the crit everyone was really taken aback because they thought I was abandoning art. Having someone say out loud “I thought you were quitting art forever,” allowed me to realize that I was just taking a break from making art the way I had been. I needed to take time off, spend some time picking through my own head before I tried to finish my degree. In doing so it felt more and and more like the right time to make a move, and this was a move I’d been thinking about making for a while. Aside from the allure of change, of trying to start up in a different city, a different community, I’m really excited to be closer to my sisters, Harley/my partner and halfway-across-the-country-closer to my parents.

Jackson: By the end of the course in Berlin, I felt the need for structure so I decided to come to King’s for the Foundation Year Programme to learn about philosophy and history. I have found that the things I originally rejected are now things that I crave. Freedom became scary and is now boring so this year, while taking the Foundation Year Programme at King’s, I have been exploring the realm of realism. I enjoy the slowness and concentration that it forces me into. [...] For me, learning philosophy has helped me be more creative and more artistic with the way I analyze and talk about things. It helps me look at things in a less literal way.

What in particular do you feel NSCAD is doing wrong? Right?

Wonf: There is so much on the table for this school right now. Inseparable as it is from the arts in this province, and the associated budget cuts, the school is clearly cornered by finances. It’s tragic and frustrating to have felt the school feel more like a business than an educational center, and to feel at times like there is a too great divide between the university’s identity and the people and events and art within it. The latter I have felt comes out of a big emphasis on the school’s history, ie: the Golden Years and its place in conceptual art of the 1970s, which is totally important, but it’s not all the school is or has going for it. Infinite points for: keeping itself alive, bringing so many amazing people together, for being a space people feel they can pursue (or at least try) their ideas further than they might otherwise, for being a space with great facilities and a really nice view (and now there’s even Art Bar and the Khyber in the same building). Not to mention having The Anna Leonowens gallery built into the school gives the opportunity to students to have a solo exhibition before they graduate. That is so important. NSCAD has had a huge impact on my life, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. (Maybe if I wasn’t so ready to go, I’d have stayed.)

What is NSCAD arts community for you?

Wonf: There’s a sense of solidarity and respect that I think allows a lot of young artists to gain confidence to commit to their pursuits, myself included. Running into your peers and professors at the grocery store is somehow a reminder that what you’re doing is actually sane, viable and important. It’s almost harder to avoid the community than it is to recognize you’re a part of it and find your place within it. I’ve met some of the most important people in my life here and to me those relationships are the most special thing.

-SKD

Works, in the order that they appear: 1. “perhaps that has nothing to do with gardens at all,” resin block (neighbourhood garden plants gathered in halifax), 2015, Sophie Wonfor. 2. “synthetic puddles,” installation view from //preserve///, 2015. 3-5. painting and drawings by Izzy Jackson.

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Snow Day AA Playlist #7

Seven! Get hyped! (Feb 8 - 21 issue.)