Plucked from the dying carcase of Barn Owl, the band Young Feathers arose with the winds of monthly Kitchener hootenannys on Stirling Street. Self desribed as apocalyptic gospel, the band enthusiastically sing about 17th century Anabaptist martyrs in five voice harmonies. Their emerging sound combines these choir harmonies with rhythms of piano, resonator guitar, drums, bass and synthesizer to imagine a landscape of the end of times.
Hootenanny’s were a staple of the community on Stirling St. Everyone just got out the instruments and someone would raise an old tune. The rhythm team, brothers Ben and Levi sang natural harmonies from growing up in a musical family. Michelle and Jared fit right in. They had been playing gospel songs on the street ever since the Recession hit. Troy, a sought after wedding singer joined to experiment with laptop beats and synthesizers.
Lyrically the song's themes came from baptism in blood theology taught at Conrad Grebel seminary and the radical politics found in punk folk records (like plan-it-x). Ivan Illich describes best the age of the Gospel, institutions, and illumination that we refer to when we say apocalyptic.
“During the days that we have been discussing my hypothesis that modernity can be studied as an extension of Church history, I have again and again tried to show you that our present world can finally be understood as a perversion of the New Testament. So, I do not believe, with some, that this is a post-Christian world. That would be consoling. I believe, though I’m hesitant about the term, that it’s an apocalyptic world. At the very beginning of our conservations, we spoke about the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of evil, the nesting of an otherwise unthinkable, unimaginable, and non-existence evil and its egg within the Christian community. We then used the word Anti-Christ— the Anti-Christ, which looks, in so many things, just like Christ, and which preaches universal responsibility, global perception, humble acceptance of teaching instead of finding out for oneself, and guidance through institutions. The Anti-Christ, or, let’s say, the mysterium iniquitatis, is the conglomerate of a series of perversions by which we try to give security, survival ability, and independence from individual persons to the new possibilities that were opened through the Gospel by institutionalising them.”
Ivan Illich, The Rivers Run North of the Future (pg 169)