Archive for August, 2006
Damolition Squad: The Pickup Band Tour
August 22nd, 2006
In case you didn’t notice it down in the “top shows” list in the sidebar, Damo Suzuki (ex-Can) will be playing Toronto this weekend, presenting more of his “instant composing” - unrehearsed sets backed by local musicians, whose participation brings them into the Damo Suzuki Network. He does the same tomorrow (Wed.) evening in Montreal, as the above Seripop poster proclaims, and Thursday in Ottawa and Friday in Hamilton, Ont.
It strikes me that his methodology has been borrowed by Jandek, who will be backed by local improvisors Nick Fraser, Nilan Perrera and Rob Clutton in his upcoming Toronto concert. Ariel Pink also attempted the trick earlier this year, albeit with less success because he was asking the musicians to learn his whole set in advance, rather than to wing it. (Anyone see a show where he pulled it off?) And Shiu-Yeung Hui (sometime member of Maher Shalal Hash Baz) pursues similar techniques in his gig tonight at Graffiti’s, to which he invites even the audience members to bring instruments and play along. (If you can’t make it tonight he’s back next week at the Poor Pilgrim series.)
It’s a touring model that’s relatively common in jazz, of course - a pianist or singer or trumpet player drops into the city and picks up a rhythm section for the duration. You also find it in bluegrass and other forms where there’s a set of standards all professional musicians would know. And improvisors in the usual (jazz-derived) sense likewise can play with anyone, as can noise musicians etc. But a pickup-band-tour also comes with many advantages for the adventurous musician who toils in the towers of song: You may not be trying to bring world unity one band at a time the way Damo is, but the economics and creative dynamics are hard to beat. And by accepting the deviations and warpings that a song - or set of song-fragments, as Suzuki uses - will undergo when entered into the atom smasher of improvisation, you present to the audience the possibility that the boundaries of song need not be so rigid as we assume. In fact you generate a kind of spontaneous folk-culture, not only among the musicians who are participating in a hypercompressed version of the oral tradition, but among the audience, who are receiving material that is in some sense indigenous to that specific time, that specific gathering, in that specific room, temporary though it is. Ephemeral folkways. Mobile mother tongues.
I’d be fascinated to see it become more common. You don’t have to go on tour to do it, of course. You could do a pickup-band tour of your own town just by calling in different players at each gig. (We could get off here into a discussion of conducted improv too, but another time.)
On the other hand, you have to try to assert the boundaries between “spontaneous composition” (or “instant songs,” as I’ve heard them called), improvisation and jamming. And the latter should be ruled out unequivocally, in the long campaign to wipe jamming off the face of the earth like polio. (What’s that you say? Feh. I contain multitudes, etc etc.)
Gabba Gabba? Hey!
August 22nd, 2006
If you don’t have a small child in your life, then like me you may not have heard there’s a U.S. preschoolers’ TV show that includes animation by Chad VanGaalen and a “beat of the day” from Biz Markie. Not to mention the Ramones-derivative title. And visually it’s like - well, I’ll let the eyeball specialists describe it. Here’s Biz, yo:
Dusty, Toxic-Sludgey, Watercoloured Memories
August 21st, 2006
Extermination Music Night 2 in Toronto - left, some decorative cardboard airplanes hung above the crowd’s heads; right, the Feuermusik Big Band. Photos by girlchoochoo on Flickr.
Saturday marked the third anniversary of the 2003 blackout in Toronto and much of the northeast. Some bars held ‘unplugged’ events and the like to recall the strange freedom that many of us felt when the usual sustaining structures of 21st-century society suddenly dropped away. But another part of the community found a different way to escape into the dark Saturday night, going ‘off the grid’ - not of electricity, though partially that, but more the grid of legal permissions and sanctioned spaces within which cultural events usually take place. Thanks to the hard work of some folks whose names I won’t drop here, I found myself joining dozens of other adventurers and slipping through the fence around an abandoned bakery-company factory warehouse to spend the night enjoying live music by torchlight and the buzzing nerves of friends and strangers.
It would be shortsighted not to acknowledge the obvious precedent for such events in the warehouse parties of the dance scene - the organizers knew about this particular space precisely because techno raves had been held in it before. But events like this are testimonies to the growing sophistication in the live-band scene on questions of public space, performer-spectator interaction and the like. On one hand, you have people exploring the exact opposite extreme of openness and accessibility - such as the previous weekend’s all-ages ALL CAPS show at Dufferin-Grove Park, or last night’s show by The Bicycles for children at the JCC at Spadina and Bloor. I’ve advocated for awhile that the scene start thinking much more seriously about offering options to underagers and over-agers (by which I mean people with kids, not so much DJ Cyber-Rap, though I’m happy to hear he’s found his pothead son) - to alleviate the narrowness of the university and post-grad demographic that’s usually associated with this sort of music, but also to reduce the attrition that produces and try to diversify the input the community gets. On the other hand, for those who are able to do the all-night experience, there’s no reason to repeat endlessly the rituals of nightclub shows when it’s possible to conceive much more altered-state experiences in the very physical setup and logistics of a music event. How interesting can a culture be when its central activity is “hanging around in bars,” after all? This weekend was a sharp reminder of that - and with the great success of ALL CAPS last weekend, and Bummer in the Summer the week before, there’s been a general August experience of revitalization of ye olde “torontopian” ideals, which had been feeling a bit like they were going stale earlier in the summer.
And the music itself was no sideshow - unlike the first EMN, last summer, in which the roster of performers was so huge that no one band seemed to matter relative to the romance of the environment, and the night dragged on way past the point of even youthful stamina. Feuermusik inaugurated proceedings with brass-and-percussion fanfares, with the main duo enhanced by a trio of horn players from the improv scene. Scott Thomson’s trombone in particular at moments practically lifted me out of my body, while Gus Weinkauf’s bucket drumming had my hips mobile full time. (At one point the term “Afro-feuer-beat” flashed across my mind.) I had fantasies of people moshing to free jazz, though that never quite emerged. The compositions, which are one part Coltrane, one part Roland Kirk, with maybe a little dash of Kurt Weill (as well as maybe Carla Bley or Misha Mengelberg), go from strength to strength. Sadly this was Feuermusik’s last Toronto show in a while, as composer and sax player Jeremy Strachan is moving to Newfoundland to pursue his studies. But I think they’ve stood out this summer as one of the local acts that many people have been encountering and latching on to for the first time, so let’s hope he’s not absent too long.
There were comparably strong sets by Rozasia, Castlemusic and even Anagram - a band I haven’t cared that much for in the past, who had me revising my opinions. But even more enjoyable for me were the interactive aspects - experimenting with what one could do with just a flashlight and one’s own body to alter the rhythms of the space, noticing when the crowd might be trending towards habitual bar-gig-based dynamics and finding playful ways to nudge in other directions, all of that. Add to that the general sense of respect and care for one another (with a couple of minor exceptions there was pretty much zero bad behaviour), the vodka-vicodin cocktails at the improvised bar and the fact that there were no gendarmes, and one could only feel that bliss was it in that pre-dawn to be alive, and well, and living in Toronto. (And covered in an eerily persistent patina of black soil that proved enormously difficult to wash off and is no doubt prone to kill us all.)
What Ho! Buttonwillow!
Newsom as the News
August 18th, 2006
As Chromewaves has mentioned, Zoilusian superfavourite Joanna Newsom is playing the Mod Club in Toronto on Oct. 4 - not an ideal venue, but probably the right size. However, I think that I’ll be seeing her at Pop Montreal instead. These are Newsom’s first performances in Canada ever. Her new album Ys comes out in November. You can count the number of tracks on the fingers of one hand, but they’re all extended suites (I’ve heard live renditions of several, which sound extraordinary - Only Skin is already one of the best songs of the year - and with Van Dyke Parks arranging they can only get better), so it will be a very different album than The Milk-Eyed Mender. I’m busily trying to arrange an interview for a Globe feature, but the Drag City folks say she’s reticent. Cross your hearts and fingers (that’s a P5K reference by the way [scroll down for my contribution to that page]). Interestingly, new-folk godmother Vashti Bunyan is playing Harbourfront the night before - I wonder if there will be some collaborative crossover at one show or the other.
Hmm, how to finish this off? Well, here are a couple of live Newsom videos on YouTube; in the first she plays The Book of Right-On on Jools Holland, and in the second Swansea in an unexplained context. There’s also a nice concert/interview video.
Come Up & See Me Sometime
August 18th, 2006
Today in The Globe and Mail, I profile Toronto lo-fi-bubblegum quintet The Bicycles, and review the new Xtina Aguilera and Bonnie Prince Billy CDs.
Busting a Three Gut
August 18th, 2006
As if completely incoherent moral objections weren’t enough, now eBay is stepping in to mess up Tyler Clark Burke’s auction plans, saying they won’t sell dirty underwear, even if it belongs to Peaches.
Weapons of Mass Orchestration
August 15th, 2006
One angle that hadn’t occurred to me, as I’ve spent the weekend fuming at the notion that books are now being treated as potential tools of terror - an idea that writers have often romanticized, but not quite in this way - is the effect that the new flight restrictions are having on musicians. Cello players seem to get it the worst, at least after bagpipers (see the comments in that one). The actual effects on economic and cultural commerce will be horrible if they’re really going to treat as a threat any traveller who’s not naked and bearing a certified X-ray to ensure they haven’t got explosive bone marrow, rather than relying on other means of screening and intelligence, not to mention the inevitable risks and even losses involved in having a free and cosmopolitan society. Considering the fundamentalist edicts against music, this is one irony that stings.
(PS: Speaking of bagpipes, I hadn’t heard till this afternoon that jazz piper Rufus Harley has died.)
‘Ten Celebrities, Four of Whom I Might Assassinate’
August 14th, 2006
No doubt thousands of us internerds (tm sfj) will be linking to the tune Ryan Catbirdseat posted today: I Started a Blog Nobody Read, which I can’t help thinking of as the 2000s’ sequel to the Bee Gees’ I Started a Joke, tho unlike the latter it is tough to read this tune by the Sprites as a Christian allegory.
Meanwhile in the land of The Mountain Goats - whom I should have mentioned in that list earlier today of heirs to Randy Newman, by the way (John Darnielle even has covered one of my favourite Newman songs ever, A Wedding in Cherokee County) - there is widespread shock and confusion that they reportedly performed the song Golden Boy in a concert this weekend in Athens, Georgia. Golden Boy (hear here [scroll down]) is one of the most beloved and requested Goats semi-rarities - originally recorded for a set of music about consumer products for Paul Lukas’s legendary Beer Frame zine, later included on the Ghana compilation - but Darnielle has always responded to such requests in the past by saying that he didn’t remember how to play it, which was generally taken as a ruse. It was always hard to say whether he found the song too corny and jokey to play, or whether it held some special personal significance, or whether he just thought he could never improve on the recording, which certainly is one of the best Goats performances ever. And now, after years why has he reversed himself and played this absurdist paean to the transcendent, nay, divine powers of a certain brand of Asian peanuts with a “young Chinese farmer” appearing on the label? Fans are abuzz, I tell you, abuzz.
If thine enemy oppresseth you,
You must let him oppress you some more,
So that when you go shopping in Paradise,
You’ll find those magnificent peanuts from Singapore. …
There are no pan-Asian supermarkets down in hell,
So you can’t buy Golden Boy peanuts.
It’s unclear whether Golden Boy peanuts from Singapore exist or ever have existed. (This Canadian company seems determined to confuse the issue.) However, there is a Thai fish sauce by that name.
The new Mountain Goats video, for Woke Up New, is here. It’s directed by the same fella who made that recent “high-school noir” movie, Brick.
It is, in case you haven’t noticed, Monday. Raining where I am. Howzabout you?
A Few Words in Defence of Randy Newman
August 14th, 2006
Every once in a while I get into an argument with someone in which I try to claim that Randy Newman was the most significant songwriter to follow after Bob Dylan. I do mean as a writer, not as a performer, in which regard he pales compared to dozens of others. But still I can never persuade anyone. There are other viable late-sixties and early-seventies candidates - Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart, Curtis Mayfield - but Newman did more than anyone to widen the pallett of techniques in 1970s pop songwriting, with his uses of irony, unreliable and/or actually despicable narrators, and pastiches of classic American pop forms (which was a minor sixties post-folk trend - see Lovin’ Spoonful, various “jug bands,” etc. - but never done so richly and competently as Newman did it). He arguably introduced serious Brechtian techniques to the pop tradition - a little-noticed influence on Dylan, actually, but one Newman used as more than an affectation, unlike what the glam crowd (including Bowie) tended to do. He’s also one of the few people to have combined comedy with rock music and not come off like an idiot or vulgarian, but he’s just as effective a tragedian. Besides immediate successors in the L.A. scene, such as Steely Dan and Tom Waits, I would put Elvis Costello at the head of the line of Newman’s heirs, along with Morrissey, the Magnetic Fields, and dozens of other pop ironists. You could even add the likes of Kool Keith and Eminem, though I think their play with flipside identities comes out of strategies from the histories of black music, minstrelsy etc. - a legacy that Newman has always been keenly aware of, anticipating all the recent pop scholarship and discussion on the centrality of the minstrel tradition to American pop by decades.
Perhaps with the upcoming release of a Newman tribute album, which strangely seems to feature mainly country-rockers such as Steve Earle and Allison Moorer, more people will come around to my opinion. I’m also thrilled to learn that next year will bring the first album of new Newman songs since 1999’s excellent Bad Love, which will include a contrarian, seemingly pro-American song - notable since Newman has mostly been a fierce critic of U.S. policy and culture throughout his career - titled A Few Words in Defence of My Country. (Which might end up being a backhanded critique, on the other hand - to say “we’re not the worst country in the history of the world” might just be another way to say “we are pretty horrible,” which is the kind of signature Newman move that he made on the last album’s brilliant rumination on the death of Communism, The World Isn’t Fair). In the above-linked interview he suggests that the new album might be called Fat and Angry.
(PS: I forgot to mention: Newman is scheduled to play a rare live date at Convocation Hall in Toronto on Oct. 14.)
Matmosmorphoses
August 10th, 2006
Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt of Matmos.
The Music Gallery, as if it weren’t doing enough by bringing us Tony Conrad and (in partnership with AIMToronto) Joe McPhee this fall, announces a two-night stand by Matmos, Oct. 8 and 9 (supported by the So Percussion quartet). The San Francisco sound-bricolage duo, best known as collaborators with Bjork, most recently released The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, which is very high on my list of favourite record this year.
(And while I’ve never met his partner MC Schmidt, Matmos’s Drew Daniel is also high on the list of my favourite people ever: Go-go-dancing-boy, ex-punk, Renaissance scholar, musician, critic, nerd, dandy and wit. We gotsta throw them an after-gala, right, Toronto? Or two!)
Check out the Brainwashed page on The Rose Has Teeth… for enriching notes on the subjects and methodology of the album - such as the tale of the author of (among much else) the Ripley books repeatedly smuggling her pets, live snails, into France, by tucking them under her breasts. Thus the track Snail and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith. Which actually was recorded with snails. And lasers. No joke. (Well, joke too, of course.)
Speaking of conceptual-art electronic-beats projects, please also read the pieces today in Now and in Eye about Ultra-red from L.A., their sound project happening at the AGO on Monday as part of the current AIDS conference, and the associated compilation A Silence Broken, which includes a contribution from Drew in his Soft Pink Truth guise as well as Toronto’s Andrew Zealley (as “PSBeuys”) and Montreal’s Lesbians on Ecstasy, which will be toasted in an event tomorrow night at the Beaver on Queen W. (See the gig guide.)
