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June 14th, 2011

Expansion :: Weird Canada + Flemish Eye NXNE Showcase!

From the eastern travels of Aaron Levin:
Weird Canada’s expansion into the eastern cosmos won’t stop at Wyrd MTL. On the Saturday before, we’ll be stopping in Toronto for a very, very special show with the perennial Flemish Eye to celebrate Weird Canada’s Searchlight victory. For easterners within the vicinity of Toronto, prepare for some heavy wig peeling:

9:00 :: GRIMES (Montreal, QC)
– Cosmic pop deity
– why we love her: here.

10:00 :: JENNIFER CASTLE (Toronto, ON)
– Mystic folk moves
– why we love her: here.

11:00 :: BRAIDS (Montreal, QC // Calgary, AB)
– Complex, undulating pulses
– why we love them: here.

12:00 :: CHAD VANGAALEN (Calgary, AB)
– The man. The mystery. The magnetism.
– why we love him: here.

01:00 :: DUZHEKNEW (Halifax, NS)
– Interdimensional pop warble
– why we love them: here.

Date: Saturday June 18, 2011
Location: The Great Hall
Doors: 8:00pm

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Categoria!! Promotions | No Comments »

January 18th, 2011

New Canadiana :: BRAIDS – Native Speaker

De la langue maternelle de Gabriel Jasmin:
Passant des soupirs aux cris, l’album Native Speaker, de Braids, abonde dans sa variété d’émotions. Ayant passés près d’un an en production, aucun son ni texture n’ont pas été peaufinés par les oreilles minutieuses des quatre membres du groupe, qui ont tout autoproduit. L’album jouit donc d’une richesse ondulatoire et aqueuse, un paysage peuplé de denses mélodies entrecroisées qui rappellent certains compositeurs minimalistes classiques. L’émotion culminant dans « Lammicken », une démonstration tourmentante de la voix puissante de Raphaelle Standell-Preston, le jeune quatuor prouve son talent unique pour communiquer la sensibilité par le son.

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BRAIDS – Lemonade

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BRAIDS – Lammicken

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Categoria!! compact disc :: New Canadiana :: quebec | 3 Comments »

January 16th, 2011

Interview :: BRAIDS

Interview with: Austin Tufts, Katie Lee, and Raphaelle Standell Preston
From: BRAIDS
(conducted by: Gabriel Jasmin)
Montreal, QC
::web/sounds::
[Photo: Landon Speers]

Montreal by way of Calgary quartet Braids make chilling, meticulously crafted pop music. Layering angelic four-part vocal harmonies over swirling synths, twinkling pianos, tropical guitars and stuttering, sophisticated rhythms, their arrangements are lush and obsessively detailed. The eye of this storm is frontwoman Raphaelle Standell Preston — also the voice behind Blue Hawaii — imbuing Braids’ songs with Bjorkian banshee shrieks, unexpected ululations and pigtailed curlicues. This week sees the release of their long-awaited debut LP on New York’s Kanine and Calgary’s Flemish Eye, a mini-tour supported by Long, Long, Long, and a lengthier jaunt into the U.S. Weird Canada’s Gabriel Jasmin sat down with the band for an interview.

Jesse Locke
Managing Editor
Texture Magazine / Weird Canada
texturemagazine.ca / weirdcanada.com

/////////////// BRAIDS INFERRED VIEWS ///////////////

Gabriel
::
Native Speaker is your first album. Considering you haven’t released much music prior to this, how do you react to the amount of press and hype you’re getting now? Does it fell rushed or did everything come together organically?
Austin
::
I think it grew very organically. We’ve been a band for four years now and we are just releasing our first full length. That’s a pretty steady growth. But yes, the amount of press is a little overwhelming. Lots of interviews and lots of business stuff we have to deal with, but it’s all a part of the process. I wouldn’t say overwhelming… It’s sort of exciting.
Gabriel
::
Don’t you feel like you’ve had nothing released and then suddenly you have a big monster in your hands?
Austin
::
It’s not a big monster, it’s just our first record.
Gabriel
::
Your songs are so complex. I’m curious to know about your writing process.
Austin
::
Everything is composed collectively.
Katie
::
Someone usually comes up with an idea, which could be a sound, or a riff, or a specific emotion and we just jam it out. But sometimes it comes on the spot too, without any thinking beforehand. Then we pick it apart, and it can take a really long time to finalize it.
Austin
::
Yeah, because everything is being created by everybody at the same time, there’s a lot of ideas being thrown out. And we try to push every idea to its full extent and see its full potential before saying yes or no to it. Unless if it’s a blatantly bad idea.
Katie
::
It’s good to let people come to a conclusion with their idea.
Austin
::
Exactly, we try to get to the point where everyone is satisfied with their own ideas and see if they keep them or discard them. Which is also why the songs are often very long and very dense. I think the reason why we write such long songs is because the writing process itself is so long. It takes us months to write a song. Because of how meticulous and careful we are about how things flow, and making sure we are capturing the right emotion. We often have to go through a lot of different parts and experiments to get that feeling.
Gabriel
::
About the actual record, can you explain the cover art and how it relates to your music ?
Katie
::
Yeah, we collaborated with our good friend Marc Rimmer to do the album art. He’s done a lot of our photos as well. We’ve always had problems agreeing on the art, and don’t want to have just one person in the band to do it because we are very critical with each other. So having someone else who we trust was really important to us, and we asked Marc to do our cover art. I guess it took him a bit to figure out what he exactly wanted. He played with photographs he had taken before, but then, one day in French class, he just left halfway through and bought a piece of those fluorescent light plastic coverings for offices. On his computer screen was this beautiful photo of a forest that he had taken, and he put the plastic covering in front of it and the colors came through. Marc said he liked the idea of it being textural, something that you’d want to touch and feel and how he wanted to create a flow with the colors in representing the feelings you get when listening to the album.
Austin
::
And there’s a contrast between the sticker, which is very sleek and simple, in a glossy finish with the art being a matte print. I think that separation has parallels with our music as well.
Gabriel
::
How about the name, Native Speaker?
Austin
::
Native Speaker refers to your native tongue, the language you’re most comfortable speaking. Between the four of us, our language is music. Also, “Native Speaker”, the title track of the album, deals with the conversation between two lovers, and how the connection they have through the conversation is their native language.
Austin
::
Like when you share a bond of love with somebody, it’s almost an unspoken language that you speak with the other person, where you know what each other are thinking. It’s a totally different kind of communication. It’s an exploration of communication. It expresses more than words, more than the vocabulary we’ve been given by the language.
Gabriel
::
The word “native” struck me as a link to your music, notably to the ritualistic aspect of drumming and chanting. Is that a consideration in your songs?
Austin
::
It’s not like saying, “Hey, I really like the way that native people play music” or anything like that.
Katie
::
We’re not taking it from the native culture.
Austin
::
I think a lot of that stems from our inspiration by the band Animal Collective and a lot of the tribal-esque drums that were written on their Feels record. It had a big influence on the way that I think about drums and feel rhythms and mostly realizing the energy you can get from having a tribal and raw approach.
Raphaelle
::
Yeah, it relates to the tribalness, if that’s even a word, because it is so raw and very emotive. And like how you (Austin) are always talking about being grounded or taking energy from the ground and conveying that through your parts. It’s the connectedness that we have with our surroundings and each other.
Gabriel
::
Connectedness really is a focal point for the band.
Katie
::
Oh yeah.
Austin
::
Big time.
Katie
::
It’s the basis of the band for sure. If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t be called Braids.

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Categoria!! Interviews :: New Canadiana :: quebec | 4 Comments »

June 18th, 2010

Review :: Blue Hawaii – Blooming Summer

Blue Hawaii
Blooming Summer
(Arbutus Records)
Montreal, QC
::web/sounds::


From the summery low-life of Aaron Levin:
Arbutus Records is at the centre of a monstrous pop vortex. Sean Nicholas Savage, Silly Kissers, Braids, Pop Winds, Grimes, and now Montreal’s Blue Hawaii showcase the breadth of avant-pop nuances circulating in their sphere of electromagnetic influence. Every burnout needs a soundtrack to escape the sun; a reason to ride the swashes of summery circuitry and gluey harmonies that crest upon Blooming Summer‘s self-referential manifesto. With Blooming Summer they will reach a chromatic zenith and swim in a stew of summer evenings and midnight exotica. So can you. GRIP.

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Blue Hawaii – Blue Gowns

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Blue Hawaii – Dream Electrixra

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Categoria!! cassette :: New Canadiana :: quebec | 2 Comments »

July 7th, 2009

The spelling is entirely Canadian.

The Neighbourhood Council - Set Pieces EP The Neighbourhood Council / BRAIDS
Set Pieces EP
(Self Released)
Calgary, AB
::web/sounds::

They’re young. Most of The Neighbourhood Council (now called BRAIDS) were in high-school when this album was recorded live-to-air on CJSW in Calgary. An amazing feat considering three out of the five tracks are over 7 minutes long. They’re long, but the least bit boring or repetitive. The songs weave, transform, and flow in a brilliant, sometimes experimental, fashion. It’s a mellow ride, so get comfy as you’ll quickly arrive at the kind of pop album you wish you could be making now, let alone when you were 17 years old and watching Japanese animation in your parents basement (true story). The Neighbourhood Council became BRAIDS sometime this year and will be conducting a mass exodus to Montreal. I’m posting the two shorter tracks, but they’ll give you the right idea.

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The Neighbourhood Council – She Brave Soul

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The Neighbourhood Council – Vendevel

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Categoria!! alberta :: compact disc :: New Canadiana | 1 Comment »

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