Sled Island 2008

Sled Island organizers have revealed a partial list of artists playing this year’s festival June 25-28 ’08 at various venues in Calgary...

and so far it's looking great! Scott Kannberg aka Spiral Stairs (Preston School of Industry, Pavement) is the token guest musical curator and will be performing along with some fantastic artists that I never thought would ever make it to Calgary such as:

Wire
Mogwai
Deerhunter
American Music Club
Jose Gonzales
Portastatic
Miss Murgatroid and Petra Hayden
The Gutter Twins (Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan)
No Age
Of Montreal
Jonathan Richman

The full line-up will be announced May 1. Early bird armband passes will be $140 plus service charges up until May 1 and can be purchased at www.sledisland.com.

With the inaugural Calgary Virgin Festival the weekend before and the Calgary Folk Music Festival happening the following month it will be a busy June/July for live music fans in Calgary. If I had to choose to attend only one of these due to time or money constraints Sled Island would definitely be my pick.

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Katharsis Mar. 24 '08

Download the show here.

A trip from pop to ambient and back, the recording of this week’s Katharsis features music from Fink (last song from Aubrey’s Shindig), Francis Cheer, Plants & Animals, No Kids, David Karsten Daniels, Joseph Arthur, Forest City Lovers, Fennesz, The Autumns, Unwed Sailor, Valet, Fourtet, Burial, Christopher Willits & Ryuichi Sakamoto, Windy & Carl, Klimek, Taunus, Sun Kil Moon, Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta, Balmorhea, and Laura Barrett (remixed by Joshua Von Tassel); all brand new music except for the Windy & Carl and Klimek. Enjoy!

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Katharsis Mar. 17 '08

Show recording archived here.

After a rocky start to the show due to a faulty patch cable/music player connection (I actually have nightmares about these sorts of dead air episodes) we got right into some brand new Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Mark Pickerel & His Praying Hands, Ladyhawk, Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, Jim White, Bitcrush, Bark Psychosis, Below the Sea, Bon Iver, Gregor Samsa, Port Royal, Efterklang, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Signal, Fennesz, He Can Jog, Skyphone, and L'Ocelle Mare.

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Toxic Alberta

Toxic Alberta is a highly provocative documentary on the oil sands (or more accurately "tar sands")...

It is by VBS TV (an offshoot of Vice Magazine) so you have to mind the salty language and the biased slant, but the pictures they show and the stories they portray of the environmental and social consequences of the tar sands development are very unsettling and should prick at the conscience of any oil consumer who sees them. I imagine the Tar Sands, The Selling of Alberta documentary that will be broadcast on CBC TV on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 9pm and on Saturday March 15, 2008 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld will address some of the same issues.

Public awareness is growing about this quagmire. With Alberta's and Canada's direct and indirect dependence on the tar sands do we have the will or the capacity to properly deal with this issue and will we or the rest of the world allow this development to continue and at a pace only limited by what the market will bear?

Scary times...

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Katharsis Mar. 10 '08

Thanks to a computer that apparently didn't make the adjustment to daylight savings time on its' own only the second hour of the show was recorded (get it here).

I hate daylight savings. In my opinion, the effort to reset all the household clocks & timers and the jet lag and fuzzyheadedness caused by messing with our internal clocks every 6 months is not worth the few extra hours of daylight in the spring and fall. Recent studies have also indicated that practicing “daylight savings” may actually result in overall increases in energy consumption and in risk of accidents.

So what’s the point? It would be a lot simpler to just stick to a standard time year round. I suspect my computer thinks so as well as it did not make the jump forward on the weekend and thus the show recording from this week is missing the first hour. There was lots of great new music in that first hour too. Argg!

Music played in the first hour (but missed in the recording): Destroyer, No Kids, A Weather, The Neighbourhood Council, Balmorhea, Plants & Animals, The Low Lows, Beach House, Hanne Hukkelberg, and Kaki King.

The selections that were captured in the recording of the 2nd hour were: Sylvian Chauveau, Bohren & Der Club of Gore, The Dead Science, The For Carnation, Dub Trio, The Big Sleep, Epic 45, American Music Club, School of Language, and Takeshi Nishimoto.

The show recording is in .ogg format taken directly from the cjsw stream. Due to the reduced size I was able to post it to zshare.net.

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Katharsis Mar. 3 '08

Show archived here.

Some of this week’s musical selections were, in mood at least, a musical response to the disappointing Alberta election results. The Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, a party whose policies, actions & inactions over their 37 years of uninterrupted rule have proven them to be neither remotely progressive nor conservative (except when it comes to conserving their own power and entitlements) won a huge majority in the Legislature. The Conservatives have again been propped up by only 53% of the 41% of eligible voters that bothered to cast a ballot. Some mandate. With the already hugely disadvantage opposition parties being further decimated and shut out, democracy appears to be in serious trouble here. Thanks to the collective apathy and wilful negligence of the majority of the people living here, we can look forward to another 4 years of neglected and inadequate public infrastructure, education & healthcare and unfettered corporate-sponsored desecration/exploitation of the environment while money and natural resources flow out of the province. At this point Alberta is nothing more than a petro-fueled cash machine. Corporations and workers come here, extract as much as they can and leave, while investing as little of themselves as possible. When this oil-fueled boom is over we will be in a sorry state. In this land of greed and oil where the vast majority appears to be completely brainwashed, blinded by ideology, bound by tradition, or corrupted through personal or business connections to the PC party, it’s every man woman and child for themselves. With the way things are going here, how much longer will we even have the freedom to express such dissent?

The music: Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, Hills Like White Elephants, 65 Days of Static, Remote Kid (Remixed by Morgan Greenwood), Bitcrush, Tim Hecker, Arrington de Dionyso and Bryce Panic, Tarentel, White Rainbow, Atlas Sound, Burial, Murcof vs. Hugo Amezquita, Lali Puna, Unrocognizable Now, & Bedhead.

The show recording is in .ogg format taken directly from the cjsw stream. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to share the files (Badongo, vs. Megaupload, vs. ???? The files are usually in the 140MB range so my options are a little more limited. Some of the free file hosting services are less cumbersome to use than others (ie. have shorter waiting times, less restrictive download/upload limits, faster uploads/downloads, don't split up the file, no pop-up ads, etc.). Feel free to comment with any suggestions.

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