Archive for November, 2003
ATM + Guy, Electric Orchestra
November 16th, 2003
(Self-Released, 2003)
ATM is Toronto’s Arnd Jorgensen (guitar, bass, electronics), Tomasz Krakowiak (percussion, electronics) and Mike Hansen (record players, electronics), and Guy is Guy Leblanc (trombone, percussion). Track 1, “Portage,” is fairly standard skitter-scratch improv quiet noise for about seven minutes, then becomes fairly standard drone plus quiet noise music for another three. “Bog” is much more enjoyably tactile, especially thanks to (I think) Hansen’s play with his record needle. As with many works in the genre it would be more interesting to see this in process than to listen to the document later — are DVDs the future of the improv album? — but the choice to keep it down to 20 minutes does allow the home listener to offer sustained attention, and hopefully not just to lapse into soundtrack-think and hear it all as tension-building backdrop for a locked-room horror flick. B-
Joe Ely, Streets of Sin
November 16th, 2003
(Rounder, 2003)
Ely is the member of the Lubbock, Tex., musical mafia who’s done the most to bring West Texas cosmic country-rock to mainstream attention, mainly with his firey opening sets for the Clash in the late Seventies. Streets of Sin carries the classic Ely sound — a little bit honkytonk and a little bit Springsteen — and a sense of a centre that might partially be credited to the regrouping last year of Lubbock wellspring group the Flatlanders (with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, who wrote two of the dozen songs here, while the rest are Ely originals). Horses, twisty rivers, dry-land farming and gritty winds, “love, wine and gasoline” in witty 4/4 country blues: Sometimes there are worse things than predictability. B
Liz Phair. The Guvernment, Toronto, Nov 15/03
November 16th, 2003
In “Help Me, Mary” — track 2 of her decade-old debut Exile in Guyville, which Liz Phair played about a dozen songs into her Toronto show last night — Phair sings about her plan to get back at the guys who hang around and “bully the stereo” in her apartment:
“I keep my mouth shut tight, I practice all my moves, I memorize their stupid rules … I’m asking you, Mary, please/ Temper my hatred with peace/ Weave my disgust into fame/ And watch how fast they run to the flame.”
She spits those last words out, laying out a Machiavellian revenge plot that neatly marks a line between one feminist generation and another — one at once more bitter and more willing to use the traditional tools of womanhood to get her own back.
It worked.
Urbanism + (other) Hubbub
November 2nd, 2003
Just in case you’re reading this before Tues. Nov. 4, a set of small announcements: First, I will be working the door Monday night at the Gladstone at 8 p.m. at TRAMPOLINE HALL VS. DAVID MILLER, a special city-election edition featuring the eponymous mayoral candidate along with Jane Jacobs (!), Nino Ricci, Daniel MacIvor, Deanne Taylor and Luis Jacob, with DJ Denise Benson, and a special set by David Buchbinder and other members of the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band.
Then, on Tuesday, I’ll be talking about “Looking With Your Ears” — basically, how listening to some music can be more like looking at a painting than hearing a song — at HUBBUB!, which is the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s monthly themed variety show. I’ll be doing this in conversation with Terence Dick, the Hubbub! programmer and a very lovely man. Actual entertainment that night will be provided by Hannah Sung from MuchMusic and filmmaker Peter Lynch, plus rapping by artist David Armstrong-Six backed by the super Toronto improvisors Eric Chenaux and Doug Tielli. It would be more fun if you were there.
Don’t forget to vote Nov. 10.
