ACCIDENCE world premiere at Berlin Film Festival.

Eccentrics unite: renowned Canadian auteur Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, all from Winnipeg, Manitoba have joined forces with unknown experimental songwriter Ensign Broderick, from Toronto, to make ACCIDENCE. This new 8-minute film explores narrative as endless, teeming micro-loops of cause and effect. ACCIDENCE will premiere alongside the directorial trio’s feature-length film “The Green Fog” at the Berlin Film Festival this February.

In a statement provided to Paste Magazine alongside the film’s trailer, Maddin describes the project as such: “Every balcony is a poem, a chant — a muscle! But whoever lives with that extra blueprint luxury of a balcony lives on the wrong side of a cross-section, on the busy, narrative-addled side of something like an ant-farm window, a brazen architectural arrangement selling cheap peeks into the naked sideshows of the quotidian — even the grisly. Step right up! Behold! A ten story wall of solid twitching muscle!”

Watch the trailer and read the full article here.

ACCIDENCE features music by Ensign Broderick, a song entitled “Accidence PSA” that will appear on his forthcoming label debut Feast of Panthers (due 3/9/18). Ensign Broderick is a later-in-life newcomer whose influences and process spans decades; songs on this album date back to the mid-70s. “This lullaby is a fractured fairytale populated with ghosts, skeleton keys inserted into closet doors and the outlines of children drawn in broken crayons. Chased into a sense of alienation and then ultimately abandonment, you are given the perfect freedom to choose between recognizing yourself in life and in the unknown, because even a nightmare is a dream,” the artist offers.

Enter Ensign Broderick’s dizzyingly expansive musical cosmos, where you can ping-pong across decades at lightning speed from Toronto’s Le Coq D’Or to the Metropolitan Opera, from The Blitz to the Louvre. A disciple of the ‘triumph of artifice’ of new wave, he is also a furtive, meticulous cataloguer of self and scene. Ensign Broderick has emerged out of nowhere with a fully formed artistic vision: a dramatic, piano-driven sound that is lavishly out of time.

With Feast of Panthers, the first album set for release by Six Shooter Records, Ensign Broderick opens his vault, a tangled fuse box that holds forty years of songwriting circuitry. With songs that hail from 1975-2011, this album reveals a creative process like no other, one that mines the glam and bathos of new romanticism, Toronto’s little known 60s R&B heyday, classically-informed structures and conventions and deeply personal stories of codified tyranny, in no particular order. Feast of Panthers is less a debut album than it is a door, one of many, into the labyrinth.

Six Shooter Records is excited to introduce Ensign Broderick with Feast of Panthers, coming March 9, 2018. Get a sneak peek of our first single, True Shame, coming in January.