WRITER
[BETTY FIKRE MARIAM]

Betty is based in Vancouver and Montreal. Aside from writing about music (specifically the Yuck piece in this issue), Betty is a student at Concordia University. She likes taking witty lines from good rap songs and inserting them into conversation (in an unsubtle way). Betty spends a lot of time on the internet, [...]

RAW LIKE SUSHI
Just hopped the red eye back from Tokyo town. The city is somehow more profoundly exciting than I remembered it, maybe because the typical tourist stock is missing in action. That phantom nuke paranoia still has the whole world shook, but fear not – there’s never been a better time to check out [...]

TALKING ‘BOUT MY…
For a band so rooted in decades bygone, New Orleans duo Generationals seem to not get too lost in calculating the components of their sound. On their most recent LP, 2011’s Actor-Caster, Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer seemed to have stripped down to an even more retro feel than the slightly sporadic take [...]

STIR UNTIL RICH AND THICK
Rolling out of the Blue Leprechaun at 4:30 in the morning, I had only two things on my mind – the good girl beside me, and my soon-to-be second interview with west coast legend & recording artist, DJ Quik. Carmen and I had gotten a trifle slaughtered from Long Islands at [...]

YOU’RE TEARING ME APART
If you’ve ever seen The Room, a movie made back in 2003 yet still enjoying cult status to this day as one of the worst, or at least strangest movies ever made, you know that it’s kind of all over the place. Centered on the story of a love triangle in San [...]

IT’S A RAVE, DAVE.
Over the past year, moombahton has exploded all over parties, nightclubs and blogs. The story of its creation has become like a well known DJ superhero origin story. Dave Nada, while DJing a highschool “skipping party” for his little cousin, didn’t want to disrupt the vibe established by the other DJs playing [...]

INFINITE STRESS
Zadie Smith called him an “actual genius”, with no equal among living writers. George Saunders said he was “The first among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest, the least inclined to rest on his laurels or believe all the praise.” Jonathan Franzen said he “wrote… as well as [...]

PDE
ION asked me to interview Parallel Dance Ensemble and to be honest I wasn’t sure how to approach the situation. If you take a look at my iPod you’re gonna get a lot of DJ Khaled, Birdman, Pusha T & OFWGKTA. But I mean, I grew up with a lot of Italian kids that liked [...]

RARELY DO HOTELS INTENTIONALLY WORK TO ASSOCIATE THEMSELVES WITH FECES AND ILLNESS, BUT AMSTERDAM’S HANS BRINKER BUDGET HOTEL IS NO ORDINARY HOTEL.
Billed as “The Worst Hotel In The World”, the Hans Brinker brand, developed for over 15 years by Dutch advertising agency KesselsKramer, is an exercise in counter-intuitive marketing. As you know, the modus operandi [...]

JESS BAUMUNG
A Manitoba to Toronto transplant, Jess Baumung is at the top of the photography game with a focus on music. A contributor to publications ranging from Mojo to The Globe and Mail, ION is lucky enough to finally feature Jess’ work.

DINOSAUR YOUTH
Yuck is a UK based band composed of Daniel Blumberg who sings, plays guitar and writes songs; Max Bloom on guitar; Japanese Mariko Doi on bass; and New Jersey’s Johnny Rogoff on drums. Fresh off a stint at SXSW, I talked to Blumberg and Bloom before their Vancouver gig. We discussed, among other things, [...]

MUSIC
Are you in a sweet band but are too shy/ugly/deformed to be in your videos? Don’t worry! You’ve just got to place a call to your local master of puppets and you’ve got yourself that video you’ve been dreaming of ever since Debbie Harry hosted The Muppet Show or when you first saw Take Part! [...]

[1] Atari Teenage Riot – Is This Hyperreal? “The streets smell of burned rubber and urine/The time for debate is over/It’s time to act/It’s time to fight through…” Ugh. Really guys? That shtick? Still? Something I’ve experienced, as I settle into adulthood, is surpassing musicians I grew up listening to in terms of maturity. I [...]

BALCONIES
You want a power trio? You got it. The Balconies are a tighter three-way than the Miami Heat, which may have something to do with the fact that frontwoman, Jacquie, is siblings with one member, and the girlfriend of the other. The Balconies have recently finished their recording session with Jon Drew (Tokyo Police Club, [...]

THIS MONTH: DR. IAN SUPER + SKULL BEARD
Combining on this month’s horoscopes we have a long forged friendship between ION mainstay Dr. Ian Super and his super friend Skull Beard. Skull Beard is an expert at tonal magic and compliments Dr. Super’s mystical powers in order to forecast the future… WITH STUNNING ACCURACY!!! Rest your [...]

BAD BOYS GONE GOOD-ISH
These days, it’s not as easy to write an article about the Black Lips as it once was. The bodily-function-drenched exhibitionism of their live shows is old news and the band has largely retired that shtick. To extol the virtues of the boys’ hedonistic tendencies and playful antagonism is fine, but as [...]