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“The Phone Call”

Tynesha Foreman has created a short fan video for “The Phone Call”, Owen Pallett's contribution to Adult Swim Singles 2015.

Hey! Listen!

In Conflict made the long list of nominees for the 2014 Polaris Music Prize. The short list of the final 10 will be announced on July 15.

Owen Pallett won the inaugural prize in 2006 for He Poos Clouds and was short listed in 2010 for Heartland.

Foxes in Fiction’s upcoming album Ontario Gothic has strings arranged by Owen Pallett on 4 of 7 tracks, with violins performed by Owen and cello performed by Ansel Isaac Cohen. Listen to “Shadow’s Song” on SoundCloud. Foxes in Fiction will open for Owen in the American tour in September.

Warren Hildebrand explained: “We met while we were both living in Toronto out of a mutual admiration for eachothers work and because Twitter, lol. When it was coming down to the final stages of recording my new album, I worked up the courage to ask him if he’d like to do the string arrangements for it and he kindly said yes.”

Owen’s latest pop song article appears on The Guardian and is about the catchiness of Mariah Carey’s new single “You Don’t Know What to Do”.

The Creators Project by Vice did a feature on Owen about looping, higher mixed vocals, and analog traditionalism.

Tsugi interviewed Owen about the video games he enjoys playing. The picture of Owen as Link was drawn by Marc Poitvin.

Caribou / Interviews

Caribou’s new album Our Love features Jessy Lanza and Owen Pallett and will be released on October 7. Listen to the song “Can’t Do Without You” on SoundCloud.

Owen gave two separate track-by-track guides to In Conflict for Q Magazine and SPIN.

He appeared on BBC Radio 6’s The Tom Robinson Show. The episode is available for streaming this week. Alpentine.com gets mentioned at 43:00!

Owen discussed some of his favourite albums with The Quietus:

  • Tori Amos – Little Earthquakes
  • Electrelane – Axes
  • Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)
  • Buffy Sainte-Marie – Running For The Drum
  • Dean Blunt – The Redeemer
  • The Blankket – Pegatively Nositive
  • Jean-Luc Ponty – Individual Choice
  • Diamanda Galás – Panoptikon
  • Throbbing Gristle – “Discipline”
  • Total Freedom – Boiler Room live sets
  • Karlheinz Stockhausen – Mikrophonie I & II
  • Galina Ustvolskaya – Preludes 1–12/Compositions 1–3/Octet/Concerto
  • Eyvind Kang – The Narrow Garden

He also provided BuzzFeed with music-theory explanations of six pop songs, including “The Riverbed”.

Radio Free Canuckistan interviewed Carl Wilson and Nico Muhly about Owen Pallett. The topics discussed include Owen’s emergence from the Torontopia scene, return with Les Mouches, covers, fanbase, online activity, lyrics, and compositions.

Stream In Conflict and live performances

In Conflict can be streamed on CBC and NPR this week leading up to the release.

nyctaper has produced yet another excellent recording of an Owen Pallett set, this time from Glasslands on May 13, 2014. It is a mix of the soundboard recording and an audience recording, and can be downloaded in MP3 or FLAC.

On The Talkhouse, Owen wrote about how his fanhood of Tori Amos changed through the years and his impression of her new album Unrepentant Geraldines.

Clickbait

In Conflict's release date has been pushed back to May 26 (May 27 in Canada and USA), though it will still be sold in the shows before release. As always, check the tour page for new tour dates and the song pages for continually updated minutiae about each song.

The music video for “Song for Five and Six” is a ballet dance choreographed by Robert Binet, whose recent ballet Unearth was scored by Owen. The dancers are students of Canada’s National Ballet School.

Our Shadows Slanting by the Lamps is a new website with a video by Brendan Reed (filmmaker and former member of Arcade Fire, Think About Life, Clues) and electronic music by Owen Pallett. It is published by Villa Villa Nola, an arts organization run by Brendan Reed. The quote in the thumbnail (“I played ‘The Swan.’ I remember the early twilight…”) turns out to be taken from a recently published novel titled Us Conductors by Sean Michaels.

Owen gave insightful interviews to Stereogum (the Oscar nomination made his family and friends more excited than himself), BrooklynVegan (amateur musicianship vs professional musicianship and coffee poop), Noisey (In Conflict is jarring and inconsistent in both its track sequencing and its artwork), Chart Attack (Owen calls out a Chart Attack writer for lying in calling out Arcade Fire for cultural appropriation on Haiti), Radio Free Canuckistan (having children as a homosexual is more of an administrative process), and Cult MTL (In Conflict attempts to capture a mental feeling like the films Persona, Melancholia, and Synecdoche, New York). Other, less insightful interviews are also listed on the interviews page. Common talking points in all the interviews Owen is giving include: some songs have autobiographical origins, but they are not “autobiographical” with the negative connotations of the word; Tori Amos and Lisa Germano being described as confessional or cathartic takes away from their intentions; the It Gets Better Project as inspiration; music theory is boring and the Slate articles were tongue in cheek; music journalism is regressing into clickbait; why living in Montreal is better for him than Toronto.

The Japanese magazine Con-Text did a highly detailed 16-page feature on Owen, including a history of his haircuts (pictured).

On the Kreative Kontrol podcast, Owen talks to Vish Khanna about “Dan Boeckner’s band Operators, the idea of parenthood and the truth, how kids are the darndest things, disassociation and themes within In Conflict, liminal spaces, sanity, change, and not feeling at home at home, going to Montreal, treating illness like a kind of gift, ‘musicians’ and ‘white people’ and music critic Ted Gioia and what prompted Pallett to write his pieces on pop music for Slate, music theory and populism, elevating social media posts and watching them turn into clickbait, his upcoming review of the new Tori Amos record for The Talkhouse, Owen’s opinionated streak and where it comes from, what Owen’s night at the Oscars was like, Joe Trapanese not Richard Trapunski, eating dinner with Randy Newman, Burt Bacharach, and John Williams, how meeting celebrities you’re not working with might be overrated, trying to write music while on the road, future plans, [and] the song ‘In Conflict’,” which plays at the end of the podcast.

On YouTube, Anthony Valenzuela uploaded a 40-minute video of almost the full set from Owen's show at the Fingerprints record store in Long Beach on May 3, 2010. It was a show with Thomas Gill and the setlist is:

  • That’s When the Audience Died
  • The Great Elsewhere
  • Lewis Takes Action
  • This Is the Dream of Win & Regine
  • Hey, Dad! → The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead
  • Oh Heartland, Up Yours!
  • The Butcher
  • Lewis Takes Off His Shirt (cuts off)

“Song for Five and Six” / Daphni / Slate

Daphni (Dan Snaith’s electronic dance alias) and Owen Pallett have collaborated on two instrumental tracks, “Julia” / “Tiberius”, which are streaming on SoundCloud. The single will be released on vinyl and digitally in “a week or so” on Dan Snaith’s label Jiaolong. Owen has previously covered his song “Odessa” (as Caribou).

Owen has written three Slate articles analyzing popular songs with music theory: “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry, “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk featuring Pharrell Williams, and “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. He goes into the motivation behind these articles on the forum.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Owen explains some In Conflict lyrics and reacts to criticism of Reflektor.