Event Archive:

Declan O'Donovan

Thu. March 2nd 2023 Musiikki Café Kingston Ontario

Event Navigation

Event Details
Artists (0)
Presenters (0)
Ticket Outlets (0)
Other Dates (0)
Description
Articles (0)
Video (0)
Photos (0)
Venue
Get involved and submit your listing

Event Info

Declan O'Donovan

Declan O'Donovan returns to Kingston with a live performance at Musiikki Café i...
Event can be attended in person In-Person Event
Thu. March 2nd 2023 + Add to Calendar Musiikki Café
8:00pm - 10:00pm

Event Description

Declan O'Donovan returns to Kingston with a live performance at Musiikki Café in support of his brand new album Amok. With special guest, Taylor Adams.

About Declan O’Donovan


Within the earthy, baroque psychedelia of his 3rd album, Amok, Declan O’Donovan meditates on losing track of time. It’s a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with—”a pedestrian and profound thing to do,” as the Yukon songwriter puts it. Amok is hardly a linear narrative, though, with a beginning, middle, and end; the album and the characters who populate it twist and pull time, fall out of it and into it, find themselves transformed by it. Songs go off the rails and expand themselves defiantly as O’Donovan inhabits their narrators—a hospital patient; a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story; people trapped on sinking ships or floating in space with satellites and dark matter.

“I lived on the Californian coast, hiked through the boreal forest, borrowed from friends and family, stole from Exodus and Joseph Campbell,” O’Donovan says. “I lit a fire, fell asleep, got woke, got high, got Covid, got angry at the church, lost my keys, and split the atom.”

Throughout it all, perhaps because of it all, “time gets disrupted, reveals itself to be uncontrollable,” he says. “Runs amok.”
Amok takes sonic cues from the places it was born in, geographically and mentally. It bends, sometimes, toward grandeur, like the vast and mountainous terrain surrounding O’Donovan’s hometown of Whitehorse, where most of the songs were written. It trades in a lushness of sound that recalls the all-encompassing greenery of Vancouver Island, where it was recorded. And it reels with a similar terror and revelatory spirit that descended upon O’Donovan during a mushroom trip in the rainforest on that same west coast before he began writing these songs. Amok frequently pushes back, too, against 21st-century isolation, investigating its effects and building something to snuff them out. Against the heaviness, O’Donovan arms himself with a healthy dose of irreverence, never taking himself too seriously. Over the jaunty piano of “Maggie,” there’s even something to find joy in as the west coast slips into the sea: “Though California’s done for, we can see the ocean from our front door.”

Maybe it’s most accurate to say the album unravels as O’Donovan makes his way through its nine tracks. The shadowy “Within the Pale” eases us into things with a slithery groove that gives way to a spacey outro carried by a fuzz guitar melody. O’Donovan dreams a dream of catastrophe on the apocalyptic, slow-burning “Every Revolution Around the Sun;” he drives “Get Thee Behind the Wheel” with a piano line that rolls like a waterfall; he meditates on how the present might affect our future on the sombre “Many Years From Now;” and he wraps the shadowy “All the World Above You” with a few lines that sum up what’s really behind our anxieties about death: “I’m not afraid of where I’m going, but I’m afraid to leave—for once I’ve left this mortal coil, how will you then tug upon my sleeve?”

“Maggie” immediately lifts things up with its troubled but sun-kissed psych-pop. The anti-ballad “People That We All Know” celebrates solidarity in the kindred strangeness of another, while “God Fearing Men” quietly seethes against hypocrisy with its low rumbling Wurlitzer. Finally, O’Donovan closes the curtain on Amok with “More Was Said Than Done,” a nearly 10-minute epic that begins with earthbound piano and spins out and up into a blissful, otherworldly dream.

We all lose track of time, get lost in time, struggle with our places in the world. Amok recognizes the miraculousness and mundanity of existence. As O’Donovan asserts: it’s all as pedestrian as it is profound.

Venue

Musiikki Café
73 Brock St.
Open / Operational

Event Image

Declan O'Donovan - Nov 14th @ Musiikki Café

Other Events

Welcome to your Arts Directory

We're here to help artists and arts organizations reach their audiences and each other.  

Non-profit run and created by the community, ArtsVictoria.ca integrates current event listings and multimedia arts portfolios, and creates an explorable, living archive of the arts in Victoria BC.

Calendar

Upcoming Events On Today Map Events Digest Emails Posters (Upcoming)

Artists

Painters Muralists Photographers Writers Theatre Troupes Bands + Ensembles Musicians All Artists

Art

Visual Art Showcase Public Art Map

Resources

Organizations + Resources Orgs + Resources Map Venues Opportunities

Media

Event Photos Articles Video Poster Archive

About

About Advertise Contact
Featured Art

Feather Friends

by  Lynda Lombardi
Available
View Art
Get involved and submit your listing

Search the Directory / Archive

List an Event in the Calendar

List a Physical Single Date or Recurring Event

For physical events that happen at a specific time. For example a concert, or dance performance. If there are multiple shows, you can still duplicate your event to cover them all.

List an Online Livestream Event

For online / livestream events. This will allow you to include a livestream url and have it featured in our livestream listings.

List an Ongoing Event

For events that run over a range of consecutive dates. i.e. Art show, museum show etc.

Submit a Profile to the Directory

List an Individual Artist / Artisan / Musician

(Painter, Carver, Dancer, Writer etc)

List an Arts Ensemble

(Band / Choir /Dance Troupe, Theatre Troupe, Artist Collective etc.)

List an Organization / Resource in the Directory

(organization, business, venue etc)

Submit Art

Submit a piece of Art

Add a photo / information on art by a local artist

Submit Public Art (Current)

Submit a piece of local public art to the gallery & map.

Submit Public Art (Historical)

Add a photos + info on pieces of public art that no longer exist to be included in the permanent public archive.

News + Media

Post an Opportunity

(Jobs, Funding, Calls to Artists)

Add / Link a Video

Add a video, which will be linked to profiles, and appear in the video feed

Add / Link an Article

Add, or link to an article about content in the directory.

Log In to Your Account

Forgot Your Password?

Create a New Account