BookThug Launches Poetry-Record Series, Chaos & Star

One of our favorite Canadian small presses, Toronto's BookThug, is going into the record business! It all started with Broken Social Scene's Andrew Whiteman pitching the idea of a poetry-record series to his old friend, BookThug's Jay MillAr. "At this time, the hope is Chaos & Star (the name comes from an Alice Notley poem, whose work Whiteman adapted for AroarA's 2013 LP In the Pines) releases a couple of new records each year." The Globe and Mail's Mark Medley has more:

"Listening to music is a very different thing than listening to a literary reading, and talking with Andrew he had this really interesting idea to try and merge the two," MillAr says. "The questions he was asking – can we make literature pop? Can we make music literary? – those questions, and how that stuff would all work together, was really interesting to us, mostly because we love work that breaks down barriers between genres."

This month, BookThug announced Chaos & Star, a new record label (and offshoot of the press) that just released its first three seven-inch vinyl recordings, which pair notable Canadian musicians with BookThug authors: Whiteman teamed up with Jacob Wren to adapt the latter's 2016 novel Rich and Poor; Carlin Nicholson and Mike O'Brien of Toronto indie-rock quartet Zeus paired with Liz Worth to score her book No Work Finished Here, her poetric remix of Andy Warhol's A, A Novel; and the husband-and-wife team of John K. Samson and Christine Fellows joined forces with Jennifer LoveGrove to transform her most recent collection of poems, Beautiful Children With Pet Foxes, into music.

"We were immediately thrilled by the idea," says Samson, the former lead singer of Winnipeg-based rock quartet the Weakerthans. The project, he adds, "is something that sits at the cross-section of all we're interested in: language and music and the power of objects, especially in this age we live in where objects are so diminished in the culture – everything is digital or kind of ephemeral in some way."

Read more about the newest poetry-record biz in town.