Program Fira B! 2022

Declan O’Donovan is a northern Canadian singer-songwriter from Whitehorse, Yukon known for his distinctive voice and genre-blending style on keyboards and the piano. With records that showcase alternative song-writing sensibilities while exploring folk and psych rock, Declan O’Donovan has drawn comparisons to artists such as Randy Newman, Father John Misty, and Harry Nilsson. O'Donovan has toured across Canada and abroad including performances at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, and multiple tours throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Declan is preparing to release a new full-length album titled Amok in fall 2022. ‘Amok is a story about losing track of time’ says O’Donovan, ‘a pedestrian and yet profound thing to do.’ When the spring of 2020 left the world in a state of suspended animation, Declan was in Whitehorse with vast stretches of space, time, and quiet, to ‘sit around and get weird.’ Getting weird might have been more easily achieved stuck up in the snowy expanses, traversing kilometres daily between home and studio to flesh out the ideas of Amok. Time and space of that magnitude can afford one the opportunity.

In listening to the size and scope of Amok, it is not hard to picture Declan going through some interesting processes: crawling onto the crest of some ridge, or up the branch of a tree in a psilocybic fever, one eye open to catch a snapshot of the universe conspiring. Mulling these snapshots over and over, refining and reconstructing them into epic universes.

Amok transitions from one awestruck moment to the next, molting like revelations across a plane of new consciousness.

It begins with wavering wistfulness, assertions in the face of the unknown. “Where you’re supposed to be.” A reassurance, a repeated mantra, to be cool, because you are undoubtedly floating in some strange ether, nebulae, primordial stew that will forever defy your ability to understand. And into this primordial stew the album goes.

This show meets the following Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda: