Arts

It’s been six years since the politically conscious Bay Area rap ensemble The Coup dropped Pick a Bigger Weapon. Now, with the release of Sorry to Bother You, the band is back, although with a slightly different sound. Straying away from a strictly sample-based approach to production, The Coup adds an assortment of sounds you […]

Is banging pots and pans music? Is street noise music? Is silence music? US composer John Cage, who died in 1992, thought so. And now, a Victoria Symphony concert entitled Cage 100 will celebrate the influential musician. The concert is part of the Cage 100 festival happening between November 8 and November 22 that will […]

An anthology of obituaries sounds like it would be just right for what’s shaping up to be another gloomy Victoria autumn, but it turns out there’s nothing morbid about Tom Hawthorn’s Deadlines: Obits of Memorable British Columbians. The focus of this collection is life, not death, and a colourful cast of real-life heroes and antiheroes […]

Xavier Rudd, the ultimate one-man band, who typically hits the stage with three didgeridoos, a guitar, stomp box, assortment of drums, banjos, harmonicas, bells, and a bass guitar, is bringing all of his gear, and himself, to Victoria once again. The fact that Rudd is self-taught and able to execute all of these talents by […]

Believe it or not, Canadian singer-songwriter Julie Doiron had a fear of recording her music until now. That’s eight full-lengths she recorded while combating that fear. But after recording her ninth, she’s finally really starting to enjoy it. Doiron’s fears weren’t conjured up the way most people’s are. She didn’t imagine her albums growing fangs […]

  Julie Doiron So Many Days (Aporia Records) 3/5   The past three years have seen Canadian singer-songwriter Julie Doiron move from Montreal to Sackville to Toronto. Also, bear in mind that So Many Days is the last in a trilogy of Doiron solo records. It’s been said that good things come in threes. I […]

Ask most Canadian indie rock darlings who they’d like to collaborate with if they could pick anyone and the stock answer is usually someone from The Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, or that dude from the Black Keys. (I could just barf all over their hipster clothes.) But ask John O’Regan, better known as Diamond […]