Blog: Zoilus

First the acetate, now the airship: Montreal artist Cesar Saez acknowledges the Velvet Underground influence on his new project , in which a giant flying banana will slip (ouch) inobtrusively across the Mexico-U.S. border to hover over Texas. This story's been Boing-Boing 'd etc. already, of course, but I'm pleased with the Globe's investigative acumen in digging up the V.U. angle. Beginning to see the light...

A postscript to my earlier Chatham entry : Ron Gaskin seeks additional guitarist(s) for this gig: "The base touring group will be Rhys on guitar and conducting with David Daniell (San Augustin, Rhys Chatham, Jonathan Kane, etc.) also on guitar. Indigenous players will be a part of this performance, so each city will have 4 different guitarists, a bassist and a drummer, with the possibility of other instrumental additions. An intro/instructional form from Rhys will prepare players. The composition is 40-45 minutes long and not overly complicated. The composer requests approx two hours committment before doors for rehearsal/sound [...]

YouTube provides a window on the first Simply Saucer reunion show for those of us who missed it. Feels a bit bar-band for the first half (Breau's vocals much less demented than in his yout') but then it takes off:

Joanna Newsom, photo by Paul Jones via Milkymoon . Not , as sniggering detractors might claim, over the sit-down (though I'd have enjoyed that, too), but due to the space, depth and accomplishment: Erik Davis writes the only article about Joanna Newsom's Ys you ever need to read , in the new issue of Arthur. It's lengthy (12,000 words) but justifies it with thoroughness and helpful demystification for those out there who still find the album difficult to get into. One for the next [...]

Congrats to The Reveries (Eric Chenaux, Doug Tielli and Ryan Driver, recently joined by percussionist Jean Martin) for getting their slobbery-pop-standards music to the cover of the first issue of Eye of 2007. I've been touting their music of, as Driver says in Vish Khanna's accompanying story , "vulnerability, mystification and confusion," for several years and it's nice to see other press take notice. The Reveries launch their Live in Bologna disc tonight (Fri) at the Tranzac, but their planned four-disc box covering Prince, Willie Nelson, Sade and Nick Cave promises to be one of the [...]

Hi, and welcome to 2007, a year that I currently can't help regarding as a work of science fiction. This perception may be disproportionately affected by having spent too much of the turn of the calendar watching almost the entire series run of Battlestar Galactica , which feels in my current dvd-marathon haze like the best serialized novel since Dickens - a claim that might more plausibly be made about The Wire , but the latter is too indebted to documentary film and too polyphonic really to stand compare with any pre-21st-century model. But Battlestar Galactica [...]

"Ice sailing, Toronto Harbour, 1912," by John Boyd, Archives of Ontario. In today's final episode of the Slate Music Club , I go ultrapatriotic and try to introduce U.S. readers to Destroyer, Final Fantasy, Laura Barrett and Blocks Recording Club, while also making encomiums to Matmos and Howe Gelb, and sniping a bit at Nickleback, Dylan and Girl Talk. (Main regret: How did I get through that whole series without ever mocking the Decemberists?) I know it's the start of the holiday weekend, but keep an eye [...]

My latest post in the Slate end-of-2006 Music Club is up now. Amusingly, in the selfsame moment that the group of critics is all raising a glass of bubbly and singing, "ding-dong, rockism's dead," the posters in Slate's "The Fray" reader's forum are doing their damndest to prove us wrong by attacking us for discussing pop: "This is the place where the reviewer tries to compensate for his lack of taste and failure to keep up with music culture by waxing poetic about the merits of Timberlake and Nelly, not where we talk about actual music (as [...]

Today in The Globe and Mail, I have a review of Sunday night's show by Howe Gelb (Giant Sand) and his Ottawa-based 'Sno Angel project, which features the Voices of Praise gospel choir. Here's a video of the group performing in Manchester earlier this year:

The Clipse: Consensus picks of the Slate '06 crew. As forecast , the Slate Music Club - feat. Jody Rosen, Jon Caramanica, Ann Powers and me - begins its annual general meeting today. So far Jody's discussed the "slow-motion collapse of the record business" in 2006, as well as country music and "Morrissey-goes-mall-rat" bands like Panic! at the Disco, while Jon's lauded the Clipse and My Chemical Romance. We've all tacitly agreed not to discuss Gnarls Barkley (will our defences hold?). My first post [...]

There's a nice piece in The Globe today about my friends Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis's apartment gallery (where I gave my "Make Your Own Bad Band" talk-shop) and other examples of in-home art spaces created in Toronto, private spaces turned into hybrid public ones. I like the way that Brian and Emily talk about their year-long experiment - that it's not as much for its own sake as to help provide a model that other people might take up. As a toast to them , I offer the following [...]

A quick but fervent reminder that tonight is the one-and-only performance of The December Show: Big in Afghanistan , the sequel to 2004's fondly recollected The November Show choreographed by Margaux Williamson with music by Ryan Kamstra, now reincarnated by Margaux Williamson with Ryan Kamstra's band Tomboyfriend , whose Wavelength debut last month was much discussed on this here blog . It's described as "a fun, poetic, ghoulish, plotless little rock show that flies like the Bob Hope Show in reverse." A rough [...]

I realized just today that some of you might have been checking Slate all week for that end-of-year roundtable I mentioned . It's actually been bumped to next week - sorry for the late notice.

Stephen Merritt on an Atlanta morning show last month, promoting the Lemony Snicket tie-in album , and not exactly happy to be there:

When I talk about participatory musical culture, the easiest example to bring up is the church or community choir. At the State of the Arts launch a few weeks ago, it came up that one of the fanciest high-end instrument stores in Toronto was originally founded to supply equipment to ethnic church-basement bands and choirs downtown, of which there were hundreds in the much-smaller city at the time. An amateur choir looks like one of the most pleasurable hobbies you could have, but there aren't many comfortable choices for a younger music lover. There are serious-as-hell classical [...]