Saint Idiot

19/11/2024

Hi!

I'm not really on Facebook. Find me on Instagram .idiot.prays, bandcamp, streaming anywhere, or reach out to me directly at [email protected]

I don't love social media to begin with, but Facebook especially does nothing for me as an artist. It does not put me in front of people who'd want to keep up with me, and it doesn't care to show my posts to the people that do already follow me. I'm not going to play the game of trying to figure out the algorithm, I'd rather be making music.

That may change in the future, but for now, head over to any of those places!

Thanks for understanding :)

23/08/2024

Here

5 track album

31/05/2024

Open my heart—what, in this economy??? 🥴❤️‍🔥

I'm proud to tell you that Hypernormal is out wherever music streams. Video below, and please click through to Bandcamp and follow me if you haven't yet. I mean, if you want.

Music, lyrics, production, and mix by Tomáš Andel
Music video performance by Michael Ortiz
Directed by Anthony Goertz
Cinematography by Ty Ferguson
Focus pulling by Emily Kiara
Zoom pulling by Edgar Pinzon
Lighting by God & Brandon Sobchyshyn

Filmed east of Edmonton on a Black Magic 6K Pocket Cinema Camera with a DZO 14-30mm Super35 Parfocal Zoom Lens. For fun.

Keyboards and additional production by Doug Parth
Drums & percussion by Mark Segger
Mastering by Kristian Montano
Artwork & photos by Kelsey McMillan

And lotsa thanks and love to you.

Open my heart—what, in this economy??? 🥴❤️Stay in touch:https://saintidiot.bandcamp.com/Instagram: .idiot.praysMusic, lyrics, production, and mix by T...

18/03/2024

A thin place is a bubble formed on the soapy boundary of the present moment, a side door out of “the usual,” a momentary, solitary, and stumbled-upon experience of reality of such intensity that it would seem completely fantastic were it not for its intense familiarity, its ancientness. It’s a slippage, a “godwink,” a standing “slightly to the left of reality.” The entire experience seems to exist as if to say, unmistakably, self-evidently, “do not forget.”

A thin place is sitting in silence in Whitemud creek for long enough that you can no longer imagine having led a life before that moment. A thin place is looking eastward towards North America, intensely homesick, on a completely empty beach on the east coast of Australia, sobbing under a brilliant night sky filled with constellations you don’t recognize. A thin place is a moment of intense meaning in the midst of city garbage. A thin place is visiting your friend at the cemetery for the first time, and living in a reality forever changed by that.

A thin place holds your hand as you slip out of an outlived life, through intense uncertainty and discomfort, through the searing heat of potentiality, towards the new thing, which is strangely more familiar than anything that came before. Here feelings can no longer be logic’d away, they supercharge, and make haste to dislodge all that is stuck inside. Long un-seen parts of us rub the sleep out of their eyes, and come to be regarded in the full light of awareness. It is a kind of unmasking, an unraveling that begs the next question, and its love can be both gentle and severe.

In Celtic folklore, the thin place is a collision between our world and the next. It is a place where we’re made lost. Here, only wearing clothing inside-out breaks the enchantment—permission, for once, to entertain irrational solutions. Here, fantastic creatures need not be strictly real because reality, for a moment, answers to metaphor. Disoriented, we stumble long enough to have a true, overdue encounter with some part of ourselves. And though the moment expires, the encounter lasts forever.

Have you known a thin place?

07/03/2024

Who helped make my EP, Thin Places?

I am unabashedly starting my gush fest with Kelsey McMillan. Are you ready, character limit?

Kelsey is an Edmonton-based musician, photographer, designer, and professional best friend. You'll hear her voice completing the song Thin Places, silken, tucked in.

There are few people who can make the dimension jump to a thin place—to the core of the matter, to the between-the-lines, to the animating principle—with as much heart, pe*******on, and tact as Kelsey. Better yet, through the side-door, dressed in a belly laugh.

In what feels like no time at all, Kelsey, as Kip Lily, has become one of the most compelling voices in the Edmonton folk scene.

Kip Lily gives me the same feeling that tasting my sun-drenched breath on the first morning of frost does. Frank yet stirring, the killer combo. Her songs are little pastel pop-up story books. Little candid slices of life. Don't take my word for it, find out at the Aviary this Saturday for New Connections.

Kelsey is a high-output collaborator who'll take that precious little baby chick egg of an unborn artwork in her hands and generously offer context-sensitive feedback, encouragement, and an empathetic anecdote. And this, with love, patience, and enthusiasm, more times, many more times, than I can count. Her gentle fingerprint is all over this EP.

Oh and yes, you'll see her photography and artwork all over Thin Places. This time though? That's Kelsey in my 50mm Minolta Fuji color world. Who's the photo now?

If you ever want someone to just wonder about the world with, I highly endorse Kelsey—she's got the chops. The chops to wonder.

Here's to you, you beautiful nut. Everyone who agrees say "aye" in the comments. Why you gotta be so goddamn bright-eyed, Kelsey. When are we restarting our podcast? Never leave.

I tried to get the Sistine Chapel Choir to sing this endorsement, but the Vatican has strangely stopped returning my calls after I apparently asked "ONE TOO MANY" UFO questions. Like,,, ... OK???? weirdos. Yeah, but St. Joseph of Copertino knew how to fly yeah right whose the dummy now

15/02/2024

Making art is therapy, until that ratf**k goes on long enough unsupervised to become its own subject of therapy. (Ratf**k, that's my word of the week.)

In the last decade of making stuff I've been no stranger to long-haul projects. But this EP, man. I've never felt so thoroughly bottomed out, so thoroughly interrogated, so thoroughly transformed by a creative endeavour as I do by this. I'm only just grokking again that there'll be life after this bardo.

Speaking of bardos, the EP is called Thin Places, and it's about, let's say, the outermost edge of faith, if we're picking one thing. There's five songs, and I think they'll surprise you, and I think you'll really like them.

If I've barely seen you/haven't seen you in months and months, I can't tell you how happy I am to now be re-entering the world of the living. I was really hungry ghosting there for a while.

I promise it's all been worth it. I groan relief.

Soon I promise to tell you a little bit about the people who've made Thin Places not just possible but resplendent. In the meantime, thank you everyone for your collaboration, support, inspiration, patience, feedback, pep, empathy, pizza pockets, trust, artist therapy, and so on.

Feels like a nice time to turn thirty-two. Ten years after starting Saint Idiot. Twenty years after rotoscoping lightsabers. It makes sense.

Photo by one of my favourite geniuses, Kelsey McMillan.