That post-winter, music blasting, kind of ride

Summers for me are a chance to dust off the winter grime off my bike and ride through the city as an act of claiming my place in it. On the bike I am omnipresent. The moment the warmth of the sun outshines the crisp winter air and permits my hands to clutch the handlebars without fear of frostbite, I grip onto the season. Of course, Toronto’s initially shy summer often recedes upon its annual debut, but nonetheless, I am eager.

When I first moved to the city three years ago, I got a second-hand bike and rode around, cherishing my moment of unemployment as a brief break from Capitalist systems. I saw the bike as my key to a new city. It was quicker than my feet, permitting aloofness and haste in moments of undesired attention and even harassment, and it also provided more freedom to explore than the public transit system. I could get into the nooks and crannies of the city to places my feet or a bus alone were not meant to take me.

The natural companion to my pedal-bound feet were my headphones playing summer tracks to make the ride smoother. During this time, dance music did the job best. Naturally, I fell into the music of Montreal producer, Kaytranada, who at the time had released his first album.

Now, I don’t claim to know anything about music. Mostly because I know some music-douche somewhere will suggest my death via guillotine for miss-labelling an artist’s genre or musical process. And also because how can we fully pinpoint the origins of sound? Like language, I see it as an ever evolving lexicon, with boundless historical references and future projections for sound.

There was something about listening to the retro and futuristic sounds of Kaytranada on those bike rides that opened my eyes to a past Toronto that I had missed and the potential for the future. Yes, the City and developers were working hard to make the city inaccessible in their luxury-condo-quests, but everywhere I rode past hope: flyers for protests on light posts that I rested against at stop lights; elders shopping for groceries as I made my way through Chinatown; the waterfront that, despite its insistence on shiny shoebox condos, reminded me of the resistance to colonialism on these lands.

I created this reduction print as the winter turns to spring to remind myself of good times ahead, as I wrap up a stressful final term in school. Reduction prints are some of the most exciting parts of the printmaking because of their colourful potential. But last year, after digitizing this reduction print in Photoshop, I got mesmerized when turning the colour layers on and off. That’s I how figured out how to make an energetic gif out of reduction prints. I know I could easily create these images with layers digitally, but there is something about the process of carving away at a lino block to reveal a new layer below that I can’t resist. I also love that there is a material print that can also be produced and shared.

Check back in next week for a new blog on another favourite Canadian musical act and the story of how I came to them!