Spring Favorites – Evie Ladin, Arborea, Harry Manx and Kevin Breit

New Spring Favourites

By Douglas Heselgrave

“Music is better” – Frank Zappa

Music is the most versatile and portable of all the art forms.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately as I’ve been working my way through listening to a boxful of new CDs while renovating my basement.  Literature – unless you’re listening to someone else read – requires a person to stop, sit down and interact with the printed word in an active way.  Otherwise, you lose the plot – in more ways than one.  And, there’s nothing passive about visual art.  It’s a commitment to occupying the same physical space as the artwork and interacting with it in a way that is both tactile and intellectual.  It can’t be done on the fly, or meaningfully experienced through flickering images on an iphone.  But, music – thankfully – because of its ephemeral, non-corporeal qualities, doesn’t require anything more than ears to hear.  Sure, there is the physical, real time experience of attending a concert and feeding off both the musicians and the other people in the audience, but the sheer variety of music I’ve been hearing in the last week – sometimes actively deconstructed and intellectually assessed and other times casually taken in at a near subliminal level – has reminded me that music is the most effortlessly pervasive form of entertainment available to us.  Here are some of my favourites from a week of listening that has been both intense and passive.