Communication Design |

Music Behind the North: The 90s Canadian Rock Scene and their Untold Stories

Violeta Bjelica

See it On Campus: Level 2

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This project is an ongoing series of CDs that explore and represent bands and individuals who were part of the 90s Canadian rock scene, with a focus on Halifax, Nova Scotia. Each CD represents specific bands and aspects of the scene, and many contain in-depth interviews I conducted with these artists. All of the designs were made through manipulating my own paintings, drawings, and photographs to represent the feelings I get when listening to the music. These CDs are a celebration of not just 90s Canadian rock, but of 90s-era graphic design.

Introduction and thank-you’s

An opened white CD gatefold sleeve with text printed in black on it reading: "In an era of extreme music market saturation, it’s easy to remember the past by picking out the names we know the best, but between the gaps is where the equally, if not more, exciting stories lie; footnotes within footnotes that are worthy of books of their own. From the fans to the distributors to the singers themselves, the ecosystem that made up the 90s Canadian rock scene is something worth remembering. My goals going into this project were to talk about rock from an angle seldom explored, eradicate the idea of popularity as a measure of worth, and to uplift the 90s Canadian rock scene and everything that makes it exciting to me. When researching into Canrock, it seemed largely like a self-sufficient machine; isolated yet insulated all at once. There were those who performed for small audiences, and those who cared about bringing a collective vision to light, all of whom made the scene what it was.
Getting into 90s Canrock to this extent and talking to so many people that have lived through it has felt exciting and strange as someone who now knows so much about an era that I wasn’t even born in. I was born in 2002 and grew up on the Serbian music my parents would play and whatever was popular on the radio until I got into singer-songwriter artists, then hip-hop and pop, and eventually rock in 2020. Yes, I almost entirely ignored rock music for most of my youth. What got me into it were the people I got to know online through other interests. Their enthusiasm for rock got me into it which opened the doors for so many other bands, and now it’s hard for me to imagine my life without it. To say this project has been one of the most exciting things I’ve worked on would be an understatement. I can’t thank enough the people I interviewed and the people who helped me out in some way for this project. Since I have so much material that I couldn’t represent justly in one semester of work, I’m planning for this project to become something even bigger than it is now and to represent all the people I’ve spoken to in some way.
Due to my intense passion for bands from the Halifax scene, I debated at the start of the project on whether or not I should keep it to just Halifax, but my curiosity for other bands across Canada as well as how connected they are made me realize I didn’t need to limit myself for the sake of one cohesive story. Breaking them down into CD booklets made the most sense to me not just as a way to explore 90s designs within my own style, but to give these stories their own world to exist in, allowing people the chance to learn about Canrock outside the confines of a traditional book, magazine or website. The common denominator of these bands and individuals is the terrain in which incredible music was made and those who etched their names in the roads this nation travels along; cold roads, winding ones, all moving towards the same sun."

Sloan

At the forefront of the 90s Halifax rock scene were Sloan, a four-piece power pop band. With the band running their own label, Murderecords, to uplift other bands in the wake of their signing to major label Geffen Records, this CD dives into their discography and provides my in-depth interview with bassist/vocalist Chris Murphy.

The opening pages of a CD booklet for Sloan. The pages are red with three uneven blue lines going across the top and bottom of the pages. The white text reads: "Sloan: My Gateway to 90s Halifax Rock" "My journey through discovering 90s Canadian rock music all started with the Halifax band Sloan on one faithful day in August of 2021. I was really into the short-lived 90s Californian power pop band Jellyfish, and so as I was browsing their albums on Spotify, I saw Navy Blues by Sloan as the first recommendation underneath their Bellybutton demos tape. After learning that Sloan are Canadian, it hit me that if I was going to get into any somewhat niche rock scene, why not have it be music from the country I was born and raised in, rather than the Britpop and American rock I was getting invested in at the time, and I haven’t looked back since."

The continuing pages of a CD booklet for Sloan. The text reads: "Sloan are four songwriters and musicians who all contribute their own slightly different sounds, though similar enough to feel like a collective voice. Made up of guitarists Jay Ferguson and Patrick Pentland, bassist Chris Murphy, and drummer Andrew Scott, Sloan, formed in 1991, have gone on to create over a dozen great records, but for the sake of this project, I’ll highlight some of their 90s material.

Their debut album Smeared marks the only time in their discography that they delved into the shoegaze and grunge sounds of the time, so it made sense that it was released after they got signed to Geffen Records, the same label Nirvana were on. While the record doesn’t reflect their sound beyond that first album and their Peppermint EP, Smeared certainly has the charm and wit of a typical Sloan album and I think they did the shoegaze thing quite well. It’s a solid debut and marked the beginning of the Halifax pop explosion frenzy, where labels like Sub Pop flocked to Halifax to pick up other bands after hearing Sloan had been signed to a major label.

Now, when people ask me what Sloan album they should listen to—because I talk about this band often enough for this to be a common question—I usually say that while Navy Blues is my favourite, you can’t go wrong with Twice Removed, One Chord to Another, or Navy Blues as starting points.

Twice Removed, released in 1994, was their last record with Geffen and marked a complete sonic shift from what Geffen were expecting them to make, which is part of why Sloan were eventually dropped and received no promo from the label for the album. Twice Removed embraced cleaner production, retro sounds, and a more democratic approach to the singer-songwriter duties than Smeared, which was mostly penned by Murphy. The recording sessions for this record were notably tense due to personal relationships falling apart and tensions between the members, so there’s quite a range between the emotional numbers like Pentland’s “Loosens” versus the upbeat and silly opener “Penpals”."

Read the interview here:

Bubaiskull & Rebecca West

A conversation with Allison Outhit and the shift from being a member of Halifax band Bubaiskull to fronting her own band Rebecca West.

Read the interview here:

Hardship Post & Jale

Diving into the somewhat short-lived Halifax bands Hardship Post and Jale and their connection with each other through musician Alyson MacLeod, along with an interview with frontman Sebastian Lippa from Hardship Post.

Read the interview here:

Experimental/Noise Music & Justice Schanfarber

Introducing the world of Vancouver experimental music through Justice Schanfarber’s projects Good Horsey, Pork Queen, and Near Castlegar, and an interview with the man himself on the scene and his label Trackshun Industries.

A 6-part CD fold-out with a drawing/painting of a spine that turns into crows doing down the fold-out. Around the art is the band names Good Horsey, Pork Queen, and Near Castlegar and "experimental and noise music + an interview with Justice Schanfarber". The text going down the rest of the paper reads: "Justice Schanfarber has been involved with a multitude of rock and experimental projects, most notably Good Horsey, Pork Queen, and Near Castlegar, while also running an experimental label called Trackshun Industries which released a number of great records. Good Horsey was an indie, lo-fi rock group with Justice Schanfarber, Mark Szabo and Max Lee. 1994’s Kazué blew me away when I first listened to it. Between the excellent playing throughout and the chaotic, noisy moments on tracks like the closer “Burn Up The Sun”, there’s a lot to love about the record and stands out as being one of the lost great albums of the era. Schanfarber’s experimental project Pork Queen takes the noisy side of Good Horsey and cranks it up to 10, delving into the non-music, avant-garde territory. Moving further into his discography, Near Castlegar was a one-off experimental project released by California label Shrimper Records in 1996. What really intrigued me about this project is that two members of Zumpano, Michael Ledwidge and Jason Zumpano, were collaborators on it, veering very far from the poppy indie rock style of their own band and into some gentle, droning electronic music mixed with acoustic guitars funneled through lo-fi production. Clocking in at 7 and a half minutes, the instrumental opening track “Sweet Kryptonite Blues” sounds exactly as the title suggests; sweet yet melancholy.Whirling, subdued synths, a gentle guitar strum, a lead guitar that comes in around the two minute mark that tugs on my heartstrings, and a simple drum loop that kicks in as strings and other instruments are layered on top. The rest of the tracks manage to also do a lot with a little, sometimes using sounds that would be annoying in any other context. The first minute of “Broken Hornet” has a loud phone ringing sound that drops out for a minute, then comes back in for short moments later in the track. The contrast of that sound with the construction-like sounds on the low end somehow works in the song’s favour. It’s an EP that I was immediately hooked on, and I think is a worthwhile listen for anyone who not only likes slightly experimental music but also wants to hear what a few Zumpano members were doing on the side. There’s a lot to delve into with his discography, as well as everything else that was being put out on Trackshun, such as works from experimental guitarist Brian Ruryk. Along with experimental sounds on the label were experimental visuals and handmade covers, such as the cut-and-paste style of Guitar Obstacle Course by Brian Ruryk which is reminiscent of punk fanzines. I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of the exciting music being made during this era, but here’s what Justice Schanfarber had to say about his various projects…"

Read the interview below:

PDF of a long fold-out for an interview with Justice Schanfarber which reads: "I wanted to ask about Good Horsey specifically, because that seemed like the most accessible band that you were in. So how did that band come about?

I was working with Scratch Records and what you do at that time was you basically just write a note on a piece of paper and put it on whatever board was at the record stores. That was the only way that any of us really knew how to find people to start a band with. And then, just friends and friends and friends and friends and as you get the ball rolling and you start playing, one thing leads to another. But in those early days, Keith [Parry] had told me about this guy that had been coming into the record store who was a drummer from Winnipeg named Max [Lee], and so I got a hold of him somehow. Again, this is before the Internet, so it’s all picking up the phone, dialing the phone, finding phone numbers. and then Mark Szabo was playing, he had a band called Infernal Devices, and they put out a tape and it was unlike anything that I had heard, and I really enjoyed his songwriting and artistry. The three of us started playing, but Mark and I were songwriters, and he was always much more of a song craft kind of person and writer. He introduced me to a lot of music because he was also very much almost a musical historian even at the time when we were quite young. Working at the record store, we were sort of the premier underground emerging indie rock kind of store, so I heard a lot of that kind of stuff coming out in real time as it was coming out, just the Sub Pop singles and people were really excited to be listening at that cutting edge. It felt very fresh. So Mark Szabo and I started playing together and recording and jamming and having a pretty good time. The three of us ended up living together in a shared house, usually with a couple of other people, there’d usually be five people living in the house. So we had a space in the basement where we could play any time, which was really handy. So whenever we had an idea or an inclination, we could easily play together, which a lot of young bands at the time, and probably still, don’t really have that option if you have to rent a practice space and you’re bound by certain schedules. So for us, it was great to be able to just go downstairs and jam for hours and hours and hours, as long as we wanted and a lot of good stuff came out of that and we started recording ourselves. Mark had a Yamaha four-track, and we were both keen. I’d been recording myself on my own four-track. He’d been recording himself on his four-track. So we had a couple mics and we ended up creating some pretty decent recordings with a relatively inexpensive cassette four-track in our basement with a couple of mics and having a really good time. So I’m glad some of those recordings have survived.

Yeah, I listened to Kazué, and that album blew me away. I thought it was excellent.

Cool! I mean, we’re going back a-ways here, so, a lot of music doesn’t age, so it’s cool that you like that. That album is named after a friend of ours who was from Japan, and we lived in a different world then, we didn’t know many Japanese people. her name is Kazué. I have no idea where she is, but she hung out with us for a while and Max actually dated her for a while. When we were thinking about album titles, we all really liked her and we thought it would be kind of an honoring and also just an interesting, unusual album title.

I was going to ask, was Carl Newman from The New Pornographers in Good Horsey at some point?

No. Carl worked at the record store, Carl and Lark were pretty good friends and I know they did some musical projects together. Before The New Pornographers, Carl was in a band called Zumpano, and Jason Zumpano lived in this house; we were all roommates. So we were pretty close and at the time we partied a fair bit and Carl was definitely somebody who was part of that group of friends. Carl and Blane especially were always tight, from The New Pornographers, but I don’t think I ever really played with Carl. I always admired him and his musical scope and in a way he kind of came out of nowhere. He sang for Superconductor which was definitely a local favourite, seven-guitar band. Did you hear them?

Yeah, I’ve heard of them. Yeah.

Yeah. So there was all of this creative cross-pollination happening there for a while before the people who found a career in it found their focus and pursued that. People like Carl, like Dan Bejar (Destroyer), and my friend Scott Morgan who was also definitely friends with that group, and his project is Loscil. He went on make a career for himself doing ambient music on Kranky [U.S. label]. There’s probably more.

You mentioned Zumpano before and I wanted to ask about the Near Castlegar EP you guys made?

Right, yeah. That was an idea, just a kind of one-off thing that I started in on writing some little song-ish ideas and living with Jason, and [I] always admired his musicianship very much. And also our friend Mike Ledwidge, who was in Zumpano, who played keyboards and guitar; very talented. So they were kind enough to come in and lay down some drum and piano for me.

I also know that there was a bit of a Halifax connection with Zumpano because they had a record [“The Only Reason Under The Sun” 7”] that was put out on Sloan’s label, Murderecords, and a lot of my project is actually focusing on the Halifax scene. Were you aware of what was happening on the East Coast at that time?

That’s a really good question. A little bit. I didn’t have much affinity, nothing the opposite of that either. The couple of tours that I went on, we went south, doing Seattle, Bellingham, Portland, San Francisco. So didn’t really meet many of those East Coast bands. I didn’t know that Zumpano did a record for Murder. The record that I remember was on Sub Pop, but I might have just missed that. I moved out of Vancouver in ‘97 and pretty much left the whole thing behind."

The second part of a PDF of a long fold-out for an interview with Justice Schanfarber which reads: "I was also wondering, how do you think Vancouver compared to other scenes in Canada, or the scenes that you witnessed while touring in the States?

Obviously grunge broke in Seattle and became dominant, definitive for Seattle, and it certainly had influence. Vancouver was always a bit weird, maybe in a good way in retrospect. Olympia definitely had a sound, and these sounds and these scenes did revolve partly around labels [as] best I can tell. Sub Pop and K Records and then Kill Rock Stars. Vancouver to me always seemed less of a uniform identity musically, and that probably worked to the music scene’s credit. I was part of quite a small, insular music scene. When I started playing, indie rock had really caught in Vancouver. it did over just a couple of years. I mean, I moved over there in ‘88 and started playing and at that time, in Seattle, Green River was playing. Mudhoney had just come out of that; Soundgarden. But it hadn’t congealed yet. Vancouver didn’t really have a strong musical entity. There was Nardwuar and all of the related North Vancouver guys like The Smugglers, The Evaporators, hard garage rock. There was this stuff that was around Scratch Records; Superconductor and the Scratch label, and then there was Mint Records with Cub and that more Olympia-influenced pop. It would be really hard for me to point to any kind of cohesive musical identity for Vancouver. In a way, that’s a little different than some of the other towns like I’ve named.

I also want to ask you about Trackshun Industries. What made you want to run a record label?

I think it was being in control of the whole process more for fun. I was interested in creating my own recordings and then seeing the whole process through. Part of it was kind of control and part of it was just creative discovery. I guess another part of it was I had no indication that anybody else was going to put out my music. And it never even occurred to me to try and get other labels to do that. I grew out of that punk rock, do-it-yourself thing, so it didn’t even occur to me to do it otherwise. Plus, I wanted to learn the process. At the time, the last vinyl pressing plant in Canada had just shut down, and in fact, I remember seeing that record pressing equipment, very heavy, large equipment, listed for sale in some newspaper. The last Vancouver record pressing plant I believe was Praise Records, and they were a Christian organization, and I remember seeing their equipment for sale and thinking, “Jeez, that would be cool to have your own record pressing plant”. But that just wasn’t something that was going to be in reach for me. So it was that DIY thing and being able to see the whole process through, and those early records were all in limited editions, and I had this sense of materiality around vinyl especially. We started doing some CDs and that was always a little less interesting to me. I always really felt that affinity for the vinyl and the materiality of the vinyl and the limited edition. Everything was in a limited edition and that all appealed to me.

There are a lot of interesting bands that were on your label. Did you notice any major differences or similarities with the bands that you were releasing records of?

Well, there was quite a diversity. I always had real diverse musical tastes. I still do. And I never really thought of Trackshun as a business. It was always a pet project and I could do whatever I wanted to do. I could put out whatever music I wanted to put out, and sometimes that would be my friends. I felt so honored to put out that Circle C single. So, they were a band that I loved, and I happened to know the drummer, and those guys are a bit older and we didn’t really hang out, [but] with Pete a little bit. And then the Hump single, so that’s my cousin and childhood friend. And then those compilation singles were always real fun. Part of the thing was we do these handmade covers. I don’t know if you came across any of that stuff. So each one was different and I’d have these little parties at the house where we’d have a dozen people just making record covers in their own sort of fashion. Including Carl [laugh] I remember Carl doing quite a few in his very particular sense of humour. I felt really fortunate to have all these friends who are willing to do that, and it was a lot of fun and it’s pretty cool that those creative moments of a bunch of people making record covers, from silly, to actually incredibly artistic, in my living room, and the materiality of that continues. But those ended up in people’s hands, and I like the idea of being in people’s collections and people like you, who I’ve never met who (unintelligible) the next generation. That’s cool.

Yeah. I was actually going to ask about the relationship between visual designers and musicians, because I was looking through the vinyls that you guys made and they all felt really considered and playful in terms of the artwork. Were you the one taking the lead for the art direction, or would other members of bands give suggestions for the designs?

It would sort of be a case by case. For my music, it was me. For Good Horsey, it was largely me and Mark, and to some degree, Max, or usually me. And then for bands like the Twerdocleb and Beauty Pear and Circle C and so on, they would usually do their own unless they wanted help. I never had any objections. I don’t ever remember going, “Nope”. I would just let them run with their idea [and] figure out how to make it work. And then [laugh] I had a couple— Les Smolenski was an artist friend, I had a couple of great visual artist friends, and they would put together the parts of it that I couldn’t do. That Good Horsey album [Kazué] has artwork by our friend Shayne Ehman, which I think Mark probably still has the original [of] that. There were some other artists. The Beauty Pear album art was done by Jason McLean who was quite a successful visual artist for a time, enjoyed quite a rise of popularity there for a while. I don’t really know how he’s doing now. It was fun to work with him and whatever other artists, but the stuff that’s really dearest to me is the stuff that I was involved [with] in the music. Although I definitely enjoyed working with other artists and that was a fun part of it. It was a way to have fun and build something together, something to be excited about. But all those handmade sleeves, that was how the label started, and that was quite special to me."

Visuals of the Scene & Catherine Stockhausen

A look into photography and visual designs within the Halifax scene, along with my interview with East Coast band photographer Catherine Stockhausen who has been responsible for many iconic photographs and album covers.

The back of a white card with a messy black border with text that reads: "[...]covers, working for Cinnamon Toast Records, the Halifax On Music festival, and a venue called Birdland. He was also in Halifax bands of his own called Quahogs and Trike. His bright, eye-catching design style mixed expressive, personality-filled drawings with handwritten typography to create posters that put the pop explosion in Halifax Pop Explosion. There’s a certain lack of perfection yet a clear design vision that makes 90s designs so special to me and really exemplified the personalities of these bands.
Now, what would 90s designs be without some good photography? When it comes to East Coast band photography, Catherine Stockhau- sen was the go-to for photographing Halifax bands for promo shoots, covers, and live concert photos. Her work celebrated the bands of the scene not just musically, but really them as people. You can feel the personalities of the individual band members as well as their dynamics shine through in her photographs, and I think a lot of that has to do with established friendships with members of these bands. She was instrumental in putting the Halifax scene at the forefront of 90s Canrock, and so it only felt right to interview her and ask about her work during the era as well as working with specific bands such as Local Rabbits and Plumtree, and putting together Snap Crackling Pop, an exhibit in the 90s which showcased the visual design side of the 90s Halifax scene."

Read the interview here:

Lotus Galaxy, Lux, & a Look Through Calgary Cassettes

A peek into britpop-esque bands Lotus Galaxy and Lux who I discovered through the Calgary Cassette Preservation Society, a site dedicated to archiving cassettes and CDs of the era.