The Or Gallery is pleased to announce Sunshine Daydream/Maerdyad Enihsnus, produced in partnership with Christoph Keller Editions and JRP|Ringier as an insert edition for Fillip 9.

Sunshine Daydream/Maerdyad Enihsnus is a misremembered cover of the Pop-O-Pies’ song Sugar Magnolia. The Pop-O-Pies, headed by Joe Pop-o-Pie, were an early 1980s San Francisco punk group that started as a Grateful Dead spoof/tribute band, originally playing only the song Truckin’. Eventually they started writing and recording their own material but also continued to produce responses to the Grateful Dead, such as a version of Sugar Magnolia. In the Pop-O-Pies’ version, the main body of the song plays in reverse, ending with a forward-playing simplified refrain that repeats the single phrase “sunshine daydream,” taken from the concluding lyrics of the original song.

Cranfield and Slade’s misremembered version, which plays forward on side A and in reverse on side B, is only the refrain section of the Pop-O-Pies’ remake, as if stuck on a partially remembered fragment of the song. The physical and mechanical action of flipping the record over (and over) suggests a perpetual loop, forever inhibiting the ability to fully recall the original.

Cranfield and Slade are interested in the role pop music plays in simultaneously expressing and commodifying—and thereby potentially undermining—genuine feelings such as happiness and sadness. That ambiguity is inherent to pop music, which is somehow felt to be as intimate and precious as it is contrived and indifferent, a mere commercial good. Choosing neither side over the other, Cranfield and Slade consider the dialectic of the two to be most significant.

Sunshine Daydream/Maerdyad Enihsnus came out of 12 Sun Songs, a concept album, to be released by Or Gallery Records later this year, made up of cover songs from the 60s and 70s about the sun, but it took on a thematic life of its own as a dedicated 7” record.

Please join us for a launch of Fillip 9 at the Fillip offices in Vancouver on March 28th at 8 pm.