Chad VanGaalen + Amsterdam’s Andenken Gallery = A Match Made in Shroom Heaven?

Life is Butter Dreamer! Aug 2 to 21/11 — IT’S ABOUT TIME someone made space for a retrospective exhibit of work from the ogre-sized, prolific psychedelic mind of celebrated musician/animator/illustrator/circuit-bending-fetishist/all-around-delightfully-mad-scientist Chad VanGaalen. Next week, the Calgary-based artist will skip the pond to play songs from his latest record, Diaper Island, to some lucky Europeans. His first performance will also kick off a three-week showing of a few hundred individual pieces of his visual art, including animation cells from one of his fantastically trippy music videos and illustrations that span the period of his four acclaimed solo records with Flemish Eye. 

VanGaalen pulled about half the material for the show from an old suitcase where he keeps drawings and retired sketchbooks. “It was definitely strange, kind of like having a conversation with your ex-girlfriend for like five days, just locked up together in a room,” he says. 

The spread on display at Andenken will feature portraits of friends, strangers, weirdos, dragons (!) and other monsters, a range of lush landscapes, delightful oddities, a bunch of half-finished comic books, and sketchbook gems from overseas album tours and road trips across Canada—including scenes from a ridiculously improvised and epic mission to Dawson City, Yukon, in a school bus, largely fueled by two mason jars full of weed. Another 100 or so pieces in the show are cells of cutout animations that VanGaalen crafted for J. Mascis’ fantastic “Not Enough” video (below), which the gallery will also screen along with some of his other morph-o-riphic moving pictures. (Speaking of which: His video for “Peace On The Rise” is like a Kubrickian sci-fi cartoon.)

Ten days before having to ship his work overseas, VanGaalen also went on a week-long drawing bender to contribute some fresh material. His subject: the droves of drunken rafters who float down the Bow River through Calgary as a summertime right of passage (or maybe just an excuse to get loaded in the sun), observed from what sounds like a totally non-incognito riverbank spot. 

“I kinda set up this, like, camo zone where I could be sitting. I hollowed out the inside of a bush on the edge of the river, and pulled the leaves out of the middle section so I had a nice shaded spot. The challenging thing about it was that I only had a window of about 10 seconds to draw people as they went by. And I was totally not camouflaged. People were like, ‘Dude, who is that dude in the bush totally perving out on people?’ It looked pretty suspicious.”

Accidental creepiness aside (in the eyes of apparent dick-wagglers, mind you), VanGaalen was pretty stoked about the results. “Being forced to draw them fast made them cartoony, kinda like Gary Larson-style almost… just one-liners. And there’s weird shit going on with rafter culture in this city, I feel like. I kinda got to know the rafts. There’s a Ralph Lauren inflatable raft that everyone has now. I don’t know where the fuck they’re getting them. It’s like a giant donut. Everyone has an inflated recliner armchair with a cup holder built in, and it seats 11 or 12 people all facing themselves in a giant ring. And just drawing an object that weird as quickly as I can is crazy enough. But then the people are shirtless biker dudes with handlebar moustaches, next to bikini babes, next to a bald headbanger or something.” 

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in Amsterdam in August 2011, Life is Butter Dreamer! is a rare and special opportunity to soak up a literal tickle trunk of crazy, uncanny, joyful and no-doubt hilarious visuals by one of Canada’s most incredible young artists. Especially in a city where you can—for the moment, at least—buy psychedelics and smokeables with your coffee.

Images by Chad VanGaalen. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Diaper Island—it rules!

Braids + Marc Rimmer = Native Speaker’s blissful blur-scape

Braids: Native Speaker [Jan/2011] — MY FIRST IMPRESSION: Pillowy, psychedelic vinyl seat covers, freshly refurbished for a cosmic party bus. Or maybe an underwater still life, printed on bubble wrap.

What’s actually happening in this vivid cover art by Montréal’s Marc Rimmer is deceptively simple, and much less cheesy. It’s a photograph composed of two unlikely props: A digital image of a mountain landscape on Rimmer’s desktop, and a 4-foot by 2.5-foot (or so) plastic light panel from Home Depot that he held in front of his camera lens.

The concept came to light simply as well, albeit via a pile of trial-and-error. Rimmer had taken some outdoor photos of the Montréal foursome atop Parc du Mont-Royal while brainstorming album art ideas for their first full-length release. After those experiments, he wanted to keep the textures of the leaves and branches and trees, but he also wanted to distort them further, to blend additional layers into those textures — a nod to the band’s approach to making music. The notion of using a florescent light panel to nail that effect came to Rimmer one day in French class, presumably with his eyes procrastinating on the ceiling.

“To me, it says Braids,” says Rimmer, who listened heavily to Native Speaker for a month or so while designing the album packaging. “It’s very rare that I’m pumped in this way about something this long after I’ve done it. The artwork has been done for almost a year, but when I look at it now, it stills says that album. I just like the texture of it, and it’s really colourful and it’s really abstract, but also really minimal and clean. You don’t really look at it and get too much out of it.”

The band wanted their inaugural record cover to convey a sort of indiscernible fluidity, and also to fuse a broad palate of moods.

“We wanted to create something that blended together a full spectrum of emotion,” explains Katie Lee, who plays keys and sings for Braids. “Our album doesn’t have one specific tone. It explores different feelings, but it’s all intertwined, it’s not jagged or separate.”

The woven, unleashed colours that adorn Native Speaker represent that blend. Lee also points out a sort of harshness created by the light refracted through a plastic panel.“It’s metallicky, not entirely smooth,” she says. “I think that works too because it’s not just a smooth album. There are moments where it’s a little bit rough around the edges. At the same time, behind that roughness is something very beautiful.”

Accentuating this effect, Rimmer was also intent on keeping the very fluid, matte-finish artwork separate from the black and white monochromatic box with album details, printed with a UV spot varnish to make it really shiny and wet. “I didn’t want to confuse or dilute the idea, or make it busy,” says Rimmer, adding that he originally had hoped to put a sticker over the solid chunk of texture rather than add copy to the layout.

The musicians who make up Braids share Calgary roots with Rimmer, and they’re all fans of his past musical contributions to Azeda Booth. They asked him to invoke this debut crop of songs with an image for two reasons: 1] they trust and respect his imagination, and b] for the sake of band unity and fresh ideas. Lee says that if one of the four band members had come up with something, everyone would have been more critical than they would be with another artist’s interpretation.

“It’s hard to see your music visually, because it’s so personal for each person,” explains Lee. “What I see when I listen to our music isn’t necessarily what Taylor [guitar, bass & vocals], or Raphie [lead vocals & guitar], or Austin [drums & vocals], or anyone else would see. I like to think that the visual side of things should be a collaboration with people who are well versed in that area — more so than my vision, or even our vision.”

Like a Braids performance, Rimmer’s complement to the band’s sound is lush and full of subtle surprises. “The band is all about flow and colour, there are lots of layers and things going on. And to me, this artwork is very tangible. A lot of people ask: What is it printed on? Well, it’s not printed on anything special other than paper, but it’s just very… juicy. Like you can touch it.”

All photos by Marc Rimmer. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Native Speaker from Flemish Eye.