ain't hallelujah but might as well have been
Again and again throughout his first sixteen months in office, Mark Carney has sombrely reminded us of the alarming scale and pace of the political-economic change currently afoot on the global stage. He’s also done an apparently quite effective job of positioning himself as the man of the hour, the cool head that’s going to take charge and steer us through the maelstrom – which is, after all, what he did while running the Bank of Canada, and again at the Bank of England. "We must establish stability amidst this chaos," he intones gravely, evoking World War II and using words like “generational” and so on, but as some tried to point out after his much-lauded speech at Davos earlier this year, it doesn’t seem to amount to much beyond new bottles for the same old wine.
That’s not to say he’s doing nothing, of course. On the contrary, between Bill C-5’s fast-tracking of infrastructure projects, Budget 2025’s slashing of public service budgets, the new Defence Industrial Strategy funnelling tens of billions towards lavish military spending, and Bill C-12’s cynical crackdown on immigration, Carney has been quite active in slimming down and centralizing the Canadian state’s administrative wing while significantly beefing up its martial capacities (sound familiar?). Suggesting that no federal government has taken such ambitious initiative since the first years of the Mulroney administration, The Walrus observed, “It feels like a wartime-footing government without a war.” I’d perhaps argue there’s more than enough war to go around, but in any case, the point is that this administration is not afraid to deploy considerable resources towards achieving particular aims – which, in this case, seem to be clustered around the quest for the above mentioned, though opaquely defined, "stability."
Now, over the last several months there’s been a fair bit of public head-scratching about Carney’s apparent abandonment of his commitment to combating climate change. As recently as late May, many still seemed invested in the belief, per Seth Klein at The Guardian, that “Carney is engaged in some deeply clever game of four-dimensional chess, confounding the oil patch and its political backers while laying the groundwork for a great transition, absent Trudeau’s performative nonsense”; but, by now, and given the events of the last couple of weeks, such hopes seem to have been ultimately extinguished. “We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix – oil and gas – to meet a short-term goal,” Carney said, absurdly, during his latest FDR cosplay, while maintaining that his government’s commitment to fighting climate change remains “absolute” even as he announced plans to double down on fossil fuel extraction and co-sign yet more pipeline expansion.
Perhaps Carney was simply out-manoeuvred by Danielle Smith, woe be to us all. But if he's not living up to the standards of the climate champion title that many seem to have bestowed upon him, perhaps it's also worth asking how he came to hold such a reputation in the first place. And, though for the record I haven’t yet read his book on “values" (its 500+ page girth still sits on my desk, taunting me), I don’t think the Harvard- and Oxford-educated banker has ever been particularly coy about the fact that his ideological dedication to free enterprise and supply-side economic policy precedes and undergirds his perspectives on how to engage with the climate crisis. As Laurence Braun-Woodley (who did read the book) wrote at Canadian Dimension last year, “[Carney] sincerely believes it is possible to create an ethically responsible brand of neoliberalism.”
Let's remember that Carney's much-lauded 2015 speech on the risks global warming pose to financial stability – around which his apparent environmental bona fides first began to establish themselves – was in fact an address to an audience of insurance executives and investment bankers, advising them not on how to prevent the coming catastrophe but how to manage it, and how to hang on to market valuation by getting ahead of it. His big idea was the distribution of more reliable and comprehensive data on carbon emissions so that investors and insurance companies could make longer term plans more consistently, in order to help bring about a “smoother transition." In a speech given a year later, he went so far as to caution against too rapid a transition to a carbon-free economy, for the shocks it would inflict on the financial system.
It's also worth paying attention to the kind of thing Carney said last week, while defending the decision to throw out the decarbonization plans of previous administrations: Canada, he claimed, has "relied too much on targets, laws, that weren't driving the actual investment that's necessary to reduce emissions. So we’ve shifted our focus." That's a telling statement, I think, and the extent to which it passes as common sense is a measure of how deeply free market logic has embedded itself into our political discourse: it's investment that will do the work, not, say, political choices.
The currently-unfolding apocalypse is ultimately a demonstration of what can happen when you accept that "the political" and "the economic" are, or should be, discrete arenas of activity, operating independently of one another – a putative separation which is, of course, a core component of the basic ideological foundation of liberal democracy. And now, with four decades of neoliberal fundamentalism behind us, even if there were the political will to enact the kind of bold and sweeping changes for which this moment calls, the most basic tools we may once have had at our disposal to exercise collective will against the power of capital now lay toothless and rusty.
Now, to be sure, Carney's commitment to liberal ideology may not be as rabidly anti-state as some of his neoliberal contemporaries – "For free trade to benefit all requires some redistribution," he conceded in 2016, for example – but at their core, his solutions to the climate crisis have nonetheless always been squarely rooted within the same political economic imaginary: the road to social change leads through the market, private investment should be its primary engine, and government's role is to facilitate and encourage such investment (and otherwise stay out of its way). It’s great that he’s been honest about what’s coming, but let's not allow his performance of sagacious realism to convince us he's on the future's side.
Okay, now here's some songs. It's once again a bit of a grab-bag, genre-wise, but I think it holds together all the same; I guess I'm imagining a sort of late night / early morning pensiveness to it.
In any case, it starts off with Japan-based cellist Yuki Nakagawa and "Upper and under the bridge," from his debut solo LP, Stills and remains, which came out in June 2026 on Tin Angel; the brief outing arrays layers of textural detail around a serene melodic backbone. Next it's the aptly-titled "Soundcheck," a highlight from Slo-Mo Neon Laminate Hoverings, the recently-released collaboration between New York guitar luminary Mary Halvorson and Bay Area avant-jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Then it's Montreal-based experimentalist (and Musicworks cover artist) Lisa Conway, whose work as LCON bridges free-form tape loop adventures and baroque indie pop. The staccato synth blips of "Heimatort," a highlight from her 2023 LP The Isolator, then meet the more impressionistic smudge of "Warped in Red," from Berlin-based pianist and Midori Hirano's February-released LP OTONOMA, which blends gentle and poignant neoclassical compositions with adventurous synthesizer-based soundscapes.
Next is a suite of acoustic guitar-based pieces, starting with Berlin-based classical player Takeshi Nishimoto's "Slow Snow," drawn from Northern Spy Records' Across the Horizon single series. Beginning tentatively in exploration of harmonics and resonance, "Slow Snow" takes its time circling the shape of a beautifully simple melodic figure, settling into final form only moments before its conclusion. Then it's a personal favourite of mine, in Eric Chenaux's "Weather the Wind." The song appeared on his 2006 Dull Lights LP, accompanied by banjo, drums and sundry percussion, but as Eric is wont to regularly revisit established pieces and wring entirely unique expressions from them, what's included here is a stripped-down solo version drawn from his 2009 self-released Mynah Bird / Le Vieux Favori CD-R. There's a striking intimacy and rich emotional depth to this performance, conveying at once a lovestruck wonder and heavy-hearted melancholy, even as Eric dazzles with his technical prowess on the fretboard. Next it's eminent folk guitar hero Marisa Anderson, with "Taqsim for Guitar," from her stunning Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, released in May. For the ongoing project, Anderson selected pieces from the private collection of one Harry Smith, which "focuses on music from places that the United States has been in conflict with since 1970: Southeast Asia, the USSR and the Arabic and Islamic regions of the world." It's a beautiful and ambitious work, and "as much a celebration of music from beyond borders as it is an examination of those borders, real and imagined, that restrict movement and curtail the natural flow of music across the globe" according to the album write-up.
Then it's something really quite special: a few years ago I paid a visit to some new friends on their farm in Maine, one of those meetings that feels like it's making a promise with the future, and not long after I got home, one of those new friends – Sofia, who releases fragile and heartrending folk music as Squinch Owl – sent me a recording of Jason Molina's "Whip Poor Will." The song has been a dear companion for years now, and I hesitated to share it with others, but it's really too beautiful to stay confined to my hard drive, and as Sofia herself said when I asked about doing so, "music is meant to be shared." Special thanks to Ky for giving the track some EQ tweaks before I put it into the mix!
That's followed up by Flock of Dimes, the indie/alt-country solo project of Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner. "Afraid," which opens her October 2025 LP The Life You Save, aptly demonstrates Wasner's ability to evoke an astonishing depth of texture and feeling with relatively humble component parts, here arraying an elegantly lush arrangment around a single repeated chord progression, her voice at once world-weary and yet near-weightless. Next it's "Todo peude se error" from Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti's collaborative LP, Almost Waking, which released in May. It's an incredible pairing of the two heavyweights – Orcutt a master of beautifully chaotic deconstructed Americana, Fratti a shooting star of an experimental cellist and vocalist – which allows each of their respective voices plenty of room to unfurl without feeling overstuffed or at all rushed. Then it's the title track from Laurence Pike's Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet, which also came out in May 2026, all piano trills alighting in the pensive ambience.
Finally, it's "Shadows of Leaves on Red Brick," the closer to Cinder Well's A Blooming Body LP, which came out last week. Amelia Baker has spent the last decade weaving together influences from various musical traditions with an exacting and evocative lyricism to craft her austere doom-folk, and this latest offering is honestly a revelation. Do yourself a favour and give it a listen.
• Mixcloud: ain't hallelujah but might as well have been (july 2026)
If you haven't had enough of me yet, a couple of weeks ago New Feeling published a short piece I wrote about thee Jack Solar and their flute-based drone/noise project Amarior. Jack and I nerded out about Greek mythology, the political valences of noise music and punk rock, and playing to the freaks and weirdos in the room. You can read that right here.
I also wrote a piece for Maisonneuve about the recent cuts to the Interim Federal Health Program, which provides medical insurance to refugee claimants not covered by provincial healthcare programs. The Carney government's latest budget mandated a 15% cut to nearly all federal departments (in order to free up money to expand the military), which lead the IFHP to now require a 30% up-front copay for "supplemental" medical services and a $4 surcharge on prescription medications. This will effectively bar refugee claimants from accessing the care they need. It's part of a neoliberal attack on both migrants and on the public healthcare system, and "an early sign of a government quietly redrawing the boundaries of who gets to belong in Canada and who is to blame for the systemic failures," according to a brief just published by the CCPA. I interviewed a bunch of doctors and organizers who are trying to fight back for the article, which is in Maisonneuve's print edition and behind a paywall for now, but should be free online in a few weeks (or you can message me if you wanna read it in the meantime, of course).
Okay, that's it! Many thanks everyone, especially to Sofia, Ky, Fred and Dave. As always, do let me know what you think, and please feel free to share this. If you're a real keener, you can even become a pAiD sUbScRiBeR, right here.
xo, graham