The future of music is here!
And it’s a kaleidoscope of woozy, disorienting snapshots – like polaroids on steroids (stereoroids?) and AI-animated – thrown at the listener (me) in commercial snippets, musical memes, barely a minute long, swiped in threads and sub-threads, pieces – history, wayward, comatose – strewn together, morphed and distorted, illuminated in tropical colours and neon stained-glass amusements, paeons to impermanence, fleeting whispers of love and regret, all rolled into an O Henry wrapper, crumbs – the walnuts (acrots by another name) – becoming the focal (the gem, the opal) of the messy room, wires snaked across the floor, slithering up the walls into mating balls of electronic organs and organ failures, there are books – encyclopedias – opened haphazardly, pages, like ribs, torn from the spine, rearranged into insectish, multisegmented flourishes of folds and addendums; worlds are lost, but these songs, like brief memories of the height of decadence, bleached pillars of creation, soar in the swirls of a cloud of poison – ah the golden idols of one’s youth…
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
