mosaic.

Leisure Suit has always been a bit of an enigma. When the band dropped the texture-heavy Leisure Suit EP last April, there was a ton of hysteria surrounding the sound -- cyclic guitars, hazy pop stylings, and uncoventional composition. But nobody knew who or where it was coming from.

Thanks Tumblr, it's been a blast. But, in line with our continuous expansion, we're moving to a bigger space. Same URL, but no more dashboard. If you'd like to continue reading we suggest you continue to visit www.wearemosaic.ca, add us to your RSS feed, and sign up for our newsletter (available soon.)

We're transferring content as I type and couldn't be more excited to share our new vision with you all.

The Hill-side AW 2011

Phillips Brewing Company -- Vote for the 3rd annual Benefit Brew

Here's a delicious philanthropic venture: Phillips Brewing Company are now entering their final week of open submissions for their annual benefit brew -- the fundraiser in which Vancouver Island's favorite brewery works with a local charity to create a custom limited-run beverage, with all proceeds going to that select cause. The beneficiaries of the 200 case run will be chosen via online poll. The value of the winnings works out to about a $9,000, not to mention the ability to play brewmaster (don't worry, the actual recipe is still up to the experts.)

Remember these guys? Of course you do. Well, Victoria's favorite supergroup are back tonight, with the support of Woolworm and The Wicks, in what promises to be one of the best $5 shows of the summer.

Full disclosure: I've written for Brad once or twice. That said, it's hard to have completed a writing degree at UVic and not have written for Brad. For a young student, Brad's got a plethora of editorial experience and it shows: in his confidence, in his knowledge of the industry, in the rare seamlessness with which he deals with stories. But perhaps the most impressive thing about Brad is his DIY ethos, which is why, when I heard he was relaunching his independent music blog, From the Garage, I knew we had to have a formal chat.

1. How and when did you get into journalism? What made you gravitate toward music?

 Brad: Well, I guess it all started in the fifth grade when my friend introduced me to Blink 182. I had never really shown too much of an interest in music before then. It transformed my life completely - from being really into sports to being obsessed with music. 

Over the next couple years, I became really into bands. I would spend hours memorizing lyrics, Googling for background information, and scavenging the internet for crumbs of interesting tidbits. 

Eventually, I found myself in the tenth grade. I'd played in a few bands by that time and realized I wasn't naive enough to aspire for a life of rock-stardom (much to my dismay). I didn't really know what to do with my life. I had a blog I would post in every once in a while to share some of my teenage angst with the world, and one day someone left a comment saying that they were impressed with my writing, or something. I honestly can't really remember, but one thing led to another and I decided to try music writing. From there I started writing for YouthInk Magazine (a youth magazine in BC, written entirely by high-school students). That just got the ball rolling.

2. There’s that old Frank Zappa quote: “Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.” What are your thoughts about that?

B: I've always thought that quote was pretty funny. Mr. Zappa wasn't entirely off if you're looking at what he said literally. You go on YouTube these days, or even some of the main music journalism outlets on the internet, and you see these kids trying to interview their favourite bands. It's their first interview ever and they're just bombing it. They're really there to meet their favourite rock stars. The same thing translates through Q&A interviews that get posted on sites like AbsolutePunk.net (though it is a great media source for new music). The questions are so generic. There isn't a ton of fore-thought put in. In that respect, yeah, those people kinda suck, and they most likely can't write very well. But, eventually, some of those kids may end up being good music journalists because of it. It's all about practice. I used to suck - really bad. I don't like watching or reading a bunch of my early interviews or profiles. Now I just suck a lot less. It's very clichéd, but practice really does make perfect, especially when it comes to something like writing or interviewing. The key is being confident in your research, your questions, and yourself. Who wants to have a conversation with some kid who is sweating and can’t speak a sentence without stuttering in fear? It makes it awkward. For the "interviewing people who can't talk" part, your job as a journalist is to make them talk. Interviews can be painfully dull if the subject isn't into it. Everyone goes through it. It's your responsibility to come up with questions or discussion topics they actually want to chat about. I don't really have a comment for the last section of the quote, but I wouldn't be surprised it there was some truth to it. There’s a difference between talking about music and writing about it.

3. And what made you decide to create From the Garage—that’s a pretty bold move for a relatively young writer, especially while trying to juggle school and work?

B: FTG was inspired by what Brian Adler does with The Adlercast. He's a huge influence in my journalistic/media life.  He grew up in Richmond, BC. Worked at the now non-existent radio station at London High School. Graduated. Went to BCIT for their broadcasting program, was hated by most of the teacher, but still finished his degree at the top of his class. A couple years later, he was made the youngest member of the program's Advisory Board.  After graduating, he worked at a bunch of radio stations around Vancouver (The Fox, Rock 101, etc.), eventually moving to Victoria to help start up Extreme 107 and had a popular show with them.  Later, he decided he was bored of radio and moved onto television. He worked with MTV Canada to help start up their new channel. He was the first host of their flagship show, MTV Select.  Soon after that, he moved on to help start Razor, another new Canadian channel. He created a show called 969, in which he was the main host, doing band interviews and the like. Nowadays he's long past that. He started a couple production companies with a business partner - Insider Films (a music video production company who makes most of the videos for 604 Records artists, many Canadian bands, and even groups as big as Papa Roach) and On Demand Production Network (a corporate video production network, focusing on online video, training videos, and commercials).  Anyway, in the eleventh grade, I sent Brian an e-mail asking to go for coffee sometime. He accepted and quickly opened my eyes to the wonders and potential of the internet, explaining the growing concept of web 2.0 and viral marketing in media and the music industry. Flash forward a couple summers and a couple internships later, he gave me a spot as an intern with his company at Insider Films.  Anyway, after our little coffee session, he told me I should start my own podcast. I decided I wanted to do something similar to him, but with more content, and that's what I've been doing ever since. I just realized I didn't actually answer most of the question. It is kind of hard to juggle the site with school, work, and life. Some of my friends aren't too into journalism and filming. It can be hard to get them to come out and help with a shoot or an interview. I also sometimes have to put it before school, work, or my social life, but that's the kind of business it is. You make it work. It's just fun. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t do it. 

4. Being a small, independent publication can be difficult, especially when dealing with PR. Do you have any advice for young writers looking to land interviews or dealing with uncooperative, or inconsistent management?

  B: The first and most important thing is to have is an outlet, even if it's just a blog. You need to have somewhere to publish your work or the publicist/management won't give you the interview. That's the case 95% of the time. The other 5% is a fluke. 

If you're just getting into music journalism, start with small bands. They often don't have publicists. You may justend up planning with the band themselves. Eventually, as your site or blog grows a reputation and a catalogue of content, publicists and management see that and decide whether you will get an interview based on it. The best advice is to just produce a lot of material and only publish what you're proud of. Everything on there is a reflection of you. Be aware of it.

In terms of uncooperative or inconsistent management, be polite, but firm. Tell them exactly what you want for exactly when you want it. The least amount of e-mails they have to reply to the better. Also, don't take anything personally. Everything sounds more blunt in an e-mail. Lastly, a big thing is to not be afraid of bugging them. Finding the right level of nagging is pretty key. It just comes with time.

5. There are already tons of music blogs out there—my reader is completely swamped with them—and some are incredibly well established or have tons of funding behind them. What’s From the Garage going to bring to the table? How do you plan to compete with some of the giants, like Stereogum, Pitchfork, or Excite!?

B: I don't think FTG is like those other sites. Pitchfork, for example, is viewed in the music journalism world as a hipster site. The stigma is that hipsters find their new music there. If you're featured on it, the band automatically has 800 new indie fans in every city. That's just how it is. FromTheGarage doesn't really operate like that.

I picture FTG as a little bit of everything. At this point, and at this stage of the publication, we don't have an online community like they do, but readership is growing. We're currently relaunching the site with a bunch of new stuff. We won't just be focusing on photos, video interviews and concert footage. We now report news and produce written features. Additionally, all the things we did before are being given a face-lift. We have new equipment and are able to do new things with them to keep up with the rest of the video world. 

 I've always thought of video as the key to internet readership - and I hope to continue down that road - but you can't abandon the old ways of things. I still love print. I love reading music analysis and industry critiques and insights. All of it is important to understanding music and interacting with that industry. I hope to continue FTG as an outlet with a little bit of everything when it comes to genre and content topics. There is a lot of great underground and up-and-coming acts out there. It seems like most outlets either focus on the new or the old. Yeah, this new band is awesome, but why shouldn't we also talk about what that older band is doing? What makes one more important than the other? The same goes for other topics. Some people couldn't care less about the state of the music industry. Others spend hours a day catching up on P2P debates and record label lawsuits.   

What it comes down to is having contributors with different tastes, interests and specialties. As long as they love what they're doing, someone else will too.  

INTERSTLLR -- Love Sit Down

If there's one thing I love about being a music journalist -- besides getting to parse albums all day -- it's waking up to a great new album in my inbox. Sure, the $5 saved on a digital download isn't a huge perk, but being the first to learn about young artists half-way across the country is! Even better, when that artist find their way to the top of your itune playlist quite quickly. That's been my relationship with INTRSTLLR, this hazy synth-pop act out of Guelph, Ontario, so far. For a more indepth summary, I'll let forward you on to said review. But if you're lazy, in a rush, or unwilling to play into my self-promotion tactics, just browse the video to right. Then visit INTERSTLLR's Bandcamp for one of the more enjoyable 15-minutes of the day.

To say that Caleb Beyers and Hanahlie Beise, the founders of CASTE Projects, are designers isn’t entirely accurate. It's definitely true, but it fails to capture the full breadth of their work: they’ve shot films and photographs, created identities, curated and bound books, built objects and built spaces. Simply put, they're creators, and in that capacity they’ve shaped many of Victoria’s most beloved landmarks: Citizen Boutique, both the Chinatown and Atrium Habit locations, and the new Victory Barber and Brand.

Their latest project is a combined open studio workspace and design shop, running until August 31 at 196 Kingsway at 10th Ave in Vancouver and offering custom handmade homewares alongside a selection of products from other designers. Caleb and Hanahlie spoke to us about the wide breadth of their work and the methods and motivations behind it. 

Tell us a little about the people behind CASTE and how the company came to be.

Caleb Beyers: I started out as a freelancer. I never went to design school, I didn’t study business or graphics or anything, But I always really liked album covers and music videos and music and film.

After university I took up a job as a film teacher at Shawnigan Lake. While I was there I started freelancing, and it was a rough go at first. But I stuck with it, did random graphic design jobs for friends and people who’d found out about what I was doing, and then I met Hannah.

Hanahlie Beise: Just before I met Caleb, I had finished art school and moved to Victoria. A couple of months after we met we moved to New York together, and I was working as a photo assistant for a fashion blogger, the Sartorialist. I also worked for an architectural photographer doing lighting and other things. It wasn’t until we came back to Vancouver that we decided to work together and combine our skills.

It seems you can do just about anything: branding, film, photography, art shows, art books, graphic design, interior design. How the hell do you do it all?

H: Fake it 'til you make it. Just being really interested in learning and in new projects and in how something works.

C: Being interested is the biggest thing. If you’re interested in something, you want to know how it works, how it came into being, and you do your research and you talk to people. It’s also about not being afraid to put it out there that you can do anything, and to try. A lot of the stuff that we’ve made, especially the stuff that I made early on, is terrible.

[Aside] It’s true. [To me] Hannah just laughed at me, but it’s true. You learn, and you get better, and you figure things out. And hopefully, if you do a good job, it leads to more exciting, interesting and challenging projects.  It’s about learning from your mistakes, and trying to make it work.

There are several fundamental skills that translate into everything: an understanding of form, and how form relates to graphics or photography or space, knowing how to put something together. Also concept and story: trying to find a balance between the form of something and the story it’s trying to tell. If you can do that, then you can find your way through pretty much anything.

H: Also the clients that we have, they let us. They let us give them ideas that we weren’t specifically hired to do, and they just hand it over. They trust us. So another thing is establishing relationships with people where they trust that you know what looks good, and what other people will like, and that you know how to get things done.

You’re responsible for the aesthetic of some of Victoria’s most beloved spots, from Citizen to both Habit locations and Victory Barber and Brand. With places like the Atrium Habit and Victory, what’s the process in taking your vision from an idea to a reality?

C: It’s always a collaboration. Matty Conrad, the owner of Victory, had a really good idea of what he wanted to do. He knew the energy and atmosphere that he wanted to create. We went to junkyards together, looked through magazines together, just hung out and tried to get on the same page, get to know each other. I’m convinced that the more cooperation and understanding there is in a project, the better it turns out. The more in depth it can be, the more the whole team can understand what’s going on and what’s supposed to happen, the more confident you feel within that framework.

H: The starting point is knowing what atmosphere you want to create in a space. That was the case with Habit: how you want somebody to feel when they enter, how long you want them to stay, what you want their interaction with the space to be. People want to stay in Habit because of the warmth of the room, the wood, the openness. And both Habit and Victory had great architecture.

C: One of the most important things in designing a space is organization, figuring out where things go and how that relates to what you want to happen in the space. So with the Atrium Habit, we wanted a space that forces people to interact with one another through a kind of organization.

We felt it was really important for customers to walk into the space and see the faces of the other people there, and for people to enjoy the view out onto the street, and putting the chairs sideways against the window allowed people to look inside and out. It seems like a really simple thing, but we agonized over it. Once you make that decision, it makes a big difference for the feel of the space. That’s just one of many decisions in putting the whole space together.

What’s the motivation behind your pop up shop, and what can people expect to find there?

H: We’re trying to change gears with CASTE. We want to keep the branding but also move into product design, mainly homeware-based. So that’s the motivation, to start something else that we can work towards on our own.  We both love the branding stuff, but when the project is done it’s not ours anymore, it’s someone else’s. So with the products, we can continue working on these things, come out with new things, and it’s all ours. So we have a sofa and a floorlamp, a perpetual calendar, some rugs and needle-felted animals. Everything in the shop is wood, textiles or ceramics, and all handmade.

C: A friend of ours from Japan will have some of her family ceramics, and we’ll have some products from Red Flag Design, who started out making totes and duffel bags from recycled sail canvas. They still use reclaimed stuff, military fabrics, really hyper-functional and detail-focused.

H: And also Henderson Dry Goods, a one-woman shop who makes really beautiful clocks and other products, all laser cut wood.

C: We’ve also talked to Ryan Willms at Inventory, and they’ll have some magazines in the shop.

Any projects in the works you can tell us about?

C: We’re working on a restaurant with the team from Zambris and Pig, an unlikely combination. It’s going to be a burger joint in Cook Street Village, a diner-style place, no table service. The quality is going to be really great, they’re going to grind their beef every morning, do a really good job of it. So we’ve done their branding, and we’re doing the interior now. It’s going to be called Big Wheel Burger.

H: We’re also in the hunt for a house renovation project, our first residential project. And we’ve always got our own personal projects on the go, too. We’ve got a big store of ideas and things that are unrealized, just waiting for a few spare moments. 

The GQ Gentlemen's Fund

On this site, we try to keep things as local as possible. But every now and again, there's something worth branching out for.  

Four Horsemen x Barbarian - Rugby Crewneck

The Style Blogger -- Not So Traditional Tailoring with Nick Wooster

The Free/man Brand Store 

Today marks a day I've been waiting for for a long time, the opening of Free/man Brand's web-store!

The shop features a small collection of luxury goods --including a few exclusives-- many which we had the pleasure of examining up close at July's Gentlemen's Reserve.

I've been trying to get some damn adventure time in this summer, so last week I made the executive decision that the weekend was obvious and scooted off to Ucluelet for my days off. God rewards the impromptu with glorious sunshine and Long Beach surf, apparently. I'm still digging the sand out of my bathing suit. You know, between the seventeen iced coffees, beers, sunning, and reading reading reading. Maintaining a bombastic and harried schedule of summer keeps the sun alive, like clapping for fairies or dancing for rain. Leave work early for the sake of keeping the sky blue. I'm holding you accountable for cloud cover.

Hobo Magazine - Issue 13

The Heavy Mental Magazine

It's no mystery that we're magazine affectionados here at Mosaic. Bonus points if you're an online publication taking its queues from print media. So naturally, The Heavy Mental -- a new online magazine beneath editor Ed Davis -- has me giddy as can be.

From the site: 

The Heavy Mental seeks out inspirational people and engages them in an ongoing dialogue about daily life, work, the creative process and inspiration. Encouraging a collaborative mentality through in-depth interviews, fictional stories, photo essays and features, HM is on a quest to build an engaging site that will document, connect and inspire.

That's right, fiction! It's great to see a modern publication take queues from the journals of the past. And despite being in its first few months, the Heavy Mental's racked up an impressive list of contributions.

Four Horsemen Artist Series No. 1 - Chris Taylor

Four Horsemen has teamed up with Victoria photographer Chris Taylor, whose work has appeared in Inventory, Vice, and the New York Times, to create the first in their Artist Series line of shirts. Each lightweight, slim-fit tee will feature local artwork created exclusively for this project, and each purchase comes complete with a signed and numbered print of the image and drops a cut of the proceeds straight into the artist's pocket. This premiere tee features Taylor's piece Ice Cream Gothic.