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Live music is a strange form of entertainment, if you really stop to consider it. As an audience member, yes, you pay for the privilege of being entertained by a band or performer whose works you enjoy, and yes, ideally, these performers earn something in exchange for that work. But to get on stage and run through your most known songs, night after night for months, sometimes year after year, is a strange desire. It would seem to me that for most musicians, for whom private jets and sold out stadiums aren't the norm, the promise of payment isn't generally enough -- as cliche as it sounds, you really have to do it for the love. 

When most people think of Montreal group TEKE::TEKE, they think of loud abrasive punk, but then they also think of 60s psych, Japanese folklore and traditional Bulgarian music. Well, actually when people think of TEKE::TEKE they think of a lot of things. That is very much because the group is composed of seven members with various musical and cultural backgrounds. And with their stream-of-consciousness and jam-style approach to songwriting, their music is always fascinating, innovative and original. 

Wow, at the time of writing, it's May. My how time flies! It feels like only a month and a half ago that I was down in Austin at SXSW, the largest, and arguably one of the most important cultural festivals in North America. I blanket statement "cultural festival" because SXSW has grown from a humble music festival to a behemoth, spanning nearly two full weeks with a tech, movie, and comedy conference rolled together to make a sort of unwieldy beast.

Oh... you know what? I actually have to write a review of SXSW. Shit... that's due at the beginning of May! Well, I don't have time to get further into the history of a festival. You can look it up on Wikipedia, so let me get moving on this review.

Alex Garland’s film Civil War taps into the director’s trademark nerve-inducing wake-up calls that hit close to home about where we are at as a society. There was the wake-up call about artificial intelligence in Ex Machina and whatever nerves he wanted to provoke about humanity with his following films Annihilation and Men. The films leave the audience with a haunting, somewhat uneasy, feeling that makes me have questions about humanity. I normally end up doing deep dives on YouTube for explanations and in-depth analysis of these films.