pick a piper.

Caribou is easily one of the best things that’s happened to music in the last ten years. I remember where I was sitting the first time I heard “Melody Day” and tripped over myself to find out who was making that colossal, layered, glorious mash-up of sound. I didn’t think it could, but it gets better, courtesy of Caribou drummer Brad Weber…

Pick A Piper is a collective from Weber along with Angus Fraser, Dan Roberts, and Clint Scrivener. They leave no sonic stone unturned: flute, trumpets, glockenspiel, flutes, hand claps, bells, and basically anything you can hit to make a sound. But more than anything it’s the percussion assault that gets you. Their music doesn’t just have a beat, it’s multi-rhythmic. It’s expansive, it’s communal. It feels put together from the best parts of a bunch of disparate sounds that only make sense when they’re together.

It feels like it could be chanted. It loops and soars and doesn’t sound like it will ever need to stop, because it’s nothing as easy to know as lyric-chorus-lyric-chorus-bridge-chorus. It’s timeless, like it might have just been dug out of the ground, and it’s also joyous, like it might have been passed down to them from generations. It sounds like happily putting your arm around someone when you’re drunk and staring into a campfire.

So far they’ve only released a 4-song EP, I’ve listened to it constantly for two days. I demand a full-length album. …Please.

For now, stop what you’re doing and listen to my favourite tracks, “Dene Sled” and “Hallam Progress”:

Plus check out a grainy, colourful, almost pre-digital looking video, directed by Weber himself, for their single “Rooms.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

myself + appendicitis = thoughts of terry fox.

Sorry for not posting last week, but I have a decent excuse. 8 days ago pains in my abdomen led me to an emergency room, where I found out I had acute appendicitis and the next day my traitorous appendix was removed. It’s odd when your own organs decide to mutiny. So now I’m pretty much free of all my unnecessary biological parts: tonsils, gone; wisdom teeth, gone; appendix, gone. It’s interesting the way we’re evolving and shedding all these vestigial pieces of ourselves, genetic hold-overs from when we ate bark or had tails. After all… what did you think your tailbone originally was for anyway?

The ironic part was that, only hours before the pain started, I’d been reading “Terry”, Douglas Coupland’s exquisite photo-biography of Canadian cancer crusader and all around hero Terry Fox. The beginning of the book deals with his diagnosis of osteosarcoma, the resulting amputation of his leg, and his time enduring chemotherapy. I’m not comparing appendicitis to cancer in any way, but I’d been thinking, as I read, about how long it had been since I’d been in a hospital, how scary it must be, how lucky I was to have been healthy for so long (in retrospect, I was basically daring the universe to smite  me with something…) Twelve hours later I was in a hospital myself. Then they gave me morphine, and I didn’t give a fuck about much after that. The next time something hurts, I highly recommend intravenous morphine. 

 

If you’re not familiar, Terry Fox is an icon and an intrinsic part of being Canadian. His name is spoken in hallowed tones: I’ve seen people grown instantly quiet and still and almost break into tears at the mere mention of his name. That’s how deeply ingrained in our national conciousness is the idea of Terry Fox.

He’s the quintessential Canadian superhero: humble, idealist, innocent, extraordinary. Boasting is completely un-Canadian, and Terry was a model of pride and modesty. A trail-blazer, he did unbelievable things, but didn’t seem to think himself deserving of any more praise than anyone else. He turned down every corporate endorsement, including a major one from McDonald’s, in an effort to keep all attention on his purpose. Any money given to him was to be donated to his cause, no advertisements or branded-strings attached. His aim was pure. His legacy was to be left in his actions, not in an image he was trying to create. Like a prism, plain and unassuming cradled in your hand, never hinting at its inherent glory. But when held up to the light by another, it bursts into a constellation of rainbows. Terry was that prism, and his modesty and unifying determination led the people of Canada to hold him up to the light. 

After losing his leg, Terry Fox trained for 18 months before he began his Marathon Of Hope. To achieve his goal of raising $1 for every Canadian ($24.17 million to match the population in 1980), he was going to run 8000 kilometres (5000 miles) across Canada. Simple. He would run a marathon – 42 kilometres (26 miles) – every single day, from one end of the second largest country in the world to the other… with one artificial leg. Nothing even close to it had ever been attempted before. 

He began on April 12, 1980 and in the months that followed wrote one of the greatest stories the world had ever seen. 143 days later, after running 5,374 km (3,339 miles) he was forced to stop due to pains in his chest. His cancer had returned, and Terry flew home to resume treatment. This is where everyone else kept running when Terry could not. A nation-wide televised fundraiser, watched by Terry from his hospital bed, raised more than $10 million dollars in one weekend. By February 1981, Terry realized his dream as the Marathon of Hope passed the $24,170,000 dollar mark. A dollar for every man, woman, and child. That June, one month before his 23rd birthday, Terry Fox passed away. 

That September, the first ever Terry Fox Run was held. In Terry’s honour, people raised money to compete in a non-competitive run. This was the blueprint, the genesis, for the countless numbers of walks and runs held by almost every medial fundraising organization in North America. Like most things he took on, Terry did it first. 

Today, the Terry Fox Run has raised more than $400 million dollars, and more than 2.5 million people have participated in the run in 53 countries around the world. The cancer that claimed Terry in 1981 then had less than a 50% survival rate. Today more than 70% of people diagnoses with osteosarcoma survive.

I think Terry would like that. 

solar collector.

If art is in the eye of the beholder, then here is what happens when the beholders are creating the art. In the hills near Cambridge, Ontario, Gorbet Design Inc. (made up of Matt, Rob, and Susan LK Gorbet) has created Solar Collector.

Just the online description itself gets my little new-media-modern-artist’s heart a-thumping:

In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.

How awesome does THAT sound? Integrating the cycles of it’s natural environment into an interaction-based work of outdoor art, similar to Jiyeon Song’s beautiful “One Day Poem Pavilion”, almost every aspect of Solar Collector’s design took a completely holistic and thought-out approach to it’s natural surroundings. Despite the high-tech aspect of its workings, there is a subtle, organic reasoning behind almost every element of the piece.

The 12 aluminum shafts are held at separate angles in the hillside. Each shaft has three LED lights and three solar collectors, gathering the sun’s energy to power their noctural illumination. The angles of the shaft represent the sun’s position throughout the year: the tallest shaft faces the sun’s location at winter solstice, and the lowest shaft faces does the same for summer solstice. If you’re a techie kinda person, you can check out all the detailed specs here.

During the day, while sunlight charges the batteries within each shaft, people go online and create their own patterns and send them electronically to solar collector. At sunset, Solar Collector comes to life and creates it’s display not just from the energy of light but from the creative energy of human beings. As the solar power in the batteries diminishes during the night, the light from each shaft slowly fades away and darkens until they’re energized by the sun again the next morning. It’s as natural and universal a cycle as breathing.

There’s also a kind of delightful shock to the location of Solar Collector. For those of you who don’t live in Southern Ontario, Cambridge isn’t exactly the first place you’d expect to find an interactive outdoor light sculpture. In fact, it may be one of the last. The randomness of its locale adds to it’s overall coolness.

Via Stimulant

todd falkowsky: revealing urban colours.

In an interesting and lovely cultural colour project, Todd Falkowsky, co-founder of the kick-ass Canadian design collective Motherbrand and one of the forces behind the must-visit Canadian Design Resource, set out to capture the visual identity of Canadian cities through simple Pantone colour palettes in his article “Revealing Urban Colours” for Walrus Magazine.

Using computers to figure out the predominant colours from landmarks and landscapes from each Canadian capital city, he then built individual palettes to create a kind of chromatic identity for each city. The end result is a multi-faceted colour theory study, with results similar to the palettes created by people on one of my fave sites, COLOURlovers,

As with the work he contributes to at Motherbrand, there’s an intrinsic simplicity to this whole project that I love. I’m a colourphile, and any work of art or science that examines our relationship with colour gets me going. On top of that, there’s something very Canadian about it. No huge fanfare and glossy pictures of monuments and other stereotypical urban signifiers (“oh, look, the CN Tower, they must be talking about Toronto…”), the colours and the entities they represent are all subtle and true. More so it’s that these are the shades of the things that make up a place but don’t necessarily overwhelm it. These are the hues of things seen and known but not always looked at or thought about…

Sometimes hockey and football, sometimes water and rock, these colours represent natural pulls to the land where these cities lie, to the cultures fostered there, and each one is chosen not for it’s glitz but for it’s purity of presence. These are real things. Solid things. Look at Whitehorse and you first see “Aurora Borealis” and “Fireweed” – it doesn’t get much more elementally beautiful than that.

Each palette has been personalized out of a genuine reality and not out of an urge to impress. Being a Torontonian, I can’t think of any colour more omnipresent than the slightly annoying sanguine red of the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission). Pretty? Not necessarily. Affection-inducing? Most people’s opinion of the TTC lies somewhere between detestation and apathy. But it’s presence is undeniable and a visual colour-thread for anyone that lives here – and capturing that reality is, I think, exactly what Falkowsky set out to do.

Thanks to Hannah + Matt.

the 2008 bessie awards.

The Bessies are the premiere Canadian advertising awards, and they’ve been showing off Canada’s creative prowess to the world since 1963. This year, besides having a keynote by one of my favourite people – author, artist, and Canadiana-collector Douglas Coupland – there are also two completely perfect new promo spots for the 2008 Bessies by ground-breaking Toronto agency John St.

Via The Denver Egotist

liz wolfe.

A version of this article also appeared on Josh Spear

Hiding beneath the vibrant candy colours of Canadian photographer Liz Wolfe’s stunning work is a whole bunch of twisted contradictions.

Exploring the juxtaposition between what we commonly consider pretty (flowers) and what we mostly consider gross (an octopus), the sugary perfections of her work force us to re-evaluate those considerations. Her shots include tentacles gently curled inside the curves of a rose and a pattern of sardines and daisies laid on the grass beneath a woman’s high-heeled feet.

My personal fave is a prostrate hand impaled on a candy stick that bleeds red sprinkles. Never what they first seem, her photos make the ugly look exquisite and the horrific seem cute. One of the great powers of her work is that by forcing us to try and understand why a bouquet of fish heads can looks so beautiful, we’re driven to re-evaluate our very ideas of beauty itself.

virgin mobile: go jesus. it’s your birfday.

I think most people can reasonably agree that all the “happy holiday” political correctness is basically annoying. Christmahanakwaanzakah is a cute buzz solution, but nobody’s really buying it. In this gloriously un-PC viral, Virgin Mobile Canada finally takes the plunge and calls a spade a spade. It’s called Christmas. It’s when Jesus was born… and we’re gonna sip Bacardi like it’s his birthday.

(Agency: zig Toronto)