Kevin Drew is a Canadian musician and songwriter who, together with Brendan Canning, founded the expansive Toronto baroque-pop collective Broken Social Scene. He was also part of the lesser-known KC Accidental, which consisted of Drew and Charles Spearin, another current member of Broken Social Scene. He is currently dating fellow Broken Social Scene member and solo artist Leslie Feist.

Kevin attended the Etobicoke School of the Arts, along with Metric’s Emily Haines and Stars’s Amy Millan, where he studied drama.

And an interview with Pitchfork from November 2007:

Today’s Artist of the Day is Louie Austen. Louie Austen is an Austrian classically-trained bar- and jazzcrooner with a Frank Sinatra voice, who’s been active in the electronic music scene for a couple of years.

“Art must be a matter of life and death – otherwise it’s not art” is the jazz & electro crooner’s sincere conviction. And so is “I’ll never retire, I’ll probably die on stage but I don’t care!”

And is one, one night in Rio (Rio)
We had two, two glass of champagne (champagne)
And after three, three minutes of talking (hahaha)
We made love (love…), again and again (again again again…)

The artist of the day is Asaf Hanuka. Asaf is an Israeli comic book artist who, along with his twin brother Tomer, received numerous awards for their series Bipolar.

“being an illustrator is not entirely different than being a traveling salesman. only instead of vacuum cleaners you sell visual metaphors. finding the proper one for each different client is not an easy task, since it’s mostly used where an abstract idea needs to be presented. a good illustration is not only a metaphor of the subject for which it was created, but also a visual combination of form and color that manage, for a brief moment, to have a life of it’s own.” - Interview with Amateur Illustrator

Dana Schutz is an artist based out of New York. In her paintings, she places characters into fantasy worlds she creates, making loose back stories for the characters and situations she depicts.

Man Eating His Own Chest, oil on canvas, 54×42”.

Men’s Retreat, oil on canvas, 96×120”.

Interview with BOMB Magazine | Artist page at The Saatchi Gallery (UK)

Crucial Quote: I’m painting a man with a mustache. You know how young people wear a mustache to be nostalgic or maybe with a little irony? But then they just become a man with a mustache. I’m painting that man. I’m thinking about a lot of different things right now. It’s kind of an in-between time for me. I might scrap the painting tomorrow.

Metric is a Canadian New Wave/indie rock band. Originally formed in 1998 in New York City, they are currently based in Toronto, Ontario and Oakland, California.

The band consists of vocalist Emily Haines (who also plays the synthesizer), guitarist James Shaw, bassist Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key. Their first full-length album, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, was released in 2003 and earned the Juno Award nomination for Best Alternative Album. Live It Out was released on October 4, 2005 and was nominated for the 2006 Polaris Music Prize for the Canadian Album of The Year and once again the Juno Award nomination for Best Alternative Album.

James Taylor was the archetypal “sensitive” singer/songwriter of the ’70s. His songs, especially his early ones, were tales of inner torment delivered in low-key tunes featuring Taylor’s understated tenor and his intricate acoustic guitar accompaniments that drew on folk and jazz. Taylor came across as relaxed, personable, and open; he was imitated by a horde of would-be confessionalists, although his best songs were as artful as they were emotional. They weren’t folk songs; they were pop compositions with folk dynamics, and in them Taylor put across more bitterness and resignation than reassurance. As he continued to record, Taylor split his albums between cover singles that were hits (“Handy Man,” “You’ve Got a Friend”) and his own songs, maturing into a laid-back artist with a large and devoted following of baby boomers.

Our friends Your Black Star [ myspace ] are going on tour in the Mid-Atlantic region, as well as a date in Mass. I highly recommend checking them out if you get a chance.

May 23rd-Great Scott-Allston, Mass
May 25th-Metro Gallery-Baltimore MD
May 26th-Private Event-Fairfax VA
May 27th-Winstons-Chesapeake, VA

The artist of the day is Will C. Kerner [ art-seattle.com ] [ website ]

“Dilemma”:

“Buddies”:

Preteen Wil C. Kerner has autism, a neurological condition that challenges his ability to learn and communicate. Completely on his own, Wil began displaying unique expressions in paper cutouts at age ten. Vivid colored papers and scissors in hand, Wil’s creative passion transcends his disability allowing him to share intriguing emotional and intellectual perspectives.

I find it interesting that so many of his pieces feature just a single eye. Autism is an interesting disorder and it’s fascinating to me when autistic kids are able to express their experience.

New Young Pony Club are a five piece indie/electronica band from London, England. Taking influences from New Wave bands such as Talking Heads and Blondie, and combining them with dance rhythms and synths, they are perhaps more deserving of the “Nu Rave” tag than many other bands in the sub-genre such as Klaxons and SHITDISCO. However, like other bands associated with the label, they are quick to dismiss it.

The band are keen to take their cues from a whole range of sources, and try not to risk becoming too close to the sound of any one other band. Their own take on their music is “We marry the dance ethic with the pop ethic, and make something that you can dance to and sing along to.”

MSTRKRFT (read as “Master-kraft”) is an electronic music group from Toronto (East York), Ontario, Canada who are signed to Last Gang Records. The group was started in 2005 by Jesse F. Keeler formerly of Death from Above 1979 and Al-P (Alex Puodziukas) formerly of the Mississauga electropop group Girlsareshort. Al-P was also the producer for Death from Above 1979’s second album You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine as well as several of (Jesse’s former band) Black Cat #13’s records. MSTRKRFT also produced Die Mannequin’s first EP, How to Kill, and Magneta Lane’s second LP, Dancing With Daggers.

John Baldessari is a conceptual artist. His work often attempts to point out irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His art has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

Technorati Tags: i am making art, john baldessari, conceptual art, absurdist, videos, crazy art

The artist of the day is Your Black Star [ yourblackstar.com ] [ myspace ]

Someone once said Louisville KY based “Your Black Star is a long stretch of highway on a hot summer night. It is a blanket of pitch-black sky pocked with thousands of points of light. It is your headlights searching the road ahead, a mystery unfolding as you roll forth into the darkness. It is a sense of calm as you roll off into the void, more curious than frightened.”

Au Revoir Simone is an indie pop band from Brooklyn, New York that formed in late 2003. The group consists of Erika Forster (vocals/keyboard), Annie Hart (vocals/keyboard), and Heather D’Angelo (vocals/drum machine/keyboard). Forster and Hart became friends while traveling by train from Vermont to New York. The band’s name comes from a line Pee-Wee Herman says to a minor character (named Simone) in Tim Burton’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.

The Books are a band founded by and consisting of American Nick Zammuto and Dutchman Paul de Jong in New York City in 2000. Their music is a mix of aleatoric, electronica, folk, and acoustic music (de Jong is a cellist and Zammuto plays acoustic guitar and electric bass), incorporating samples of sounds, speech and music. They have released three albums, all on the German (Cologne) label Tomlab. They are currently recording and residing in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Their 2006 live shows consisted primarily of live acoustic performance (cello, guitar and vocals), played with prerecorded electronics and synchronized video. Read there interview with Hate Something Beautiful.

Bansky