VLVBVMV consists of McGill students Stokely Diamantis on bass and electronics, Kate Markle on vocals, and Max Williams on the guitar. Their bare-bones beats paired with lofty vocals create an interesting balance — one with a purposeful outcome. “One thing that I think people need is music you can dance to, but also listen to and have great conversations with, and I think that that’s something we strive for,” said Markle. “We want people to have fun but also to be able to talk and enjoy it more peacefully.” Their music combines relaxing guitar riffs with more upbeat drums. Their instrumental “Mortal Wombat” takes this combination and uses bubbling samples to merge the two opposing sides together. In their non-instrumental pieces, Markle’s voice complements the guitar riffs, and creates more contrast with the drums – as in songs like “Just Passing Through.” As for specific influences, the group mentions Radiohead as having a huge impact on their music. As Williams explained, “Radiohead is, like, the trunk of the tree.”

“One thing that I think people need is music you can dance to, but also listen to and have great conversations with, and I think that that’s something we strive for.” -Kate Markle, singer for VLVBVMV

The group formed in November 2012 and have brought their different musical backgrounds to the table. Williams is trained in jazz, and was originally enrolled in the Performance Jazz program at McGill. Markle has classical, jazz, and opera vocal training, while Diamantis is doing a Musical Science and Technology minor. The group identifies itself as pop, but is constantly trying to push the limits of the genre. “It’s really cool to try and be as eclectic as possible with stuff like that,” said Markle. “I think it adds a lot to our appeal, even if it’s just around our friends.”

Diamantis came up with the name VLVBVMV during the first stages of their project. “I had named the rough demo tapes we had of this project, or the beats that I made I just sort of… oh sure I’ll type that in. I didn’t really anticipate that it would become our actual project name […] it seemed cool at the time,” joked Diamantis. Despite their somewhat impromptu origins, the music Diamantis, Markle, and Williams create is substantially more calculated. As the lyricist for the group, Markle draws inspiration from her Philosophy major to evoke themes of nature, imagery, natural philosophy, and the inner psyche. These ideas come through both in the lyrics themselves as well as in the band’s sound. “A lot of the lyrics are exploring emotions,” Markle explained. “Some of them [are in response to] heartbreak, some of them more psychedelic experiences, and some of them dealing with mental health issues as well.” She also admitted that, among the indirect inspirations, she’s also taken all of the lyrics from one song from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Even though they all seem to have separate roles in the band, Diamantis, Markle, and Williams identify themselves as a collaborative project. While Diamantis usually works on the underlying beat, and Markle tackles the lyrics, the melody is a group effort, and one can see a visible group dynamic. “I’ll ask them, what did you have in mind for this song? And like, what inspired it? And I’ll try and work off that,” said Markle.

“It’s really cool to try and be as eclectic as possible with [pushing the limits of the genre]. I think it adds a lot to our appeal, even if it’s just around our friends.” -Markle

On January 23, VLVBVMV played a show at La Sala Rossa with other bands from McGill. The group had mixed opinions on how successful the evening was. Diamantis seemed to be the only one pleased with how the show went, while Markle and Williams seemed unsure about the quality of their performance. “We had a ton of energy, people were dancing,” Williams clarified. “I’ll take that over playing really cleanly to a room that’s asleep any day.” The show was definitely a surprise in light of the band’s songs, which are for now only available online. VLVBVMV seemed to deliver their own pieces live with more energy and fullness than their recorded versions, something that can prove to be difficult for many bands. Markle’s voice sounded more confident live, although the group did not look particularly at home on the stage. On top of playing their older songs, they performed three new ones, and covered both The xx and Rhye. “We don’t play totally new stuff very often, but when we do it always puts [our music] into context,” reflected Williams. “It’s like we’re covering our old songs – and that’s a good place to be.” Their covers were impressive, and were appropriate picks for the group’s instrumentation.

VLVBVMV has recently found themselves breaking out of the ‘English university’ music scene and into the wider Montreal scene. Until now, they had been performing with bands from McGill and Concordia. The Montreal music scene is notoriously international, so despite Markle being the only band member from Canada, they fit in easily. They recently played a show with the Montreal band Noyro, and were fortunate to play at last fall’s POP Montreal festival, which they described as being a fun experience (despite not being able to remember most of the week).

As far as their future is concerned, the group has big plans. They are currently working on two EPs, one of which should be released before the spring.

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This strange performance marked the launch of Time Forms, a four-day conference exploring the relationship between the experience of aesthetics and the fluctuation of time. The workshops focused on art as a manipulator of temporality and challenged the concept that time can be cut into convenient and discrete units. The works strove to break free of the mechanical “clock time” by which modern humanity abides, while investigating how art can make “time felt.” Clocks are seen as the fundament of time. They are made up of hours, minutes, and seconds, and consequently, are measurable constants in the world. What then accounts for those moments with friends when time seems to flow by effortlessly, or those days in class when the hand on the clock seems hardly to move at all? Time Forms aims to delve into this notion of fluctuating time, and explore its connection with the aesthetic experience.

Despite the slightly esoteric nature of its premise, the curators of Time Forms – McGill professors Alanna Thain, Stephen McAdams, and Eric Lewis – made accessibility a goal when organizing the conference. “We want not only everyone to be able to get in, but to feel like they belong here, too,” said Thain. The structure was also important. Time Forms was designed to counter the typical conference-style layout, in order to stress the inconsistent nature of time. The pace of activity was in constant flux: for one hour, a participator could be sitting down listening to a talk on multitemporalities, and the next, chasing a dancer down Prince Arthur.

Putting together Time Forms was no easy task: it required the hard work and time of many people who were interested in the concept, and that turned out to be a surprising number. Lewis estimates that a few dozen parties from McGill were involved. “We’re all interested in breaking out of the traditional academic silos,” he says. Thain continues, “We were also lucky to have good community partners.” These partners ranged from the PHI Centre, where the events on September 21 were held, to the Performing Arts Fund of the Netherlands, which funded the Vloeistof dance group’s visit to Montreal and hosted the dance experience titled, “Am I Here Now?”

One workshop, called “Maintenant” (“now” in French), was led by McGill music professor Eleanor Stubley and sculptor Joël A. Prévost. “Eleanor [Stubley] spends a lot of time theorizing about touch,” said Lewis. “If you want to do more than just theorize about it, engage with a sculptor.” In June, Stubley began collaborating with Prévost, a self-taught sculptor from Montreal. The two got together over a three day period during which Prévost would sculpt Stubley’s hands as she conducted her original compositions. The fundamental shape of the sculpture was based on the position of Stubley’s hands at the start of the piece, with details added as the sculpting process continued. During “Maintenant,” videos played behind them on a screen, artistically arranged to stress different aspects of the collaboration: capturing movement and emotion with sculpture, a conductor bringing life to notes, the materiality of togetherness, and metaphysical versus clock time, just to name a few.

These sort of deep philosophical ponderings were not rare in Time Forms. There was a performance of the legendary trombonist, scholar, and pioneer of electronic music George Lewis’ piece “Mnemosis.” As explained by Lewis in the discussion that followed, “Mnemosis” was based on two philosophical concepts: Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of timelessness. Nietzsche postulated the idea that the universe is a recurring entity that will continue to recur in a similar manner an infinite number of times, while Wittgenstein said that whoever lives in the present lives for eternity. As a result, “Mnemosis” itself has repeating portions, and is laid out in a way in which the listener can cognitively enter and exit the piece at will. It was terrifying by most standards. The pianist dragged a jar against the inside of her piano, and at some points it was as though the wind instruments were just being blown on rather than actually played.

During an event called “Lunch Beat” in the basement of the New Music Building, food was given out on one side of the room while the rest was transformed into a giant dance floor. The lights were low, the trance music was loud, and several art installations lay around the room. On one screen, glitchy films flashed, while another screen showcased phrases like, “make this moment last” and, “now………won.” As Thain described, “What do you normally do at lunch? […] There’s something about daytime dancing that’s a different way of feeding yourself and feeding your body and feeding your soul. […] There’s something about taking an art break in the middle of the day, and particularly a body-based art break. [It] gives you just a different experience.”

The Vloeistof dance tour “Am I Here Now?” played on imagination in daily life. Small groups followed a dancer around Montreal while listening to an mp3 recording of the dancers’ ‘thoughts.’ She made remarks on pedestrians’ weight, the state of the neighbourhood, and sometimes referred to the group itself. The dancing was unconventional: it involved raw movements that seemed out of place in the middle of busy Montreal. The dancer ran, zig-zagged, and threw herself into bushes. At some points she would stop, and repeat abstract movements so that the group would have to stop and watch her (along with some people who just happened to be passing by). It was not a performance that had been rehearsed and presented countless times before, but rather a new and unique work every time, one that was co-created by the audience.

All in all, the organizers were pleased with the outcome of the event. “It was a huge and complicated undertaking; it required a lot of elaborate technical support because of our strong emphasis on performance and media, the coordination of a lot of people who had never worked together before, and a group of participants, both presenters and audiences, who were willing to take risks with novel forms of engaging with research [and] creation,” said Thain. She also expressed hope that another Time Forms conference would happen in the future, albeit not any time soon. In the meantime, the organizers are involved with the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas and plan to run several workshops through it. Thain explains, “We’re still working [the workshops] out, but one may involve a visit to the beehives at Macdonald campus with a mobile cinema, others may involve looking at how ‘slow food’ movements intersect with contemporary political practices and critiques of labour under neo-liberalism.”

While it may be difficult for some to do serious philosophical reasoning with such quirky distractions, the participators in Time Forms seemed to do just fine. No one batted an eyelash when musicians plucked at their instruments during presentations, and everyone was still paying attention on the dance tour when passers-by took pictures and giggled at the dancer. It didn’t seem like eccentricity was a goal of the conference, but rather a symptom of gathering so many like-minded artists and thinkers. The Time Forms conference effectively brought together people of different backgrounds and different ages, and allowed them to connect based on a shared desire to think about time, think about art, and be a little bit obscure.

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Jagjaguwar / Paper Bag

With their recently released debut album Perpetual Surrender, Toronto-based band DIANA comes precariously close to being just another synth-pop group.  They manage to save themselves by making it evident that not only do they also want to make people sway and bob their heads (and maybe even dance), they want to make people think.  While parts of the album drag on unnecessarily and sound awfully close to H&M background music, the majority of it demonstrates both the group’s collective talent and broad abilities.

The first track, “Foreign Installation,” starts the album off strongly with a serious question accompanied by hazy synth backing, but goes on too long. As the album progresses, DIANA flirts with a few more upbeat dance tempos, while vocalist Carmen Elle continues to sing about chasing lies and wasting love. The title track best illustrates the band’s talents, with Elle’s voice carrying smoothly over the clean, if slightly over-produced, drum and synth rhythm; the saxophone solo also offers a refreshing change of pace.

The album flows well from song to song, even if some tracks are almost worth skipping or sound too similar to the ones they follow. “Born Again” climaxes into an almost Marina and the Diamonds-like chorus, which DIANA manages to pull off in a way that isn’t too sugary-sweet but instead asks to be sung along or danced to.  The second-to-last song on the album, “New House,” is the most mature, and shows that DIANA shouldn’t be given up on yet. “New House,” would probably have been a better finish to the album than “Curtains.” While Perpetual Surrender may not introduce DIANA into the world as anything fantastically new, it does offer a positive glimpse into what could come from them in the future.

-Lillian King

Caro Emerald – The Shocking Miss Emerald

Grandmono Records and Dramatico

With her breakthrough single “Back it Up” and debut album Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor, Caro Emerald brought listeners a sound that seamlessly merged jazz, pop, and tango. Her second album, The Shocking Miss Emerald, doesn’t deviate from this style, even slightly.

Emerald’s sweet yet husky voice, following a varied, upbeat tempo, combines with masterful backing from her saxophonist to give the album a retro feel that is tinged with nostalgia for a time of Chevy Camaros, martinis, and men who wore hats to work, never ceasing to be light and fun. This is music to relax to, music to dance to, even music to laugh to. There is real humour in her lyrics – “If playing with your string happens to be your thing,” she sings coyly to one gentleman during the hit song “Tangled Up.” Meanwhile, tracks like “Coming Back as A Man” maintain mildly feminist overtones. Here, Emerald describes how she plans to take on a more masculine identity, both by literally cross-dressing and then by reversing the typical romantic roles so that it is she who chooses and ensnares the man for a night of pleasure that he won’t forget. Moments like this bring an intellectual edge to these sweet-sounding tunes.

However, while the music is sexy and slinky, it never strips and scandalizes. Emerald has repeated the formula of her first album without variation. No artist wants to risk a sophomore slump, but by reproducing an already old-fashioned sound, this singer has begun to stagnate. The record has a lot to recommend it. Old fans looking for more of the same won’t be disappointed. Fans of Lana del Rey, Duffy, and Amy Winehouse looking to branch away from mainstream pop are sure to find a new heroine in Emerald. Ultimately though, there is nothing new here. The Shocking Miss Emerald? Not so much. The Consistently Enjoyable but Slightly Tired Miss Emerald seems more apt. Sadly, this doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

-Rachel Eban

Arctic Monkeys – AM

Domino

Our lovely neighbours from across the pond have been providing us with quality alternative music for decades: The Kinks, Radiohead, Bloc Party, and the Libertines, to name a few. Another British export, Arctic Monkeys, recently released their fifth studio album AM.

The album is undoubtedly their most sensual, as frontman Alex Turner croons cleanly and crisply, laying out lyrics like “If you like your coffee hot, let me be your coffee pot” and “There’s a tune I found that makes me think of you somehow, and I play it on repeat,” words that may cause Turner’s fangirls to spontaneously combust when sung over a heavy bassline.

The album begins with the single “Do I Wanna Know?,” a glammy beat-driven alt-rock anthem. Other songs, like “No. 1 Party Anthem” and “I Wanna Be Yours,” have a nostalgic air to them, the kind of sad Elton John song your parents play in the car. Beware: many songs, like “Knee Socks,” score high on the ‘cheesiness scale,’ but are eloquently disguised by Turner’s, as some would call it, ‘cool factor.’

While listening to AM, the growth of the band’s sound is incredibly evident. Gone are the days of the grungy, underground Arctic Monkeys. Their new sound is clean and tight. The boys have traded their long messy hair for coiffed 1960s hairdos, and their jeans have been replaced by fitted suits. AM has a more sterile sound, not necessarily an improvement on their earlier efforts. It’s not impressive, but it’s enjoyable. AM may not be the next OK Computer (Radiohead acclaimed album), but it is good, nonetheless.

-Sonya Peres

Hobo Cubes – Rapid Glow

Jeunesse Cosmique

Hobo Cubes (a.k.a. Montrealer Francesco De Gallo) walks you through the intricacies of the mind in his new tape Rapid Glow. Francesco De Gallo is a serious beast of experimental electronic music. Not only is he the mastermind behind the Hobo Cult cassette label, but he also has an impressive list of bands and collaborations under his belt.

This album is a trip from the beginning. The first track, “Phase Attraction,” transports the listener with arpeggiation that could be straight from an 1980s arcade game. The track to follow, “Subliminality Chamber,” has alien-sounding loops that endlessly rotate, punctuated by twinkling notes; the perfect entrance to such foreign territory. Hobo Cubes forms perfect relationships within Rapid Glow. The track “Infinity Pillow” is the perfect complement to its subsequent track “Therapy Vision.” The former lulls the listener into a comfortable state, mimicking slumber by washing over them with throbbing tones and constant reassuring hums. Towards the end of the track, crisper notes interrupt the sleep, which harmonize well with the alarm-clock-like penetration of “Therapy Vision.”

Rapid Glow is not music to be shared with others. Its dreamy dissolving synths complemented with glitchy ebbing tones seem too personal to share. They are entirely individual. The flowing layers seem to emanate from the listener themselves, while those that pop along the surface feel like curious beeping robots. This album’s minimalistic approach and clean modular tones are tranquil but colourful, never allowing room for boredom. It separates the body from the burden of its surroundings, and plunges it into a relaxing sensory experience.

-Lucy Gripper

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