OBJECTS: Elle Barbara
Photo Credit: Tyler Clark
Montreal’s Elle Barbara is an avant-garde singer-songwriter, recording artist, and performer. Her debut album Word On The Street is a prog-rock one. Taking eight years to create, the concept album splashes ideas about the impact consumerism and technologies have on marginalized communities over synth grooves. The 10-track release is credited to Elle Barbara’s Black Space, an all Black musical ensemble. “I created a space of Black musicians while not playing to expectations of what Black music is supposed to sound like,” she says.
Watch as she shares the work of Montreal-based street artist André Serouille, whose anti-Kraft Foods campaign inspired the project.
Features
Spirit Hotel's debut Rêve is an examination of the mind. It’s vivid, disorienting, and hard to shake. Fronted by Leila May Hauck, the record moves between haunting and harmonious, mirroring Hauck's own fascination with dreams, memory, and the unreliable narrator within all of us. We sat down with Leila to talk about turning visions into songs, the eerie pull of the Farfisa organ, daily creative rituals, and what it means to make music from a place you're not sure you can fully trust.