A snippet of the klezmer band that played at Luisa and Olle’s 10th anniversary party. They were very good and very spirited.

I stopped for a snack at Malmö C (the central train station in the city) last night. There’s a piano in the waiting room and a group of young people were clustered around it picking out tunes, the last of which was the opening refrain from Celine Dion’s Titanic theme. Or was it?

I have been an unremitting fan of  Jane Siberry since the very beginning. She released a new album, Ulysses’ Purse, earlier this year, a release that, despite my unremitting fandom, I did not discover until earlier this week.

My favourite track is Five & Dime; it is hard not to love a song with this line:

But lead her to a ledger of a hopeless nightmarish accounting mess

As is usual and right with Jane Siberry, you can both buy the album and download its various components freely, as your needs and abilities dictate. You can also simply send her money via Paypal, which is the easiest way to complete a transaction: no shopping carts or registrations required.

Whatever way you choose to confront the album, I recommend you do so: it’s complicated and lovely and rich and melodic and confusing with a dizzying arrange of talented collaborators, including David Ramsden, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O’Hara, and kd lang.

It’s 24ºC outside as I write, the warmest it’s been all year. And so it’s a good time to revisit this CBC Mainstreet piece I recorded a decade ago in 2004 about iced tea many years ago with host Matthew Rainnie.

It may be my favourite piece of radio of all those I’ve ever produced, and it’s clear that I was channeling both Ann Thurlow and the late, great Marg Meikle, my radio mentors.

Matthew was, and remains, one of the easiest people to do a back-and-forth on the radio with: he’s inveterately curious and has an appreciation for the quirk. I had so much fun doing the research for this piece.

So pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea, sweetened or not as your preference dictates, and have a listen…

(In September of 2004 I went on to do the piece in radio syndication, deliverying a variation of what I did with Matt with 12 CBC radio hosts across the country in the course of a single afternoon; it was both facsinating and mind-numbing).

As I was rolling across Nova Scotia on the weekend I was listening to a late June episode of Radiolab.

Buried deep inside that episodette you’ll find a song by the Brooklyn band called Lucius. I liked what I heard and so when I got back to Charlottetown I fired up the Rdio and looked them up:

I pressed “play” and out of my headphones came this.

Was this the same band?

The band that Seventeen magazine called “two indie darlings”?

Well, no.

It seems there are two bands called Lucius: the indie darlings from Brooklyn and the Norrköping, Sweden band in the video above, a band that plays, it is said, “today’s best aggressive metal.”

Perhaps music needs to adopt the same conventions as acting and have Professional Name Protection for bands? This would prevent those looking for careful, gentle music from finding violent attack music (and vice versa).

If you’re still in shock from having pressed play on the Swedish aggressive metal, here’s an antidote.

If you’re in the radio game – and it’s something of a family business for we Rukavinas – then This American Life is the bigs. Which makes it both unfortunate and somewhat delightful that there was a Rukavina appearance in this week’s episode. Unfortunate because it’s a not-directly-related-that-we-know-of Rukavina and because said Rukavina is pretending to put his (or maybe his wife’s) finger through a wood splitter, and delightful because, well, it’s This American Life and it’s someone named Rukavina. Gotta start somewhere.

My grandmother, born Natalia Potjahailo and known after she was married as Nettie Rukavina, was born in Fort William, Ontario in 1915. As a child she played in a mandolin orchestra; here she is, sitting beside her cousin Stella at the left end of the first row, in an undated photo from that time:

Many years later, at 80 years old, she was still playing the mandolin. In 1995 my brothers and I gave our parents a large glass jar containing sand from the four corner of the country we then called home (our sand came from Victoria, PEI, gathered on the car right off the Island toward Ontario). My brother Steve captured the preparation and unveiling of that present in video, and he used a duet of my father on guitar and my grandmother on mandolin as the soundtrack

All week long students from the Holland College School of Performing Arts have been rehearsing for in the theatre next to the Reinventorium, readying for this weekend’s showcase event Love and the Lack Thereof (April 20th & 21st, 7:30 p.m., tickets $14.00 general, $12.00 students, at the box office or online).

Here’s what they sound like through the (thin) wall that separates our office from the theatre.

I’ve heard so many bits of the show, puntucated by starts and stops and stage directions, that I feel compelled to attend a performance this weekend. Maybe you should too?

Every Tuesday morning Michael Pendergast, aka “The Music Man,” has a session for young kids in the theatre here at The Guild, right next to our office. The walls are thin here, and so this means that every Tuesday morning we are treated to the sounds of happy children and accordion music. You might think this would be annoying and would interfere with being in the zone. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. I think Jane Jacobs would be happy.

I sat down in the Charlottetown studios of CBC Radio One this afternoon with Matt Rainnie to chat about our June 17 Pecha Kucha in New Glasgow and the piece aired this afternoon in the final half-hour of the program.

I’ve attached the audio of the interview to this post; if you want to watch the entire talk I gave at the 2006 Pecha Kucha in Copenhagen, it’s right here. You can also watch the Pecha Kucha talk on “Small” that Guy Dickinson – “the man on the balcony” – gave as part of the same session.

And remember, if you want to attend, just RSVP right here.