Chet Singh Album Release

With Caylie & Gerhard Gepard | Special Guest: Lillian Allen

Sunday November 17th | 3:00-5:00pm.

The Pig’s Ear Tavern, 144 Brock St. Peterborough, ON

Chet Singh’s 6th album of dub poetry with Gerhard Gepard currently an Eastern European based itinerant sound designer was 3 years in the making. The album bears witness to an increasingly polarized world where imperial wars, ethnic cleansing, predatory capitalism, ecological disasters and backlash to equity initiatives are defining features of the 21^stcentury.

Chet cofounded Peterborough’s first reggae band, One Mind in the 1980’s as a Trent student becoming one of the first wave of diasporic Caribbean dub poets; after returning to Peterborough, he released a couple of albums with Dub Trinity. As a social activist in the educational system and community he was involved in popularizing dub poetry and spoken word. He was involved in planning the first international dub poetry festival in1993 where over 40 poets from the UK and Global South performed at venues across Toronto. As a founding member of Canada’s Dub Poets Collective, he helped organized numerous educational and community programs and events. Some of his albums have charted on Canada’s indie music chart for world music and a couple of his poems appeared in the documentary Capitalism is the Crisis. Involved in numerous activist groups over the years, he also served as a board member at the Ontario Art Council working to create access for minoritized artists and was a member of the implementation team for the Ministry of Colleges and Universities human rights framework for higher education. His work on decolonizing the curriculum and social justice education was acknowledged with several North American Awards for critical global education.

At the album release, Chet will be performing with Caylie and Gerhard Gepard his long-time producer. Gerhard has released several albums, the idea behind their work is recreating the concept of landscape architecture in the realm of sound design. The main inspiration for their work is the geometry and order as found in natural forms. Caylie, who accompanied Chet along with some of his former band mates at this year’s Peterborough Folk Festival is a singer, songwriter, improviser and producer in a variety of projects including her solo ethereal electronica album Future Memory, dream noise duo Glass Salt (Whatever’s Clever Club, Cherche Encore), song- improvising duo with cellist Matt Brubeck, NYC-based avant-rock project Anthems of the Void, and electronica collaborations with Morgan Doctor (Aporia).

Special guest Lillian Allen a key originator and leading exponent of dub poetry is considered a literary godmother of rap, hip-hop and spoken word poetry. An influential figure on the global cultural landscape for over four decades, her albums have won 2 Juno awards. She is credited with opening up the form of dub poetry to enlist and engage feminist content and sensibilities. A an award-winning and internationally renowned multi-disciplinary artist, Allen was the instigator, co-producer and host of WORDBEAT, the CBC’s national radio show on poetry and the spoken word. Featured in numerous films and most recently Toronto Poet Laureate she is a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU).

To download the album, visit the Website: https://www.chetsingh.com/

Fueled by Public Energy & Supported by the Ontario Arts Council

Contact Chet: 705 927 3605 or [email protected]