In October 2011, Brandon “Roy English” Wronski and Cameron “BRKLYN” Trowbridge, both formerly of Dead Letter Diaries and Eye Alaska, began releasing music under the banner Canary Dynasty. Joining them were collaborators Cody B. Ware and VerBS.

Here’s a fun fact: Boston outfit Bad Rabbits were once listed under the collective’s website, but never released anything with the Canary Dynasty banner.

From the Canary Dynasty website (seemingly plagiarized from Wikipedia):

Canaries were once regularly used in coal mining as an early warning system.[3] Toxic gases such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the mine would kill the bird before affecting the miners. Because canaries tend to sing much of the time, they would stop singing prior to succumbing to the gas therefore alerting miners to the danger. The use of so called miner's canaries in British mines was phased out in 1987.[4]

Hence, the phrase "canary in a coal mine" is frequently used to refer to a person or thing which serves as an early warning of a coming crisis. By analogy, the term climate canary is used to refer to a species that is affected by an environmental danger prior to other species, thus serving as an early warning system for the other species with regard to the danger.[5]

The same occurred in England. First the birds were only owned by the rich but eventually the local citizens started to breed them and, again, they became very popular. Many breeds arose through selective breeding, and they are still very popular today for their voice.

When explorers discovered large dogs on one of the islands, the island became known, in Latin, as Canaria Insula ("Island of Dogs"), the root of Canaria being canis ("dog"). By about A.D. 300, the entire group of islands had the Latin name.

Because only male canaries sing, the traders tightly controlled the supply of male birds and created a monopoly on them. This kept the price of canaries high, increased their desirability and made them affordable as pets only by the wealthy

Brandon would continue releasing under the Roy English moniker for a few years before adopting Jagwar Twin as his new persona. Cameron has found continued success with BRKYLN by adding Cody Nadeau as a creative partner.

The Canary Dynasty project lived for roughly a year, culminating in a shower of singles over Tumblr, Soundcloud, and YouTube. The metadata for some of these songs hinted at a Canary Dynasty Mixtape. So although the primary duo of Roy and BRKLYN never formally released the tape, I eagerly collected it track by track and compiled one of my own. This 15 track collection contains every song released by Canary Dynasty.

Tracklist:

Changelog:

V1 - February 12, 2021 - Initial release

• 15 singles encompassing the career of the Canary Dynasty collective.