7" Survey: New Chance

7" Survey: New Chance

As one of the owners leading Toronto’s Healing Power Records, Victoria Cheong has been responsible for releasing some of the most charmed and magnetic sounds the city has yielded since 2008. Creating music as New Chance, Cheong personally contributed to HPR’s orbit of compelling meditative atmospheres with the release of Ear Rationelle in March, and hasn’t stopped since, producing further work in collaboration with Dancemakers and Public Recordings before the year ended. In advance of New Chance’s inclusion on our December split with Nailbiter, we had Cheong fill out our seven-inch survey to help us catch up.

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BUGGING OUT

BUGGING OUT

Since 2006, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley’s performance art partnership Life of a Craphead has been responsible for – among other things – renting out videos they rented from Queen Video, filling the Yonge-Dundas intersection with actors pretending to sell things, and proposing a “stress ramp” that directs anxious Torontonians into Lake Ontario. Their newest work, Bugs, is their feature-length film debut: a satire that reimagines Toronto as a bug garden run by an unaccountable family. It screens at the AGO Dec. 11, and beyond that, Life of a Craphead is looking for experimental art film festivals to submit it to.

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7" Survey: Nailbiter

7" Survey: Nailbiter

Josh Korody’s had a busy year. When he wasn’t producing and recording releases by artists like Dilly Dally and Fresh Snow at Candle Recording, gigging in support of WISH’s 2014 self-titled debut, or subbing in on drums with Vallens and Moon King, he and Jesse Crowe unveiled the sophomore follow-up to their 2013 debut as Beliefs in November, and he still found time to pump out Format, his first electronic record working under the solo moniker Nailbiter on Hand Drawn Dracula. Grab a copy of our December seven-inch this Saturday (Dec. 12) for an as-of-yet unreleased Nailbiter track and another from New Chance, and check out our seven-inch survey with Nailbiter himself to get caught up to speed.

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Five years of Pleasence

Five years of Pleasence

For the past five years, Pleasence Records has been supporting some of the weirdest, loudest and most wonderful bands Toronto has to offer. From New Fries and Slim Twig to CROSSS and Blonde Elvis, Pleasence has been an essential part of the explosive local music scene we are currently emerged in. Now as the label enjoys its fifth anniversary, they are not only celebrating a determination that has kept their fires burning, but also a milestone 50 releases bridging cassette, EP and LP formats. 

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7” Survey: Elsa

7” Survey: Elsa

Even though they’re set to release their Never Come Down 12-inch March 31 via One Big Silence, Elsa didn’t mind reaching into the archives to commit “In Waves” – a song from the same sessions as their 2013 I Do EP – to wax on the March instalment (LW-005) of Long Winter’s split 7-inch series, available free to the first 250 guests through the doors at the Great Hall on March 13. In this questionnaire, singer/guitarist Jonathan Rogers explains the origins of the song and tells us about a near-fatal winter experience.

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7” Survey: Dreamsploitation

7” Survey: Dreamsploitation

Together with vocalist Alice Hansen, Charles Blazevic makes ruminative, nocturnal pop music in You’ll Never Get To Heaven. But on March 13, Blazevic brings his solo instrumental project Dreamsploitation to the final Long Winter of the season. In this questionnaire, Blazevic explains how “Accent Blue“ – available on our March split 7-inch with Elsa, free to the first 250 guests through the doors at the Great Hall – was inspired by solo piano music.

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Chopping Blocks

Chopping Blocks

Over the past 12 years, Blocks Recording Club facilitated an environment of local labour and love. Started in 2003 as a cassettes and mini-CDs-only label operating out of the Tranzac Club, its central goal was simultaneously modest and idealistic: to forge a co-operative economy of nurture and engagement that united around local talent. What resulted was a network of artists that banded skills and resources together to collaboratively produce, physically assemble, and distribute more than 70 recordings. But as years have passed and members have become involved with other projects, the club has slowly dissolved from the hub of enthusiasm it long constituted.

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