BCX Vol. 6
BolloksCraft Xine
Vol.6
Autmn 2013 Editor Rónan McGrath
Contributors Hannah Boyd Leafy Sea Dragon... pg 5 False Fiona Silver Blue Sky... pg 5 Jessie Kobylanski Bacon Caramelized Marshers... pg 19 Open Review... pg 21 Frank Luca Attenuated... pg 9 Sean Luciw Modal Brightness Stars... pg 14 Graeme Marlin Bollokscraft Interview... pg 22 Bruno Mazzotta Saturday April 24th... pg 6 Liam McGrath Drawing... pg 12 Rónan McGrath Calypso Borealis... pg 10 Ears out... pg 20 Hope Mikal Untitled... Inside front cover Untitled... pg 7 Stephanie Patsula Three and Six... pg 4 Melaina Todd 7 inch... pg 8 Richard Tronson Poem... pg 13 Vasyl Ko Stuff We Like... pg 16
Layout Crew Jessie Kobylanski Rónan McGrath
Designers Jessie Kobylanski Frank Luca
Cover Frank Luca
THANK YOU BCX Made Possible By: Anonymous Andrew Blackwell Mairi Budreau Bobby Case Ben Eastabrook Bruno Mazzotta Siobhan McGrath wiL Shulba Raeli Warcoye KPA Publishing 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 grouping of art and music community projects all geared to be inclusive and collaborative in every way possible. Bollokscraft is a record label, a publication, a community of musicians, artists, writers and creative types of all and any description. Above all, the Bollokscraft thing is about connecting people and encouraging open and forthright creative relationships – we’re a developing community aimed at facilitating open and diverse projects. By working in good faith and honesty with others we invariably gain new perspectives. By filling in gaps and learning new things in this way, the tendency is that we have a good time and produce unpredictable and excellent works. These are the guiding notions of Bollokscraft and what 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!
For any further clarification, please see the mandate/ guidelines at bollokscraftrecords.com
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
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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last night i had the strangest dream there wasn’t difference between pink and blue everything molded into one gray nothing that i’ve ever seen i left today for something better i found a river, the one in my dream carrying glaciers over water i got in the way, so i wrote this letter ‘hi, it’s me i have died but i came back’ you can hit me back, with full postage i will leave for a day or four come back to my sister’s Jack find me over the sky ,somewhere dry and if your are promised trust for the price of silver ask why and blue may return to sky
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Attenuated - Deep Opacity // Space Slave Editions
One of the standout releases thus far in 2013. I had been looking forward to this tape since first hearing about its announcement some months ago. Attenuated’s previous effort, last year’s Night of Sense (also on Space Slave) was exceptionally easy on the ears upon it’s initial unveiling. To say that Deep Opacity is anything short of an extraordinary album would be providing it with a massive disservice. This one is extra-lengthy, as it’s listed as a C76, but the sound never drags or tires. It demands your attention - it’s blissed out walls of drone are more than sufficient in drawing in the listener, while simultaneously allowing you to drift off in a swell state of mind. Of course, there is also the fact that the cover is hand printed & painted, which only solidifies Deep Opacity as truly exceptional in every way. This one gets my highest recommendation. Listen for yourself // http://spaceslave.bandcamp.com/album/deep-opacity. Available for purchase at Bollokscraft Records.
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Calypso Borealis // Agaw Shasha I think that it’s an interesting thing that an artist might willfully limit the amount of online information about his/ her projects while remaining congenially responsive to dialog with interested fans via email and be greatly inclined to share their artist-copies of their albums at screaming deals. I encountered this strange promotional method when I sought out info about Calypso Borealis in the hopes of writing an informative review of his(?) most recent release on Space Slave Editions – Agaw Shasha (c46, limited to 100). I did my usual thing and dug around all the websites that typically have artist identity details/history details such as personal blogs, review blogs, label sites and even Discogs. However, it quickly became apparent to me that Calypso Borealis is internet represented only as follows: “Calypso Borealis is a mysterious French artist.” (sourced from Discogs.com) And:
“Music by – E.B.A.” (sourced from the liner notes of Agaw Shasha and other CB releases) Seriously – the only other information I could stir up was by back referencing the email address connected to the Paypal account to which one would forward payment when buying directly from the artist, emelinebong@h______ Emeline Bong? The E and B seemed right for the first and second letter of the mysterious album credits mentioned above, but the actual identity of this musician still eluded me – there was not a single mention of Emeline Bong ‘A-nything’ on any blogs or music websites. So without hope for digging up anything to write about except the ear-value of the music itself I resigned to writing based solely on the sounds (like a good journalist?). My last ditch effort to rake together some research content was to email CB inquiring about distribution-bundle deals on a number of his/ her artist copies from earlier cassette editions. Surprisingly, CB (who’s name turned out
to be Emmanuel – as per the sign-off at the bottom of each email) got back to me within a few hours and turned out to be a very amiable conversationalist. Furthermore, in response to my inquiry of bundle-deals on CB tapes, Emmanuel offered Bollokscraft a fantastic deal – selling us 5 different CB tapes at well below the market value. From my experience as a music merchant it’s my opinion that in most cases where an artist is clearly bent on anonymity the estrangement between musician and listener usually extends to the level of distribution as well. Often release sizes are ridiculously small, represses never happen and email addresses and ‘contact us’ pages get left unattended and inactive. With Calypso Borealis, however, I was exposed to the reality that some artists are genuinely disinterested in being personally identified by their works and prefer instead to have their works speak for themselves. Emmanuel made it impossible for me to write an informative and indepth article about the history and details of the CB project, but at the same
time made it easy for me to bring his tape-music into the Kamloops community where it has been shared and discussed in its own right. Maybe Emmanuel never conceived of things this, way but regardless of his intention I find that there’s something kind of refreshing and inspiring about the result.
(Sub)abstract: This has been an experimental review of Calypso Borealis’ Agaw Shasha. The music of CB is very much like the experience described above: remote and elusive but all the while familiar and broadly welcoming.
Agaw Shasha is a study of receiver perception of distant and unclassified sounds all in harmonious half-lotus position with periodic air-swells of synthesized and acoustic instrumentation.
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Modal Brightness Stars (hitherto undiscovered music theory palindrome) During the writing of “Chaos In Boxes: twisted adventures in music theory,” there was one extra-super-special thought gem which somehow never made it into the book. I’ll include it in the forthcoming e-book edition, but here it is now. I call it “Modal Brightness Stars” and it goes like this... The traditional and extremely common Major Scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do) has 7 notes if you exclude the double occurrence of “do.” You could also say “Root, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8ve”, and 8ve (short for Octave) is the same as Root because the cycle repeats. If you temporarily decide that the 2nd is now the Root, then everything gets shifted by one position and a new scale is created. The new scale is called “Mode 2,” which has its own special mood. Repeat this process starting on each successive note of the Major Scale and you will create a total of 7 different “Modes,” each with its own emotional colour. They have Greek names (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian) but sticking with just the numbers is more relevant for the purpose of explanation. So far, all of this is fairly widely-used knowledge amongst musicians. The Modes can be ordered according to “brightness” which means “how many sharp or flat intervals are contained in the Mode.” At the risk of over-generalizing, you could say that a Mode with more sharps sounds more uplifting, while more flats sounds sadder. Mode 4 (a.k.a. Lydian) is the brightest, while Mode 7 (a.k.a. Locrian) is the darkest. The complete list of Modes in order of decreasing brightness is 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7. Before reading further, maybe you can see some sort of pattern in that list of numbers?
Here comes the fun part (my “new” discovery and contribution, at least I’ve never seen this before or since)... First, draw the numbers 1 through 7 in a circular arrangement (see Fig. 1).
Now connect the numbers with lines, in the order of Mode brightness listed above (4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7) plus one more line to get back to the start. See Fig. 2.
WOW! Awesome spikey 7-pointed star shape! This amazing geometrical music thingy also works in reverse... Draw the numbers in Mode brightness order, in a circular arrangement (see Fig. 3).
Now draw lines joining the numbers, in the order the Modes were created in the first place (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) plus one more line to get back to the start. See Fig. 4. Nice. The reverse process generates a rounder 7-pointed star shape! Whoop, there it is. If I ever get tattoos I’ll probably start with these 7-pointed star shapes. 15
Stuff We Like: Ravenhill Herb Farm Ravenhill Herb Farm is a little piece of paradise overlooking the Saanich Inlet and the beautiful Lauwelnew (Mt. Newton) Valley, nestled in the heart of the Saanich Peninsula in WSà NEC territory near Victoria,BC. Basking in the hot summer sun on the south facing slope of the mountain, the farm’s dry Mediterranean microclimate provides a natural habitat for a wide variety of herb plants to thrive. Home to many furry and feathered friends, the little herd of goats, heritage hens and geese enjoy many acres of peaceful pasture interspersed with coastal Garry Oak, Arbutus and old growth Douglas Firs. During the summer months vistors can wander the herb and veggie gardens while taking in the sweeping views. The market in the old 1910 barn offers a wide selection of organically grown herb starts, seasonal fruits and veggies, free-range organic eggs, herbal tea blends, herbal infused honeys, herbal salves, and a variety of local handmade goodies. Summer Market is on Sundays until Fall Equinox from 10-4. ravenhillfarm.ca
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Bacon Caramelized Marshmallows Camping incidents can be graphic and memorable. Fortunately for our camping friends on a birthday camp-bonanza, the incident was tasty and free of burns... well, sort of. Everyone seems to be particular about how he or she likes a marshmallow toasted, roasted or burned. Until very recently, I prefered them black and blistery: ugly little nodules of sugary, mouth-filling goo, i.e. camp happiness. The goup had finished some bacon frying on a cookie sheet for breakfast and there was an abundance of grease pooling in one corner. Being the sort of person who hates to see good, flavourful fat go to waste, and someone who can’t help but notice a half-bag of marshmallows just hanging out on the picnic table, I put two and two together. The result is a crazy, almost gourmet experience. It’s crunchy and gooey and sweet and just the tiniest bit salty/ smoky. It’s Bacon Carmamelized Marshmallows for goodness’ sake! EAT THEM! Put two or three marshmallows on a goodly sized stick. Gently rub the marshmallow in hot, liquid bacon grease - just enough to coat. The heat from the grease will begin to melt the marsher, so be tender with it and don’t let it fall off the stick. Stick the coated marhser directly into the flames. The grease will keep the marshmallow from just burning because it has a higher smoking point than the sugar. Instead, the intense flames will caramelize the exteriour of the marshmallow in a bubbly, lacey golden way that’s appealing to the eye and the tongue. Allow these to cool a little before stuffing your gob, but then, by george, stuff away! 19
EARS OUT: Black Pepper - Ellipsis Blackpepper’s Ellipsis is a somewhat mysterious affair... label Reckno states on their Bandcamp page that the content of the cassette is a curated selection rather than an ‘album’ in the traditional sense: “Extracted from an old hard drive that contained over 200 tracks which had been abandoned by their creator.“ This is to say that Reckno ring-leader Chris Catlin (who records as Yaard) took curatorial-reign over a hard drive belonging to visual artist/musician Jason Kerley (who put out his debut 7” as Blackpepper on Dirty Demos back in ’09) and thus ‘executive-produced’ Ellipsis, Blackpepper’s first on Reckno. This unusual approach to album building may sound a little awkward at first, but make no mistake – although what we hear is a selection of artist-abandoned tracks, Ellipsis turns out to be an intriguing collage of cutting-room floor treasures. Catlin’s curatorial style is to present these various unreleased Blackpepper pieces without pomp or any evident attempt to make them cohere like a unified ‘album.’ Instead we are treated to an array of compositions that together provide a lens through which we peer onto some indeterminate interval of Blackpepper’s creative output. This makes for a very unusual and quintessentially modern type of cassette - a retrospective on the works of an artist released at the head of their discography rather than the tail end. It’s wonderful that with Ellipsis we can have a glimpse into the history of Blackpepper’s Acid-based sample experiments and subtly wacked-out synth compositions (all bound up by a keen and propulsive sense of rhythm) even though that history hasn’t yet been realized in the classic sense. BUY CASSETTE (Edition of 50 - pro-dubbed grey c30 + individually decorated slipcases) from Reckno
Black Pepper: Open Review
crispy radio casio ironing board robot static o matic seinfeld sample vivaldi sucker radio shack attack lazer phaser box drums Nintendo shambles no-macho break-beat bungee bridge bam bam no singing popcorn rain chime earthbound spring aphex drug underground level pusher arp picnic nip nip nic
hyper car button mash boss fight win den spin glen din catwalk opener spring string ghost waltz bitter tea scrape tap fade out stop snap.
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Bollokscraft Interview BCR C002 A few weeks ago, I saw Ronan McGrath and Graeme Marlin sitting in a coffee shop interviewing each other for their upcoming split tape release on Bollokscraft records. I watched them sitting there, occasionally asking each other questions and then writing down their answers on loose pieces of scrap paper and old receipts. The table wobbled and one of their coffees spilled and ruined all the notes. Frustrated with this method of interviewing, they tore up the papers, threw them in the trash and left. I later searched the trash and put the pieces in my pocket and went home. I’ve spent hours of forensic investigation piecing this interview together for Xine readers to read. It was no easy task, their writing was quite messy and indiscernible from each other (I also suspect that they switched pens several times throughout the interview), there are no questions on the papers only answers, and it was difficult to piece the papers together since they were drenched in coffee. I did my best at piecing this interview together and I hope it brings an insightful preview of the upcoming BCR-C002 release. -Anonymous Fan
We have a bunch of differently coloured cassettes lined up for the next few catalogue entries. So it looks like we’ll be following this split with at least four more releases of 25 in the next six months. It is very exciting to have released another (2nd) in the BCR Cassette Series. Putting out this split and the following Aupp(*) C90 (BCR-003) I have definitely learned that editions of 25 are probably the most sensible method for the foreseeable future of the BCR Cassette Series. The evolution of the piece came from my desire to collaborate for the final project. In the last few years I have tended to move away from conventional “sing water”(*) style songs in favour of more open-ended improvised music. I started out with no particular vision. I just loaded a bunch of stuff onto my sampler like bubbles, radio voices, and two(*) octaves of guitar, chord organ (distorted and cut up to sound like bagpipes(*), the first glitch music) and went over to your house to record it without any clear vision. However when we first discussed - - - and proposed a “freak folk” sound I felt compelled to return to more neutral(*) song writing.
Bollokscraft Interview BCR C002
I felt it necessary to take apart my original joy bringing in an explosion(*). Since I didn’t know what it would sound like in the end, you guided me to follow a certain structure. In the piece didn’t make sense, like there’s these bubble people(*) who start playing Scottish music, then they - robot sings a sad tune, and then there’s Andrew. I think that it differs so much from the original as a result of me having to let go of some of my self-indulgent experiments in favour of making playable space for Andrew – a positive change for the composition I’d say. Seta Strand is a work of deconstruct(*). I read out a the flip book I’d been carrying around for the past few years. I just picked a random page and read it out into the vocoder(*). The title is the product of taking apart some of the song’s central lyrics (which are also the product of a intentional obscuring systematic(*) method) and extrapolating them into something unfamiliar. I don’t remember where the lyrics came from, it might come from an ad for pickled herrings(*), or bathroom(*) graffiti, - - - or maybe something weird someone said to me. Somehow it remains rooted in the recorded work though.
For the longest time (2004-2009), I worked mostly alone at home making loopy ambient music on the computer and - - - that’s all in the past now. Since then, it has mostly been a sparse time of creation trying new things working on different equipment (tape, computer programs, samplers, synthesizers, field recordings). Simultaneously, I’ve been trying to put out a new full length of synth compositions (similar to the opening/closing pieces on Light and Strand). I’m feeling inclined toward(*) two separate projects for the near future. I definitely want to continue in the reindeer(*) - - - of the manifestation of Sxa Ormbjüment(*) that appeared on the BCR-C002 (more collaborative, possible(*) to perform live) so I am probably going to focus on - - - that jamming, bringing different band members together and trying to “write” open-ended experimental music. (*) denotes a possible typo - - - denotes a possible missing section
Sxa Ormbjument/Plastic Owl - Seta Strand/Light and Stars (c30, edition of 25) sxaormbjumentplasticowl.bandcamp.com bollokscraftrecords.com
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