Sun Belt's collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town. Drawing from an array of invented sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports, Cabalcor charts the rise and fall of a mythical boomtown that, within the span of a century, becomes a desert wasteland.

The multi-layered narrative is woven together by an extraordinary blend of texts, both black and white and colour images, and a full downloadable album of Sun Belt's quietly surreal, dusty music.

Praise for Cabalcor:

"... Cabalcor is not, as far as this reviewer can tell, intended as a thinly veiled commentary on a real-life town or even on the oil sands. Rather, it ruminates on the larger issues of extraction, migration, labour and 'desertification' in all its senses." (The Globe and Mail)

"Sun Belt have done a remarkable job developing a fictional location that has a distinct atmosphere and local character; the album is part of a multi-media release in combination with a book, Cabalcor: An Extracted History, which features fictional sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports that chart the region's descent into a wasteland. ... " (Exclaim)

"... the subject is incredibly timely, in terms of activism, as Sun Belt's project examines the ramifications of tar sands just as Greenpeace recently published a statement demanding the Canadian government stop such acts and 'end the industrialization of a vast area of Indigenous territories, forests and wetlands in northern Alberta' and thousands of activists in Canada continue to protest the expansion of numerous pipelines." (rabble.ca)

Sun Belt's profile page

Sun Belt members include:

Rick Maddocks, author of Sputnik Diner (Knopf Canada), former singer-songwriter for The Beige, and the composer of the experimental opera The Meal presented at the PuSh Festival and Vancouver's Pacific Theatre. He teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

Carrie Walker, a Vancouver-based artist whose practice is strongly rooted in drawing, often employing images of non-human animals as metaphors for the human animal. She has exhibited her drawings in New York, London, Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Stephen Lyons, a Juno-award winning musician/writer whose iconoclastic work is at the forefront of Vancouver's creative music scene. Known mainly as the leader of the seven-piece avant-rock group, Fond of Tigers, Lyons is also a noted producer and presenter of experimental music.

Florence Barrett , a costume designer whose recent theatre credits include: To Wear a Heart so White (Leaky Heaven Circus), Visions of Vancouver (Pi Theatre), El Jinete (Puente Theatre), Foreign Radical (Theatre Conspiracy). Film credits include; Eadweard (Motion 58) Patterns of Liquid Stars (Chien Productions) and Pas De Deux (O'Shea Pictures).

Other members include Spanish-based illustrator Sandra Carvalho González, songwriter Jon Wood, multimedia artist Justine Gabias, and Grammy-nominated musician and composer Paul Rigby.