Mary Halvorson Quintet: Saturn Sings

This is tense, spooky music with a delightfully playful side. In Saturn Sings, her second album on the Firehouse 12 label, Mary Halvorson adds alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon and trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson to her already formidable trio with drummer Ches Smith and bassist John Hébert.   Without Halvorson, that combination[Read More…]

Animals go feral in Sedaris’s latest

There’s a clear reason why Ian Falconer, who illustrated David Sedaris’s latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, only uses shades of red and black in his illustrations.  It’s because the stories, which tersely detail single events in the lives of animals, are often bloody and bleak. But it’s[Read More…]

Looking Montreal in the Eye

There’s an exhibit of Jenny Holzer’s sometimes-incendiary conceptual art on view at DHC/ART until November 14. But you needn’t have seen it to attend Early Warning Systems: Inflammatory Poetry by Six Montreal Poets, a poetry reading honouring her work.   Holzer has often used text as images in her art,[Read More…]

Dan Mangan is nice, nice, very nice

bcscene.ca It’s challenging to listen to Dan Mangan’s song “Robots” without singing along with the refrain: “Robots need love, too / They want to be loved by you.” Those words may or may not be true, but you believe them when you hear them. Perhaps Mangan, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter from[Read More…]

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