Studio A Audio Recording & Production

Source

Kim and Kim Titus, founders of the Thumbs Up Foundation, pose or a picture during their foundations Mental Health Awareness concert at the Woodside Golf Course in Airdrie on Saturday, June 10, 2017. The concert featured performance by Sean McCann and Kara Golemba.

The Thumbs Up Foundation and SLAM are hosting a benefit concert in support of Mental Health and Addiction Awareness Month in Airdrie.

“[Mental Health Month] is important because [mental health challenges] are a growing epidemic across the country,” said Kim Titus, a co-founder of the Thumbs Up Foundation. Titus started the foundation in 2015 after her son, Jesse Braden Titus, took his life.

“I believe we are exactly the right community to lead the way and show how to change this,” said Titus.

City council unanimously declared June Mental Health and Addiction Awareness Month in their May 15 meeting after a request of Titus.

Titus says she believes that there are great mental health programs available in Airdrie, but there is always room for improvement.

“We need to get together more collaboratively and discuss where the gaps are, and knit together the gaps between [mental health] organizations.”

The foundation has been meeting with Airdrie city council in order to work on creating a mental health survey for the city, so these issues can be better addressed.

“This is bigger then all of us”, said Titus.

Her son loved music and his family has always wanted to host a music event to honour his legacy.

“Music and mental health are the most natural pairings,” said Titus.

The concert is part of the Thumbs Up Foundations movement to change the energy in the city, and raise awareness for mental health during June.

“We believe strongly in the healing power of music. [The concert] is the perfect match,” said Steve Gillis, Marketing Director for SLAM (Supporting Local Area Musicians).

Sean McCann, from the band Great Big Sea, and guest artist Kara Golemba will be rocking out for mental health on June 10 at the Woodside Golf Course. Doors open at 7:00 pm.

“We believe music and mental health go hand in hand.

Music heals so the concert was a no brainer,” said Gillis.

The Thumbs Up Foundation has been pivotal in helping to bring the musical event to Airdrie.

“[The Titus’s] are amazing people and they are doing amazing work.

“It’s a massive accomplishment for everyone,” said Gillis.

The concert has been in the works for several months, and come rain, wind or hail the show will go on.

The event was original scheduled to take place at Town and Country in Airdrie, but a severe weather left the venue damaged.

But the show must go on. The damage to Town and Country led to the concert moving to the Woodside Golf Course.

The last minute venue change may have been unexpected but the organizations are still hoping to see the community come out for the show and to support mental health.

The foundations will be taking donations at the door.

Airdrie Mayor Peter Brown will serve as the master of ceremonies for the event.

“[Mental health] is something people don’t want to talk about. It’s not comfortable for people,” said Brown.

“It affect’s all of our lives.”

Brown said he hopes the decision to declare June Mental Health and Addiction Awareness Month will help bring awareness and eliminate people’s fear of asking for help.

The month will help to promote counselling sources in Airdrie and demonstrate to individuals that there are resources out there that can help out those in needs.

Brown says he compares mental health to body health.

If a person is injured or feels unwell they just go to a doctor. Yet, if they are struggling with their self worth and don’t feel well about themselves they don’t talk to anyone. Instead they try to learn to live with it.

“You don’t need to learn to live with it you can over come it.”

Source

The return of Guns N’ Roses and Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow underlines how logos and audience loyalty are more crucial to a group’s success than who is on stage

This weekend, two of the biggest names in hard rock return to London: Guns N’ Roses play two nights at the London Stadium, while Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow headline the Stone Free festival at the O2 Arena. But, while fans are excited about the shows, there is a sense that this bonanza of riffs will be less like watching bands perform and more like engaging with well established rock brands. Rainbow, for example, will feature none of the many members who were in the band during the group’s first turn around the block in the 70s and 80s. Guns N’ Roses’ shows, billed as a reunion of the band who reinvigorated metal 30 years ago, are no such thing. It’s no longer Axl Rose plus hired hands; it’s Axl Rose plus Slash plus Duff McKagan plus hired hands. In particular, there’s no Izzy Stradlin, viewed by many fans as just as important as Rose and Slash to the dynamic of the original lineup.

I’m not complaining. With hard rock it rarely matters who’s in the band as long as the brand is healthy. If the songs are played well, if the performances are dynamic, if the crowd are behind the group, it can be one original member plus five people recruited from Britain’s Got Talent and still be terrific. That’s a lesson I learned last summer, when after writing here that AC/DC should call it a day following the enforced departures of Malcolm Young and Brian Johnson, I saw the band with Axl Rose fronting them – and thought they were spectacular. Perhaps even better than they had been with Johnson.

There are plenty of other examples of bands who’ve rotated members with alacrity: Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy. Even Def Leppard, who were adamant they couldn’t carry on without Rick Allen after the drummer lost an arm, have spent the past 30 years with different guitarists.

Metal and hard rock are unusually good at subsuming band to brand. It’s hard, for example, to imagine Coldplay still being Coldplay if it was Will Champion and Guy Berryman plus two. Or U2, even with Bono in place, if there were three rotating replacements behind him. Kraftwerk have managed it – Ralf Hutter is the only member predating 1990 – largely because they had dispensed with the notion of the individual long before the other members of the classic quartet began to depart. They were Die Mensch-Maschine back in 1978. Sugababes managed the feat of replacing all their original members, though few view that final lineup with much affection.

Why, though, are hard rock and metal fans so willing to embrace the brand over its human components? I suspect it is tied in to the intense tribal loyalty and sense of us-against-them that heavy rock engenders. That’s the loyalty that still leads people, 40 or so years after the habit first became commonplace, to sew band patches all over their denim.

Those patches on the jackets contain another crucial element of the brand identity: the logos. More than any other style of music, metal celebrates the logo. It’s noticeable that, since reviving Rainbow, Ritchie Blackmore has used none of the nondescript typography of most Rainbow records, choosing instead the memorable gothic script that featured on only three albums but which most fans think of as the classic Rainbow logo from the classic Rainbow lineup.

However, there’s a third element to all of this. You’ll often hear heavy bands talking about their bond with their audience, about everyone being family, and how they are a people’s band. It doesn’t matter whether or not the bands themselves believe that; what’s important is that the fans believe it. A great rock gig is as much about the communion of the fans, the sense of gathering and unity, as it is about what’s happening on stage. That’s why the metal festival at Donington Park in Leicestershire, under whatever name it operates, is considered some sort of sacred pilgrimage by bands and fans.

Once the band is no more important than its fans, it’s a short step to realising that whoever happens to be on stage playing an instrument is not crucial to the success of the group. That the brand is bigger than the band. All of which is why I’m not that fussed who exactly I’ll be watching – I hope – on Friday and Saturday. They will still be Guns N’ Roses and Rainbow, no matter what the lineups are.

Source

Calgary radio station WILD 95.3 and Alberta Music on Sunday announced this year’s Top 12 Artists for Project WILD. A professional development program designed to educate, promote, develop and launch the careers of some of Alberta’s up and coming country and roots artists, the Top 12 announcement kicks off the Project’s second year.

The 2017 Project WILD Top 12 artists, in alphabetical order, are:

Andrea Nixon (Edmonton)

Brad Saunders (Calgary)

Charlie James (Calgary)

Dustin Farr (Olds)

Karac Hendriks (Sherwood Park)

Lucas Chaisson (Edmonton)

Lucette (Edmonton)

Mark Times (Parkland County)

Mikaila Cooper (Calgary)

Nice Horse (Calgary)

Ryan Langlois (Red Deer)

Tanya Ryan (Okotoks)

Each of the Top 12 Artists will make their debut with Project WILD at Knoxvilles on Sunday, June 25, completing orientation and then performing for the public to get their first live listen, in a series of showcase events running through to the November 2017 finale. For more information on this show, check out ProjectWILDcountry.com.

Administered by Alberta Music and funded through country radio station WILD 95.3, Project WILD, is part of a seven year, $4.9 million program, designed to kick-start the international music careers of three emerging Alberta artists annually, and give a boost to all Top 12 finalists selected by industry jury. The Jim Pattison Broadcast Group is backing the project through CRTC Canadian Content Development programming.

This is the second year for Project WILD, last year’s inaugural winners were The Dungarees (1st place), Sykamore (2nd place), and Ken Stead (3rd place). For the two years prior to the last, the program was known as the PEAK Performance Project, which also ran as a program in BC for seven years. Project WILD will run in Alberta for the next three years.

Since 2011, The Uptown West Neighbourhood has hosted the Grand Porch Party on the second Sunday of June. Nearly thirty local musicians take post on house porches between Alexandra Ave. and  Dawson St. (north and south boundary) and  Avondale Ave. and Short St. (west and east boundary), for an afternoon of connecting with others, enjoying the warm weather and appreciating the immense musical talent that resides in the Waterloo Region.

Continue reading “2017 Grand Porch Party – June 11th” »

by Neil McDonald Waterloo Region Record

Anvil, consisting of band members Chris Robertson, Steve (Lips) Kudlow and Robb Reiner, will play the Starlight in Waterloo June 1.

Not too long ago, Canadian metal legends Anvil may have seemed like a band out of time.

The group’s official website, for example, is a fan-run page that hearkens back to the days of the internet’s infancy, and heavy metal’s mainstream heyday is an increasingly distant memory.

In 2009, the documentary, “Anvil: The Story of Anvil,” depicted the band — co-founded by high school buddies Steve (Lips) Kudlow (guitar/vocals) and Robb Reiner (drums) in 1977 — as something of a real-life Spinal Tap, toiling in the obscurity of small bar gigs and mishap-laden European tours while still working menial day jobs, all while chasing an elusive major label deal decades into a career that had seemingly peaked in the early ’80s with the group’s second album, “Metal on Metal.”

Continue reading “Anvil stays true to heavy metal” »