Recording: Sahara

Artist: Sahara

Song: unknown^*

Recorded at The Great Hall's BLK BOX ("Long Winter: Year Four, Volume One"), November 13, 2015.

Sahara - unknown

Returning once more to bring some cultural glow to the darkest part of the year, Long Winter kicked off its fourth season — once again building on three years of experience while trying some new wrinkles. As has happened in the past, the season's first event felt a bit like a "dress rehearsal" for the year, less reliant on a big headliner as the thousand little logistical wrinkles of throwing a one-night-festival got worked out. So while a new liquor licence meant drinkers weren't confined to the floor of the main hall (easing the huge bottleneck there) there were still some flow issues, including a couple sets in the restaurant that were (as far as I could tell) utterly inaccessible to event-goers. Another slow evolution is that, perhaps more than ever, it felt as if it was the non-musical component was central to the night as a whole, with music filling in the leftover space instead of vice versa. Of course there was still a lot of music — I caught at least part of no fewer than eleven sets. It's crowded and a little claustrophobic, but there ain't nothing else in the city like Long Winter.

Although this trio's website just shows a loop of shaky desert footage, it doesn't look like they're trying to be too mysterious, as their facebook page helpfully reveals their identities and lists an affiliation to Hand Drawn Dracula's Artificial sub-imprint. Those two points help us triangulate to Joseph Elaschuk's former project Mausoleum, which issued an EP on HDD and shared a certain dry, goth-y undertone to this band. But there doesn't seem much to be much music from this project online yet. The song title "No Water" (which was on the very cool cassingle given away at Long Winter) just adds to the band's near ungoogleability, but the band says that'll be the first song on their forthcoming EP.

[Volume Two of this year's series is already announced for Saturday, December 12th (do note that it's not on its usual Friday) with music from Isla Craig, New Chance, LUKA, Nailbiter, Petra Glynt, LAL, Blunt Chunks and much more. The LW crew is also taking over the AGO as part of the Gallery's First Thursdays series next week.]

^* Does anyone know the title to this one? It's called out at the start, but I can't quite make it out. Please leave a comment if you know!

Recording: Sahara

Artist: Sahara

Song: Cherry-Coloured Funk [Cocteau Twins cover]

Recorded at The Dance Cave (DEATH TO T.O. V), October 30, 2015.

Sahara - Cherry-Coloured Funk

For its massive fifth year of Hallowe'en covers, DEATH TO T.O. upsized from its home at The Silver Dollar/Comfort Zone to Lee's Palace and the Dance Cave. That allowed it to keep its sprawling two-stage upstairs/downstairs dynamic even as it accommodated a bigger crowd than ever. Besides curating no fewer than seventeen (!) short sets, Dan Burke and Elliot Jones also kept things running on schedule, with one set starting quite crisply as the one on the other stage ended for nearly the whole night. And as always, the bands put in a lot of work — not just musically, but a lot of the time in trying to capture the look and mannerisms of the band they were covering.

This group had the toughest time of the night getting started, pushing their start back about ten minutes as they fiddled with their gear on stage. Once they were going and settled in, they had a nice line on Cocteau Twins' shimmery, chorus-y guitars and sweet but semi-buried vox.