Photo Credit: Steven Pan | Jacket Burberry Prorsum
I did a profile for the BLOCK. Keep an eye out for the story in the fall issue.
I was invited on CBC Radio 3 today to talk to Dave Shumka about Austra, whose ‘Feel It Break’ album is up for the Polaris Prize this year. You can listen to our conversation here (just as soon as it’s been uploaded).
Hyperballads and hyperlinks
How a Toronto web design company helped Björk realize her latest online vision.
BY: JENNY CHARLESWORTH
The remnants of a recent brainstorming session are splashed across the IdeaPaint-coated walls of Liberty Village new-media studio Jam3. Six months ago, the cryptic equations and rushed shorthand would have been engulfed in a constellation of marker points as studio partners Mark McQuillan and Adrian Belina, along with Pablo Vio, worked furiously with their developers to give Björk’s website an intergalactic facelift.
“We received a video of what they wanted it to look like,” says McQuillan of Jam3’s first dealings with the international team spearheading the ambitious project for the Icelandic pop princess. “Björk was looking for a site to match the creative around her biophilia project, which involves an album, videos, apps for each track, and really explores organic form and nature in a highly stylized fashion. But [Google SketchUp], the technology they used to create that video, doesn’t have a clear exporting path [to the web], so it was next to useless. We had to put on our sleuthing caps and basically figure out how we were going to get it from A to Z.”
“Z” is where Björk fans can navigate through a 3-D solar system to explore the superstar’s musical output and learn about her forward-thinking biophilia concept (the re-launched website is the first phase of the multi-disciplinary endeavour). And getting there meant pushing the creative envelope with HTML5, a technology that Vio kindly demystifies for those not altogether tech savvy, describing it as “a fancy new HTML for being able to animate pages.” Apple bossman Steve Jobs has endorsed it as an alternative to Flash.
Jam3 has established itself as a leader in the digital storytelling realm after eight years of award-winning work. (The dozen or so accolades on display in its foyer are hard to miss, unless, of course, your gaze first falls upon the prized Street Fighterarcade game.) They acknowledge that landing this latest VIP client has a lot to do with the fact they actively encourage their developers to experiment. In fact, it was an experiment in HMTL5 “thrown up” on the Jam3 labs blog that caught the attention of Björk’s management team at One Little Indian Records, which was canvassing for a studio that could effectively execute the creative vision she had developed with French design partnership M/M (Paris).
Cults Plan Hip-Hop Mixtape, Talk Jim Jones Influence — Exclusive Video
My interview and co-direction credit
They may offer a nod to fearsome Jonestown icon Jim Jones on their record and have a slightly creepy name, but there’s nothing off-putting or diabolical about New York duo Cults. Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion — partners both musically and romantically — have quickly won the favour of just about anyone who has a penchant for dreamy, retro-flavoured indie-pop (including Lily Allen, whose label is behind the group’s self-titled debut).
Spinner recently sat down with Cults during AOL’s NXNE party at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto to talk about their foray into hip-hop, creepy cult leaders, and why they’re just a couple of “control freaks.” Oh, and we also got the lowdown on Follin’s guest gig with iconic Canadian punks F—-ed Up.
