Videokill! in Montreal!

The immensely popular Vancouver-based indie music video event Videokill! is coming to Montreal in October. Organizers Lindsay Sung and Heather Trawick will be making the trek out, and guest curators are the Cafe X curators Pale Phantoms (hey, c'est moi and artist/swell person Tracy Maurice!)...

The most recent Videokill! in Vancouver on August 12th was well-attended and featured videos by Black Mountain, Radio Berlin, Wolf Parade, They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Sparkle Motion, T.A.L.A.Band, Black Rice, The Beans, Heavy Party, Channels 3 & 4 and performances by Primes and Bakelite.

Any bands interested in including a video for exhibition should contact palephantoms@gmail.com, and prepare to have either a hard copy of the video available or it available on the internet for consideration. Submissions should be in before September 20th.

Drinko Bingo: Selfhood as the eternal soul.

Victoria breeding.

Victorian ex-pats can take comfort in the return of Drinko Bingo this Wednesday at Pharmacie Esperanza. Hosted by Carlin & Jennie, the evening promises prizes, booze and the assorted cast of art students and layabouts. DJing by Warren Hill (former synth-player for Radio Berlin!) and Jay Watts III (that's me!). Show up around 9pm. Dress well. People appreciate it, they really do.

Wednesday, August 18th
@ Pharmacie Esperanza / 5490 St-Laurent

Soul Jazz DJ.

This upcoming Saturday sees another show by personal favourites Duchess Says: the Quebec-city dark new-wave transplants will be performing at a Fluodata zine benefit at the Jupiter Room along with Dark Mana, a group fronted by ex-Short Pants Romance bassist and 21st Century Fox dynamo Jordan Robson-Cramer (Jordan Robson-Spector to those who've witnessed him at the controls of an impromptu basement recording studio) and Mary-May. Duchess Says are one of the numerous factors leading to a critical and popular re-assessment of groundbreaking art-damaged synth-fuckups Six Finger Satellite, who deserved the interest and attention that the inferior Brainiac received. Stop by Cheap Thrills sometime and you'll notice they've re-stocked all the albums, previously only available in bargain bins.

On Friday, Vice Recording's Death From Above 1979 (re-christened to avoid confusion with, and litigation from New York's DFA Recordings) return to Montreal, fresh from a Japanese tour with Toronto's GGBB Controller.Controller. DJ Cherry Cola spins the original songs interpreted last time by We Are Wolves.

Friday, August 20 Death From Above 1979, Controller.Controller, DJ Cherry Cola @ El Salon (St. Laurent)

Saturday, August 21 Oneida, Horsey Craze, Lullabye Arkestra @ La Sala Rossa (St. Laurent)

House is Gay.

SOLAR SWASTIKA

Film critic and PopMontreal Communications director Anna Phelan (pardon the missing accent) will be celebrating her birthday tomorrow (Wednesday, August 11th) at Le Swimming. The event is free, there are DJs (), and the reformed Ten Commandments will be performing as well. New members include quick-talking Vaudevillian filmmaker Matthew Law and former Ghosts member Ami Brousseau. Tales of whiskey and rivers of blood and divine wrath and justice from the baroque, art-damaged group... Bring presents.

Yes, Yes, WOLF PARADE is the best band in Canada.

fucking googlesearch.

...And judging by recently received e-mails and internet buzz, the rest of North America will soon know it. Wolf Parade's recent string of shows with Modest Mouse have made them a desirable commodity - unfortunately I've heard they've already run out of CDs and shirts...
The Audioscrobbler site rates them #1, beating out TV On The Radio, The Unicorns, The Fiery Furnaces and every other worthy and unworthy buzz band that's dared to pop their delicately sculpted haircuts above the underground in the past couple years. All this attention without a publicist, too!

Montreal kids get the chance to either jump on the bandwagon or chase it down and burn it, backlash-style, this Friday. They're playing at the Rialto on Ave. du Parc, opening up for Modest Mouse. The oversold show might be a wee bit difficult to get into, though - and with capacity issues, don't expect backdoor fellatio to be gaining you access, though I'm sure the effort would be appreciated.

from Panos Cosmatos' site...

Filmmaker, designer, and Moebius fan Panos Cosmatos has designed some truly stunning posters that will be for sale at the show tonight as well, check them out (as well as other work) at his gallery at http://www.panoscosmatos.com/gallery...

OTHER WORTHY BAND NEWS: Vancouver's Pink Mountaintops (side-project by Black Mountain frontman Steve McBean) received a solid 8 out of 10 from Britain's ire-raising musicpulp, NME.

Image from Showstudio.

Photographer Nick Knight's always innovative Showstudio project has posted the results of a recent. Belgian designer Martin Margiela (known for his process-exposing works) designed half of a shift-dress, posted the pattern on Showstudio and invited Showstudio readers to finish the dress and submit the results. Notable designs have been recently posted... My stand-outs include Min Lee's hand-sewn, baroque interpretation and a dramatic, minimalist cape-like work by Masumi Raymond. The pattern is still available for download for interested readers, as well as a previous, completed pattern by Alexander McQueen.

The Suggestive Power of Media

Did anybody notice a jump in the amount of guys in sleeveless shirts skulking about Parc La Fontaine at night since The Mirror published their list of top cruising spots in Montreal last Thursday? I certainly did. I was pondering exactly how much money I'd charge for a latex-gloved handjob when I realized that anyone who's hanging about in a park, probably doesn't have the sort of cash I'd demand for such an operation...

Okay, for some of you, the big show this week is the Sonic Youth/Le Tigre/Les Georges Leningrad triple-bill at Metropolis. And for others, myself included, the more enjoyable event is the (gasp!) oversold Modest Mouse/Wolf Parade concert at the Rialto on Friday. Sonic Youth are older than my parents. Combine all of their ages and extend it into the past, and the gigantic, aged beast you'd have on your hands would have been born just after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I'd imagine. They're playing with a band noted for revolutionizing the world of poor spelling and that group that everyone outside of Montreal has been hearing a lot about recently, Les Georges Leningrad. Jesse from Channels 3+4 in Vancouver begs for news about them everytime I talk to him, Erase Errata (remember them?) and The Gossip speak in awe of them, and me, well, I've never seen them. Nope. Not once. In fact, I've only heard that one "Georges 5" song, and I'm inclined to think it's trash, despite having a real sweet tooth for no-wave nonsense, I gather. Hey, I salivated when I saw a real, live copy of "No New York!" and I even dropped the $40 for the Japanese re-release a couple of years back, but that song's terrible. Christ.

Wolf Parade though, there's a band. They're going to be huge by the beginning of next year, probably big on the internet before that. Massive. Gargantuan. And well-respected. How long before Pitchforkmedia gets a whiff of it? Does anybody care? Has something superceded Pitchfork yet? DESPITE WHAT PUBLICISTS WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE, NO ONE OUTSIDE OF 15 YEAR OLD BOYS READS BUDDYHEAD AND LISTENS TO THE ICARUS LINE.

Finally... I suggest that, as no one has satisfactorily pin-pointed the origins of the ever-annoying phrase "my bad," it be replaced with the more ennobled Latin "mea culpa." Consider it.