It was the absence of performing animals that defined it in the 1980s, but contemporary circus has come a long way since. Cirque Éloize, a smallish touring company which started in Montreal in the late 90s, has so effectively dissolved the boundaries between dance, acrobatics and theatre that it performs around the world under any or all of those banners. Its current tour to UK theatres offers urban attitude, breakdance and hip hop along with aerial skills, trampolining and trick cycling – often hair-raisingly at the same time. Perhaps it was inevitable. Street dance and acrobatics share a Read more ...

Some time in the not too distant future, there are only two films on offer: Duck Soup, and, if you order the DVD in advance, Zoolander. And you have to watch them in a museum.Canadian director Ann Marie Fleming’s unusual, semi-dystopian fantasy is shot by C Kim Miles in the gorgeous Powell River area of British Columbia. In spite of excellent performances from the two leads, Sandra Oh and Keira Jang, it fails to come to life and has a clunky, didactic feel, though it looks very pretty.Ellie (Oh) lives with her daughter Kiah (Jang) in a charming wooden house with a beautiful garden where she Read more ...

There is, let’s be honest, a certain self-congratulatory self-satisfaction among some particularly well-heeled sections of the Edinburgh International Festival audience, event-goers who’ve forked out a fortune to be fed high culture carefully curated for them, and who either reside in some of the city’s most well-off districts or have perhaps travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles for the pleasure.Heck, a group in front of me were even discussing the merits of the city’s various private members’ clubs, and the intricate exclusionary processes for admission, while waiting for their Read more ...

Debby Friday is a Nigerian-Canadian singer-producer who found some success a couple of years ago with her debut album Good Luck. It won the Best Electronic Album 2023 Polaris Prize, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy or Brit. That album had a moody rock-tronic feel.The new one, created in her new London base with her guitarist, the Australian producer Darcy Baylis, is more straightforward EDM, but draws from a varied palette and retains her personality. It’s a likeable club-centric outing.Initially, it appears she’s going to go 4/4-bangers-all-the-way but, as the album goes on, she becomes Read more ...

“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers (1975), and that slippery adage could sum up more than a few of the Canadian sensationalist’s movies in the past 50 years – not least his latest, The Shrouds, which was in competition at Cannes last year.As far back as the cheap and nasty Shivers, Cronenberg molested the line between the quick and the dead, pioneering horror motifs like inflamed-penis parasites bursting out of stomachs and plugholes and into people’s orifices. His films became famous for Read more ...

Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English and Yemeni heritage, he came of musical age in the Bohemian hotbed of 1990s Berlin with a close-knit bunch of other Canadian ex-pats, including Peaches, Chilly Gonzales and Feist.In the early days, this mini-scene was about a delirious collision of huge musical ambition and the urge to goof off at every turn. Puppet shows, silly rap personae, punk provocation and cabaret razzle-dazzle meshed with musical virtuosity, electronic experimentation, with Read more ...

Around eight years ago, London singer-songwriter Lail Arad started releasing one-off tracks with Canadian singer JF Robitaille, once of Montreal indie outfit The Social Register (Arad’s own 2016 album The Onion is an undiscovered diamond that should be sought out).The pair now finally release a debut album which contains a few of these singles (although not “The Photograph” and “We Got It Coming”– Spotify those two). Their literate indie guitar-pop, touched with alt-folk sensibilities, is a sprightly listen spotted with a few true jewels.It's music built for these times. The chirpily doomed, Read more ...

According to PUP lead singer Stefan Babcock, the Toronto foursome practiced together a grand total of twice before embarking on their current UK and European tour.Given the band’s well-known habit for disagreements and teetering on the edge of imploding, that might have been a wise decision. It didn’t affect the show itself, for while the group’s history is littered with chaos, this was a lively but controlled display. There was little fuss or frills here, instead around 20 tracks being hammered through with a consistent bounce, inside SWG3’s pillar strewn concrete bunker of a Glasgow Read more ...

20 years on from their first appearance on record, the seventh long-player from Canadian indie-art-rock behemoths Arcade Fire comes off the back of four consecutive UK album chart-toppers.Also lurking in the background are the 2022 sexual misconduct allegations against mainstay Win Butler. He seems to have weathered them better than most, supported by his wife and bandmate Régine Chassagne. This review is not the place for an investigative deep-dive. Make your own mind up. But Pink Elephant, especially its first half, contains some impressive songs.Working with Daniel Lanois, Butler and Read more ...

It would have been hard to pick up a copy of the album credited to and titled 1001 Est Crémazie in 1975. Just 500 copies were pressed. It didn’t reach shops but was circulated amongst the musicians playing on it, their friends, families and fellow students at Montréal’s Collège André-Grasset, the school at which those on the album were pupils.As is the way with these types of thing, the privately pressed album was found by collectors and became sought after. The album’s final track “Bright Moments” reappeared on a DJ-targeted bootleg single in 2000 and then on 2002’s grey-area France and Read more ...

Cultural references run up the flagpole on Ghost Palace include Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” buskers covering Lynryd Skynyrd and Ed Sheeran, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and The Ramones’ Leave Home album.Album opener “Celebrities in Cemeteries” encounters Jim Morrison in Père-Lachaise, the do-it-yourself funeral ceremony for Gram Parsons at Joshua Tree and a cemetery in Oklahoma reserved exclusively for circus performers. Contemplating this travelogue, The Burning Hell’s hopeful Mathias Kom sings “They’ll all come see me where I’m buried, Once anonymous and nameless, I’ll be posthumously Read more ...

 Snow Dance for the Dead: Choral Music by Seán Doherty New Dublin Voices/Bernie Sherlock (Voces8 Recordings)I have come across the choral music of Seán Doherty more and more recently and always liked what I have heard. His music is imaginative, wide-ranging and original, and all these things are evident in his debut disc with New Dublin Voices, under their enterprising conductor Bernie Sherlock. Doherty has been a member of the choir since 2015, and Sherlock describes him as “a tap that pours out great choral music”. There is certainly more than enough variety to sustain a full album – Read more ...