We’ll be unveiling a track each week leading up to the release date on June 19^th. When a song is introduced it will be available to download for free until the next song is posted. On the fourth track ‘Laughing Yearning’ now! 

Go on and get it! http://therest.bandcamp.com/

SOUND SANCTUARY

In order to celebrate the imminent release of SEESAW, this month’s featured bit of architecture is Catherine North, the studio where we recorded the album. This building started its life as a church, and went through a few different owners and careers before becoming the studio it is today.

A few days ago I started writing a long article describing the spatial massing and overall character of the studio, but I ended up discarding that rambling piece in favour of a series of photographs and videos which I hope will paint a fuller and more succinct portrait of Catherine North. For those of you who have acquired (or are planning on acquiring) a copy of SEESAW, it might interest you to know that the final song on the album, Slumber, was recorded using only one omnidirectional microphone in order to showcase the warm, reverberant nature of the studio.

Martin Tielli http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w574A74mjV4

City and Colour http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPjf5fGwQg0

…and some of us http://www.southernsouls.ca/the-rest-part-1/

XOAJ

Outhousery

Last month I drew attention to an architect’s non-architectural design work. As a sort of companion piece, this month I would like to showcase a building designed and built without any architects in sight. Although there are many beautifully thought out buildings out there which have been conceived by masters of their craft, some of my favourite structures are those which are built in a fairly unconsidered manner by amateur builders.

Rural outhouses are good examples of such structures. The outhouse pictured above is a sort of Frankenouthouse, cobbled together out of the remains of several older outhouses. The building’s frame is only a few years old, but the door and substructure were taken from earlier outhouses. The door came from an outhouse on a farm in northern Ontario which was dismantled roughly 30 years ago. The door’s age is uncertain – it may be 60 or 70 years old, or it may be much younger or older. When it arrived at its present location, it was greyed, unvarnished, unpainted cedar. It has had several coats of paint applied since. Knotholes in the door act as tiny windows, fortuitouly providing enticing yet highly constrained views of the outdoors – precise views of the landscape, created purely by chance. The foundation incorporates rough hewn cedar logs and flat-ish pieces of granite and gneiss, all collected near the building site for use in one of the property’s previous outhouses. I could wax poetic (or at least architectonic) about this substructure, using words like ‘materiality’ and ‘tectonics’, but in the interest of brevity and not losing myself in archispeak, I will merely say that I really like the juxtaposition of colours, textures and materials in the support system for the outhouse. The entire building assembly is unassuming yet vaguely charming, slapdash yet constructed with pride and care.

Almost certainly, this outhouse will never win any design awards, be granted a heritage plaque, or be studied by historians, but it has some surprisingly beautiful moments, is a splendidly typical example of backwoods Ontarian construction, and functions as a time capsule of sorts all the same. I’m glad to have the chance to share this piece of ‘accidental architecture’ with you!

XOAJ

A Side(board) Project

Architects have a tendency to design more than just buildings, and so this month I have chosen to highlight the Cylinda Line. In 1967, the Danish design house Stelton launched a series of coffee and cocktail vessels and accessories designed by fellow countryman (and architect) Arne Jacobsen. I am a sucker for stainless steel and simple, elegant, functional design, so when I discovered several of Jacobsen’s pieces casually nestled amongst the china on my grandparents’ sideboard a few years back, I all but swooned. The detailing on these pieces is exquisite – all folds and welds are handled in a clean and beautifully efficient manner.

XOAJ

Let me start off this beer review with stating I’m writing with a heavy head. A few band mates (who shall remain nameless) and i went out for a quick beer, that turned into a texas quick beer (4 pints). The beer  responsible for this uncharacteristic behavour is Spearhead’s Hawaiian style pale.  This strong west coast IPA(6.5%), flavoured with pineapple, reminds me of the mother of one of my friends, full bodied, and makes me stay in bed a few hours longer than i should in the morning. The malts in this beer and often overlooked in favour of the citrus zest of the hops, but they give it a solid backbone of honey and caramel. When i first heard of this pineapple infused ale, i thought it was going to be a terrible drink only Jimmy Buffet fans would enjoy (such as orange mouthwash). As it turns out, the pineapple is mellow and just enough to bring out the full flavour of the hops. I should also point out the carbination is stunning. Sleeker than most IPA’s, but not silky. I believe its from a natural carbination, but it could be the ghost of last night talking(or the beers i had at work). Great refreshing beer for the summer time, but it still tastes fantastic in the winter, or in the shower. All and all, i give this beer 7 out of 10 bowmans. 

This Month’s Pick Is:

My pick for this month is “House Of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski.

went crazy. He became obsessed with “The Navidson Record”, a documentary about a guy (Navidson) who realizes his house is bigger on the inside than the outside. The first video he put out was “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway”. The video consisted of a continuous shot where Navidson shows a door in his house, climbs out the window, and reveals that when the door opens it will lead to the garden outside. However, when he opens the door, there is a hallway. I don’t want to give anything away about what lies beyond the hallway. Anyway, Zampano, who is absolutely obsessed with the “Navidson Record”, dies. The character who is explaining the story has a friend who takes him
to see all of the crazy writings and whatnot that Zampano left behind. The character explaining the story then becomes obsessed with Zampano and “TheNavidson Record”.

If you are not an avid reader, you may find this book a little difficult to read. It’s definitely not a straightforward story. I was so enthralled by this book that I wanted to talk about it with everyone. Problem was that no one else I knew was reading it. Trying
to explain it to someone doesn’t really do it justice either, as they

needed. If you can find someone to read it at the same time as you, then you won’t run into that problem. It’s not that you need to discuss it to figure out what’s going on, it’s just that it is so intense and intriguing that you want to talk about it! If you want something different to read, then I highly suggest getting lost inside this book.

Shoreline Silhouettes

As someone with a less than stellar sense of direction, I find it comforting to spend time near large bodies of water. Next to a lake or an ocean, there is always at least one very obvious reference point: the shoreline. As long as one stays within sight of the water’s edge, it is impossible to become truly lost. Often there are also secondary orientation marks, formed either by nature or through human intervention. These secondary reference points can tell the waterside traveler quite a lot about where one is, and where one might be headed.

One of the shorelines I visit most often is the one stretching around the north-western end of Lake Ontario. Standing on this shore, the most prominent features of nearby lakeside cities are distilled into icons dotted along the water’s edge at vaguely regular intervals. On a clear day in Hamilton Harbour, for instance, the CN tower and its entourage of glass towers is clearly visible across the bay in Toronto. On the same day, a lakeside observer in Toronto is confronted with the monolithic smokestacks of Hamilton’s steel mills.

Like most cities, both Toronto and Hamilton have gained place-specific stereotypes. I think it’s safe to say that at one time or another the majority of Canadians have witnessed and/or taken part in a bout of Toronto-bashing, viewing the city as chaotic, and its residents as cold, snooty and self-absorbed. Considered architecturally, this perception of Toronto and Torontonians isn’t really that surprising – the city’s most prominent landmark is a massive communications tower which screams out “look at me! When I was built, I was the tallest free-standing structure IN THE WORLD, and I can STILL look down on every other tower in the country! As a nightly reminder of my awesomeness, I become a pulsating beacon of a lightshow, rainbows of colour zipping up and down my sides. I am so zappy! Yeah!!!!!”

Hamilton, on the other hand, is often referred to as the Dirty Hammer, viewed as a blue-collar town full of uncouth and unsavoury sights and smells. Once again, the tectonic icons of the place support the stereotype: three main stacks dominate the skyline, presiding over a forest of smokestacks and vast factory sheds, belching gases into the sky day and night. It’s almost as though they’re shouting back at Toronto “yeah, you may go higher and have more twinkly lights, but we breathe smoke, steam and FIRE. We are tended with sweat and sinew, and we CREATE STEEL. If it wasn’t for places like us, places like you couldn’t be built!”

Obviously there’s much more to both cities than what can be inferred from lakeside snapshots, but we humans are highly visual creatures, and I’m sure every one of us has at least sub-consciously judged a place to some extent based on a first impression. I am incredibly fond of both Hamilton and Toronto, and if you haven’t spent time in them before, I hope that some day you get the chance to move beyond the stereotypes and more fully experience both cities for yourself.

XOAJ

This month’s pick is:

My selection for January is “11/22/63” By Stephen King.

At first I was not going to pick a Stephen King novel because he is already so well known. However, most people that I speak to about Stephen King have their opinions formed by his movies. Reading a Stephen King novel and watching a movie adaptation of that novel are vastly different experiences. To me, just watching the movies is like listening to people cover the Beatles and then deciding what you think of the Beatles. So, I picked this novel in the hope that people who have not read him will read it and see how fantastic he is at his craft. Stephen King is mostly known for writing horror, but this novel is not a horror novel at all. It has a bit of sci fi, but other than that it is just a phenomenal story for anyone who likes any genre. If you have not read Stephen King, or even if you have, I suggest reading this novel. 

This story is about a teacher named Jake Epping who finds a portal that takes him back to September 9, 1958. No matter how much time he spends in the past, when he returns to 2011 it will be only 2 minutes after he entered the portal. However, he will have aged the length of time he was gone. He decides to see what will happen if he makes changes to the past, testing the butterfly effect. Every time he enters the portal he is taken back to September 9, 1958. Thus, everything he did on his last visit will be undone. He starts to believe that if he stays in the past until November 22, 1963 he will be able to save JFK’s life, therefore saving Robert Kennedy’s life, which could then lead to saving Martin Luther King’s life, etc. That is just the landscape for this story.

 The main story deals with Jake living in the past with a false identity and trying not to use slang that hasn’t been thought of yet or singing songs that have yet to be recorded. This story is at times funny, intense, romantic, and emotional (I will never admit I cried at one part). There is also a little bit of mystery thrown in there. Stephen King has such a flow to his writing that you just get absorbed in the story and lose track of time. I believe anyone from a teenaged boy to an elderly lady will enjoy this novel.