Heartland ...

Heartland Soundtrack (Season 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1)

from the album "Big Eye Little Eye" (2005)

Dynamo

Dreamer

“stratospheric audio adventures... producer Philip Strong takes her versatile voice and wide-ranging musical curiosity and hits the frappe button” 
- Stephen Cooke, The Chronicle Herald 

“this spiritual stepchild of Eno and Laurie Anderson has crafted yet another haunting and haunted disc... Laurel MacDonald’s name on this album is synonymous with a complete aural vision” 
- Bob Klanac, Scene 

“you won’t find a vast philosophical difference between MacDonald’s Song for This Child and Brian Wilson’s Our Prayer from Smile in terms of harmonic complexity, melodic twists, and spiritual depth... Luscinia’s Lullaby weaves its world music influences and MacDonald’s voice into a kind of waking dream.” 
- Bob Tarte, The Beat

Luscinia’s Lullaby is the third full-length CD by acclaimed Canadian singer and composer Laurel MacDonald. 

MacDonald has built her recording career on a production style characterized by the use of multiple layers of her voice, with eclectic instrumentation and soundscapes concocted by producer and sound designer Philip Strong. They revel in playing along musical peripheries, and juxtapose disparate elements with ingenuity and beguiling sleight of hand. 

MacDonald’s vocals dovetail and spiral in bewitchingly complex layers. By turns she sings with simmering intensity and wistful fragility: here, a spine-tingling invocation; there, a sleepless lullaby. From boyish soprano to husky alto; from yodels to whispers to wails. 

A record to defy the tyranny of musical genre-fication, Luscinia’s eludes description as if the act of elusion were itself a game. A torch song rife with playful innuendo is accompanied by slithering slide guitar and liquid violins. A trippy, groove-driven polyphonic chant generates a new wave of mediaeval funkadelia. A gaggle of Venusian doo-wop girls warble and croon their way through a jubilant rhapsody. An aching lament is borne forth on shimmering triangle, vacuum hose spinning through a cloud of delay, and tube drum with undertones verging on the subsonic, conjured to resonate through your body and into your bones. 

With Luscinia’s Lullaby Laurel MacDonald and Philip Strong hurl their sonic mirror ball into the stratosphere to create a pulsing, buzzing, soaring vocal fantasia. Perk up your earthling ears.

Envelope Of Many

JUSTIN NOZUKA-DOWN IN A COLD DIRTY WELL

Justin Nozuka- Golden Train

After the release of their third critically acclaimed album Coat of Arms, The Golden Dogs were at the tail end of an exhaustive touring schedule and facing the departure of their long-standing drummer. They were ready to give up.

“Not long after the last show, we sold the van and started contemplating our musical existence. Classic story,” says Dave Azzolini (vocals, guitar).

Along with his wife and fellow Golden Dogs leader, Jessica Grassia (vocals, drums), the prolific duo who maintained the core of the group’s striking brand of high-energy, smart power pop suddenly found themselves in a sort of musical limbo.

In 2012, the couple moved into an apartment on top of their Toronto-based studio, Ill Eagle, and slowly began to work away at new material – experimenting, demoing, and even tossing around new bands names. Trusting in the magnetic and infectious chemistry they share, both on stage and off, Azzolini and Grassia spent years working towards something new. That process also saw Grassia move away from the keys to the kit and the eventual addition of two new members: Stefanie McCarrol (keys, guitar) and Alejandro Cairncross (bass).

The lineup change injected new life into the Golden Dogs.

“Music became fun again and we were proud to be back on the scene playing songs with the same fierce love that we had done for years before,” says Azzolini.

In the whirlwind of this renewed enthusiasm the band is set to release their new album 3 ½ - an unrelentingly catchy, raw and radically diverse set of tracks. Largely mixed at Sloan’s studio by Zeus’ Carlin Nicholson, and featuring a track recorded live off the floor with Joao Carvalho at Revolution Recording (“Decided”), the album is super-charged and invigorating, new, yet refreshingly familiar. Arguably at their most mature and inventive, the Golden Dogs continue to deliver their token high-energy sweaty fist-pumps, hypnotic kick drums and guttural yells – the kind of triumphant power pop that has helped the band cement their cult-like status within the ranks of the Canadian music scene.