It’s true!  Jenny Mitchell of Label Fantastic! has been assisting in the booking of her tours for years, and has now taken the reigns to do it officially and efficiently.  Her first official booked-entirely-by-her tour this past November for Bird City and Shopkeeper was a huge success – fifteen shows in fifteen days, from highly respected bars, to alternative art spaces, to the basements of teenagers in the suburbs.  They had somewhere to stay every night, they made all of their money back and then some (including close to $1200 in flight costs) with tons of homemade meals along the way.  For two bands that have NEVER toured before it was an incredible feat.  The next hurdle is music festivals!  We are soooooo excited to represent so much amazing talent, it will be fun to see how many festivals think they’re as great as we do.  We’ll see!!!

Bird City (of Jenny Omnichord, Barmitzvah Brothers) is venturing out of her hidden musical home life to hit the road to the east with Guelph’s best all-star-under-the-radar heartbreaking band Shopkeeper. Shopkeeper is fronted by songwriter Scott Haynes and surrounded by Steph Yates (of Esther Grey) and Alanna Gurr (of Alanna Gurr and the Greatest State) They will have a brand new record for the road and they are honestly one of the most amazing bands you almost definitely haven’t seen yet. Bird City has pulled together a 16 song 14 year retrospective collection of bedroom recordings, new unreleased material, and tracks of Bird City-like moments from previous projects. They’ll have these albums for sale, and probably other magical merch. There are about eighteen shows in 16 days, stretching from Southern Ontario to Newfoundland and back again. Some of these folks have never played some of these cities so we reallllly hope you can make it out. Here are the shows so far (all are Bird City and Shopkeeper unless otherwise stated. Other bands mentioned are additional to Shopkeeper and Bird City):

Saturday November 8th: The Tranzac, Toronto Ontario w/ Jose Contreras!!!

Sunday November 9th: Wasted Space, Oshawa (Next Winter Festival)

Monday November 10th: Grumpy’s, Montreal – Chick pickin’ Mondays (Note: This show is Bird City, Alanna Gurr and Steph Yates but NOT Shopkeeper)

Tuesday November 11th: House show, Rothesay NB

Wednesday November 12th: Jazz Guys, Sackville, NB w/ Julie Doiron!!!

Thursday November 13th: Gus’ Pub, Halifax NS, w/ Cactus Flower and Nap Eyes!!!

Friday November 14th:  Prescott St. House show – Shopkeeper, Jenny Omnichord and Max

Saturday November 15th: Early evening show at Fixed St. John’s, NL – solo performances by Scott Haynes, Jenny Mitchell, Steph Yates and Alanna Gurr

Sunday November 16th: The Ship, St. John’s, NL w/ Alanna Gurr backed by Green and Gold!!! w/ Bird City, Rube and Rake and Lady Brett Ashley

Monday November 17th: The Rose and Thistle St. John’s, NL w/ “Imposter Grey” – a special St. John’s version of Esther Grey!!! Ilia Nicoll and Shopkeeper!!

Tuesday November 18th: The Levee, St. John’s NL, w/ Bird City, Shopkeeper and Green and Gold!!!

Thursday November 20th: The Capitol, Fredericton, NB w/ CFL Sessions (Henry Svec)

Friday November 21st: Le Cagibi, Montreal, QC w/ Swag Train (Renee Deschenes)

Saturday November 22nd: Raw Sugar, Ottawa ON, w/ Richard Laviolette!!

Sunday November 23rd (MATINEE): The Garnet, Peterborough ON w/ Nick Ferrio

Sunday November 23rd (evening): The Cornerstone, Guelph ON

To keep updated as to any amendments or additions you can follow the event on face book at https://www.facebook.com/events/767925283269265/?ref=br_tf

Shopkeeper

Shopkeeper is a band of song singers assembled in the Ontario music hub of Guelph, Ontario. Scott Haynes (Bill Killionaire, Dutch Toko) formed the group in the fall of 2013 to showcase sets of minimal folk rock songs he had composed the previous summer. Steph Yates (Esther Grey, ex-Hinidar) was recruited to play the drums, and Alanna Gurr (Alanna Gurr & The Greatest State) was added on bass.

Bringing compelling vocals and emotive instrumentation to Haynes’ songs, these three musicians have built Shopkeeper into a powerful live act, drawing emotion and engagement from audiences in their short time as a band. Songs of love, loss, and longing are brought to light not with dreary seriousness to reinforce the gravity of the material, but with a triumphant spirit. Feelings of helplessness seemingly near breakdown give way to exuberance and epiphanies throughout.

Shopkeepers debut album will be released on Label Fantastic! and Little Room Labs on November 18th!

We are really REALLY excited for this one.  Label Fantastic! has been pretty lucky with the beautiful variety of artists we’ve managed to collect – recent releases have ranged from the computer-generated country-folk of Henry Svec’s project “Livingston”, to the perfect pop orchestration of Pink Moth to the lush and swooping Canadian landscape of Man Meets Bear.  But Label Fantastic!’s inaugural artist Jenny Omnichord has been getting kind of lonely over in the synths and keyboards department.  Until NOW.  May we present you with “Tyson” a one-man-keyboarding-pop sensation.  Known primarily for his exceptional powers with a gameboy, this album brings Tyson to a whole new level of keyboard domination and pop production.  It’s a treasure, he’s a treasure, and we are so pleased to get to team up with Little Room Labs for our second co-release together.  Do you guys know how coveted the music is that’s coming out of Little Room Labs?  Every little indie label in the area would LOVE to get to throw their names on the magic that comes out of that studio, and as soon as the music hits the streets the big labels will be chasing them too.   We definitely know how lucky we are.

TODAY, Tyson will release his debut album, casio fiasco, on hand-printed compact disc. the celebrations will begin with a pizza party. then our dear friends blimp rock, fresh back from their european tour, will dish out a fine set + powerpoint presentation. the newly assembled tyson trio, featuring steph yates on bass and dan paillé on the kit, will then cap off this early evening affair. this is going down at silence, 46 essex st, guelph. details here. join us, why dontcha.

CASIO FIASCO is LRL06, co-presented by us over here at label fantastic! be prepared to fall in love with this album’s multi-coloured strange-pop landscape. tyson has really pulled up his studio socks with this one, showing off his reverberating ankles and his keen sense of sonic adventure. you’ll sink with him to mean, dark places; you’ll dance with him through the neon fog of anxiety; you’ll float with him to soft, pink cloud castles.

to preview some tracks from the album (available online next week), check out tyson’s interview with chelsea of THE FLANNEL HOUR : TUES AUG 05 2014, 3 PM.

We are please to announce we have collected a new artist and friend, the delightful Soren Little Brothers, known for his musical work in various awesome projects (such as the Funz) in multiple provinces and countries including BC, Quebec, and Germany.  We’ve got him down here in Southern Ontario with us for the time being and we couldn’t be happier.

Waagaaskingaa is the 18^th and newest album by Man meets Bear, recorded in Kitchener, Ontario. Soren Little Brothers, the songwriter and only musician appearing on this album, is a professional ecologist studying the Great Lakes and their synergistic connections to the land and atmosphere. Waagaaskingaa explores some of the ecological concepts which come up in his research, as well as the mythology of Ontario, presenting a lattice of biology, spirituality, Ojibwe language, and other aspects of the Ontario landscape. The cover art is “Northern Painting 25/Northern Lake II” by Lawren S. Harris, a member of the Group of Seven. The distinctive Ontarian expression of theosophy inherent in much of Harris’ work provides a fitting counterpoint to the themes of Waagaaskingaa, and as such, the artist’s family gave permission for this image to be used as the album cover.

Spending the last ten years based out of cities such as Osaka, Montreal, Vancouver, and Berlin, Man meets Bear has collaborated with artists such as Dirty Beaches and Aidan Baker (of Nadja), among many others. Waagaaskingaa was mastered by Todd Macdonald (Norvaiza, The Winks), and its release will be celebrated by a brief tour of Ontario and Quebec.

Some acclaim for Man meets Bear’s previous album, Buffalo Comets:

“Islands of beauty descend upon our memory before flashing through the unattainable grasp of our senses.” – Weird Canada

“Beautifully crafted” – Gray Owl Point

“… these Buffalo Comets race across the sky like furry stars. Watch them burn, listen close, let them go.” – Luna Kafé

For more information, contact sorenbros@hotmail.com

manmeetsbear.bandcamp.com

www.facebook.com/ManMeetsBear

Upcoming Waagaaskingaa tour dates:

June 21st Guelph with Toby Goodshank (The Cornerstone)
22nd Toronto with Norvaiza, Slight Birching, and Birdsacrosswater (The Central)
23rd Blyth with Slight Birching and TBA (Queen’s Bakery)
24th Brantford with Slight Birching and Dark Bird (house show of Paul and Sarah)
25th Guelph with Slight Birching and M. Mucci (Red Brick Cafe)
26th Kitchener with Slight Birching and Catlantis (Cafe Pyrus)
27th Montreal with Slight Birching, Make Love, and TBA (house show of Merida)
28th Montreal with Slight Birching, Brenden Orange, and Le Fruit Vert (house show of Andrew Forsythe)
29th Montreal with Slight Birching (early-4PM in-store show, Phonopolis Records)

They’re also listed here on facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/1428156727437707/

So as the huge fan of Pink Moth that I am (and I am a HUGE fan) I am extremely excited to announce this release.  The album was written in Berlin and mixed by Label Fantastic!’s best friend Andy Magoffin (Great Lake Swimmers, Constantines, Jim Guthrie)  at the House of Miracles in Cambridge .

Pink Moth has 7 releases under their belt before this one, one full-length and an incredible six-EP series.  As far as I am concerned they have never written so much as one bad song, and by extension they have earned the title of “most consecutive repeats in my car”.  I’ve been anxiously awaiting this new release for a year now, and even as I am typing this I feel like it’s that moment that happens sometimes in the company of  your musical friends,the last moment you get to write about a band as though they’re your own personal secret gem before they explode to having the kind of success that if it weren’t for the date stamp on your web post, you wouldn’t actually be able to convince yourself they were ever unknowns.  If all goes well, if this record gets the exposure it deserves…well, I honestly don’t even think I can wrap my head around all the possible explosive outcomes of that.  I’m going to anxiously await that too.  Please track this record down, please watch the videos and circulate!  This shouldn’t be kept  secret.

Pink Moth has three album release shows over the next three days. Tonight (March 26th) they will be at the Piston in Toronto with label mate Jenny Omnichord and “The Island Years”.

Tomorrow (March 27th) they’ll be at the APK in London with Eric Howden and Taylor Holden.

Friday March 28th they perform in Oshawa at “Wasted Space” with The Island Years and Clara Engel.  Stay tuned for more dates soon!

Here are videos for two of the singles off this new record.

Video for “Lines” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGJJDzKCSyw

Video for “Eclipsed” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GEBG8v-pTI

It’s officially released!  Dr. Henry Adam Svec’s “LIVINGSTON: Artificially intelligent Folk Songs of Canada” is making the rounds to great reviews!   Wondering what exactly this project IS?  You can read the full-set of FAQs as well as download the album at http://folksingularity.com/   Here are two of the basic answers:

What is LIVINGSTON?

LIVINGSTON is an artificially intelligent, digital organism capable of accessing the totality of the history of Canadian folk music (among other corpuses) and generating new yet hyper-authentic Canadian folk objects via her/his algorithmic agents and compression formats. LIVINGSTON does not produce sound, only transcriptions of lyrics and harmonic progressions (with supplementary recording instructions) to be interpreted and performed by humans.

Where was LIVINGSTON made? Who made LIVINGSTON?

LIVINGSTON is the product of collaboration between the Canadian folklorist and song collector Dr. Henry Adam Svec and the Czech programmer and computer scientist Mirek Plíhal, who were artists-in-residence together during the spring of 2013 at the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. Although the two initially came to Dawson to work on their own individual projects (Svec on a collection of Klondike “attempted murder ballads,” Plíhal on an iPhone app about Newfoundland), it turned out they were both interested in questions of archivization and integrity. Thus, they pooled their talents and time in an effort to build something that might matter.

Here are a whole bunch of reviews.  This album is worth collecting!

http://grayowlpoint.com/2014/02/26/review-artificially-intelligent-folk-songs-of-canada-vol-1-livingston/

http://telescopemedia.com/2014/02/03/livingston-artificially-intelligent-folks-songs-of-canada-vol-1/

http://pittsburghmusicmagazine.com/2014/02/03/livingston-presents-artificially-intelligent-folks-songs-of-canada-vol-1/

http://www.saidthegramophone.cohttp://www.thegauntlet.ca/story/spun-livingston?qt-latest_and_most_popular=0

http://www.thegauntlet.ca/story/spun-livingston?qt-latest_and_most_popular=0

Pink Moth

On March 25th we will be releasing Pink Moth’s incredible new album “Eclipsed.  Stay tuned for more info and show dates.  In the meantime, check out the video for the title track here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GEBG8v-pTI

THE RELEASE: We here at Label Fantastic! are pleased to announce that our dear friend Dr. Henry Adam Svec has once again unleashed a piece of Canadian musical history, under the title: ” LIVINGSTON – Artificially intelligent Folk Songs of Canada Vol. 1″ .  While Henry’s last release  ”Folk songs of Canada now” saw him collecting renditions and reinterpretations of our Canadian songs of old, Henry is now MAKING history, playing a key role in the development a folk-music -creating-super-machine.    We’ve listed some more information about “LIVINGSTON”  at the bottom of this post.   You can download the album for free (or purchase with a donation) here: http://www.folksingularity.com/   Henry will be doing a series of presentations throughout February and March, and joining him on a number of the shows will be Jenny (Omnichord) Mitchell with her new tenor guitar/banjo project “Bird City”.  Jenny has been working on the songs of Bird City over the course of the last fifteen years, always pushing the project to the side.  But she has recently kicked it into gear – read a bit more about her project here

Here are the LIVINGSTON show dates (# marks the shows joined by Bird City):

THE KARAOKE- Jenny and her karaoke loving friends the “Golden Throats” have started a bi-weekly karaoke night at the ANAF in Guelph Ontario.  But it is not simply your basic selection of classic mainstream super hits – The Golden Throats are collecting and programming a catalogue of “Indie Rock karaoke”.  The catalogue is already pushing 100 songs, and is growing with each event.  The current collection includes such artists as Jim Guthrie, Wax Mannequin, Shotgun Jimmie, Constantines, the Burning Hell, and Great Lake Swimmers.  Interested in having your songs turned into karaoke?  Well I bet WE’RE interested in that too.  For more info, event dates and to get in touch,  check out their facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/goldenthroats

MUSIC VIDEOS: Blimp Rock, Jenny Omnichord and Esther Grey have posted some pretty incredible music videos over the past little while.  So here are some links!

Blimp Rock: “The Love that Treats you Right”  http://vimeo.com/81965145

Jenny Omnichord: “…and in the Cold”  https://www.youtube.com/watc

h?v=1pdY2lb3K1A

Esther Grey: “The Body of a Healer”   https://vimeo.com/49453381

Don’t forget to like all these folks on their respective facebook pages!  It’s the best way to stay up to date, and plus it helps them with things like grant applications.  Handy things, those’likes’

Now: More about LIVINGSTON:

Featuring work produced by the sentient database LIVINGSTON, Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada, Vol. 1 is the culmination of years of research in both Canadian folklore and computer science. What if we had a digital machine that could access the entirety of Canadian folk music and generate new yet hyper-authentic compositions from the source data? Thanks to this exciting collaboration between Canadian song collector Dr.Henry Adam Svec (The CFL Sessions, Folk Songs of Canada Now) and Czech programmer Mirek Plíhal (Všechny Milí Lidé), there is no longer any need to wonder.

An intelligent archive is already an achievement. Yet, LIVINGSTON only producestranscriptions of words and melodies, and so our engineers also needed to put together a band. Fronted by Svec himself and featuring Misha Bower (Bruce Peninsula), Marshall Bureau (Octoberman, The Pinecones), J.J. Ipsen (Hayden, Jim Guthrie), Andrew Penner (Sunparlour Players), and more, these human musicians have breathed life into LIVINGSON’s brilliantly cold calculations; from rough hollers and stomps to smooth-country croons, from the sparse sounds of the field to the sparkle of Andy Magoffin’s House of Miracles Studio, Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada, Vol. 1 documents the limits and possibilities of Canadian folksong—a record as wide and as varied as our land and/or the internet.

Download the music for free or for money via www.folksingularity.com, where you can also access tour dates and the FAQ, and stay tuned for Vol. 2 (sung by Olenka Krakus) and Vol. 3 (sung by Mathias Kom).

Facebook links:

https://www.facebook.com/JennyOmnichord

https://www.facebook.com/wax.mannequin?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/theburninghell

https://www.facebook.com/BlimpRock

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Esther-Grey/262714637143789

https://www.facebook.com/jennybirdcity

https://www.facebook.com/theskeletonesfour

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Richard-Laviolette/155130974503469

https://www.facebook.com/goldenthroats