TLDR:

The Quiet War is a collection of peaceful protest songs created over the last 3 years by a concerned Canadian citizen. The album was inspired by the federal court case of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform vs. The Bank of Canada in addition to a satirical political pasteup attributed to Lyle Hartford Van Dyke, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.

Recommended songs: 01, 02, 04, 05

Watch the videos:

01 - The Silent Weapons: youtu.be/gw6PKVm4k4Q

03 - The Anthem: youtu.be/NNOAvaT7tnY

Kanada Day is a peaceful protest of grungy psychedelic rock by a concerned Canadian with a pure punk DIY ethos. Having grown up in rural southern Ontario, the songs for this solo endeavor were created over the past three years in between sessions & rehearsals with other bands I play in around Toronto. These tracks resonate with the sounds of bands like Fugazi, Greys, and The Clash. My high school art teacher played Fugazi and The Clash during class and that’s where the seeds of this project were planted.

It broke ground in 2012 when I released my first single, Crime Minister. The animated music video for it went viral amongst the #cdnpoli Twitter crowd and may have influenced Blue Rodeo to political action, too, oddly enough (since my amplifier used to be Greg Keelor’s). It also got me audited by the Canadian Revenue Agency, something I was warned about after releasing the video, but paid no attention to until it actually happened. The CRA agent’s initials were F.U. which made me laugh. Harper wanted to know who was funding me, apparently. If so, I’m sure his minions were surprised to see that Kanada Day is what some art school punk does with a bit of his free time instead of watching porn or playing video games (not that there’s anything wrong with that). To some, politics is pornography.

Initially inspired to song on The Bailout (2012) by the Crime Minister, Stephen Harper during his decade of deceit, it was the federal court case of the Committee On Monetary and Economic Reform vs. The Bank of Canada (2011-2017) that quickly caught the attention of this citizen. It inspired the song Public Service Announcement from the 2015 EP of the same name. The case revealed Harper as nothing more than a symptom of a deeper problem plaguing our society. That problem is what I explore on this new album.

The Quiet War (2019) is my first full length release. There’s an asterisk* below to elaborate upon the credits but I wrote, recorded, played, produced, mixed and mastered this album, like my previous releases. This body of work is intended to bring awareness to an issue that is destroying democracy and our environment: the economic assault on our sovereignty. Money is public and social, not private. Austerity and usury are tools of wealth transfer enabled by compound interest. We don’t have to pillage the planet to generate wealth, or borrow from debt based private banks that simply lend credit conjured from the ether at interest. Since 1974, well over $1 Trillion of Canadian tax dollars have been used to pay the interest on a debt a fraction of that size. A debt that has yet to be repaid. There is no need for this. We can create public wealth with the Bank of Canada because that is what it was created to do. We did it from 1938-1974 and we can do it again. The inflation argument is a straw man. Over a century ago, this was THE central political issue of its time (it inspired The Wizard of Oz). Today, it is obfuscated by the disinformation of the capital vampires.

The concept of this album was inspired by a satirical political paste-up, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (1979) attributed to Lyle Hartford Van Dyke who presented the above process of capital theft as a manual on how to take over the world. Countless people have claimed it to be an authentic instructional manual for an elite secret society (despite none being mentioned), although it was merely the musings of an artist with a keen eye for detail hidden in plain sight.

Songs of Interest:

01 The Silent Weapons is a dubbed out exploration inspired by the book that has shaped the entire 21st century: Propaganda. Written in 1928 by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays reveals the mindset of the corporate Elite he envisions destined to lead the stupid masses (that’s us he’s talking about, folks). The book explains how democracy must be subverted by corporations to create a society of trained and predictable consumers by Manufacturing Consent, further explained in the book of the same name by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky in 1988. The end result is the politics of eternity we recognize in Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

02 The Business Plan is a purely punk inspired introspection of what it’s like to “live” in the 21st. Are we humans or slaves? We have apparently chosen this society with these rules and these leaders, but has that choice been manufactured? Are we nothing more than a feast for the capital vampires? Take a look all around you. This is a business plan.

04 The Mascot is a playful synth rock sing along that questions the efficacy of our local MPs ability to represent us, the wealth creating citizens. In reality, all political members of The Party are beholden to The Party Whips that ensure The Party Line is the bottom line. Lip service is played in the local ridings, but our local MPs power to represent us is ultimately dependent upon the views, influence and financial support that corporations provide to The Party of the day.

05 The Face is psychedelic punk catharsis, boldly calling out the farce that politics has become. Do you ever wonder if our leaders are individual people capable of critical thought? Or merely handsome automatons selected by focus groups and think tanks to read scripted talking points written by The Party Spin Doctors who are, in turn, guided by hidden corporate hands to peddle influence one elected representative at a time as the face of corporate welfare?

If you've read this far, you probably have the patience for Adam Curtis' four part television documentary from 2002, "The Century of the Self" which was another inspiration for The Quiet War: youtu.be/buPGp5YPdM4

And if you like that, you will also enjoy his 2016 documentary, HyperNormalization: youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU