scoring big: school depot guy makes it on the big screen

If you make your way to the basement floor of the CJ building on Loyola campus, and walk to the end of the dimly lit hallway where the equipment depot hides, chances are you’ll find John Brennan.
The 29-year-old tech, who sometimes quizzes students before letting them borrow minidisk recorders and cameras and is more inclined to letting you off the hook for tardiness if you show up with green tea or cookies, leads a pretty cool double life.
Brennan is a musician, and a very unique one at that. He began playing violin at age three, was in his first band in grade eight, started composing at the age of 13 and released his first album, which he produced completely independently, at 16. He went on to study music at Concordia and graduated three years ago.
He describes his style as an “experimentation of strange guitar tunings and odd time signatures” used to “create a natural textural world in song form,” which means he doesn’t use instruments in a traditional way. He reinvents them to produce unfamiliar and sometimes eerie sounds, and rejects the conventional eight beats per bar model in favour of irregular and organic beat structures, or non-structures rather.
The result is fresh, yet surprisingly not so weird. Paired with his breathy vocals, Brennan’s music is sometimes reminiscent of Beck or Sonic Youth, which he cites as influences.
Although he is unsigned, Brennan often forays into the commercial world, composing tracks for television shows and movies. Recently, Concordia film production student Jean-Fran