BGA's 43rd Annual Schmolaris Prize is...

Dancing About Architecture...

Each one of us, from the greatest – the Bachs or Beethovens, the Napoleans or Temuchins – to the least great – the long forgotten and unremarkable Akkadian farmers, the cloistered religious monks – is, ultimately, unimportant, is, ultimately, insignificant. Each one of your desires, each one of your fears, your hopes, is of infinitesimal consequences. In the grander scheme of the universe – which may just be one universe in a seemingly infinite number of universes – you are nothing; despite your accomplishments – whatever they may be – your life means nothing. You are, generously, a speck of dust. What is the fate of a single dust mote? What is the fate of a single atom to you? As you fret about your day, absently biting a fingernail, what were those keratin-filled cuticular cells to you? What did those protons – those electrons – mean to you? As easily as you slough dead cells from your eyes with each nervous blink, the universe cares much, much less about you and your well-being. The bacteria living on the K button of my keyboard can trace their lineage back nearly 4 billion years to the origin of life on Earth – and so can you. How important is that bacterium’s existence? How important is yours? And how do you reconcile the unimaginable largeness of the universe with your own unimaginable smallness? 

It is with these troublesome thoughts going through my mind that I’m honoured to award the 43rd annual Schmolaris Prize to Micah Erenberg for his album Art Week (the album), a collection of nine songs that struggle with the question of significance and perseverance in a world where meaning, ultimately, is absent. What gives a person meaning? How does a person become satisfied with life? What is worth pursuing? And what is not? Art Week (the album), with its rich and warm – and addictively rewarding – melodies, is philosophic in its answers, capturing them like the afternoon’s light in a pendulous crystal hanging in a window, scattering colourful patterns on the carpeted floor beneath it.

Faced with such gloomy nihilistic prospects is no easy feat to overcome. Many don’t, and instead languish in religious fervour, gripped in an endless fever, consoled by the fantasy that only once life ends will its true meaning become apparent. What point is there for living if there is no meaning behind it? they ask, breathless with worry. What good is a meaningless existence? they ask, kneeling in a desperate prayer. These are the ones “distracted by a living lie”, as Micah sings on Love is Gonna Find You; the ones that “remain something small”, as Micah sings on Do it for Love. Meaning is not to be found in some mystical external source, like some hidden elementary particle; for Micah Erenberg, it’s love – a love that swells from within, a meaning that swells from within. This is the lesson Micah learned from his childhood friend who could make bright colours from grey – in the same way that a melody enters Micah's head, he makes meaning from nothing but himself. Melodies aren’t caught by brains like butterflies in a net. No one waits around with a cage, baiting a melody out from under the front steps. They’re created from within. Are melodies not worth pursuing if they have no external source? No, they are worthwhile despite that. Even if they are painful reminders of tragedy, they are worthwhile. Do it for the love of the melody. Do it for the pain of the melody. And do it again and again and again. Do it for its own meaning. 

But that realization did not come easy for Micah. On Song For My Sister, Micah lists his failed attempts in his search for meaning: alcohol, weed, speed, cigarettes, internet, phones, screens, scenes. None of which are satisfying, none of which are fulfilling. And, yes, although alcohol does indeed make other people less boring – and I’m sure this rule doubles for amphetamines, and, at the least, quadruples for screens – it will rob you of your health, wealth, and friends. Choose life, and all those Trainspotting words. They are false muses. They are apparitions of happiness. And they make you lose sight of your true self, that true creative self who finds meaning from within, who hears melodies from within, who hears songs from within – and brings them to life. On I Promise You, in which Micah promises to give up the vices that deafen his inner ear, he sings he’ll do what he has to do in order to get out of the mucky prison he finds himself in. And the clearest path before him is one of acceptance. 

Reeve of the Rural Municipality of Chicken Town, Micah Erenberg has accepted a country life. Scrub poplars angle upward like crooked white fingers. Black medic and red clover line a packed gravel driveway. Elms and maples shade a series of small sheds – red, blue, and brown. And hidden in this farm life, like a painted egg in a woven nest, is a secret studio – its walls lined in song and verse. Remove all the city vices and a pregnant silence – a silence full of possibility, a creative silence; like a blank canvass or a blinking caret – is waiting. In such silence, anything can happen. It is a silence ripe for self-reflection. A silence ripe for art. Everyone should have a place like this. A place at the base of a swaying spruce, in amongst the pillowing moss, roots that rock as you lay there, lifting your head buoyantly in meditation. And no one around for miles and miles. A profound silence. A leafhopper jumps onto your jacket’s sleeve, and leaps away again – into the small forest of Labrador tea that look like shredded umbrellas, their orange fuzz like cotton lips. In such a silence, everything is as it should be. One’s existence, one’s self is accepted – you are who you are. Alone, at last. Embrace it. Love it. This is the one life you get, so you may as well make beautiful things.

Art Week (the album) documents Micah’s struggle to overcome the futility of significance, and in doing so creates music that will last much longer than seven days – to anyone that hears them, they will last a lifetime.

- Steve Schmolaris

October 19th, 2020

"The pecan haystack wasn't as good as the ham banana." - Glen Murray

"I picked Cantor Dust... What the f*ck is wrong with you." -  LANETTE SIRAGUSA 

"Satanus vobiscum." - Remy Bouchard

"Drake likes Micah Erenberg. Get at me." - Drake