Colin Cowan Is Folk Music's Elastic Star

Photo courtesy of Marcus Jolly

When I knock on the door of Colin Cowan’s two story faux brick apartment building, it takes a couple tries before he hears me banging. Inside he’s making a ginger kale smoothie, and a Sun Ra record plays at a respectable volume in the background. Cowan is obsessed with Sun Ra, they share a birthday, and he plays in a couple other bands who dedicate excess time to covering the jazz hero's songs. Cowan has lurked for over a decade in various jazz trios, folk groups, alt rock bands, and in the background of chilled out solo projects, but after sitting down and writing a song called “Fall Paths” on tour with one of these groups, he realized the therapeutic effect solo songwriting can have on your emotional state. This song put the ball in motion, and on August 1st 2013 his cardinal album was released. “Fall Paths was basically the summation of that album, a nostalgic album. It was a song written for my nephew Brody, he lives on the other side of the country and I never get to see him, I was 20 when he was born, my youngest brother had him, and he’s a special buddy in my life who is family. I realized I don’t ever get to think like that, it felt great, I’ve got a lot of shit to work through. So I put out this nostalgic album and no longer felt nostalgic, I just felt really good.” Evolving into a new emotional state hurtled Cowan towards his next growth period, free of the burdens of the past, he had a lot of time to get bitter about how our actions affect the future. “I was feeling frigid and coming to deep terms with a lot of things you do in your 20s, like darkness, and politics, and money, and all the dishonesties and bullshit that people develop their wisdom from. So I did an album like that and afterwards I felt pretty chill. I was in a spring state.” His latest release Spring Myths expresses a sense of contentment after a darker winter and fall. Cowan refers to this seasonal process of recording albums as emotional exorcism, with each new record he lets something go and moves forward to explore a new region of himself through song.

Continued below…

Spring Myths was recorded in the shed studio behind a cash-only venue and bar called The Lido in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. In this shed, armed with only a quarter inch 8-track tape player and the fertile budding inspirational energy of May months, he laid down the tracks. Cowan was the album’s sole instrumentalist, with Malcolm Biddle of art rock group Dada Plan producing the project. To elevate the title of ‘Producer’ Cowan lovingly proclaims Biddle’s role as that of a “Sonic flexer and juggler.” These occasional cosmic nods Cowan works into our conversation only further cement my view of him as a jack of many trades, with his head in the stars, just trying to make it here on earth. He describes the experience of solo making music as “Like lightning and cosmic star energy flowing through me. I love lots of music, and now I can make the things I hear in my head.”

Photo courtesy of Marcus Jolly

The first time I saw Cowan perform live was not while he was expressing these sounds in his head. It was at the all-ages venue he runs in a space above an Asian bulk food store in Chinatown. He closed out a night of solo sketch comedy dressed in panty hoes and a bulky grey cardigan as a disgruntled elderly woman trying her hand at stand-up. It took me the whole set to realize the bitter old squab on stage was actually the medium-height ginger who had been previously tending bar that night. It turns out this appearance was not Cowan’s first brush with the funnies, he started doing improv comedy when he was 19 at Toronto's infamous Second City. “I was one of those kids who spent all their time making faces in the mirror, like a lot of weirdos that eventually get into comedy. I was really shy until I was about 9, then I discovered how to make myself comfortable,” he explains. The comfortability that comedy offered was a skill that carried over to Cowan’s musical career, it provided him with a laissez-faire approach to live performance. “If shit goes down at a show now, it almost makes the show. You can make some drunk asshole or electronic fuckup a really cool part of it if you don’t care. If you aren’t like ‘Oh! My masterpiece is ruined! I have all the reviewers here tonight!’ As long as you trust that moment, you’ll be fine. All the weird comedy has confined that feeling in me. As a result I love live energy and live happenings. That’s what I call shows like a fucking beatnik, ‘I love live happenings, kitty kat.’”

Now that it’s September, and we are all dusting off our Gortex jackets and watching the leaves fall, another summer seems a million miles away. But as Cowan hunkers down to write the final release in his seasonal series, warmer months are on his mind. The fourth edition is promised to be “unbelievably groovy,” a caribbean inspired collection of celebratory jams laid on a foundation of remixed session recordings. “In the 70s people archived cool music from Turkey and Africa, they made recordings with just someone in the corner holding a microphone. Later those recordings would be remixed. I want to use that process, where I create the archives, and then remix them. I’m bound to get a weird sound out of that,” Cowan explains.

Once the series is completed Cowan intends to shed the project of thematics, his surname, and all earthly restrictions. He will be known simply as the Elastic Stars, expanding his experimental psychedelic rock sound with more cosmic energy than ever before. Cowan says it will leave him with room to write without any reflection on the past or future. A freedom that will allow contemplation of the present and all its subtle living equations, which as his hero Sun Ra taught us, are only clear to those attuned to the vibrations of the outer cosmic world. All this is to say, Colin Cowan will continue on as the loud and charismatic band leader of the elastic stars, a truly weird fellow with his head far above the clouds, trying to bring himself back to earth with nothing more than freak folk tunes he records in a shed as his anchor.

Maya-Roisin Slater is a writer living in Vancouver. Follow her on Twitter.