Festival

ARTS, Festival

Cheater Sheet For Block Heater: Picks to help you make your way through the Calgary Folk Music Festival’s 2023 winter wonderland

The Calgary Folk Music Festival presents their eighth annual Block Heater Festival, which, like its namesake, keeps your engine purring through the long, cold vagaries of late winter.

ARTS, Festival, Music

Just Backdated: Alejandro Escovedo looking forward to keeping the pace in his musical marathon

It’s daytime on New Year’s Eve, and songwriter/guitarist Alejandro Escovedo and his wife Nancy Rankin are at Milton Riemer’s Ranch Park in the hill country of Dripping Springs, outside of Austin, Texas, ready to go for a hike after Escovedo finishes his interview.

ARTS, Festival, Music

BIG Must-Sees: A sampler of some of the acts to catch at this year’s winter music and arts festival

After a series of pandemic-related false starts resulting in a cancelled 2021 festival, and a revised format, multi-weekend festival in April 2022, Calgary’s BIG Winter Classic is back in a big way for 2023, with a stacked roster and guaranteed stellar performances in the doldrum-defeating January music festival format we once knew and loved.

ARTS, Festival, Film

Bathroom Reading: Documentary of NYC’s indie-rock scene will send you back to the literary source

Meet Me In the Bathroom, the documentarized version of Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral archive of the late '90s/early aughts trajectory of New York rock ‘n’ roll revivalists like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem, though impressive for the sheer scale of its “you had to be there” found footage, might be better served as a visual companion to the book.

ARTS, Festival, Film

CUFF.Docs Turns 10: Festival of non-fiction films returns to in-cinema experience

Hibernation is a little more entertaining this year and sociable. After a couple of online-only and hybrid events, the 10th edition of the Calgary Underground Film Festival-curated documentary fest, CUFF.Docs, will return to an exclusively in-cinema experience Nov. 23 to 27 at the Globe.

ARTS, Festival, Film

Animation Domination: Quickdraw’s annual GIRAF event

Each year, the organizers behind GIRAF (Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival) search the world high and low for the most inventive, unique, beautiful, experimental and mind-altering animated films.

Festival, Music

The Devil and Mr. Daniel: Spoon dish up their most rock ‘n’ roll record to date with Lucifer on the Sofa

I turn my camera on, but Britt Daniel does not. The Spoon frontman’s publicist insisted upon a Zoom interview, so I’m momentarily thrown when I realize the next 24 minutes and 46 seconds will be spent interviewing someone embodied only by an ominous black box labelled ‘BRITT DANIEL,’ that faintly flashes every time his gravelly drawl breaks the silence like some sort of Texan HAL 9000.

ARTS, Festival, Music

Sled Island 2022: Getting to know Cardiograms

Another excellent Calgary band will take the stage tonight as part of Sled Island. The fantastic pop quartet released their debut last year, Sweet Despair.