Ease back into 90s sluritude with Weed’s latest quad-platter offering of bummed-out grunge. The newly formed melancholy drips mighty rhythms into a painful chorus of subterranean solitude; the glimmering sun, locked into grooves laced with peaks and valleys, rarely yielding a morning dew more suffocating than the BOSS distortion warming each track on Gun Control. Minimal synth aficionados will be fooled by “Ben’s Tour”‘s opening riff, but the real heads will dive for the mail-order-only grippage. Vinyl is limited to 200 copies with a cassette-version offered via Green Burrito.

With just enough slacker isolation to eschew the waning spring, Beach Velvet’s warbled shimmer slips unseen into the eternal heat of summer noons. It’s an easy sound that hits all the right vibes and osmose into your mind to the rhythm of swirling jangle and warm riffs. Relish in the simplicity of tape jammers and log cabin chillin’, mentally free-basing off these tape waves.

For the past six weeks, my life flipped from Weird Canada editor to Dirty Beaches drummer/driver on a motorik expedition through Europe. The montage above (filmed by Alex Zhang Hungtai on iPhone’s 8mm video app, ‘natch) gives a glimpse into the 23 hours we spent each day in-between shows, including white knuckle mountain drives, parking lot slow dances, basement bro tats in Copenhagen, behind-the-scenes footage from a food blog in Belgium, sexy wallpaper in Rotterdam, and a potentially NSFW truck-stop washroom purchase. Meanwhile, the soundtrack provides snippets of our in-car listening: Alice Coltrane, Liaisons Dangereuses, Mac DeMarco, a Nick Cave audiobook, etc. Big ups to Elias, Jakob, Etienne, multiple Chrises, Francesco, Line, Edda, Brando, Michael, Yann, Tess, Tara, and anyone else who made this tour a blast. Viva Europa!

Clean, austere, marmoreal: the penetrating realism of the DIY choose-your-own-adventure Mathematics Oddyssey by Kent Windermere, illustrated by Eugena Simington, is the perfect fictionification of everyone’s first real analysis professor. The author’s outlook for the future treads a careful path between bleak and hopeful. Were he constrained to the typical linear narrative, he would have been forced to come to terms with the ultimate conclusions to which all stories refer: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. From his own uncertainties Kent crafts something much more elusive: an expression of the stress that is caused by the knowledge that your life depends solely on your choices. Though focused tightly on mathematics throughout (and let me stress this point: contemporary research-level mathematics, and the style of life such research provides), the message applicable to you and I rings loud and clear: choose wisely.

Shuffling and smiling through a moon-hung Ren. Faire when the dandelion wine has kicked in for the minstrels, electroacoustic jazzbo Lee Hutzulak dips into that crazy river. Tucked underneath his faded poncho, the twinkle-eyed lifeguard of Dixie’s Death Pool unleashes a squadron of steam punk arachnids to undertake his mystical bidding. Rev up your electric flute, grab a Mackie Blackjack and get jiggy.

Rambling through the bedhead basement freak scene like a scorched tumbleweed, Student Teacher play hooky with classification. These teenage dirt ‘stache desert jammers make crocodile rock wha-wha pop sound just as leisurely as monotonic garage, wayward drifted psych-outs and corpse paint metal broods. Somewhere between the janglophone twang of Dead Ghosts and Babysitter’s hormone-overdriven hack and thrash, our new favourite Vancouverites are bumming out Mount Pleasant. Grip.

Not exactly sure how the entire world missed this one. Very quietly sometime last week Alex Zhang Hungtai a.k.a. Dirty Beaches posted the final product of one of his dreams come true: a music video directed by Tsien-Tsien Zhang with cinematography by Christopher Doyle. Mr. Doyle is of course the man who helped give legendary Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s films their distinct look with his fast & loose approach to shooting. The result of this unique technique gives the work a very natural, human perspective. You quickly forget you are even watching a film and sink deep into the world they create.

Doyle & Kar-wai’s collaborations include a long list of masterpieces such as Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), etc, etc. The video for “White Sand” feels very much like a vignette from one of these films with its voyeuristic, fly-on-the-wall approach, moody drifting shots and abundant (but mild) NSFWisms. It’s clear with the absence of >tired tropical tropes, that is to say the imagery that indie-rock has beyond pillaged in the last few years, that “White Sand” stands as simply a state of mind.

In the days where most young bands use old sourced footage to make quick videos on the cheap in a fast grab, the impact might not be as heavy seeing something so eloquent, warm grainy and hypnotic. Your connectopathic brain is trained to think that something so beautiful could not possibly be original. However when you are informed that this is original footage, shot and directed by professionals specifically to accompany the music it takes on a whole new life and meaning. We are simply not used to seeing this type of thing attempted by unsigned bands in the underground.

Plodding along the unending hallways and caves of life, we lust for the sedatival inspyrations of happiness slung to the souls, throats and pasts of others. Alex Hungtai stars as Dirty Beaches and has for the past few years laid bare the minimalism that the over-saturated (that’s you!) and inundated generation(s) crave. This new 7” (the haunting “Lone Runner” and a reissue of “Stye Eye”) lets you slink into chicken wire honky-tonk darkness; like reverberated leather, Bakersfield-cum-Nayshville yelps all set to a comfort-drug soundtrack. With two, sometimes three psychedelic tongue-wagging crooners and percussive mutants as accompaniment, it’s time for you to think less, listen more and step out from behind that beautiful shell into the great divide.

As I begin my journey east I have begun reflecting upon the westward strangers whose lysergic testaments have shaped my own vision. Paul Marcano, with his ode to a future bursting with space colonies and solar winds, is first in mind. Recorded in his secluded studio outside Victoria, BC, Islands in Space is a testament to the forward-thinking creative consciousness existing within the New Age cosmos. Ragged guitar, searing leads, layered vocals, and dense electronics synthesize Islands in Space into one of the great psychedelic canons of the north. As an experience that begs meditation and continuous listening, I challenge readers to take a dive into Paul’s universe. Islands in Space is a pre-cursor to Lightdreams’ tape-only release 10,001 Dreams.

Standing by our never-ending infatuation with all things Jennifer Castle, Weird Canada is proud to partner with Flemish Eye, Beatroute Magazine, and Sled Island in presenting three evenings of ethereal reverberations. For the lucky druidics mingling around Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary, we welcome your participatory magik while this otherworldly hippie goddess from the east conjures her delicate, finger-picked minimalism. Please, join us.

## Vancouver, BC

- Date: Thursday, September 29, 2011:
- Location: Electric Owl Social Club (928 Main St.)
- With: The Ruffled Feathers, David Vertesi
- Price: $10 / $12
- Link: facebook
- Presented By: Beatroute Magazine & Weird Canada

## Edmonton, AB

- Date: Friday, September 30, 2011:
- Location: ARTery (9535 Jasper Ave.)
- With: Kris Ellestad, Smoke+Band, Mark Templeton
- Price: $10
- Link: facebook
- Presented By: Weird Canada & Flemish Eye

## Calgary, AB

- Date: Saturday, October 1, 2011:
- Location: Cantos Music Foundation
- With: Kris Ellestad
- Price: $10
- Link: facebook
- Presented By: Sled Island