I dismantled my radio the other day. That’s right; I completely took it apart. Forgive me, but I couldn’t help but get sick of the stations. They all seemed to be playing the same cup of tea. Besides, I’d begun to develop the irrational fear of Carly Rae Jepsen’s lyrics melting my brain to smithereens. Thank God for hammers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against music that lacks lyrical depth of any sort. Really, I understand. It’s summer; we all crave music that doesn’t need to be analyzed, music that we can chant along with like camp songs for simple, easy entertainment. After all, the critical thinking and whatnot ought to be saved for our time in school. No point in thinking deeply unless we’re being graded for our efforts, right?

But as good ol’ Eminem implied, there’s no getting beyond the fact that there’s been a huge decline of good music in today’s society. This can easily be proven by comparing today’s music with the music developed back in the nineties, eighties, seventies and even the sixties. Back then, we had The Beatles, Elvis, Michael Jackson and Tupac. Today, we’re stuck with Justin Bieber, Katy Parry, Carly Rae Jepsen and Ke$ha. Need I say more?

The mainstream music contains little meaning, and is cunningly designed to incorporate the catchiest of tunes, with lyrics – specifically choruses – that are easy to remember. Nowadays, more musicians are entering the industry with miniscule levels of talent and are forced to resort to the manipulation of machinery to help their voices sell.

Have I mentioned that their lyrics are often filled with taboo and unnecessary sexualisation? Maybe that’s for another time.

 

By Sarah Jama

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Myles Chats With Montreal's Newest Noisemakers: The Breezes

Myles Herod
Entertainment Editor

Montreal’s The Breezes are not only defined by their geography, but by an irreverent dose of humour, unpredictable at any instant.

Consisting of Matt Oppenheimer, Daniel Leznoff, James Benjamin and Adam Feingold, the electro-pop foursome possess tunes and talent of adroit jest, as evident in their viral, sing-a-long anthem “Count to Eleven.”  However, as guitarist Dan Leznoff explains to ANDY, their roots are everything. “Seriously, Montreal made us. We’ve seen every band. Living here, the culture just breathes into you, covers you like a film of dust you don’t notice.”

Questioned further as to what gives Quebecois artist’s their certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ over Western Canadian cotemporaries, he didn’t hesitate to lay it down, proud and precise. ”Montreal is significantly cheaper than Vancouver and Toronto. It attracts artists who want to focus deeply on their craft without having to worry about rent and food. When you are really dedicated to learning about your art you come to Montreal and then you move on hopefully. It nurtures growth more than other cities.”

While the band’s sound derives from a dance floor zeitgeist of neon vibes and skinny ties, The Breezes undoubtedly know how to craft tasty hooks that balance the digital divide between today’s Top 40 and indie-chill. Indeed, adopting inspiration from all facets is integral to their tone – channeling the spirit of everyone from the late Owen Hart and Evel Knievel to Guns N' Roses and Ice-T, “boyhood heroes” as he calls them.

As for songwriting styles, Dan makes no bones about it: it’s about camaraderie and analogies. “A songwriter is just like an athlete, after a while he stops thinking about what he does and just does it. All you can do is live your art, study and listen a lot.  Being in a band is all about building together. Competition is a force that helps the building process but one that can obviously destroy everything. Its all about figuring out how much space to give and how much to take.”

Aided by an escalating profile, the band exudes confidence, rather than evince egotism – something blithely reflected in the strength of their music and the successful manner by which they are managed.

The Internet can be a pitiless pool of blog-o-sphere build-up. For The Breezes, life’s too short to worry – embracing technology, but also swaying to their own sails. “Aint no taint to the paint. The Internet has leveled the playing field and opened the door for people all the way from Xanadu to Atlantis to Shangri La to know about you instantaneously, no matter where you’re from. We download music, shop at record stores, listen to the radio, go to clubs and the library to find music. Digital streaming and blog stuff have changed surprisingly little. A song is still a living, breathing thing that you hear with your ears and feel with your soul. ”

Online, songs can sustain longevity. However, to succeed professionally, a group lives or dies by their ability to perform live. From a recording studio to stage milieu, Dan explained the difference between both in typical Breezes fashion. “Our live show is much more free and loose, like a virgin in Tijuana on Spring Break. The record is like her audio engineer twin sister, who views Spring Break as extra study time to nitpick and dissect sonic mysteries.”

Anticipating label approval, and a subsequent debut LP within months, the band are currently on tour, turning people onto their EP of bedroom psychedelia entitled “Update My High.”

The future looks bright, as Dan concludes, with good times ahead “In two years hopefully we won’t see The Breezes, hopefully people will see us. The party is starting very soon…”

If that’s the case, count me in.

 

The Breezes will be performing in Toronto on March. 24 at Wrongbar  

 

Katija Bonin

The Silhouette

 

After five years of conceptual design, paired with a successful grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and support from McMaster University, the L.I.V.E. Performance Laboratory is under construction.

Located in McMaster’s Psychology Building, the facility will include a small concert hall and stage with seats for one hundred.

Although seemingly simplistic, it is the incorporated technology that defines this project as a Large Interactive Virtual Environment (L.I.V.E.), which will facilitate research in the areas of music and neuroscience.

The walls of the lab will be lined with a dense array of loudspeakers, which will allow users to mimic virtually any acoustic environment – “from a subway station to Carnegie Hall,” said project director Laurel Trainor.

The lab aims to fuel investigation into basic questions pertaining to the significance and universality of music in human society. “Why do people still go to concerts, when they could just listen to music at home?” said Trainor. “How do people coordinate and entertain together when playing music?”

The audience seats will be wired to measure physiological responses such as heart rate, breathing rate, skin responses, and muscle tension responses through the fingers. Thirty of the seats will be equipped with EEG sensors, enabling researchers to monitor audience neural activity. Performers will also have an EEG system, able to track four musicians at one time.

Additionally, there will be a motion capture system, tracking the movement of performers while making music and audience movements in response to music, and the back of the stage will house an array of monitors to measure the effects of visual stimuli.

The technology will allow researchers to investigate everything from how a musician’s brain copes when fellow performers make a mistake to an audience member’s physical and psychological responses to different types of music.

The concept of such a laboratory originated in McMaster’s Institute for The Music and The Mind, a multi-disciplinary institute incorporating psychology, neuroscience, engineering, music, mathematics, kinesiology and the health sciences. It is an extension of a three-tiered mandate aimed at promoting research in music cognition, music education, and music activities in the community.

It is known that music plays a role in altering mood, and music is traditionally used in many social gatherings, from parties to weddings to funerals. Research has found that “people engaging in music making or dance feel a closer social bond. This facility will enable us to test such theories,” said Trainor.

The design and technology of the facility, although originally intended to discover how music affects people, will also enable research on a variety of topics.

Already, Steven Brown and Matthew Woolhouse, researchers in the field, plan to use the space to test the psychological response to dance, while Sue Becker and Ian Bruce plan to test how well hearing aids work in realistic auditory environments, and Joe Kim, professor of Psychology at McMaster, plans on using the space to forward his research in pedagogy – the method and practice of effective teaching.

Trainor affirmed that this project is “like no other, and its potential is unlimited.”

Construction began in early January, and in the current timeframe, will be complete by Spring 2013.

Brianna Smrke

This is Your Brain on Bach

“When Music Tells Us Something”

The McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind

Integrated Concert and Lecture

November 5, 8 PM

Convocation Hall

A German neuroscientist, a husband-and-wife team of pianists and a Hungarian-born mezzo-soprano walk into Convocation Hall. Waiting for them are two flute-bearing McMaster faculty members and two grand pianos, not to mention a crowd of curious students, faculty and community members.

Is this a joke without a punch line? More like an oddly fascinating way to spend a Saturday night. The McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind’s seventh annual Integrated Concert and Lecture brought together music and neuroscience without cheapening either discipline.

Dr. Stefan Koelsch of the Freie Universität Berlin presented graphs of brain activity, summaries of key experiments and several jokes about the Germanic predilection for cold beer in an effort to convey the multiple meanings of music. Although his initial focus on terminology was a little disengaging, it paved the way for an exploration of what music can tell us. What truly made the content relatable, however, were the musical stylings of Elizabeth and Marcel Bergmann. Pounding on their grand pianos, they brought music out of the laboratory and onto the stage.

Starting the integrated lecture with a rendition of the First Memphisto Waltz, an emotionally intense, back-and-forth piece describing fiddle-stealing, frenzied dancing and naked frolicking, the Bergmanns set the tone for a powerful evening. Throughout the lecture, Koelsch was able to employ their expertise to illustrate points of his lecture. Symbolic music, for example, was accompanied by a classy rendition of the Sleep Country Canada jingle.

Margaret Bardos, the mezzo-soprano, layered her voice on top of the pianos for several songs. Also contributing their talents were two of McMaster’s own. Laurel Trainor and David Gerry, both professors associated with the MIMM, piped in with flutes for a few pieces, most memorably in “Toast and Eggs”, in which the melody they provided wove the morning sounds of a kitchen into a song. This piece was not out of place in an eclectic selection of music that ranged from The Rape of Lucretia to West Side Story to The Sound of Music. In a way, this variety in genre supported one of the main ideas of the talk – that the ability to find meaning in music is universal.

After most pieces, Koelsch began to analyze the component parts for meaning. But nearer to the end of the lecture, he simply instructed the audience to appreciate the sounds instead of picking them apart – he encouraged the crowd to let their hands drum on chair backs and their feet tap on floors. All he wanted, he concluded by saying, was to convince us that “music is not meaningless.” It seemed a rather modest goal for such a meaningful night, but one that was handily achieved.

Josh Parsons, Music Editor

By now, Sam Roberts is used to life on the road. He has to be – he’s spent the last several years releasing album after album, touring the world in support of each. Nearly a decade after his breakthrough record, the recently retitled Sam Roberts Band has accumulated four Juno awards and has become one of few Canadian rock bands to achieve international success.

The band is currently in the midst of a cross-Canada tour, headed toward the GTA en route from the West Coast. The high-profile tour is the band’s second trip across Canada this year, supporting their critically acclaimed 2011 release, Collider. Amid the hectic touring schedule, Sam Roberts found the time to sit down and chat with ANDY about his successful career.

“We started off this year with a tour of the U.S. and then spent a couple nights in Toronto at Massey Hall. Then the summer kicked in a we just played festivals all over the place, bouncing around from coast to coast.” He was happy to be back to the straight-cut, linear autumn touring circuit.

Roberts was reminded of his band’s first major tour and decided to reflect for a moment on the band’s rise to fame. “When we were on our first tour with the Tragically Hip, our song ‘Brother Down’ was doing really well on the radio. To solidify ourselves in the Canadian musical landscape, we really needed this tour to be a success. Opening for the Hip is daunting,” he laughed.

The tour generated a tremendous amount of positive response from Canadian press. Roberts was keen to cite journalist Mike Bell, of the Calgary Herald, as integral to the success of the tour. “[Mike] talked about us as a new band that was worth the time to come and see,” Roberts said happily. “That kind of language really helped us out. It was never hyperbole.”

When asked about his recent work, Roberts was candid and sincere, eager to chat openly about Collider. “I don’t know if it’s necessarily a conscious decision that you make to shift direction,” Roberts suggested. The album has a markedly different sound than his previous albums, pushing the recognizable style of the band into fresh and experimental territory.

“It’s scary to think that I have no method,” he admitted. “But it’s also beautiful in that way. Every time I put pen to paper, I’m venturing into the unknown. I try to leave it completely open-ended and just let the song come out – almost as if you’re trying to interfere as little as possible.

“Defining yourself is where your creativity starts to dwindle. The more you open up your perception of yourself, the further you’re able to go and the more varied you can be,” Roberts said confidently.

Although Collider marks a turn for the band stylistically, Roberts was self-assured that the songs fit comfortably into the bands live shows. “Its always scary to see how the fans are going to react to a new record. Fortunately, these songs translate really well on to the stage; they’re rhythmic, they make people move. It keeps the audience engaged, whether or not they know the melody or words to a new song.”

Evident by virtue of another high-profile tour, the Sam Roberts Band remains as dedicated to quality music as it was a decade ago.

 

The Sam Roberts Band is playing Nov. 12 at Hamilton Place.

 

 

 

Nolan Matthews and Jay Scherer

Kardinal Offishall rocked TwelvEighty on Nov. 4, bringing hits like “Body Bounce” and “The Anthem” to McMaster. Though the bar wasn’t totally packed, both Kardinal’s and the crowd’s energy was high. Even through the smoke machines and strobe lights, it was pretty easy to see why Kardinal Offishall dominates the Canadian hip-hop scene.

“I’m from the T-dot-O, rep it everywhere I go,” sung Kardinal on recent single “The Anthem.” His Canadian roots have always been an important part of his music. “We all came up during this whole independent surge … and for the most part it was a strong scene, and that’s really what, for my generation, sealed the love for Toronto,” said Kardinal in an interview with ANDY after the show.

The “independent surge” Kardinal describes happened in the late 1990s, and was responsible for bringing Canadian hip-hop international recognition. “That was a crazy time for us and we were super blessed … our crew had super talented people. It wasn’t just like it was one of us that was doing big things at the time, there was a gang of us that was doing shit.”

With the help of the track “Dangerous”, Kardinal went from being a Canadian success to being known just about everywhere. “Dangerous” became the first song by a Canadian hip-hop artist to chart on the American Billboard Hot 100 singles list, and much of the song’s appeal comes from the catchy R&B chorus sung by Akon.

But the partnership between Kardinal and Akon has led to more than just an international hit song. “He really just mentored me and opened doors to a lot of different things … Akon is a really cool dude and just taught me a lot over the years about breaking into the mainstream in a big way.”

Kardinal has definitely broken into the mainstream with his album Not 4 Sale, but it took years for him to reach this level of commercial success.

“When you saw someone else who was doing their thing … they had to put thousands and thousands of dollars into getting their music out there. You emailed somebody and a DJ emailed you back and was like ‘that shit is crazy,’ you had to buy that plane ticket, literally carry your fuckin’ 12 inches to LA, and give each DJ two copies.”

Though it’s been about three years since Not 4 Sale, the wait for a new Kardinal Offishall album isn’t due to a lack of inspiration. “I just keep making so much music and it’s from so many different influences. I worked with people from Paris, England, Amsterdam, the States, Canada, literally everywhere … Fans don’t understand it, they’re like ‘where the eff is the album?’ but I’m just having too much fun and its hard to decide what you want to come out with.”

Despite travelling the world and making hit records, Kardinal keeps it modest. “Some people want to make ‘x’ amount of money, some people want to achieve a certain amount of fame, but for me this is the best blessing, to be able to pay all my bills, be comfortable, and just rock out like tonight and have fun.”

But rocking out isn’t all Kardinal does. “We actually went to Africa, to Kenya, and visited the drought-affected regions and … this past year I worked with so many different people from Free the Children, to One by One, to World Vision, the list goes on … it’s really nothing to be able to spread my blessings and to help other people.”

After the show, Kardinal remarked, “McMaster was dope.” Thanks, Kardinal. We thought you were pretty dope too.

 

 

 

 


Julia Redmond

The Silhouette

 

Victor Hugo once said that, “music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” As it turns out, he was right—the mind can interpret more meaning from music than people might have thought, according to Dr. Stefan Koelsch.

Koelsch, professor of Psychology at Germany’s Freie Universität Berlin, visited McMaster on Nov. 5 to share his knowledge on music cognition. The seventh annual public integrated lecture and concert was hosted by the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM).

“[MIMM] deals with a kind of science we can all relate to, all understand,” said Dr. Gianni Parise, Associate Dean of Research and External Relations for the Faculty of Science.

The concert portion of the evening began with a performance by the piano duo of Elizabeth and Marcel Bergmann. The two have performed together for more than two decades, playing in various cities across Europe and North America, earning much acclaim along the way.

Seated, facing each other, at two grand pianos at the front of Convocation Hall, they performed their first selection: Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. Koelsch used this as a platform for his introduction of extra-musical meaning.

Koelsch explained that a lot of music tells a story. This is done by providing iconic, indexical, and symbolic meaning. The meaning elicits emotion in the listener, and this reaction is a key element of music cogenics and the central focus of Koelsch’s research.

To demonstrate the significance of emotion in music, Koelsch described an experiment that was conducted on a native tribe from Cameroon in which the participants, who had no prior exposure to traditional Western music, listened to clips of music and had to identify them with photos demonstrating emotions.

The results of the study showed that even with no background knowledge, the participants could properly identify the feeling of the music, lending insight into the universality of music.

Koelsch further explained the neurology behind musical interpretation. The part of the brain that processes music is the same part that interprets semantics, further supporting the concept of music as a language.

The lecture was punctuated with more musical selections. Margaret Bardos, an Ontario-based vocalist, joined the Bergmann duo onstage to perform such pieces as Climb Ev’ry Mountain and Send in the Clowns. Flutist Laural Trainor, director of MIMM, along with McMaster Music professor and flutist David Gerry, played the rather quirky song Cats in the Kitchen, composed by Philip Bimstein.

Even before the show was over, Koelsch brought the audience to their feet, encouraging a physical interpretation of the meaning in music while the Bergmann duo played selections from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.

Koelsch extended concluding words of advice,  “you don’t necessarily constantly have to think about musical meaning,” he said, “Sometimes you can just enjoy music and your brain can do the rest.”

Jemma Wolfe

Senior ANDY Editor

It was a bad two years for rock and roll.

The premature death of Rolling Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones in 1969 sparked a morbid trend in music. By July of 1971, a mere 24 months later, rock and roll had also lost legends Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. Together, these four musical icons, lost to drowning, asphyxiation, drugs and heart failure respectively, soon became known collectively as the 27 Club – musicians forever immortalized for the age at which they lost their lives.

The curse of 27 added Kurt Cobain to its roster in 1994 when Nirvana’s frontman was found dead several days after he’d shot himself the head. Cobain, who had displayed suicidal tendencies since an early age, had often expressed his desire to die at 27 like the artists he idolized; after his death, his mother is reported to have said, “now he’s gone and joined that stupid club.” The spectacle of Cobain’s suicide on top of the dramatic life he’d lead solidified his spot among his deceased peers.

Amy Winehouse’s death this past summer at the age of 27 renewed discussion of this strange phenomenon as she was added to the list. Coroner’s reports have finally revealed Winehouse’s cause of death to be alcohol poisoning. While the official statement is “death by misadventure,” a fatal level of alcohol was responsible for her demise.

Despite the seemingly circumstantial nature of these artists’ deaths, rumors still circulate about possible causes for this creepy coincidence. Apparently, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix all had a white lighter on their person when their bodies were discovered. Others trace the 27 Club back to Louis Chauvin, a ragtime musician whose death in 1908 at the age of 27 is considered the originator of popular musicians dying in their prime of fame and fortune.

Whatever the cause, these tragic deaths remain a cultural phenomenon mourned by the fans, the families and the music industry.

 

 

Josh Parsons

Music Editor

Don’t you just love Halloween? It’s the only time of year when we can live out our sickest fantasies without friends thinking we’re the next Jeffery Dahmer.

Admit it: sometimes we lust to connect with that animalistic realm that breathes just below the surface of our sterilized society, and Halloween gives us just that fix.

In celebration of the holidays, I felt obliged to muse for a moment on some of the most disagreeable, disgusting, foul-smelling musicians that have clawed across the surface of the planet over the past few decades.

Forget that Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson stage theatre crap. These musicians are the real deal when it comes to being insane.

I couldn’t start with anyone other than the greatest degenerate in rock ‘n’ roll history, GG Allin, primarily because Halloween was such an important day for him. It was, of course, the day he had planned to off himself by wedging a stick of dynamite in his ass while performing and then proceeding to stage dive. Unfortunately (actually, fortunately), a premature heroin overdose in 1994 erased the possibility of this.

GG Allin functioned as the figurehead for a sort of punk-rock cult that had membership coast to coast in America. Legions of freaks flocked to his shows, just to watch a drugged-up Allin strip naked, mutilate himself and roll in his own feces, all while moving through the audience and physically attacking onlookers. God Bless America.

The world of hip-hop also has a plethora of disturbed individuals to offer up. Take, for example, gangsta rapper Big Lurch. In 2004, Big Lurch pulled an all-nighter smoking PCP with some buddies. Police arrested him the next morning, bloody and yelling at the sky, after finding his girlfriend dead, with her chest sliced open and bite marks on her face and lungs.

Outside of America, you need not look further than the nightmarish land of Norway, where some of the most off-putting artists have reached demi-god status. In the early ‘80s, kids started hanging around a record store aptly titled Hell, setting the groundwork for the Scandinavian Black Metal scene. Within months, youth across Oslo were painting their faces, reading the Satanic Bible and burning down any church they could find.

The essence Scandinavian Black Metal is personified in each member of Meyhem, a band famous for pouring lamb’s blood on their fans. In 1991 vocalist Dead, who reportedly was convinced that he was not human but some possessed semi-demon creature, took a shotgun to his own head. A band member found him, snapped a Polaroid and decided to use it for the band’s cover of the their next album.

As a heartwarming gesture, the remaining members of the band collected fragments of his skull and were, for some twisted reason, inspired to make necklaces of them. To this day, they wear them proudly and even occasionally distribute them to a select cult of musicians they deem worthy.

So stop worrying about whether or not your costume may be pushing the boundaries in terms of gore; I say buy that second tube of fake blood. When else will you get the chance? Remember, there will always be someone more disrturbed than you.

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