Time once again for my usual roundup of my published work from the past month. In addition to the below, I would also like to point out that the latest print edition of MONTECRISTO Magazine is now out, and it includes an article I worte about the new Vancouver Opera season. Also the annual Stir Fall Arts Guide, a 100-page print magazine, has apparently hit the streets of Vancouver already, although I haven’t seen it yet. I have a few pieces in that as well.
Domestic life and video-game music shaped Basia Bulat’s most recent batch of songs
(Stir, September 11, 2026)
IF YOU LIKE the sound of Basia Bulat’s 2025 album Basia’s Palace, you have motherhood and 1990s video games to thank, at least in part.
The Montreal-based singer-songwriter has a style rooted in acoustic folk, but throughout a recording career that has spanned two decades, she has taken her share of sonic detours. On 2016’s Good Advice, for example, Bulat added a few dashes of indie rock and R&B to the mix, while for 2022’s The Garden, she teamed up with a string quartet to reinvent songs from her catalogue as chamber-pop mini-masterpieces.
Basia’s Palace was created in the basement of the house Bulat shares with her husband (fellow musician Andrew Woods) and their two children—a two-year-old and a newborn, at the time. That domestic reality heavily influenced the songs, and so did Dragon Warrior IV.
“I was playing a lot of video games, and I was listening to a lot of the music of the video games of my childhood,” says Bulat when Stir reaches her by phone at a rehearsal space where she’s preparing for her upcoming solo tour…
With its technically demanding production of Heist, the Arts Club aims to wow the audience
(Stir, September 14, 2026)
THE LIST OF TECHNICAL requirements for Heist reads more like specs for a Hollywood film production than for a stage play. According to the official Heist website, the show calls for “lasers, drones, sensors, fog, flashing lights, high-tech toys…on screen graphics, rapid-fire sound cues” in addition to aerial sequences in which one of the actors descends from on high in a harness.
Playwright Arun Lakra has acknowledged that Heist—about a team of criminals attempting to steal a highly prized diamond from the lair of an international jewel thief—draws much inspiration from big-screen capers like Ocean’s 11. It’s the play’s movie-like aesthetics that make staging it a daunting prospect for any theatre company.
“I’ve always tried to braid the design of a show really intricately with all the other storytelling, but I’ve got to say, this is next-level,” says Andrew Kushnir, who’s directing the Arts Club’s upcoming production of Heist. “The number of cues for this show—across lighting changes, sound changes, video changes, aerial changes, laser changes—it’s in the hundreds and hundreds. It’s at an operatic level. I’ve worked on shows that are intricate, but I’ve got to say that this is the most complex in terms of integrating all those design elements, and it kind of befits a heist story. Any heist movie has you wondering, ‘Can these people actually pull this off?’ And I’d say the play is no exception…”
In Job, The Cultch presents a psychological thriller for the age of social media
(Stir, September 22, 2026)
IN MAX WOLF FRIEDLICH’s drama Job, tech-company employee Jane has come to therapist Loyd’s office, seeking to get green-lit to return to work after an on-the-job meltdown has landed her on extended leave.
And that, dear reader, is about all we can tell you without the risk of revealing too much. Brian Markinson, who’s playing Loyd in The Cultch’s production of Job, is happy to talk about the show with Stir, but he’s also determined to keep the conversation spoiler-free.
“What’s great about the play is that it is open to interpretation, and an audience is going to bring their own story to it, and what they think the thing is ultimately about,” he says.
“We have to be intentionally vague about it,” says Markinson’s co-star, Elizabeth Barrett, who is also on the call. “Just by nature of it being a psychological thriller, it’s most satisfying for people if they come in not really knowing anything, I would say. In fact, I would suggest that to people.”
That might come across as a caution against reading the rest of this article, but we shall try to avoid revealing too much…
Xiu Xiu explores the sonic and visual worlds of David Lynch’s surrealist horror classic Eraserhead
(Stir, September 23, 2026)
YOU WOULD BE forgiven for assuming that Eraserhead Xiu Xiu is either a screening of David Lynch’s 1977 first feature with live accompaniment by Xiu Xiu or simply a concert in which the experimental rock band performs the film’s score.
Neither of those is the case, as Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart explains on a Zoom call from his studio in Berlin.
“We’re not playing to the film of Eraserhead,” he says. “We’re doing an interpretation of the aesthetic of Eraserhead, which is very, very distinct. And the way that we thought about it was, what if Eraserhead was 12 hours long instead of two hours long? What other sounds that would fit in that world could still happen? Our concert’s about 50 minutes long, and we made a 50-minute film to go along with it that has no footage from Eraserhead, but, again, if Eraserhead was 12 hours long, what else could possibly have been in Eraserhead?”
The fact is that a straightforward live performance of the surrealist body horror movie’s soundtrack would be a Sisyphean task. Apart from a few snippets of Fats Waller tunes played on a pipe organ and one undeniably haunting original number called “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)” (composed by Peter Ivers, with lyrics by Lynch), Eraserhead doesn’t feature much in the way of music. What Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet created for the film was more of a sonic world than it was a score…
Little Miss Higgins considers no town or venue to be too small for annual Harvest Tour
(Stir, September 24, 2026)
LITTLE MISS HIGGINS has dubbed an upcoming string of 19 concerts across Western Canada her second annual Harvest Tour. And you can take that name literally, not just because the tour takes place during harvest season.
The merch table at every show will feature some items that you won’t find anywhere else, including handmade soaps and even a little something the Winnipeg-based singer-songwriter cultivated with her own hands.
“I have started selling my garlic that I grow,” Higgins tells Stir during a telephone interview. “I’ve always loved growing garlic. If people have seen my show, they’ve probably heard me talk about my garden. It’s woven itself into some songs here and there. And one of the things I truly love is garlic, so I’ve been growing a porcelain hardneck variety called Music—of course, I had to.”
Higgins—known as Jolene to her family and the taxman—reveals that her garlic patch yielded about 1,000 bulbs this year. Not an industrial farming operation to be sure, but an ample crop for her purposes.
“We harvested it, hung it up to cure, and now I just have to trim it up and it’s ready to go,” she says.
If you’re getting the impression that this is someone who prefers to do things the old-fashioned way, the music she makes won’t dispel that notion…
Songwriter D.L. Forrest’s Fresh Eyes on Vancouver
(MONTECRISTO, September 25, 2026)
Daniel Forrest had not so much as set foot in Vancouver before deciding to pull up stakes in Philadelphia and set off for a new life more than 4,700 kilometres away, piloting a U-Haul from one coast to another and across the border.
“I’d never been here before,” the musician says. “It seemed like a cool place to be, another country to experience, meet new people. And my partner likes to bike and hike and camp and stuff, so it just seemed like a good place for us to be.”
Five years on, Forrest balances his academic pursuits—he’s a PhD candidate at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability—with a seemingly superhuman level of musical activity. Along with his membership in three bands, he also performs and records as a folk-rock-leaning singer-songwriter under the name D.L. Forrest.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Forrest is how keenly he has come to observe the place he initially knew nothing about. That perspective is woven through the songs of Buddie, the grunge-pop project he started before his big move…
Do You Love It? highlights
I continue to chip away on my new music blog, Do You Love It?, which I launched on Substack on July 16. I’m quite excited about this relatively new venture, and I hope you will be too. What I hope most of all, though, is that you will subscribe. Currently, all the content is available for everyone, but in the near future I will be posting some exclusive subscriber-only content.
Here’s what I posted in September.
From the Archives: Tame Impala (2011-12)
I interviewed Kevin Parker at a pivotal time in his musical evolution
From the Archives: The Killers (2012 & 2018)
Whatever happened to the SKOOKUM Festival, anyway?
From the Archives: José González (2015)
The Swedish singer-songwriter talks about his seven-year solo hiatus and his “mushy” aesthetic
Live Shots: The Zaxons, Johnny De Courcy, and The Stakes Are Us
At LanaLou’s on September 20 (photo of Johnny De Courcy is shown abaove)
My First Listen: M83, I Wrote You a Letter
A track-by-track reaction to the long-running French project’s latest album
Leave a Reply