We’re very much looking forward to playing the Burlington Sound of Music Festival again this year with some great local bands including our Catherine North Studios compatriots The Human Orchestra.
The evening portion of the Burlington Hyundai stage performances begins at 6 PM and we’ll be hitting the stage around 8:15. This is the largest free music festival in Canada and hope people can make it out not just to enjoy us but to take in the whole weekend’s worth of performances! We promise you’ll love it – OGC – (16.05.13)

Growing up my mom played a lot of types of music compiled over several hundred CDs and compilations that were presented to me in phases. This form of delivery which would gift me with these far out sounds from the past half century of our universe would be played, and then sequenced with similar feeling music that would have been appropriate to my mom’s tastes at that moment, I would hear these songs cycled over in a relatively short time span. These phases, contrasting to the presentation of music that once played would not be heard again until their impression has been lost from my memory, allowed my kid-self to associate these sounds with one another and start to develop a auditory vocabulary that I’m still using today. There’s a lot of memories I have to certain music and I have an idea about how these worked together. The actual memory itself and its characteristics not being evaluated, there are two things which I’m identifying as having influence on a piece of music’s associative strength – 1- Novelty, meaning how “different” the piece sounds compared to your own experiences and tastes for music, and 2 – the strength of the piece based upon musical criteria, like melody, rhythm, etc.
I call recall listening to Loggins and Messina, or Diana Ross, or Bing Crosby and it all being some variation on the shade of “music”, and upon hearing this music from when I was younger I recall most of it but it’s only certain pieces that I associate with memories. What I’ve started to notice recently is that it’s only songs which seem to meet one of the two criteria (novel, or theoretically strong) that I’ve developed strong memories with and I’ll provide an example of each. I don’t know where in the world my parents heard about the Gipsy Kings from but I can listen to Baila Me and I’m instantly 5 years old again racing my brother across Koopa Troopa Beach in Mario Kart 64. Those danceable rhythms and percussive back-beat were so different from everything that I heard on the radio in the car or the grocery store and it really made an impression on me. The other example type is for music which is inherently “good”, if I could even dare to present such a immorally-shaped phrasing of the idea. I’m presenting Burt Bacharach and his work with Dionne Warwick for this example because it’s what got me thinking about writing all of this in the first place. When I listen to their stuff, I become reinvigorated about my understanding of music. The lines that I had in my mind which define genres and “tastes” are all wrong because at the end of the day, if a song has a good melody, lyrics and there’s enough rhythmic detail, it can be translated into any genre and still be good music. [See The White Stripes' cover of I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself compared to the Bacharach-Hunt original]. I don’t imagine there’s a grand hypothesis at the end of my thought train here, I guess it’s just that I really enjoyed listening to this song.

“Anyone Had a Heart” – Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, performed by Dionne Warwick – 1964

CF-(12.04.13)

Thanks to Lucas from the Sil for joining us last week during CMW!
“The Cadillac Lounge was almost exactly what I had imagined. Hubcaps lined the stage, Elvis photos and leopard print sheets adorned the walls and a beer tap made out of a guitar head turned out drinks. The owners were certainly swinging for the blues-rock bar fences. It was a cool vibe for a music venue.
McMaster’s own Of Gentlemen and Cowards made the trip down to the Lounge on Thursday evening for their first time playing at the famed Canadian Music Week. The annual CMW is an exposition of over 1000 artists in 60 venues throughout downtown Toronto and brings together all of the major (and minor) players in the industry. Needless to say, if you’re an up-and-coming band or simply want to get into the scene, this week is of paramount importance for that next step.”…
Read the full review here!