Stuffed is an album best consumed as though each track is a painting on the wall of a gallery.
Released on June 8, this chaotic audio collage comes to your ears compliments of gITar, a creative duo made of two Evansville, Indiana natives; Ellipse Elkshow and I Cut People.
The two childhood friends have used their home town as inspiration for their audio exploration of North American culture. Their town was, perhaps, an easy target: home to major polluters, factories, cancer statistics, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and fast food creations.
Stuffed’s short tracks range in length from 57 seconds to two and a half minutes, and are a bizarre barrage of the sound clips you’ve been passively absorbing your entire life. Carefully woven together along common themes, each piece stands alone as a stew of music, news, television, movies, commercials, and video game audio snippets. Using every day verbiage, they have created little examinations of what we’re being fed by the media on a continual basis.
Alt-rock icons The Pixies have cancelled their first-ever concert in Israel.
“We’d like to extend our deepest apologies to the fans, but events beyond all our control have conspired against us,” said the band in a statement released by concert promoters. “We can only hope for better days, in which we will finally present the long-awaited visit of the Pixies in Israel.”
While the band gave no official reason for the cancellation concert organizers, said their decision was directly linked to Israel’s deadly raid on a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid destined for Gaza last week.
With the upcoming G8/20 meeting in Toronto around the corner and folks mobilizing in Toronto and all across Canada and the US, we thought we’d bring this incendiary political music video from AnarKidChris to your attention for this week’s second (and bonus) Friday Film Pick. Enjoy.
“It is a matter of instinct and conscience,” writes internationally celebrated singer-songwriter Elvis Costello in an open letter reflecting on a landmark decision by Costello to cancel planned performances in Israel this summer.
Around the world in recent months a wave of high-profile artists are publicly expressing support for the Palestinian struggle for liberation and in opposition to Israeli apartheid policies against the Palestinian people. Artists globally are responding to the 2005 appeal from Palestinian civil society for a comprehensive campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel rooted in a similar campaign internationally that targeted the apartheid regime in South Africa.
It’s Summer, and in Canada that means public consultation season – at least, it does for Stephen Harper’s Conservative government who like the (distracting and vacation-filled) summer for asking Canadians to get involved in public policy. And just like last year’s rushed copyright consultations, the Digital Economy Consultation (DEC) is happening inside a tight time frame. Canadians have 60 days to tell the government what they want for their digital future.
It will come as little surprise that the DEC is riddled with economic and market framing like “regaining leadership in the digital economy” and “improving productivity and competitiveness”. But don’t let the business rhetoric obscure the fundamental importance of Canada’s digital future for artists and activists – in fact, for every community in Canada. These are important policies and Canadians should tell the Conservatives what they want.
Haiti has nearly vanished front page headlines only a few months after the devastating 8.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince.
A massive media-powered spotlight on Haiti that captured world attention has quickly faded, celebrity telethons ended, massive donation drives shut down, politicians turning to a new cause célèbre of choice, while on the ground Haitians continues to struggle to survive in real time, in neighbourhoods and communities across the country largely still picking-up the pieces.
Artists like celebrated Haitian singer Bélo provide direct cultural conduit to the ground in Haiti at a time of continued crisis. Recently Bélo performed in Montreal along side local Haitian hip-hop artist Vox Sambou of Nomadic Massive, a concert highlighting progressive Haitian music direct from Port-au-Prince and also from the Haitian diaspora in Montreal.
Boxed In tells the story of a young woman of mixed ancestry who struggles with an Equal Opportunity form that asks her to select one, singular ethnicity.
This four-minute piece by Shane Belcourt is the second installation in Work For All’s 10-week campaign to highlight issues of racism in the workplace through film.
Aisling Chin-Yee, a film producer who herself is a mixed-race person, explains the problem with the idea that ethnicity can neatly fit into bureaucratic check boxes on the Work For All blog:
I understand the positive reasons for self-identifying, and why these measures exist to ensure a diverse workplace. But the question of self-identity is much more complicated than checking a box, and like the Mountie in the film points out, it’s not how she identifies on the inside, it’s how she identifies on the outside. Notions of “diversity” and “visible minority” are based more on physical characteristics, colour of skin, shapes of eyes, colour of hair, than on cultural identity. And, sorry to tell you, this type of categorization is racist, even if it’s trying to promote inclusion.
So watch the video, join the discussion, and stay tuned for next week’s chapter in the Work For All campaign.
Alt-rock icons The Pixies have cancelled their first-ever concert in Israel.
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