Chop Suey Presents: The Octopus Project // Paper Lions // The Hoot Hoots

The Octopus Project has been releasing joyous party music since 2002, all the while touring the world both on their own and as handpicked support for artists as diverse as Aesop Rock, DEVO, and Explosions in the Sky. They’ve earned a reputation as a band that creates exceptional experiences through elaborate multimedia experiments, lavish album packaging, and the intensity of their extremely fun, extremely loud live shows. The band plans to hit the road again in August in support of Fever Forms. Tour dates coming soon!

https://www.facebook.com/octopusproject
http://www.theoctopusproject.com/

Hailing from the unlikely small community of Belfast, Prince Edward Island, brothers John and Rob MacPhee and neighbour Colin Buchanan began playing music together at a very young age in a variety of garage bands. After meeting in high school, David Cyrus MacDonald was recruited and Paper Lions cemented with John and Rob filling the positions of lead vocals and bass respectively, Colin on lead guitar and David on drums.

After the release of their critically acclaimed, five-time ECMA nominated 2010 EP, Trophies, Paper Lions has literally been around the world. They performed at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics, the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China, from Italy and Malta, to Nashville and New Orleans, as well as a series of shows that brought them from Goose Bay, Labrador, all the way to the most northern human settlement on Earth – Alert, Nunavut.

The Lions have seen their fair share of success on the home front as well. Their song Traveling was uploaded to a fledgling YouTube in 2006, and it’s not hard to tell when watching it. By December 2011, the heavily pixelated video had received 60,000 views. By May 2012, it has garnered over 1,000,000 views and continues to climb. The band decided to offer something to these new found fans, and started giving away their EP Trophies in exchange for an email address. Mere hours after posting the letter of explanation to their fans, it hit the front page of Reddit.com. Over the next day, the band’s website crashed under the weight of over 130,000 hits, and the EP was downloaded more than 12,000 times.

So it has been a very hectic, strange and exciting winter. One that was capped off by the recording of their as-yet-untitled, debut full length album with Howard Redekopp (Tegan and Sara, The New Pornographers, Mother Mother) during a Vancouver April. Slated for release in September 2012, these 10 songs are a Polaroid of Prince Edward Island twenty-some years ago. Stories of love and pain, childish fights, best friends, beaches and forts; they evoke the melancholia of youth, remembered by someone not very far from it.

Eight years and three vans in, with over 1300 shows played, Paper Lions has received 16 ECMA nominations and one win, over twenty PEIMA nominations and four wins, the Touring Artist of the Year award from CAPACOA, a Verge Music Award nomination, and a CBC Radio 3 ‘Bucky’ award nomination. They’ve played Hillside Festival, Virgin Festival, The Warped Tour, Stan Rogers Folk Festival, Evolve Festival and many more. They’ve shared the stage with such varied acts as CAKE, Tokyo Police Club, Hollerado, The Rheostatics, No Joy, Hot Hot Heat and Electric Six. They’ve had their songs featured on ABC and NBC, MuchMusic, MTV and AUX, had an iTunes Single of the Week, were finalists in the 2010 John Lennon Songwriting Competition and won the David Suzuki Playlist for the Planet competition.

http://paperlions.com/my-friends
https://www.facebook.com/paperlions

THE HOOT HOOTS
“With The Shins on sabbatical and quirky pop outfit The Unicorns long-dissolved in other projects, The Hoot Hoots have picked up the torch, carefully building on the idiosyncratic, whimsical sounds of those bands with their second release, Appetite for Distraction, a 10-song long cakewalk crammed with tight pop melodies, expressive, lush harmonies, and kooky sound effects across the board… While the group’s fun-loving, reverential spirit keeps them orbiting their influences, their high-energy songbook, full of stories about ghosts and robots and brain eating dinosaurs, captures the essence of goof-pop with upbeat, irrepressible glee.”
- Gwendolyn Elliott, Seattle Weekly