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Music

Chad Vangaalen

CHAD VANGAALEN at the Great Hall (1087 Queen West), Saturday (June 18), midnight. Free with NXNE wristband/pass or $15. nxne.com. See listing.


It takes three calls to Chad VanGaalen’s house in Calgary before his wife, Sara, finally picks up.

“He’s in his studio,” she says, “so I’m sure he’s probably lost in space.”

That’s fitting, considering how much time he must have spent there between the release of his last album, the Polaris-shortlisted Soft Airplane, and now. He’s since recorded three albums’ worth of material, most of which he deemed “mediocre or just plain bad,” before culling it into the recent Diaper Island (Flemish Eye).

Not that his efforts were in vain. The self-taught producer and musician’s constant experimentation is responsible for both his inventiveness and his lack of a filter.

“I learned how to record music before I properly learned how to play it,” he explains from his studio, Yoko Eno. “I can’t imagine going to a professional studio and watching the clock tick while I fail to do a proper take.”

Influenced by found-sound field recordings and John Cage’s compositions with prepared instruments, VanGaalen claims that 90 per cent of his output is “droney, soundscape kind of stuff,” most of which will never see the light of day.

“I’m constantly sending records to Ian at Flemish Eye, saying, like, ‘Hey, I recorded a rainstorm for 45 minutes in the left channel and I’m trying to mimic that with white noise in the right channel.’ He’ll write back, ‘Fuck, man. I don’t have time to listen to fucking static for 45 minutes.’

“But that’s what excites me. This whole singer/songwriter thing started as another project, like, ‘Oh, maybe I can make a record.’ And so I made a record and now everybody thinks I’m a songwriter. It’s almost like a joke I’ve played on myself.”

Considering that Diaper Island is his most conventional singer/songwriter album yet, he must be laughing pretty hard. Whereas his previous records juxtaposed folk and rock songs with off-kilter electronic experiments and the sounds of homemade instruments, Diaper Island is almost entirely built around his guitar and tuneful falsetto.

He credits this to his work producing 2010’s Public Strain by fellow Calgarians Women.

“That turned out to be my favourite thing I’ve ever done. So it made sense for me to steal all their guitar sounds.”

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