Keys To The Streets - Video #5 ft Scarlett Jane "We All Just Wanna Be Loved"

For the second year Big Smoke has teamed up with Keys To The Streets to film musicians performing intimate concerts on the public pianos located throughout the city.

The latest video, their fifth, features Toronto's folk/noir duo Scarlett Jane on the piano at theVancouver Folk Music Festival! 

To see where all the pianos are located, click here. To see the archive of all the performances from this year and last, click here.

Here's what Adam Sharp of Big Smoke has to say about this video:
Part of the charm of these 'run 'n' gun' videos we're putting together is the unavoidable presence of ambient noise, which in the case of this video included the finalé of a Vancouver Folk Fest Stage 3 set from just around the corner of where we were filming. Nevertheless, Andrea and Cindy of Scarlett Jane were so professional as they performed for us this beautiful, stripped down version of their new single, “We All Just Wanna Be Loved”.  Enjoy!

Watch RUFF, While You Can!

Toronto's Born Ruffians have launched a very strange and interesting new project today. It's a 30-day video stream that takes 12 hours of VHS (yes, that's right) footage and stretches it out into over 1.3 million images. There is a new frame every two seconds in order for it to cover the 30 day period.

Here's the kicker, once the frame is gone, it's gone for good. 

Strange for this day and age, where everything uploaded will exist forever! That said, fans are encouraged to take screenshots and share them, like the still I grabbed earlier today.
I'm not really sure what is going on in this part of the footage, it kind of looks like Luke Lalonde is doing stand-up in New York in the 90s.

You can watch the video for the next 30 days by clicking here (their hashtag is #watchRUFF), which leads up to the band's release of their new album RUFF on October 2nd.

Keys To The Streets - Video #4 ft Paloma Pendharkar "We Live Here"

For the second year Big Smoke has teamed up with Keys To The Streets to film musicians performing intimate concerts on the public pianos located throughout the city.

The fourth video in the series is one of the many performances on the pianos that wasn't by a professional touring musician. The Keys To The Street team stationed at the Folk Festival this year filmed as many raw talents as they could. I'll let Adam explain more about Paloma Pendharkar's piece below!

To see where all the pianos are located, click here. To see the archive of all the performances from this year and last, click here. And a reminder that you can donate to keep the program going for NEXT year as well - more info here.

Here's what Adam Sharp of Big Smoke has to say about this video:
One of our goals with this year’s video series was to disprove the inference that to be featured on it required some level of professional commitment to music. In any industry, it figures that the people you’re going to be around the most are those who are also in it with you, so we made a point of trying to record some artists who don’t frequently tour in bands or involve themselves in that music machine, and who simply just play the piano really well!

Our two-person team stationed itself at the Folk Fest piano for as long as we could stand the heat over the three days of the festival, and were fortunate enough to film a handful of performances from exactly these sorts of players.

Paloma Pendharkar approached us whilst selling 50/50 tickets as a volunteer for the festival to ask what we were doing, and ended up taking 5 minutes out of her day to play for us.

This is such a beautiful song, and as we attempt to capture some of Vancouver’s city flow in each video, could easily serve as something of a theme tune for our series.