Music

Calgary artists create an expressionistic tribute to Women's Chris Reimer

by Jesse Locke

No Rest for the Obsessed is a column spotlighting some of the most exciting new music AUX’s Associate Editor Jesse Locke finds each week. It began in 2010 for Calgary’s dearly departed alt-weekly FFWD, and takes its name from a Lightning Bolt song.

Dude, That’s Insane

Calgary’s late Chris Reimer left an indelible musical mark as a member of bands like Women, The Dodos, Azeda Booth, and Gold. He was also an accomplished experimental artist, with his more outré recordings collected on a solo cassette with proceeds directed to a scholarship fund. Last year, the Quickdraw Animation Society linked up with 17 visual artists and musicians (including Chad VanGaalen, Laura Leif, Ben Jacques, Heather Kai Smith, and Neal Moignard) to create an expressionistic animated love letter. Its soundtrack is compiled from Reimer’s unreleased solo work, seamlessly stitched together by Morgan Greenwood of Azeda Booth and Baths. Simultaneously sombre, surreal and silly, it shifts like the mind of a limitless imagination.

No Negative – “Eternal Crypt”

So far the only hard evidence of Montreal’s electro-damaged scuzz punks No Negative has come in the form of hyper-limited cassettes from Swollen City. Thanks to the always reliable Psychic Handshake, their upcoming pessimistic split release The Good Never Comes will be an LP that you can probably actually find. Cover art from drummer Felix Morel pushes this one into must-grab territory. RIYL: Human Eye, Chrome, frayed nerves, flipped wigs.

Ian William Craig – “Habit Worn and Wandering”

Vancouver’s Ian William Craig issued one of the most singular releases of 2014 with his hauntingly beautiful A Turn of Breath. The last word of that title is the operative one, with Craig’s operatic vocals floating and flickering through blown-out soundscapes in various forms of decay. This song from Cradle for the Wanting, his second LP for Recital Program, may be summed up best by a blurb from the label: “Ian crafts an aural home in this album; one can glide through its halls for days without blinking back to the modern age.”

Savant – Artificial Dance

Winnipeg’s Kerry Leimer is another singular and highly overlooked talent straddling the worlds of experimental electronics and art-disco angulations. Following a collection of his 1975-1983 solo recordings, RVNG Intl. have continued their reissue series with Leimer’s group project Savant under the fitting title Artificial Dance. More post-production than post-punk, these sessions saw him stitching together jam sessions into ghostly sound collages that sometimes eerily resemble David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.