My friend and hero Waxmannequin, one of my favourite songwriters, hosts these tiny concerts in his mother’s art studio, about once a month, usually featuring a visiting icon of Canadian alternative music (case in point Carolyn Mark in the photo above). I was asked to share the bill this past Saturday with Carolyn; I’d be surprised if more than 20 people could fit in the space. But something I’ve learned from the few house concerts I’ve done in my life is the size of the crowd does not co-relate to your nerves going in, does not indicate the importance of the event at hand.  Tiny shows put you in such intimate proximity to the audience you can’t hide or obscure much. Tiny shows also have radically charged social contracts that bind them.  Everyone in the room puts on the show.  Nothing is really transactional or profitable in any conventional sense, thus whole effort feels like a collective stretch for something higher; every audience member who risked being awkwardly trapped in a weird circumstance is just as brave as the performer I think.  It makes playing music as close to an act of pure devotion as I’ve ever ...

Hey. In my crippled efforts to keep this site updated this year, the page I most avoid touching is this one. I think because this News page is set up as a blog. Blog means writing, like art, like music, is this thing that I love to do, but which can get very precious if I’m not in a deep habit of doing it. Which is a drag because I’m certainly not without things to reflect upon. This year, I’ve left a 7 year stint at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, jumped into a life-altering artist residency at the Bunnell Arts Centre in Homer Alaska, installed a public art work in collaboration with Simon Frank and Gary Barwin, wrote a play for the Hamilton Fringe which succeeded beyond my wildest hopes, delivered a quite resonant performance at Hamilton Supercrawl with the TH&B Collective, and then capped it all off by fracturing my elbow whilst hitting a pothole with my bike. It all feels like turbulent undulation–deep moments of frenzied production that allow for deep moments of introspection and self-reflection. This blog entry is merely to crack the ice, so that I can start posting regularly on a bunch of things. I’ve conditioned myself to view my website as a promotional space, and thus tend to avoid it. I’d like to push myself to reframe that presumption–to start thinking of my website as a place where I live. Either this post will dangle embarassingly on its own, or it will quickly drop down the page. That’s a good kind of gauntlet to throw down I ...