Recorded in Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Studio in Olympia, WA, Canada’s most progressively potent gang of art-damaged grumps have created what could be their masterwork. After years of touring Rollins style and unleashing countless slabs upon the mound, AIDS Wolf have pared it down to the bare wires pulsing and robbing us of the horizon. Chloe Lum’s vocals are louder than ever, yet processed in robotic jabs to the eardrums, playful, violent, while Alex Moskos floats and meanders through a valley of oozing moans, all on top of the unrelenting smash provided by Yannick Desranleau. Every time they get into the studio they take it out to the left field for another round of “how insane am I/how insane is the world”, barefoot and lost. Finding new meanings inside the sullen husks of human interaction, focused on the future and destroying the past relatives we had known. Repetition. Repeater. Realized. Where do we go from here?

A familiar scene: a young dreamer alone in his parent’s basement makes music to escape loneliness and boredom. Now, the unusual thing about this scene is that this basement is filled with state-of-the-art (for 1984) home-recording equipment and synthesizers and is located in rural Alberta surrounded by endless potato fields, miles from anything remotely metropolitan. For the young Tona Walt Ohama, the major portals to the world-at-large from his isolated farm were through television, radio and records. A well-rounded diet of classical, rock, prog and most importantly New Wavers like Gary Numan & John Foxx gave Ohama the vocabulary he needed to beam beautiful analog messages from his farm to the greater world. I Fear What I Might Hear, Ohama’s first album proper, is a masterpiece of modern folk-form, perfectly capturing the Canadian cultural climate of the early eighties and its effect on a sensitive young mind. I Fear is at once as introspective and pastoral as Nick Drake, but rather than evoking acoustic images of Camus and moody English moors it speaks of McLuhan and a plugged-in landscape that is equal parts muddy toil and media spoil. The LP works effectively as a cohesive document partly because the existential themes of isolation, identity and cultural decay are explored as lyrical subject-matter throughout, but also because the songs are all stitched together using a concrete pastiche of sounds that ranges from idyllic & rustic (animals & water) to industrial & urban (engines & TV). Truly, this is a prescient letter of distress and dislocation revealing the disappearance of a dichotomy, where it doesn’t matter where you live, Google will find you. Don’t be afraid though, it’s a great comfort to know that Ohama’s clear and visionary voice is out there in the Great Wide Aether.

For further insight into the great mind of Ohama, check out my extensive dialogue with Tona via Polyphasic Recordings.

Canada’s prime officer of cool meets England’s queen (of baroque pop), sibling solo sculptors of static foggy goodness. Dirty Beaches’ Badlands b-sides find a home here, living through Super 8 memories and dissolving time into slow swaying cigarette smoke. A strung out cinematic soundtrack for a long overnight train ride.

Deep within Canada’s tundradic core lies a lush gully of acoustic majesty. As these warm vibrations pierce the embittered cold, their very migration needs a soundtrack; hymns to carry us while our ancient graves turn barren lives to eternal dust. While the sky turns Paris Green and our eyes drift softly into slumber, Jessica’s hymns persuade; Brother Loyola‘s warmth and gorgeous mellow shall swallow us in a liquid sun of minor-key mourning. The cover says it all: grip.

Caked from top to bottom in a thick simmer of fuzz, Silver Dapple choose to fight amplifier feedback with massive walls of unclean guitar overdrive. English Girlfriend’s honey dripping sounds echo back two decades at Black Tambourine’s feminine noise-pop, its finely wound songwriting tangible through humble hooks and fairly removed expressionism. À dévorer à pleines dents.

With decade-spanning CVs instilling sonic seasickness, Toronto’s smirking surrealists have become an underground institution of near NSB proportions. Carboard Oracle marks Six Heads’ inaugural expedition on vinyl, and it’s a seriously woozy cruise. Sipping from the same strange brew as Smegma, A-side “Smaller, Larger, Lighter (Incantation of the Naugahyde Witch)” finds Twin Peaks’ little man from another place bubbling up the bong and raiding a kid’s tickle trunk to find a kalimba. The flip slides even further sideways, as “Carnival Dust” spins on a not-so-merry-go-round of smeared signals, chimes and disconnected static from the depths of the Devil’s Triangle. Not for the faint of stomach.

Machete-cut chunks sliced straight out of the post-punk ether, Duchess Says reiterate their whirlwind shrieks and jabbing throbs, rousing your tendons into unconditional muscular praise. Join the noise-wave church of switchblade synths and bass bullies, their tortures involving dissonant Moog squelches, sweaty mosh pits, frantic dancefloors and a few slower songs. Oh, and of course everything singer Annie-Claude hurls at you.

Feel the coarse, desert grain fade as the scarubs march fringeward to the beat of Omma Cobba. Slurs of popular bass emanate from the fringes of oases while the vacant desert melts away to Cobba’s burning morning chrome; a hazy trip through opium dens of merino acid and cashmere horses. Welcome the new dawn with dusted lungs and eyes brimming with theta waves. 12″s of polyvinyl glory ripe for the gripping.

Like a phoenix emerging from its gilded egg of myrhh to set off a cave rave at the gates of Heliopolis, perpetual Weird Canada posterchildren GOBBLE GOBBLE have soared into the next level of hyper-pop consciousness, rechristened BORN GOLD. Yet Bodysongs is no Day-Glo abortion of the past, but rather a hydra-headed celebration of where these bodacious boys have been and where they’re heading next. Well-worn singles like “Lawn Knives,” “Wrinklecarver” and “Boring Horror” bump and grind against live staple “Eat Sun, Son” and the rebooted emo-Rihanna banger “Alabaster Bodyworlds”. Above all, the twitchy steel drum synths of “Decimate Everything” blast a laser beam into the future, proving these MUTEK/Ghost Throats hybrid humanoids still have plenty of tricks up their skirts.

The only way to survive living in the yuppie void of Oakville, Ontario is by burying your head deep in the intoxicating sands of imagination. For Lou Champagne this meant filling his nose with the sting of solder, his eyes with a labyrinth of circuits, his mind with resistors and his ears with a virtual synthtopia of Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, Chrisma and their analog ilk. Lou’s ‘Champagne System’ is a self-invented device that allows him to control his synths with his guitar so that he can perform as a modern day (pre-MIDI) one-man-band. The beast born of his engineering explorations, No Visible Means, sounds at times like a gristleized Swell Maps, at others like despondent Transparent Illusion produced by Rago & Farina. Although Lou’s vision is viewed through singular Chrome & Cristal glasses there is something in these songs that is familiar to anyone who turned to art, music and dreaming to escape the boredom of growing up surrounded by numb suburban slump. Lou’s words are just as true now as they were in 1981, “I’m like a man in a fantasy, and maybe I should just get stoned”. Throw your glass in the fireplace and gulp Lou’s brew straight from the bottle; legit reissue available from Medical Records.