Calgary, Alberta's Chad VanGaalen's blood flows by unrestrained creative impulses. He has never worked in a commercial recording studio.

By his hands alone, one line, sound, shape or word leads organically to the next. Over the last ten to fifteen years, Chad has been producing living maps in songs, drawings, modified instruments, animations and performances--shifting forms pointing to another world, infinitely more liveable, maybe hidden just under the surface of our own ever-disintegrating reality.

In "Shrink Dust", Chad's fifth full-length album under his own name, we have a new window into his world.

The album is, in Chad's view, a country record. It is also partially a score to Chad's soon-to-be released, animated, sci-fi feature, Translated Log of Inhabitants ("It's like Bob and Doug McKenzie in space," says Chad).

Always a fan of esoteric instruments, Chad taught himself to play an aluminum pedal steel guitar.

His experiments with this instrument unify the album, along with themes of death, transformation, fear, benign evil, and the eccentricity of love.

A newfound affection for The Flying Burrito Brothers, and the sci-fi mysticism of the 1980s graphic novel The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius, also drove the album.

Somehow, with all of its disparate influences and components, Shrink Dust might be one of the most accessible moments in CVG's creative life, simply because it is more apparent than ever how much fun he is having blurring the lines between the vivid worlds of his creation, and the world his audience inhabits.

For those who are open to it, Chad's adventures in music and art illuminate a path that is more colorful, playful, and sustainable than those commonly available to us.

A path that is, most importantly, always changeable.