BCX Vol. 5
BolloksCraft Xine
Vol.5
July 2013 Editor Jessie Kobylanski Rónan McGrath Contributors Andrewpedia BCX Hannah Boyd Maryann David Ben Eastabrook Tenille Fisher Mike Grant Graeme Halibut Jessie Kobylanski Frank Luca Sean Luciw Ashley Mauerhoffer Rónan McGrath Bu Patsula Sage Prokop Richard Tronson Brett Woolward
Dutchmen Dairy... Pg 30 MISSING - HELP... Pg 32 Owl Stencil... Inside Front Cover Owl Stencil... Inside Back Cover Homelands... Pg 21 Avocado Ice Cream... Pg 25 Mental Safari... Pg 20 Mental Safari... Pg 30 Tea Rex... Pg 15 Won’t Find This on Kindle... Pg 12 On Tuesday... Pg 8 On Tuesday Response... Pg 10 Luxury Comedy... Pg 29 Dots Bots... Back Cover Photo Cred Pg... 16-19 Cottage... Pg 23 The Haxan Cloak... Pg 27 Between Worlds... Pg 24 Huang Quinjun... Pg 6 On Tuesday... Pg 8 Bizarre Bazaar... Pg 16 Good Gear... Pg 26 Creative Artistic Ventures... Pg 31 Colossus... Pg 28 Bug... Pg 4 Birthday Explosion Poem... Pg 5 Photo Cred Pg... 16-19
Layout Crew Jessie Kobylanski Rónan McGrath Designers Jessie Kobylanski Frank Luca
Cover Bizarre Bazaar Doodlers
THANK YOU BCX Made Possible By: Anonymous Andrew Blackwell Kristina Bradshaw Mairi Budreau Bobby Case Ben Eastabrook Bruno Mazzatto Siobhan McGrath wiL Shulba Raeli Warcoye Edge Publishing: Wenda and her Great Team The Art We Are The Grind Hello Toast The Kamloops Art Gallery Movie Mart Red Beard Roasters Zack’s Coffee and Teas
BolloksCraft Xine Firstly, What is Bollokscraft? Bollokscraft is a lot of things: it’s a collective; a music label; an events co-ordination spot; a distribution point; some folks just hanging out; a hub for makers; and above all, a place for people to connect. We’re a developing community aimed at facilitating open and diverse projects. Bollokscraft is all about collaboration and community. Working in good faith with others to gain new perspectives; fill in gaps; learn new things; and just have a good time are tenets we strive to foster in our ventures. While working on ideas under the Bollokscraft umbrella we encourage thinking beyond inbuilt expectations; embracing new views; and practicing new creative methods. We want to tear down the walls between ‘artists’ and ‘audiences’ to nurture an inclusive doing/being community of folks who want to collectively produce and share works that are greater than the sum of their contributor’s particular skills. Participation at Bollokscraft is the process of celebrating the experimentally positive in all ways possible.
Bollokscraft produces, publishes, distributes, organizes events, and connects people and points.
How Does a Zine Fit Into This?
Our Xine combines the best elements of a classic zine with newspaperly publications. It contains the love for underground and the artistry and casual creative awesomeness of a zine, but has the consistency and approachability of a newsletter or traditional magazine.
Why Xine?
Our really cool X is a crossing and a meeting of different avenues and as such it stands for the freely associated convergence of the principles and values of many forms of publication. Our plans for the Xine don’t fit under the usual headings, but allow us to set our own course through that infinite fractal of print media, information and opinion. The Bollokscraft Xine contains a wide variety of article styles and content: from album reviews, to art info, to rad DIY projects, to blurbs on the awesome and inspiring, to comics and illustrations, to tear-out pages of art/photos/ origami and more. If you can
think it and make it 2D, we will always work to accommodate it. This Xine monster is maintained by some key people who inexplicably feel compelled to go above and beyond in putting in hard work during their free time (and sometimes even their not-sofree time). However, this Xine is nourished by a community of various kinds of people who submit their art, media, thoughts, insights and considerations for print. The Bollokscraft Xine is a tangible nexus to showcase ideas from the Kamloops doing/making community and beyond!
Submissions
Submitting any work to the Bollokscraft Xine means that you understand and agree with the following: You have labeled the document with your name or pseudonym, email address and phone number, title, medium and any special notes (ex. preferred in colour, is time sensitive, contains valuable/delicate material etc.). Text should be sent in a word.doc. If images are to be included, please send them separately as jpeg, tiff, png
or bmp files that are labeled with the image title and your last name. Ideally images will be 300 dpi. If you’re unsure about any formatting specifications, please just contact us. We are more than happy to help!
cover printing costs. This is not mandatory, but a small donation goes a long way to getting not only exposure for yourself and our community, but in providing a nexus point for doers and makers alike!
Your work will probably see publication. If so, you will be notified by email or telephone.
For any further clarification, please see the mandate/ guidelines at bollokscraftrecords.com
If the editing party thinks changes are required, you will be contacted (if you’re not there) and asked to modify whatever needs work. If an agreement cannot be reached, we will withdraw from working with that piece, but in no way discourage you from submitting other works. If you submit something to us, say a short story, and in the mean time you have also submitted it to a major publishing firm and they decide to publish your piece with exclusivity, it is your responsibility to notify us so we can pull it. We want to keep this legal and easy, so please keep us posted. By contributing works, you will also be encouraged to contribute a very modest sum (around $2) to help
Submit Works To: bollokscraftxine@gmail.com or mail it to Bollokscraft Xine 406 Nicola Street Kamloops BC V2C 2P8 CANADA
Support Bollokscraft is a donation and volunteer powered organization and since we prefer our Xine to be ad-free we welcome any kind of support. Monetary donations are the most direct way you can help out in sustaining this publication as an art/idea sharing space. If you want to send funds directly to the BCX coffers through Paypal, visit bollokscraftrecords.com/ support/ If you provide your name and address with your donation, we will see to it that you recieve a proper BCX thank you! (more details on the website) At the moment, the printing cost of every edition of this Xine is covered using the personal savings of our most involved community members. Any donations will greatly reduce that out of pocket expense and ensure the persistence of this thing. If you are more inclined to support this project through volunteering, contact us via bollokscraftxine@gmail.com. We look forward to working with you!
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Huang Quingjun’s Jiadang and Identity Through Stuff We all have stuff surrounding us. Some things we’ve bought, others we’ve inherited from family or friends. Some people have more stuff than others. An important question that applies to all is what does this stuff say about us, and how does it contribute to our identities?
Chinese photographer Huang Quinjun has been working on a photography series since 2003 called Jiadang or Family Stuff. Quinjun has visited 14 out of 23 provinces in China asking rural families to empty every single one of their belongings in front of their homes on display for him to photograph. As you browse the photos it is apparent that these families do not own much, but through the objects that they do own, there is a story being told. What does this stuff mean to them and how does it contribute to their identities?
In comparison to these subjects, we in North America are no strangers to stuff and most likely own more than we need to be comfortable and happy. In some way we hold on to this stuff in order to create an identity for ourselves. It is no far stretch to say that we often buy things that we feel compliment our existing identity or represent a change in that identity that we wish to achieve. This does not apply only to North Americans but to everyone in the world. The amount we own and what we own can say a great deal about our identity including our social class, occupation, heritage and passions.
If Quinjun were to ask of us the same as his rural Chinese participants, what would we discover? Would we see a portrait of the person we want to be? Would our true identity be realized? Our identity does not rest solely on these objects but they have become an integral part of how others see us and even how we see ourselves. It may not be possible to avoid this connection between objects and our identities, nor is it necessary, but it is possible to create an awareness and a dialogue as to what that says about our society and what effect it will have on us in the future.
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On Tuesday: A Cut and Paste and Cut On Tuesday, the 17th, I was waiting patiently in the daily deluge on Robson and Burrard, downtown Vancouver for a White Gloves with mascara running down her face repeatedly apologizing profusely (and LOUDLY!) on her phone. Commuters were getting irritable due to the White Gloves begging for mercy and the downpour which forced them into captivity with this poor White Gloves. One of them said “I had a can of Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli which I happily ate cold “ “Yeah, that guy was an asshole”” I replied thinking of the bus I’d taken many times. I’d never seen so many people on this mountain before I was hungry and realized that all I had eaten was thepacking people in the large suitcases of sardines. “Well, at least it’s not as bad as in Tokyo. Actually, the large suitcases aren’t all the bad there” replied a young man next to me “You were on sale a couple months ago, Graeme - much cooler than climbing the mountain with strangers.”
This young man and his friend, whom I later found out to be named Andrew and Andrew continued to stand on the wooden bridge and marvel at the old White Gloves. I listened and asked questions. They later asked me what I was doing with the various and unusual flavours of halibut. To everyone’s amazement, I was going for super awesome consequences of such a spur of time during the long bus ride home. They were very supportive of me and the optimism of the scene seemed to win over the negative energy from the White Gloves bawling at the back of the bridge. I got off on the second last mountain to go for my super awesome consequences of such a spur of time during the long bus ride home. I listened and asked questions. I listened and asked questions. I came out of the consequences about half an hour later feeling like sardines. I wandered around the terminal and bought a supply of
Japanese coconut bread and Cliff Bars from a small town in dress shoes looking around like a building. I stopped in front of the wooden bridge to change from my well-travelled bag to street shorts and saw Andrew and Andrew. “Hey! Wanna walk off the island mountain??” “Very well! Thanks for asking” I replied, “Where are you guys expected?” “On the 250 boat, to go for an army of caterpillars!” They replied, “The White Gloves only comes out for a short period, if you just wait a bit, it isn’t swampy at all. The mountain is far steeper and rockier” I bit my lip and we longed for the swampy bog. The boat lands and we and we start the laugh and ascend. We stopped so I could roll up the sleeves on my dress shirt and make my pants into Pi. During the break, the Andrews the stepped over the swamp it crosses, taking a few opportunities.
We were about to leave when the Mountain suddenly moved on us. We get talking while the boat stood there for a moment and poured over the mountain. Pinstriped dress shorts immediately ambushed Andrew and Andrew and I felt that it would be too sudden to take a few pictures. We spend the day with these mountains instead of swimming. I was glad because I didn’t even have any real shoes on.
So The lake came up and the Andrews looked in, disappointed to see my friend - a small bowl of oatmeal. We all laughed. We all laughed. We all laughed. “Sorry, can’t I meet on the bus?” Andrews yelled. “The last stranger we took on a hike with us managed to squeeze on the box daily while we finished up and quickly descended the mountain!” We decided to move on, but we knew the swimming would pay off.
Decisions sets sail - none. It was sunny out now: “Okay, let’s go, cool strangers I met on the mountain!” We go into x. The Andrews were surprised to find a Scottish village called Irn-Bru. They bought a bunch more Cliff Bars. Really, we just picked them off our clothes, shared them and carried on text messaging - asking if they “want to hang out today and climb the White Gloves.” Hmm, quite good.
We finally reached the summit to see that it was way too swampy to even consider it a bus. While on the bus, one of them opened a General Store and looked to the North.
the cliff!” … The bus was late - very late - and when it finally came, it was already packed. “I think it’s always a good idea to take every opportunity and go on every unexpected adventure. Who knows how much fun you’ll have... or you could die” yelled the driver trying to get as many people on as possible. I managed to find a spot standing right in front of these too old White Gloves with whom I bet were heading to the Island. Made my day. Your tickets have the bold capital letters that say HALIBUT Blah blah blah, interview stuff...
We took and parted ways where we first met and we just fell down on the rock and relaxed. They gratefully shared their stories of the bus. They said they put White Gloves in the lake with some sardines at their mountain-swamp but they were and stopped and couldn’t find them. “I left the White Gloves on
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On Tuesday: A Cut and Paste and Cut Response
Oh my! Not quite what I had in mind when I said “cut it up lots”, but much much better! Made my day! I hope it isn’t too late to accompany the short story with a shot(er) essay explaining what an editor should do when someone sends in a story that he or she is really embarrassed about and decides to retract from the xine. What else would an editor do with a bad short story? Not print it? Bah! Even better, contort it in such a way that the (original) author would laugh at it. I mean, it’s 0100hrs right now and I’m barely conscious enough to write proper paragraphs, but I can’t help but chuckle out loud at the edits you’ve made. Are they even edits? You’ve butchered it! But in good way, like a butcher cuts off the tastiest bits of the animal, except this butcher is more like Picasso, scratch that, more like Burroughs or Gysin. Tie up the Mugwump! Dr. Benway swished the toilet plunger in the toilet instead of sterilizing it and began to massage the patients heart. Blood sprayed all over the place, just like when the
butcher editor edited/butchered my text into the tasty meal that it is today served with fava beans and a nice chianti. That wasn’t a bad recipe I found in Recipes For Musicians, I don’t know why I took even bothered to cook it, because a cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe and this book told you how to cook ramen noodles. I don’t know why I ever bothered, maybe because I have oodles of time on my hands. There were a few things I felt were inadequate about my story. It left out details like Andrew and Andrew being lifelong friends who had based their entire relationship on having the same name or the funny stories we shared like when they were looking for an apartment in Vancouver and they found a place that was advertized as “Room with en suite” for 600/month by Joyce-Collingwood Station: the ad had it all wrong, it was a bathroom with a bed in it. We really have to wonder what the heck is going on when people are renting out their extra bathrooms in this city.
Anyway, half the work in writing is creating memorable characters that draw you into the story like a drunken animator working late in an old haunted castle on top of a high mountain on a dark and stormy night... At least he wasn’t living in somebody’s bathroom. I’d take the haunted castle any day/night. I friend once told me that there is an art in creative writing. Teachers in school mark a lot of papers based on creativity (and the use of proper devices) so they might give you some characters, a setting, and so on and ask you to write a story containing these elements. So if you’re asked to write a story about badgers, an uncreative story would involve a family of badgers going on an adventure to resolve some sort of conflict; but on the other hand, a creative story would be about a badger named Destructicore who has jet packs on his back, and a cannon on his chest and who goes on this mission to avenge his badger wife’s death by travelling back in time in a time machine he made out of licorice whips and was powered by his
tears to attend a tea party with a young girl possessed by Santa (not Satan) and get possessed himself and then dies in a tragic gardening accident and thus creating a space-time paradox sort of deal where he could never have been born to marry his wife thus never being able to avenge her death and so the world doesn’t really exist after all. The end.
Anyway, what I mean to say is that I feel really horrible submitting a bad uncreative story, yes I know, true stories are rarely ever really creative, and I want to thank you for saving it by cutting it up like butcher Burroughs working late into the night in a haunted bathroom castle not far from Joyce-Collingwood Station which he rents for 600/month+utilities.
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You Won’t Find This on Kindle
When At Second Glance Books closed out in Kamloops last year, I took quite a few books home with me (reading material for the rest of my life). Mostly I went with Canadian-authored trade paperbacks and some by authors from all over that I had never read. On my way out the door one night I grabbed a box that was destined for recycle. There were a couple of older classics on top but I didn’t dig down to see what was buried beneath until today. Most of them were fairly beaten older copies of familiar titles but two of them really jumped out.
One is a handwritten notebook from The London County Council (name and school not filled in) and appears to be a writer’s daybook containing observations of the world around him/her. Aside from incredibly beautiful penmanship (a lost art) this notebookcontains some smaller pages with handwritten notes for a walking tour of London, theater and concert listings/dates, and a list of London pubs with addresses. Entries are all dated 1955 except a handwritten copy of notes and comments from “The Philosophy of Insanity” by “a late inmate of the Glasgow Royal Asylum for Lunatics at Gartnavel” (published by Fire-
side Press, London, 1947). Then I uncovered the second book (top left). It’s in pretty poor condition but, considering that all dated entries are from 1805-1810, I suppose this is to be expected. Once again impeccable penmanship but this one is a collection of cooking recipes, folk medicine cures, and general information. Held in place by traditional red sealing wax are a number of smaller notes as well as newspaper clippings with marriage and death announcements and instructions for the captains of British merchant vessels should they experience a cholera outbreak at sea. There’s also a six page written sermon about keeping the Sabbath. I suppose as the author is named “Lord”, this is appropriate. Based on most of the content I am assuming that
J. P. Lord is male, although I’m not 100% sure of this. All pages are heavily browned, most have finger smudges and some have been cut out. A lot of notes have also successfully freed themselves from the wax but I still love this book. This is an example of why we still need brick and mortar bookshops. Archive hand-written personal material like this doesn’t show up too often in stores but it will certainly never be available as a download and that’s too bad. These are personal insights into the times in which they were written. Times before television and other distractions…times when one would sit with pen and inkwell by the fireplace, perhaps an oil lamp on the roll-top, and document a personal glimpse into the
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events of the day in a quality of script rarely seen and in a voice like no other. I wonder how J.P. Lord would have reacted had he known that something he’d written would, 208 years later, be read by someone in Kamloops, BC, and then exposed on this thing called the World-Wide-Web. That two centuries later someone would be reading his recipe for Chutney or his handwritten personal diet for invalids especially for Mrs. Brown of No. 11 Grosvenor Place (plaster cast extra at a cost of one Guinea). Books like this are to be treasured and valued because once they’re gone a little bit of history disappears. People don’t take the time any more to just jot down thoughts and impressions. Perhaps we should…and on
From grafixpblog.wordpress.com
paper because who knows what kind of technology will be used two centuries from now when someone stumbles onto a hand-written personal insight into what it was like in the good old days of 2013. I’d like to personally thank those people who had held onto this book for the past 200 years but I don’t know who they are. I’d like to know where in the world this book has been and I’d like to know why certain pages have been carefully cut from the binding and what was on those pages…but there’s no-one to ask. This will probably forever be a mystery but if you’ve ever wanted to solve the mystery of curing the common cold… this is how they did it back in 1805:
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BolloksCraft Bizarre Bazaar Recap
Many goodly folks stopped by to drink in the fine weather, puruse the diversity of curiosities on display and generally to join in with the music, art, food, and merrymaking of our second Bizarre Bazaar! Sales were made and cash flowed like wine. All the while, music rumbled and bounced along with sonic performances from No Spectrum, Panda Inc.+Sean Luciw, Andrew Hood and Drums of Drone+Compost.
On the ‘mini-Chromesthesia’ side of things, folks got busy chalking up the sidewalk and contributing to a central doodle.
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Even some on-the-spot block-printing went down! After we had spent all of our cash and the sun had climbed higher into the afternoon sky, the whole gig relaxed into a pretty laid back hangout of excellent folks to excellent tunes.
In the end, the 2nd Annual Bizarre Bazaar was a wonderful thing to take part in and we greatly look forward to putting together an even bigger and better one next year – same place, (possibly) same time! See you then! Special thanks to the musical guests, Stephanie for bringing the chalk and the popsicles, Bender and GRRT for the good eats, M+D McGrath for the cake/sangria, Brett and Frank for taking the solid sets of photos, Andrew Blackwell for providing the tables, and Andrew Hood for sharing the turntable/ speaker set-up! You folks are the greatest! Aaaaand, thanks to everyone else who showed up, hung out, and helped out – you are ALSO the greatest!
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Homelands Going back to India after 4 glorious years in Canada was not something I was looking forward to. Sure, I was born and brought up in New Delhi, but I never really felt like I belonged. Why? I don’t quite understand it myself. My skin is brown all year, I lose my shit if I get B’s in school, and I cook curry and eat it too. I fit the bill, right?
coloured my perspectives on the most commonplace events and helped me see things in a way not many of my friends could. Anyway, I was apprehensive about going back
But wait – I don’t worship cows, I don’t have 8,000 gods to fear, and I can eat any meat I want, when I want. Oh, there’s the slight oddity. What really makes someone belong somewhere? Despite my very impressive credentials, I’ve never been a very good “Indian”. Perhaps it is my Anglo roots that wrench me away from conformity; perhaps it was being brought up in a Catholic home that
“home” but I was excited too. I missed the food. A LOT. So I sucked it up, and decided to make the best of the trip.
The heat was sickening. Every newspaper screamed how corrupt all political parties were, and there were at least 16 different reports of 16 different rapes peppering the remaining sections. People were selfish and rude and self-absorbed on the subway, or they were lecherous and obnoxious. Urine dripped from every wall and street corner. Dozens of stray dogs scavenged for food in the dumps beside dozens of homeless, scavenging children. I’d seen all this before, grown up watching people rotting away on the streets and being too little and too helpless to do anything. There was always too many suffering and too few who could help. This time though, I was mentally comparing the
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homeless in Canada to those in India. I’ve never really felt proud of being Indian. I won’t do something stupid like hide my ethnicity and pretend to be something I’m not - I’m not ashamed I’m just not proud.
I thrived on the experience of exploring places I hadn’t visited before alone.
I love many things about being Indian: our delicious food; our colourful customs and festivals; all the wicked forts and palaces; the beauty and diversity in nature; and all that good stuff. I love it! The lack of education, the ridiculous amounts of poverty and corruption soaked into the very roots of society and severe lack of common courtesy? That’s the stuff I despise. I loathed the time I had to spend in crowded areas.
Maybe I’m just not a big people-person, or maybe people needed to stop shoving and elbowing me to get a burger 3 paltry minutes sooner than if they waited their turn.
So I chilled on an elephant, smoked hookahs on the beach at night, and checked out old palaces and forts, and ate TONS of traditional, authentic desi meals all day, erryday. When I came back to Kamloops, I felt at ease again. I was happy to not have to wear jeans in 50C just because I constantly felt unsafe. I was overjoyed to stand in queue and not have someone cut in, and thrilled to smile at strangers and have them acknowledge and return this most basic greeting. I was glad to be back in this foreign land I now call home.
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Avocado Ice Cream
I’ve only made this fresh, summery dessert once or twice, but it’s not very hard and it helps that it’s dairy-free for folks with allergies or strict diets. The recipe I’m posting here has been adapted to suit my own palate, and is a bit more natural, I feel. You can go to the original post and see if that is more suited to you.
Ingredients: 3 large, ripe Avocados (to make 1.5 cups of puree) 1¼ cups Milk (I use Soy/Almond milk instead of Water) 1.5 cups Honey ¼ cup Lime juice 1/3 cup Tequila Lime Zest (to garnish, if you’re fancy) Directions: Peel and pit the avocados, process in food processor till puree is smooth. Add water (or whatever you chose), honey, lime juice and tequila to the puree and run the processor till thoroughly blended. Freeze overnight. ** Alter measurements and add ingredients as you wish! This is the most basic recipe, which you can definitely play around and have fun with. Crush nuts over it, drizzle honey, throw in some mint leaves – it’s up to you! ** http://www.lifescript.com/food/healthy_recipes/a/avocado_ice_cream.aspx
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Good Gear TC Electronic Ditto Looper Although I generally find convoluted distortion/effects pedals to be tantalizing, and therefore to be malignant to the healthy thickness of my wallet, occasionally I find myself wanting after certain sound tools that serve very specific or rigid purposes. This sentiment is likely shared by other noise/experimental sound enthusiasts and creators, and to you like-minded sonic-adventurers I highly recommend TC Electronic’s most recent creation – the compact, efficient and straightforward Ditto Looper. The Ditto is a stripped down loop pedal which ditches all bells’n’whistles like rhythm guides, input control knobs, phrase saving, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah, and flexes 5 simple minutes of looping capacity. This means that one can create a loop ranging from a mere second to a brawny 300 seconds and can then infinitely overdub on top of that interval-establishing base loop. Really, that’s a hugely useful little power (and it is extremely little at only 9x4x3cm) for my rig – allowing me to create no-hassle drones and percussion layers for pattern shifting with my other looper and delay. So if you want to grab a quality looper with squeaky-clean True Bypass and analog dry-pass for under $130, dig around on the Internet and get yourself a Ditto. Good gear, indeed.
The Haxan Cloak’s Excavation
I first heard about Bobby Krlic’s The Haxan Cloak a couple of years ago as his brand of dark drone electronica was beginning to make waves on the usual blog networks. I did not, however, properly take notice until the release of this year’s Excavation. The first thing that struck me about my reintroduction to The Haxan Cloak was probably the noose-adorned album cover. The combination of such a stark, yet powerful image in addition to the fact that the record was released by the increasingly impressive Tri-Angle Records, were two big indicators as to why I knew I needed to give this album a listen. In actuality, it would be unfair to judge this particular record on it’s artwork alone: from the second the sample track,
“The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)”, concluded, I knew I was hooked and that this would be an immense record. To describe the sound of The Haxan Cloak would be a dis-service to what a stunning piece of work Excavation really is; it needs to be heard and experienced. Dark ambient records are not in short supply these days, but I feel as though this one stands out amongst the rest, much in the same way that a noose hanging just about anywhere would. The walls of sound, the textures, the landscape being painted for you - the listener - is all so very dark and such an exquisite listen. Recommended listening: in a dark room and preferably very loud.
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Hey Colossus’ Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo Today while at work in the café where I work (work, for me, is serving coffee) I encountered a customer who was wearing a Devildriver t-shirt (he had other clothes on as well, of course). I thought then how estranged from ‘metal’ I have become since my end-of-highschool phase of adventurously exploring the seemingly limitless abyss of metal sub-genre classification. Because Devildriver held little intrigue or cool to me back in the day and are definitely laughably ridiculous to me today I admit that a pompous internal sneer manifested in my mind when I saw the dude in the shirt. Oh, but naturally I had to eat that mind-sneer this evening when I decided on Experimedia’s advice to give Hey Colossus’ 8th full-length a spin. God damn it, this album starts off with the uncanny marriage of psychedelic synth modulation and ambient drone with exactly the kind of dude-chug metal/rock sound that I had mere hours prior internally disdained in my memory of Devildriver/the rest of ‘metal!’ The brawny opener ‘Hot Grave’ smacks like any dumb cowboy hat wearing groove-metal stalwart-song might sound however, the subtle experimental undertones retained my ear in just the way that bands like Black Sheep Wall and Isis failed to do as my taste changed and drew me away from the doldrums of most metal toward the rewarding diversity of almost anything else (I am arrogant here for emphasis). And I am very glad that I stuck this one out: Hey Colossus have carved out a sound (on Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo, at least) that makes me think of a kind of post-metal Hawkwind. As the album flexes the thick grooves and riffs of genre-familiar song writing (here sludge metal/groove metal) it all steadily gets perverted and twisted up in evolving kraut rock style song progressions and space-rock synth experiments.
Effect and distortion pedals are endlessly toyed with and aural spaces are tweaked, compressed and then ripped open over and over creating a hallucinatory odyssey through the monolithic zones of sludge and doom. In this way, the brutishly corny feeling opener becomes something of a foil to the rest of the record that thus illuminates the surprising experimentation showcased throughout. All together Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo is as good as it is intriguing/bewildering - definitely check this out if you ever got tired of metal and decided you were going to get all smart-guy about music and started listening to only ‘heavy’ music if it mostly excluded ‘metal’ tags - sludge, drone, doom, noise, etc. Hey Colossus just might reignite that old flame for you with this new one. CHOICE JAM: ‘How to Tell Time with Jesus’ / ‘Hot Grave’ IF YOU LIKE: Can+Harvey Milk, Hawkwind+Isis, Melvins+Kayo Dot, Devildriver?
Stuff We Like
Luxury Comedy Ooooh Yeah! Dun dun, dun dun oh yeah, Luxury! Comedy! This sweet BBC sketch comedy show has one of the best and catchiest theme songs of all time. Go ahead, youtube it just for the intro, but be prepared to get sucked into the glittery madness. Sesame Street for adults meets a grade 4 school play meets magical mystery tour mayhem = Luxury Comedy, starring Noel, Smooth, Dolly and Andy Warhol (sort of). Noel Fielding (The Mighty Boosh, Never Mind the Buzzcocks), a notably stylish and talented man, has created something pretty special, e-special-ly considering it’s television. Prepare your peepers and brain to be consumed by the sequin-shimmer esthetic of the bizzaro costumes, animation and makeup. Never before have you seen so much metallic face paint or lamé outfits outside Diva Night at your local tavern. If you’re a sucker for the surreal or for wacky accents or mashed potato revolvers or tutting mountains, this show is well worth watching… multiple times over. “Meet Fantasy Man! A modern-day Don Quixote character trapped inside an electronic operatic world that resembles Tron. He rides a porcelain unicorn - Arnold 5 who has an ice-cream for a horn, and a voice like Barry White.” 29
Stuff We Like
Dutchmen Dairy, Sicamous Sicamous is a small town that is famous for two things: lush scenery, and ice cream. Either of these two things alone are worth the trip out there. Dutchmen Dairy, is the sole tourist attraction for a town; and a taste of their ice cream will be clear why. The ice cream is that old-fashioned kind that you’ve always heard about, but probably only have experienced in cheap imitations at your grocery store. I would even go so far as to say that it is the best ice cream in BC. When I was last there, I did not count how many different flavours they offered, but it was certainly more than 31‌ You have the option of buying ice cream cones, milkshakes, and containers. One minor 21st century annoyance: no debit/credit devices are available, so make sure to have cash at hand.
IMPORTANT! A bass guitar and two pedals were stolen from a very friend good of ours on June 20th. If you’re a kamloopser and see these in a pawn shop or for sale online, PLEASE notify us at bollokscraftxine@gmail.com Dan Electro Longhorn bass in black Blackout Effecters Whetstone Analog Phaser pedal Infanem Second Voice pedal
BolloksCraft Xine Check out the Xine in full colour online! Scan here Or check out Bollokscraftrecords.com