Sled Island 2010 Information Package
Sled Island is an annual independent multi-venue music and arts festival in Calgary, Alberta.
The music part of the festival will happen in Calgary from June 30 to July 3, 2010. There is also a Film 'festival of festivals' that will take place from June 24 to 29. Click on the film link for more info. Music shows will take place in venues around downtown, with the main outdoor site taking place the weekend of July 2nd and 3rd at Olympic Plaza. We will be posting a full schedule of all events - and where and when they are happening - in the weeks leading up to the festival.
also........ We have some great guest curators this year!
Sled Island 2010 Curators!
Curator Profile: King Khan
Brewing up a heady mixture of high-spirited rhythm & blues, real-gone psychedelia and middle-finger-flipping garage rock, King Khan has earned an international reputation as one of the wildest showmen in underground rock. Born and raised in the suburbs of Montreal to a family of Indian émigrés, Erick Khan first made a splash on the Canadian music scene in 1996 when he joined the frantic garage punk outfit the Spaceshits, where he played bass under the name Blacksnake. The Spaceshits released three albums and a handful of 7"s, but after nearly four years with the group, Khan opted to strike out on his own, relocating to Germany following a tour of Europe. Adopting the new stage name King Khan, he began assembling a solo act while also recording and touring with former Spaceshits vocalist Mark Sultan (aka Bridge Mixture and BBQ), cutting a pair of albums as the King Khan & BBQ Show. King Khan & His Sensational Shrines (the "Sensational" part tends to come and go at will) made their recorded debut on a split single with Reverend Beat-Man & the Nonbelievers in 2001, followed by the EP Spread Your Love Like Peanut Butter and the album Three Hairs and You're Mine. King Khan's band grew all the while and took on a number of remarkable personalities, including Ron Streeter, a percussionist who spent years touring with Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder; Ben Ra, a German sax player who worships at the altar of John Coltrane and Sun Ra; Freddy Rococo, a French organ player who previously led a one-man band in drag; and Bamboorella, the Shrines' full-time go-go dancer. After cutting a split LP with the Dirtbombs, Billiards at Nine Thirty, Khan and the Shrines released their second full-length album, 2004's Mr. Supernatural, which was followed by lots of international touring and a third full-length, What Is?!, in 2007. In 2008, Vice Records signed King Khan & the Shrines to an American record contract, and sealed the deal by releasing The Supreme Genius of King Khan & the Shrines, a collection of Khan's best material to date, dominated by tracks from Mr. Supernatural and What Is?!.
-Mark Deming, All Music Guide
http://www.myspace.com/thekingkhanbbqshow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmxHDx0SBQ&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEZdSFjrsas&feature=player_embedded
Curator Profile: Quintron & Miss Pussycat
Quintron has been making genre-defying noise and "Swamp-Tech" dance music in New Orleans for over fifteen years. The majority of his ten full-length albums have the psychedelic soul of New Orleans garage R&B filtered through a tough distorted Hammond B-3 and a cache of self-made electronic instruments. He has also released strange soundscapes based on inner-city field recordings of frogs and neighborhood ambiance. Quintron regards his most significant creation to be his patented instrument called the DRUM BUDDY, a light activated analog synthesizer that creates murky, low-fidelity, rhythmic patterns. Notable DRUM BUDDY clients include performers Nels Cline of Wilco, Laurie Anderson, and Mr. Dibbs.
Miss Pussycat, otherwise known as Panacea Theriac, is a New Orleans based puppeteer. Born in Antlers, Oklahoma, she began learning puppetry at the Christian Puppet Youth Ministry at the First Baptist Church of Antlers. She began her professional career in New Orleans and assisted in founding the influential night club “Pussycat Caverns.” For the past fifteen years she has traveled internationally conducting puppet shows in rock clubs and at international festivals. She is the President of Rhinestone Records and produces vinyl LPs of her puppet's many bands. Her three full-length puppet movies, North Pole Nutrias (2002), Electric Swamp (2005), and most recently Trixie and The Treetrunks (commissioned by Vice magazine in 2007), have featured the voices of numerous New Orleans musical, political, and literary celebrities, including Sheriff Harry Lee, seafood entrepreneur Al Scramuzza, Antoinette K-Doe, and Andrei Codrescu.
The Quintron and Miss Pussycat live show is one of barely controlled electronic chaos, "Swamp-Tech" dance beats, small explosions, clothes, and entertaining puppet stories. You can experience them live at their own secret club, the Spellcaster Lodge in New Orleans or on one of their many tours around the world. This act somehow has equal relevance in sleazy nightclubs, pizza restaurants, university lecture halls and late-night legion parties.
http://www.quintronandmisspussycat.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUdO7twIizY&feature=player_embedded#
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzM99EOAdA&feature=player_embedded
Curator Profile: Fucked Up
Fucked Up formed in Toronto in 2002, high-school friends influenced by first- and second-wave hardcore bands like Minor Threat and NOFX. It was instantly apparent that they were not carbon-copy punks. Their first 7" was entitled No Pasarán after an anti-fascist slogan from the Spanish Civil War. It was also ferociously melodic and inventive, setting the scene for a string of 25 singles over the next four years that combined political commentary with incredible musicianship and a sense of theatre.
Known by bizarre aliases, Fucked Up employ creative methods of spreading information & misinformation, spurning MySpace and a band website in favor of Wikipedia and an oblique blog. Basic facts are constantly in flux. A guru-like manager named David Eliade shares the same last name as a controversial Romanian philosopher, and allegedly taught 10,000 Marbles how to garden. It is unclear how many of their 7"s have actually been released. Rumors about Fucked Up circulate like wildfire among their obsessive fans.
Some things nonetheless became clear during the course of the band's early existence. Their musical influences are varied and deep: singer Pink Eyes' record collection is one of the more noteworthy assemblages of independent vinyl in Canada. The band has a deep affection for twee English pop, while the live shows are theatrical events where it's not uncommon to find a half-naked, bleeding Pink Eyes prowling the audience. Fans caused thousands of dollars of damage at MTV Canada's studios during a performance of the appropriately titled "Baiting The Public." Attention follows Fucked Up like a sick puppy, whether from a midnight bridge concert at SXSW that turned into a police riot, or a split single with an allegedly fascist band that required clarification at a Toronto press conference.
In 2006 Fucked Up released their first album, Hidden World (Jade Tree), and they had clearly moved on from their frenetic early singles (collected on Epics In Minutes). The songs were stretched out, slower. Guest musicians played string intros and outros. Songs explored organized religion, rebirth, mysticism. Tibetan motifs in the artwork enhanced this newly mysterious direction. Still, despite new textures and layers, much of the music remained very much punk and hardcore in its massive riffage, its guitar-only breaks and, of course, Pink Eyes' gruff vocals. This was about to change.
In 2007 the band released an 18-minute single entitled "Year Of The Pig," an impassioned commentary on the plight of sex workers in Canada. Opening with female vocalist Jennifer Castle singing creepily about pigs being led to slaughter, guitars enter one by one, followed by Pink Eyes trading vocals with Castle as the song crescendos. Abruptly it slips into a fast, intricate breakdown more reminiscent of Neu! or Faust than anything punk. The effect is thrilling and disorienting - this band could only come out of hardcore, but they are now making music like no hardcore band in history.
Fucked Up's 2009 polaris-prize winning album, The Chemistry Of Common Life, synthesizes all these diverse impulses into an expansive epic about the mysteries of birth, death, and the origins of life (and re-living). Merging elements of hardcore songwriting with up to 70 tracks of guitars, organs, winds and vocals, (including 18 guitars on the first single, the fatalistic "No Epiphany"), the music remains iconoclastic and startling, with Pink Eyes' vocals front and center. Guest musicians, of course, abound, notably gorgeous female voices such as Brooklyn's Vivian Girls and Toronto's Katie Stelmanis.
The band remains contemptuous of churches and religion (opening track "Son The Father," with its refrain "It's hard enough being born in the first place: who would want to be born again?") while promoting an almost Buddhist mysticism ("Royal Swan"). But in the end the view is idiosyncratically scientific: amid soaring guitar chords, the title track pays homage to the random chemical processes that created life on this planet. Though Fucked Up remain punks at heart - if quixotically diverse ones - they have created a great, weird, heavy record that stubbornly sticks in your brain and your heart.
http://lookingforgold.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPWFnti4pas&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcolZON2kV0&feature=player_embedded
