Jan. 11, 2012 - Issue #847: The great indoors
Pocket Universe
» The Universe wishes art a very happy birthday
Part of Art's Birthday
Ortona Armoury, $5
It's been a long five years since Pocket Universe took to a stage and performed music. Having a pair of children will have that effect on a duo, Moonfyre Cardinal, one-half of the eclectic-industrial group explains with a laugh before pointing out that, in truth, calling it an absence is only partly correct. The band has occasionally surfaced, on stages here and abroad, to tout its unusual blend of theatre and music, but in that span of time the forms it took were skewed far more towards the theatrical side.
"When we do the theatrical performance, what we do is record our music and we just add in our vocals," Cardinal explains. "Sometimes we don't even do that, we just do a cabaret kind of thing to our music in the background and do our theatrical performance in front of it. We've been doing that in scattered venues all over the continent for the last two years or so. We'd go to an event that was already in place ... but as far as going out, and performing live, and being Pocket Universe being part of a musical event, this has been five years."
The band's return to form—that form being a mixture of instrumental, sometimes sung, sometimes spoken-word songs imagined through '80s synth washes, expansive industrial soundscapes and, occasionally, rootsy folk rock—comes as part of this year's celebration of Art's Birthday. The event was created in 1963 by Robert Filliou, a french artist who arbitrarily assigned "art" his own birthday of January 17; now, a scattering of events happen all over the world. The Edmonton incarnation will slot Universe in alongside burlesque troupe Zombies and fellow musicians Don Ross and Bill Damur.
"What I like about it is it's actually a loose collection of artists and organizations, and there's no structure," Cardinal says of Art's birthday celebrations. "It's like, go celebrate the fact that we have art. How cool is that? Isn't that what art is all about?" vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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