Music
Late '60s electronic freakers Intersystems get recharged
by Jesse Locke
November 27, 2015
Plus hear new music from Slim Twig, Old & Weird, and Gown.
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.
Intersystems – Intersystems
In the late 1960s, Toronto’s Intersystems emerged with three gloriously warped albums combining swirling electronics with musique concrète cut-ups and subtly spooked spoken word. Poet Blake Parker contributed the “chaste mouthings” of the latter with the switched-on soundscapes of John-Mills Cockell (who would later work with everyone from Syrinx to Bruce Cockburn to Anne Murray). The group’s trio of LPs (Number One, Peachy, and Free Psychedelic Poster Inside) have now been collected in a lavish 3LP boxset from Italian label Algha Margen, bundled with a 132-page book of essays, poems and images. An essential history lesson.
Slim Twig – “Live In, Live On Your Era”
Slim Twig and his sister Lulu flip on their Mozart wigs for a trip to Bowlarama. Neon lights, strikes, shotgunned PBRs, and the inevitable alley puke from a pair of Elizabethans aren’t exactly the images I thought of when I first heard this glam stomper from his latest LP Thank You For Stickin’ With Twig, but they sure are now. For bonus fun, check out a remixed version of the flute and wah wah slinker “Fog of Sex” featuring U.S. Girls on lead vox.
Old and Weird – “Kirkobain”
The ramshackle messthetics of Halifax’s Old and Weird get a great new video for this slice from their 7″ split with Toronto’s New Fries. Sleepy smiley faces, dance moves in slow-mo rewind, and some peachy beachy shots are the perfect visualization for a pop song that keeps on zigging and zagging. Kurt himself would probably be hecka impressed. Grip the juicebox from Pleasence.
Gown – Sound of Time
My introduction to the sky-darkening psychedelia of Andrew MacGregor (a.k.a. Gown) was The Old Line LP on Nova Scotia’s DIVORCE Records in 2009. Six years later, the one-man doom and gloomer returns with a new album on Toronto’s Arachnidiscs that should scorch you to a crisp. If you’re interested in MacGregor’s roots on Vancouver Island plus his previous collaboration with Thurston Moore as The Bark Haze, head on to the label’s blog for a reasonably rambly Q ‘n’ A.
