freelance writer @MusicworksMag @exclaimdotca @TheGrindTO
co-founder @newfeelingcoop
managing director @LongWinterTO
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Articles by Tom Beedham
LAL Find Harmony in the Wake of Romantic Dissolution on ‘Practice of Love’
For three decades, the downtempo electronic project known as LAL has continuously evolved, experimenting with new sounds and shapeshifting ensembles. Known for its evocative atmospheres, the project’s only constants were singer Rosina Kazi, producer Nicholas Murray and the romantic relationship between them. But in 2023, while recording their eighth studio album, Spectacular, Kazi and Murray consciously uncoupled, hoping to grow; to be better to each other and their music. Easier said than done.
Tricky Gives New Voice to His Apparitions on 'Different When It's Silent'
"Make me want to die." Rolling over the plodding bass guitar dirge that opens Tricky's 15th studio album like fog off a pond, the first line on Different When It's Silent belongs to a new boy from Bristol — or rather, it's voiced by one. As his stage name suggests, authorship has always been deeply muddied in Tricky's world.
Meet the Gen Z Youth Leading Toronto’s Shoegaze Revival
“I remember my first time listening to shoegaze and realizing it was shoegaze,” Sheeka Martin recalls. “I kept thinking, why do I feel so nostalgic for a time I wasn’t a part of?” Martin is an organizer with the Loveless Collective — a youth-led, DIY music and arts organization based in Toronto (no relation to The Loveless Cafe).
BIG|BRAVE's 'in grief or in hope' Is a Collective Reckoning
Since 2012, BIG|BRAVE's Mathieu Ball and Robin Wattie have consistently found a warm, safe place in the house of distortion. Treating signal and noise less as extremes to be reconciled than as mutual materials to be shaped, felt and inhabited, on their 10th album, in grief or in hope, that immersion feels more tangible than ever before.
Boards of Canada's Catalogue Ranked from Worst to Best
Growing up in rural Scotland, brothers Michael and Marcus Eoin Sandison experienced a formative stoke of serendipity when their father took on a construction gig working on the Saddledome and the family relocated to Calgary at the end of the '70s.
Cola’s New Album Offers Split Visions of a World Beyond Capitalism
“For the last bunch of years, I’ve been just always on the move,” Evan Cartwright says. The drummer for the post-punk trio Cola, Cartwright is in Victoria, B.C., for his sister’s wedding when he joins his bandmates for a video call with The Grind. Over the last three years, he’s lived mainly between Toronto and New York, where he’s studying composition.
How Toronto’s Concert Venue Landscape Changed in 2025
Toronto’s live music landscape is a hotly contested battlefield. Over the past 12 months, we saw the rise of a mega-stadium, new smaller venues opening, landlords doing landlord things, monopoly money moved around, beloved haunts closed and spaces rebranded. The Grind kept track of all the moving pieces, detailed below. In what was easily the GTA’s biggest music story of the year, Rogers Stadium finally opened its turnstiles on the former site of Downsview Airport this June.
Emma Goldman: The Dispossessed
With her 1974 novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin crafted a radical vision of anarchist futures and existential exile. Utopian sci-fi, the text follows a physicist named Shevek who departs an anarchist moon in pursuit of interterrestrial collectivism. The brutal irony of collective alienation under hegemonic oppression is the driving provocation of Vancouver screamo punk band Emma Goldman’s debut full length.
21st Century Co-op Ecologies
Cooperatives have always been more than a business model, they’re an experiment in how we might live, work, and create differently together. From early credit unions and newswires to listener-owned radio, the cooperative movement in so-called Canada has long offered material alternatives to top-down control and profit-first logics.
Carney’s Budget (Nearly) Maintains Meagre Status Quo for the Arts
When Mark Carney’s government unveiled its austerity budget in early November, it was met with mixed reception from the cultural sector.
Canadian Artists Brace for Austerity: ‘Cuts Will Hurt Everyone’
Arts organizations across Canada are scrambling to secure future public funding after Prime Minister Mark Carney hinted the 2026 federal budget could deliver a critical blow to arts and culture programs.
SoundList is Dead. Long Live Earlobe
Toronto’s music community started 2025 with a loss. For a quarter-century, musicians, promoters and audiences had turned to the weekly email digest SoundList for local event listings, but it was falling apart. Beleaguered by technical issues, SoundList dispatches slowed from weekly to monthly updates in fall 2024. “There were coding errors with the submission platform and the server wouldn’t allow new subscriptions [or] unsubscriptions,” says former SoundList editor Fahmid Nibesh.
Nightlife braces for Bill 10
Landlords for clubs and music venues are worried that a new Ontario law would slap them with fines or jail time for any drug activity that happens in their venues. Bill 10, the Protect Ontario Through Safer Streets and Stronger Communities Act, has sparked concern from many groups, including supportive housing landlords who rent to tenants struggling with addictions. The bill would hold landlords responsible if their properties are used for producing or trafficking drugs.
Editor's Note - Issue 23: Nightlife
By: Tom Beedham | Art by: Michael Rancic What is nightlife? The word’s inherent contradictions are rich in meaning. It implies a distinction from the working day yet operates as an extension and a foil for it. Nightlife stokes imaginations and offers reprieve from the tedium of the daytime grind, facilitating the extracurricular connections that make life feel like living. Under the imperial rule of techno-feudal capitalism, it is a liberatory escape hatch, but also a target of ideological capture.
Rae Spoon: Looking for “Friends in Low Places”
By: Tom Beedham | Photo by: Wynne Neilly, Art by: Tom Beedham “I’m actually struck very hard by the Stampede and how ‘unhinged’ it is. All these posters and every T-shirt on Marketplace — it’s just, ‘Let’s get unhinged!’” Rae Spoon is speaking over the phone from their former hometown Calgary. Connecting with New Feeling in the weeks preceding the launch of the annual Stampede, they’re beguiled by a new provincialism.
Ten Years of Halocline Trance
By: Tom Beedham | Image courtesy of: David Psutka Ten years ago in a plane somewhere between Toronto and the U.K., David Psutka’s thoughts plunged beneath the Atlantic. “I would always look out the window and think about how peaceful it would be 20 metres beneath the surface of the water in the Atlantic Ocean,” Psutka explains. He was thinking about a phenomenon called a halocline, a hazy layer in the ocean separating fresher water from saltier water below.
Ten Years of Halocline Trance
Ten years ago in a plane somewhere between Toronto and the U.K., David Psutka’s thoughts plunged beneath the Atlantic. “I would always look out the window and think about how peaceful it would be 20 metres beneath the surface of the water in the Atlantic Ocean,” Psutka tells The Grind. He was thinking about a phenomenon called a halocline, a hazy layer in the ocean separating fresher water from saltier water below. Psutka was making regular commutes between Pearson and Heathrow at the time.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
By: Tom Beedham | Art by: Michael Rancic Godspeed You! Black Emperor weren’t supposed to spend the U.S. presidential election night at Drake’s nightclub in the Beaches, but here we are. Originally slated for the Concert Hall, the Toronto stop of their Liberation Autumn of ‘24 tour was only relocated to History after ticket sales prompted promoters to source a bigger room for the booking. And yet, it’s difficult to imagine a more appropriately named venue for tonight’s show.
Madonna's Celebration Tour Took Toronto Through the Decades and Beyond Scotiabank Arena, January 11
Published Jan 12, 2024 Holding out an open palm bearing a tattooed Om symbol, Madonna emerged onstage for the first of two nights in Toronto with an invitation. Promising listeners a journey through four decades of hits and spectacle, Madonna's Celebration Tour offered a rare moment of reflection and introspection from an artist and figure who inarguably fashioned a reputation as one of pop culture's most defiantly ambitious modernizers.
Ontario's Cloud 9 Festival Offers A Glimpse Of A Sustainable Future
By Tom Beedham | Photos by Brad Ball For the second year in a row, this past September, Eastern Ontario’s Cloud 9 festival saw some 400 attendees converge on No. 9 Gardens for a weekend of electronic dance music, camping, and ecological dreaming. When I learned of the festival and its promise of “an immersive and multi-sensory celebration of a sustainable future” on a 40-acre sustainability centre in Rideau Lakes, I was all in.
Austra Finds Her "Dream Project" in Rewriting Tchaikovsky
With 'Swan Song,' Katie Stelmanis subverts the orchestral music of her youth Published Sep 29, 2023 Katie Stelmanis was in a rut. In May 2020, the Toronto musician also known by her middle name, Austra, delivered her fourth studio album, HiRUDiN, to a fraught listening landscape. Arriving at the height of pandemic uncertainty with no touring to be had, save for the odd belated show, she never got a chance to bring the record to life, precipitating doubts about future prospects of the project.
Chamber Music
By: Tom Beedham | Art by: Tom Beedham Early one Sunday evening in February 2019, strange sounds leaked out from the council chambers at Toronto City Hall. Inside, a score artists stationed between empty councillor desks drew sustained tones out of everything from traditional concert instruments like trombones and electric guitars, to ad hoc implements like street pylons.
myst milano. Forges Through the Fakery on 'Beyond the Uncanny Valley' | Exclaim!
Published Aug 23, 2023 9 "I offer Beyond the Uncanny Valley as a working anthology of Black electronic music across generational, geographical and genre lines," Toronto rapper/producer myst milano. said about their follow up to 2021's Shapeshyfter in a press release.
How Trickle Down Music is helping artists punch upstream
By Tom Beedham | Art by: Tom Beedham “We’re surrounded by programs and grant systems — just systems in general in the music industry — that seem to always have the artist as the afterthought and never the main crux of new initiatives. It never seems to trickle down to the artists themselves.” Gesturing to trickle-down economics, Calgary guitarist and arts administrator Shawn Petsche paints a troubling picture of the place musicians find themselves in.
aja monet's 'when the poems do what they do' Is a Roadmap to Somewhere Greater | Exclaim!
Published Jun 05, 2023 8 In a 2017 interview with gal-dem, aja monet said, "I don't share things for you to understand or feel me, I'm sharing something so that we can change the conditions we are living in and we can do something about it." A surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer who won the 2019 Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida, monet's debut record is framed in similar terms of action, a title like when the poems do...
Devours' Glittering 'Homecoming Queen' Welcomes You Into Its Complicated Alienation
Published May 08, 2023 8 Homecoming isn't for everyone. A heavily ritualized institutional ceremony loaded with the bombast and myth-building of parades and faux-military spectacle, typically seized as an opportunity to funnel investment from nostalgic alumni and sponsors eager for a captive audience — it makes sense the phenomenon also brings some detraction.
Harrison Pushes Beyond the Material World on 'Birds, Bees, the Clouds & the Trees' | Exclaim!
Published Apr 27, 2023 8 Harrison's third full length introduces itself with a cloud of vinyl crackle and hiss — a language anyone who's dropped the needle on the outer rim of a record will be familiar with — before the twinkling keys and brushed drums that propel "Daydreamin" kick in. Like its title, there's a crisp, spring-welcoming warmth to the technicolour tones that permeate Birds, Bees, the Clouds & the Trees.
Caroline Polachek Welcomed Toronto to Her Island Queen Elizabeth Theatre, April 17 | Exclaim!
Published Apr 18, 2023 Shoulders back and head straight, Caroline Polachek strode across the volcanic stage set at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre like it was a runway, hit her mark, and greeted a sold out crowd with an invitation and a spell: "Welcome to my island / Hope you like me, you ain't leavin'." Self-described as a "walk of shame" and an expression of "ego at its core," "Welcome to My Island" lays down some important rules for Desire, I Want to Turn into You.
Hipgnosis, Song Acquisition, And The Elephant In The Room
By: Tom Beedham | Art by: Tom Beedham On January 24, Justin Bieber joined a sea of music legends surrendering their copyrights, unloading his entire music catalogue to U.K. investment manager Hipgnosis Song Management for a cool $200 million USD.
J3M looks for love across the universe with ‘AFRONAUT’ — Long Winter
Stationing himself at the control board of various keyboard instruments for his new solo project J3M, and a debut EP, AFRONAUT, Jemuel Roberts journeys through space and time to find his bearings in the present. Taking listeners on a galaxy quest through cosmic nu-disco, R&B, soul, and synth pop soundscapes, the record is a concept EP that tells the love story of the titular AFRONAUT travelling across the universe in search of his alien lover, getting rejected and learning to let go.
After The Gold Rush: Wonderhorse Reviewed
Long enduring turn-of-the-20th-century associations assigned from the dislocation of the Klondike Gold Rush and Jack London's brand of American literary naturalism, to many outsiders, the Yukon is a hard place that bends only to climate and the whims of biological and socioeconomic determinism.
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ layers up — Long Winter
“Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions,” Stevie Nicks sings in the second verse of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Partially refracting the song’s opening, the line marks a perspective shift from second-person commentary to first-person meditation as Nicks registers relational hurt on a more psychedelic and personal level, weighing possible futures.
Vasuki Shanmuganathan: dream warrior — Long Winter
As generative work, Shanmuganathan’s art revalues storytelling and consent, especially in the community she’s immersed in. Herself a refugee of the Sri Lankan Civil War spanning 1983 to 2009 and the Sinhalese government’s attempted genocide of Tamils, she’s witnessed firsthand the affects of weaponized surveillance.
Malik McKoy: from architecture dropout to city builder — Long Winter
Malik McKoy is building a city, but he’s still reinforcing his foundations. A multimedia artist with a penchant for colliding the surreal and mundane, McKoy’s original career path had him enrolled at Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson) to study architecture, but he soon found his program’s emphasis on codes and standards stifling and promptly dropped out.
Unpaving paradise: Shonee brings biophilia to the big city — Long Winter
“I lived basically inside of a jungle.” Speaking over the phone from her home in Montreal, Shonee recalls her youth with a sort of mournful fondness. Also known as Bianca Shonee Arroyo, the digital media artist was born in Costa Rica, taking intense biodiversity for granted from an early age and growing up amongst lush rainforests densely populated by amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals until her family uprooted and moved to Bowmanville, Ontario when she was nine.
The Killers Channelled Their Idols at Self-Described "Superspreader Event" in Toronto Scotiabank Arena, September 23
Published Sep 24, 2022 "We hope you enjoy your stay / It's good to have you with us / Even if it's just for the day." Standing preacher-like at a keyboard console rigged with a confetti cannon and an LED infinity symbol that looked right off the Vegas strip, Brandon Flowers borrowed the sepia hospitality and retroactive intro of "Enterlude" to address the crowd at Scotiabank Arena with a mile-wide grin: "We hope you enjoy your stay / Outside the sun is shining / It seems like heaven ain't far...
Courtney Barnett's Everyday Observations Took on New Meanings in Toronto Massey Hall, September 14
Published Sep 15, 2022 Warming up the room and establishing the material conditions of the occasion, Courtney Barnett opened her Massey Hall performance with the lead singles from her first three albums. Stretching the absurd to its limits with rambling wordplay and fingerpicked distortion love-ins, Barnett trades in making public the wry observations of private experiences. Things Take Time, Take Time's "Rae Street" set things in motion with a drum machine before Barnett and co.
Aquakultre Is More Than Just Halifax's Hottest R&B Star — He's a Community | Exclaim!
Published Jul 20, 2022 It's the July long weekend and Lance Sampson is working. A union plumber by trade and still a few weeks away from releasing his latest album as Aquakultre, he technically has the time off, but when Exclaim! reaches him over the phone at his home in Dartmouth, NS, he's writing outside.
Family Values: Lawnya Vawnya Reviewed
Family Values: Lawnya Vawnya reviewed ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND’S LAWNYA VAWNYA FESTIVAL INVITES EVERYONE HOME By: Tom Beedham | Art and photos by: Tom Beedham “My mother taught me to love the sea, for water is the beginning and end of life on this earth.” -Celeste Bell, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché We’re three bands deep into the five-band punk matinee at Lawnya Vawnya, and Tunnel Vision is pummeling the all-ages audience in the Eastern Edge Gallery garage.
Family Values: Lawnya Vawnya Reviewed
"My mother taught me to love the sea, for water is the beginning and end of life on this earth." - Celeste Bell, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché We're three bands deep into the five-band punk matinee at Lawnya Vawnya, and Tunnel Vision is pummeling the all-ages audience in the Eastern Edge Gallery garage. The handful of teens that just arrived are already drenched in sweat, having brought the mosh pit in with them off the street.
Kazoo! Fest Makes Its "Long-Overdue Goodbye" by Doing What It's Always Done
Published Jul 18, 2022 It's the beginning of the end of Kazoo! Fest, and shn shn is seated cross-legged on the floor of the stage at Royal City Mission, an assortment of electronics at her fingertips, plastic butterflies radiating from her forehead like a crown of change and adaptation. "So many ways to start, it's the ending that's hard," she sings, drawing syllables into the mounting pull of electric swells. "So take time." Kazoo! has followed that wisdom.
Group Chat: Ariane Roy; A La Una & Kimmortal
Welcome to New Feeling's Group Chat. In this feature, we invite a panel of writers to give their takes on two songs selected by our editorial team, with the goal of offering a variety of perspectives of each track and discovering common threads of interest, analysis, and interpretation.
Joseph Shabason and André Ethier come out of the kitchen with Fresh Pepper
Joseph Shabason and André Ethier come out of the kitchen with Fresh Pepper The collaborators compare restaurant industry resumés, and the grind that connects music and service workers By: Tom Beedham | Photo by: Colin Medley | Art by: Tom Beedham Rattling off a handful of restaurant gigs he worked on College Street and Queen Street West, André Ethier is filling in a personal map of Toronto’s downtown when he lands on the time he quit a job to tour with the Deadly Snakes and ended up...
Joseph Shabason and André Ethier Come Out of The Kitchen With Fresh Pepper
Rattling off a handful of restaurant gigs he worked on College Street and Queen Street West, André Ethier is filling in a personal map of Toronto's downtown when he lands on the time he quit a job to tour with the Deadly Snakes and ended up barbacking the original Silver Dollar Room through venue talent booker Dan Burke. "I was complaining that I didn't have a job, and Dan was like, 'Come down to the Silver Dollar.' That was horrific," Ethier recalls.
Joel Eel's Heart Works Harder Than Most on 'Love Infinity'
Published May 11, 2022 9 Late capitalism permeates all: work days stretching into unnecessary commutes; the market invading private moments and commodifying attention, sowing class division. It's a lot to bear, but Joel Eel's heart works harder than most.
Jane Inc. is more than a sum of its parts — Long Winter
Carlyn Bezic cuts a path through modernist anxiety on ‘Faster Than I Can Take’ “I feel like we’re in a moment of real ‘why not?’” Carlyn Bezic remarks over the phone as she’s mulling over the shapeshifting sounds that populateJane Inc.’s Faster Than I Can Take, the follow up to last year’s solo debut, Number One.
Kyla Charter flattens space and time on "Qwyn" — Long Winter
In the video for her new single “Qwyn” (premiering tonight on Long Winter TV), Kyla Charter thrusts past into present, stitching together clips of home videos recorded by her late grandfather. In one shot, the camera’s trained on a smiley toddler, bouncing at the knees and waving both hands with glee as they maneuver a young cedar in a sunny park. “That’s me,” Charter tells Long Winter over the phone a week out from the video’s release.
FREE SPACE: THE FUTURE OF LIVE MUSIC IS WIDE OPEN, BUT WHAT WILL WE DO WITH IT?
We heap a lot of importance on concert venues, but places are just spaces, and they're only as good as what you fill them with. Between March 2020 and the time of this article's publication, they've also spent a lot of time empty, and for a while we didn't know when—or if—they would come back. Then, 2021 brought gigs back indoors, at least for a moment.
FREE SPACE: THE FUTURE OF LIVE MUSIC IS WIDE OPEN, BUT WHAT WILL WE DO WITH IT?
FREE SPACE: THE FUTURE OF LIVE MUSIC IS WIDE OPEN, BUT WHAT WILL WE DO WITH IT? By: Tom Beedham | Art by: Tom Beedham We heap a lot of importance on concert venues, but places are just spaces, and they’re only as good as what you fill them with. Between March 2020 and the time of this article’s publication, they’ve also spent a lot of time empty, and for a while we didn’t know when—or if—they would come back. Then, 2021 brought gigs back indoors, at least for a moment.
Communal energy: a conversation with Ciel — Long Winter
November 25, 2021 November 25, 2021/ Tom Beedham On Nov. 26, Ciel facilitates a two-hour beginner’s Ableton workshop at InterAccess, where registrants will learn how to build a drum rack from scratch.
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