Futures: a series of imaginary soundtracks to Canadian dystopian novels.

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I love reading. Actually, to be specific, I love listening to audiobooks. I've spent much of the last decade commuting by car, and I'm thankful that the Toronto Public Library has a truly incredible selection of audiobooks to borrow. It has allowed me to listen (or read) so many wonderful texts.

I've always loved Canadian fiction, and in the last decade or so, I've started to notice a trend, as some of the books have been perhaps a little less optimistic. Pre-pandemic, I'd say that dystopian literary fiction would be my absolute favourite subgenre. I had to step away from it for a little while once I started feeling like I was living in one, but I wasn't away for long.

As I looked at the list of books I've read over the past handful of years, I picked out this group and noticed that there were some thematic similarities, namely their use of dystopia as social commentary. Each of these authors write from from a Canadian perspective, and I think there are a lot of elements in each of these books that might challenge what a non-Canadian might assume about this country.

See below for my details about each book and my ideas around creating the tracks as they relate to each work of fiction. I hope at very least that my songs inspire you to seek out these books - they are all incredible works of art, many by first-time authors, and exactly the types of books that leave enough of a lasting impression that someone would want to compose songs about them.

A sincere thank you to all of the authors of these wonderful works. I had the chance to connect with many of them and I sincerely appreciate you giving me the go-ahead to name songs after your works.

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Before I talk about the individual tracks, I've decided to combine my album with a local fundraiser. Since this is a project inspired by books, I would like to use it to give back to my community. One of my nearby stores and neighbourhood hubs, Old's Cool General Store in East York, has started a book fund looking to donate books by and about queer, trans, and people of colour to local schools. I will be donating all digital proceeds, all physical proceeds beyond manufacturing costs, plus all streaming proceeds to this fundraiser:
www.gofundme.com/f/OCGS-Change-the-Narrative?

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1. Moon of the Crusted Snow
Inspired by the Waubgeshig Rice novel (instagram.com/waub)

Of all the books I read that made me want to create a dark ambient soundtrack, this one stuck out the most. Rice's book takes place in an Anishinaabe community, when all of a sudden everything goes dark - no internet, no television, no more anything. We don't find out why. We don't need to know. The book follows the community through a tense winter as they deal with an unusual outsider, and figure out their steps for survival. I took cues from gloomy ambient post-rock, with a guitar-heavy drone track. But there's also a bit of light, reflecting the resilience of the community, and the the ability to survive.

2. Station Eleven
Inspired by the Emily St. John Mandel novel (instagram.com/emilystjohnmandel)

This might be the most well known of all these books, seeing as it was recently made into a very good HBO series. Long before it was greenlit for television, it was the book I kept recommending and/or buying for all of my friends. It's a story about a disease wiping out most people on a planet, but it's also a book about art, about hope, about what happens after. The novel is different enough from the miniseries to be worth reading, and I tried really hard not to think of the visuals and soundtrack to the TV series while I put this one together - a sparse ambient piano track that reflects the solitude and the strange beauty of its post-pandemic world.

3. The Marrow Thieves
Inspired by the Cherie Dimaline novel (instagram.com/cherie.dimaline)

In this apocalyptic future, non-indigenous folks have lost the ability to dream. The only remedy for this is found in the bone marrow of indigenous people, so they become hunted. As young adult fiction, it's one of those books that would definitely spark fascinating discussions in high school. This track used a lot of different elements, and I intentionally built it up in a way that kept tension, though never really hitting a big crescendo. The minimal pulsating kick drums to me felt like the feet of those running from the marrow harvesters.

4. The Amateurs
Inspired by the Liz Harmer novel (instagram.com/harmerliz)

In some ways, this might be the least dark of all the books on here. A tech company creates a portal that allows anyone in it to go anywhere in time or space that they desire. The portal becomes really popular, and many people use it to leave, and never come back, leaving the world nearly empty of people. An odd set-up, but one that allows Harmer's characters to exist and grow in this unusually quiet depopulated world. I built the song around my favourite guitar chord, which I jokingly call the Goo Goo Dolls Chord (listen to the pre-chorus of Slide), one that is both sad and hopeful. In a few different spots, sparse drums appear. They could be the portal. They could human connection. They could be really out of place on an ambient album. Depends how you see it.

5. An Ocean of Minutes
Inspired by the Thea Lim novel (instagram.com/thealimwriter)

I loved this book, an unusual take on time travel and love, and set in the 80s and 90s without being too dependent on era nostalgia. It's more of a character study in an unusual post-apocalyptic world, and I wanted to create a feeling of lost connection, hence the use of a radio-like loop going through much of the track. I aimed to make it feel like reaching through time reaching through time, trying to make connections when they feel so far away.

6. Songs for the End of the World
Inspired by the Saleema Nawaz novel (instagram.com/saleemanawazwebster)

If you heard about this book two years ago, it might have been because it was about a virus originating in Wuhan, China, and turning the world upside down. It was written well before COVID, and released not long after. I'm sure many readers took to it to see what kinds of resolutions Nawaz found, but trying to fit a novel's reality onto your own never works how you want it to, even if it's impossible to ignore the current state of things as you read it. I decided to keep things minimal and sparse for this track; late in the book several characters are at sea trying to avoid the virus, and there's a bit of a haunting loneliness that I tried to capture here.

7. Crosshairs
Inspired by the Catherine Hernandez novel (instagram.com/legshernandez)

Hernandez' first novel Scarborough was one of my favourites of the last decade, a book that got passed around to many of my friends and family members. And then I found out she was writing a book in my favourite subgenre. Crosshairs is about characters trying to survive in a world where the government quickly turns against anyone not white, straight, or evangelical Christian, leaving queer folks, people of colour, or anyone identified as an 'other' as good as dead. As a straight, white, cis male, the book is designed to get me out of my comfort zone, trying to make me think this kind of thing couldn't happen, when we all sadly know how easy it could be. It's a novel about resistance, the power of community in face of oppression. In this track I used the slightly unsynchronized piano to represent trying to balance identity, and how fraught it might be. I went for an unsettling tone for the whole track, a way to kind of fit how I felt reading the book (and which I think is sort of the point of it).

8. Greenwood
Inspired by the novel by Michael Christie (instagram.com/michaelchristie)

Greenwood was one of those books where, when it ended, I just sat there reflecting on how perfectly woven together it was, an epic multigenerational masterpiece with so many perfect little details. I almost never reread books but I might have to make an exception for this one. At its core, it's about a family and its relationships with trees and the land. My track is in four parts, all linked by a repeating series of three notes (using a motif like this I absolutely stole from Floating Points' album Promises). These notes interplay with the sounds around them throughout each part, until the final one, where it plays with itself, until it falls apart, which I used to represent the frail lives of the trees in the book's 2034 part. This track is by far the most experimental one, but also one where I felt I wanted to represent so many components of the book in song.


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Do you want to know more about these books? Do you have reading recommendations? I LOVE talking about books. Send me a message via Bandcamp or on Instagram!