Chad VanGaalen to Release 'Shrink Dust' B-sides on New Cassette Releases

BY Alex HudsonPublished Jul 24, 2014

Following 2011's Diaper Island, Calgary musical mad scientist Chad VanGaalen released a couple of cassette albums of B-sides. Soon, the prolific songwriter will do the same for this year's Shrink Dust.

"I think there'll be two [new] cassettes — there's at least three records' worth of B-sides on [Shrink Dust]," VanGaalen told FFWD. "That's usually how it works. Garbage Island 1 and 2 were the sort of crème of the crop that came off Diaper Island. To tell you the truth, I think Garbage Island 1 is better than Diaper Island, when I go back and listen to what I was trying to get at with that record. For whatever reason, I feel like those B-sides were a little more coherent than the B-sides that will come off Shrink Dust, which is why Shrink Dust was a little bit harder to make in the first place."

So what will these B-sides sound like? Apparently they span noisy dance experiments, folksy numbers and alt-pop songs. There's also some electronic material that likely won't see the light of day.

"Like, 'Where Are You?' is more of a noisy dance track, and there was maybe a [full] record of that in there," he said. "And then there was a record of more country, folky songs. Then there was a record of 'Frozen Paradise' — poppier, cleaner sounding pop/alternative tracks, whatever you want to call them. And then there was a bunch of straight-up electronica that actually sounded horrible; that stuff probably won't even make much onto the B-sides."

Meanwhile, he's still pressing ahead with his long-in-the-works sci-fi animated film, Tarboz. The film is apparently finished, but he's still tinkering with details like voice acting. VanGaalen said, "I've never voice acted before, and suddenly I'm doing like 40 different characters, at the end of 30 minutes you'd just be like, 'Seriously? Come on, hire some of your buddies to get drunk and do some voices, man. Don't try to do it all by yourself.'"

None of these projects has a firm release date just yet, but we can expect to hear more from VanGaalen soon.

In the meantime, see all his upcoming dates here. They include a show tonight (July 24) at the Calgary Folk Music Festival.

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