Intrapost synergy: Steve Kado as The Blankket, in front of the Brave New Waves logo.

An update on tomorrow (Wed) night’s concert in Toronto by NYC/Paris minimalist pioneer Rhys Chatham. (Previously pumped here.) Tickets are $13 adv, $15/door, at the Tranzac at 8 pm, and the roster of local guest players that’s been announced includes not only guitarists, as advertised, but a full string section including Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy), Julie Penner (Fembots/sometimes Broken Social Scene & many others), Anne Bourne (prolific local folk-and-new-music cellist), Nick Storring (jazz, improv and more), Rose Bolton (respected local composer) and Mika Posen (Forest City Lovers) on viola. Glenn Milchem (of the Swallows/Blue Rodeo) plays drums. Kevin Lynn (who’s played with King Cobb Steelie, Holy Fuck and many others) is on bass. And the guitar heroes include: Colin Fisher, Geordie Haley, Brian Kroeker, Bill Parsons, Matt Rogalsky, Paul Swoger-Ruston and Bill Brovold from Michigan (a Chatham and Glenn Branca veteran best known for his own work with Larval). The concert will consist of Chatham’s 1977 composition Guitar Trio, best described as one long crescendo that gets very, very fucking loud. (Godspeed fans, come hear where they ripped that idea from.) The concert will be recorded for release on Table of the Elements. Local longtime new-music maverick Eugene Martynec opens with live computer/interactive video music. Why wouldn’t you be there?

Speaking of Final Fantasy, an update on the following (Thurs.) night’s show at Harbourfront, “View Points: Inside the Musician’s Studio,” with Owen P., Blocks’ Recording Club/Barcelona Pavilion/The Blankket honcho Steve Kado, and yers truly, Zoilus: Contrary to some previous misinformation, including mine, Steve and Owen aren’t going to be doing any live music that evening. I tried to convince them to turn the show into a performance by their duo, Internet, in which they act out RPG fantasies while screaming. But to no avail. Instead, we’ll just be having a conversation, with each other and the audience, about why they make music and records the way they do - with a little three-way iPod battling to lively up the joint. I may press Owen to explain his theory that you can tell whether a musician is an asshole by the way he or she records drum sounds, or Steve to explain why it’s a bad decision to try and make a living from your art. We will preview the newest Blocks releases. We will not talk about the Polaris Prize. We may talk about the Art Bears. There will probably be fighting, and Steve’s sure to insult someone in the audience - maybe you!

And finally an update to last week’s conversations about the assassination of Canada’s most important nighthawk radio show, Brave New Waves: Helen Spitzer continues to collect the news, and links to a recording of the final new episode of BNW as it heads into its rerun denouement, and Michael Barclay writes a lovely obit for the show, to which he’s been both lover and husband over the years. My former colleague at Hour in Montreal, Jamie O’Meara, also has a column on the subject, in which he talks to BNW host Patti Schmidt (whose “fuck Toronto” sentiments are entirely apt, for once, in this context, unlike those of, say, that whiney suburban baby from MisShapes). We all join in saying, “We will not hear its likes again.”

PS: Update update. I somehow managed to miss the advent of a video for Final Fantasy’s This Lamb Sells Condos a month or so ago. In case that happened to you, here it is. The young man who shows up in silhouette late in the song is our friend Sasha. The young lady who shows up sooner is CeCe, Zeesy, whom we don’t really know, but is a better shadow-show mime than Sasha. This was directed by Stephanie Comilang and puppeteered by Jamie Shannon, and as Torontoist noted, was shot live, without edits.

I’ll leave you for the weekend with this Uncle Tupelo video someone pointed out to me, from a St Louis cable-TV show in 1989. Farrar and Tweedy and drummer Mike Heidorn look so heartstoppingly young here - for the first time, I understand how blown away people must have been by witnessing this act live in its early years, with the wizened voice coming out of this kid Farrar and these tough exacting riffs, so solid and unhesitant, blasting out of the gear he and his schoolboy friends had in their slender hands. No wonder a small but intense camp of fans contended, as I first read on a Knitting Factory bathroom stall in about 1991, that Uncle Tupelo was the best band in America.

The Star’s Joe Fiorito gives his account of the Parkdale gentrification discussion I moderated early this week. Unfortunately, his tone is terribly smug and superior, although he comes around to some of the right ideas in the end - “inclusive zoning,” in particular, was one of the more valuable ideas raised. I wish he’d talked more seriously about the idea he uses as his hook at the beginning, because it’s one of the things the event made me think about a lot: Am I a gentrifier, as a middle-class professional in the arts community who, first, bought a renovated house in the Portugese neighbourhood east of Parkdale, and later, moved into a converted industrial-loft apartment on the other side of the tracks? Sure I am. Not to the degree that a developer building a condo tower is, but as much as someone who opens a fancy housewares shop so they can sell shit to people in my building and the even pricier condo building up the street. How does that relate to my generally wary position on the issue, and what kind of ethical responsibility does it entail?

It’s obviously stupid to think that “renovating your kitchen makes you a bad person,” as the Star’s headline tendentiously teases. Caring for and investing in your immediate environment is a worthy value, just as it is to care for the global environment. Another idea raised at the forum was to subsidize home ownership for poor and working-class people in the area. It’s a complicated proposition (to figure out how mortgages etc. work in that instance) but it’s a more direct form of security, preventing people from being so easily dispossessed of their homes by profit-seeking landlords - but over and above that, ownership gives people a bigger stake, more pride in the condition of your home and your neighbourhood, which is good for social conditions for everyone around you. It’s collective self-esteem, which breeds a willingness to speak up and defend your interests, and so on. These are the intangibles that affluent people have that poorer people don’t, which probably count for more than most of the material differences. (Which is why middle-class or wealthy kids who become artists and live at poverty-level incomes don’t truly share class interests with working-class families, etc. - they have a different sense of agency, of status, and so forth. Although in many cases that experience of living at a different income level also differentiates them from their class origins. They’re a distinct, aberrant social formation, which is why they get demonized by everyone, but also why they seldom have a coherent understanding of their own position.)

However, what we gentrifiers do with that confidence and know-how is another matter. Do we fall into Nimbyist opposition to halfway houses and other social programs in our neighbourhoods, for instance? Do we just selfishly take care of our own stuff and turn a blind eye to what our neighbours have or need? Or do we have a responsibility to try to use some of our privilege to assist those neighbours in getting what they need? Obviously those responsibilities aren’t just localized - we’ve all got an ethical obligation to take care of one another, and those with more means have more of an opportunity to do so and therefore a bigger obligation. The millionaires in Rosedale don’t see what’s happening in Parkdale, but they still bear an ethical burden for it. However, I also think, personally, that if I’m complicit in the gentrification of my neighbourhood - if the presence of loft apartments and nicer shops in the area works to my benefit - then I incur a special duty to make sure that my neighbours aren’t going to suffer as a consequence: That there’s still affordable housing, still affordable studio space for artists, that people don’t become homeless, that those who are have services, that something of the heritage and personality of the area is preserved, that the changes that happen are beneficial to a broad range of people and not just the privileged few - or even the privileged many. Think of it as the extra rent you pay to live in a special, but troubled, place.

I’m still working all this out in my own mind, and wish Fiorito’s column had confronted such questions instead of snarking cluelessly about the people who attended the forum. (Who were by no remote stretch of the imagination all “planning students.” Did Fiorito stay for the question period, where people of all descriptions were discussing crime and drugs in the community, housing co-operatives, high rises, political representation, etc., etc., etc.? Were Parkdale’s city councillor, MPP and MP all there to talk to “planning students”? Give me a freakin’ break.)

The February listings for Zoilus’s Toronto Gig Guide are up in first draft now - look to your left for the link. As usual, it’s the sparsest musical month of the year, but there are some highlights. And as always, your additions and corrections are appreciated.

What does ‘independent’ mean if you’re part of an x-hundred-label consortium? I haven’t had a chance to research much about this new “Merlin” project, but I wonder how much uniformity it imposes on participating indie labels’ licensing approaches. The idea that it is somehow a “fifth major” seems like an extremely dubious parallel (and not a particularly pretty picture), but I’m curious to hear your opinions. Also, I haven’t seen a list anywhere of which indies are actually a part of it - including which Canadian labels.

Meanwhile, a case study in whither-”indie”-2007, from the Seattle Weekly, on The Shins and Sub Pop.

Policy prescription 2007: Send in the (20,000?) clowns.

Randy Newman rebuts the State of the Union address today in the New York Times - with the lyrics to his song, A Few Words in Defence of My Country. In light of Newman’s Oscar nomination for yet another cartoon-movie song, it’s good to see him showing his other side. (For more about which, see my previous panegyric, not coincidentally titled A few words in defence of Randy Newman.)

And speaking of altered states, I feel that Zoilus readers would want to know that a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse reunion movie is in the works.

Ex-Brave New Waves hosts Patti Schmidt, Brent Bambury, Augusta LaPaix.

I’ve put off long enough discussing the upcoming programming shuffle at CBC radio, and specifically the official anti-climax of the long, slow, choking death of Brave New Waves (and the rather sudden demise of the broadcast version of Radio 3). In part, that’s just because I’ve written about it at such length in the past. That last link includes a column I wrote about BNW in 2004, and it sums up most of my feelings; the one before that is my screed about CBC “youth strategies.”

It’s worth saying that, as CBC revamps go, this round overall is one of the least asinine so far. It doesn’t arrest the decay that’s been eating away at the network(s) for years, but in the single stroke of removing the horribly misconceived Freestyle show it has at least killed off a national embarrassment. It also wisely defines the people they’re trying to attract as between 35 and 50, more than 20 to 35. The kind of 20-somethings CBC can attract will be attracted by the same programming a 40-year-old will; its attempts to aim at people in their 20s have always been condescending and messed-up.

And while I strongly feel that Brave New Waves had the potential to remain vital, and even be a flagship program for a smarter Radio 2, I also see rationales not to carry it. There are very few people who would have been BNW fans in high schools and universities today who really need the show the way we did in the ’80s and ’90s. The Internet, mainly, makes discovering alternative, experimental and avant-garde music much easier and more probable. Yes, there are going to be kids who lose out, who don’t have the internet access or the cultural reference points and might have discovered them through BNW, but it’s a small number and I can’t strongly argue that the CBC had to keep the show going for their sake. (Contrary to some misreadings, by the way, BNW is not becoming a podcast or a satellite show - that’s the Radio 3 fate. All indications are that BNW is just dead.) What’s irksome is the abuse and disrespect the show got the past couple of years: It should have ended in a week’s or month’s grand closing with a media publicity campaign and celebration of the role it played in Canadian cultural life the past 20 years. The network’s never understood what it had on that level. Instead, as far as I can see, it dies with a whimper. That’s undeserved and insulting.

As for Radio 3, it’s harder to say. Certainly they’ve made a mockery of all the promises and promotion around it by shuffling it over to satellite. Yeah, the podcast is nice, but that’s not radio - as far as the mainstream of CBC listeners goes, R3 is apparently over, for now. But ever since the demise of its distinctive web project, R3 has just been a polished version of college radio, and again, while that’s enjoyable, I’m not sure how vital a service it is, for all the reasons given above. If anything, the BNW model, as an explicitly intellectual take, makes much more sense, if we consider the CBC’s purpose to be to provide what commercial radio cannot.

The cumulative effect, though, is that the CBC is backing off of post-boomer pop-based music, and reinstating a lot of the high-low divisions that always made Radio 2 seem stuffy. Glad that jazz is being given a prominent berth, and to see Matt Galloway’s name on the live-music show, but, well. We’ll see what the new evening show with Laurie Brown, whom I admire, involves. They haven’t defined the term “contemporary” music in this context, so I’m not sure if they just mean contemporary concert music (are they really going to play three hours a night of new composers? That’s kind of awesome, but weird) or if it is in some broader sense that would incorporate popular music (which is more Laurie’s ballywick, no?).

(Addition: A CBC employee in the comments section to this post clarifies “contemporary” in this context: “While I stress that this is still being worked out, the original idea was to have all sorts of contemporary music–from new composers to modern classical to experimental. Some examples of artists that could fit on the show, and that were tossed around during an earlier development phase, are Final Fantasy, Polmo Polpo, Arvo Part, Gavin Bryars, Hard Rubber Orchestra, Sigur Ros, John Oswald, Omar Sosa…” So that’s actually very very good news, and obviates some of my sniping above.)

Meanwhile, aside from the first hour, BNW’s old slot is taken over by the ill-defined “Overnights” - why BNW couldn’t have filled this position just as ably is an apparent mystery. CBC management has just had it out for the program, no matter what. And Patti Schmidt ends up off the national airwaves (she currently has a regional show in Montreal).

Otherwise the most upsetting move is the elimination of The Arts Tonight, which is probably the most consistently intelligent regular block of arts coverage in any mass medium in Canada. (Including newspapers.) I have no issue with Jian Ghomeshi’s afternoon show - he gets more flack than he deserves, and will do fine if the show’s well-planned and produced - but shunting his reruns into the Arts Tonight timeslot is a shoddy, cheap decision. Fortunately, we’ll still get Eleanor Wachtel, the country’s best broadcast interviewer, on Writers & Company - but that’s just once a week, and in a very specific format, no substitute for the wide-ranging cultural conversations on The Arts Tonight.

Here’s one very cogent response with a long-range view, and if you want to plunge deep into these debates, check out the comments section on the Ceeb’s official blog. Personally, I will mourn and move on. I think most of the damage was done to CBC radio before now; it’s going to be a long time till it fully recovers, if it ever does. Most of my radio listening in recent years has been to NPR via the Internet, to pop radio of various stripes whenever I’m in a vehicle, and to podcasts. But I’ll turn an ear to some of the new programming when it begins. Even a hopeful one.

Meanwhile, speaking of BNW, check out this lovely piece of writing from Helen Spitzer, recent temporary host of the show, describing the Arcade Fire’s secret show at one of their old high-school alma maters in Ottawa last week.

Michael Brook @ Joe’s Pub, New York, July 18/06. Photo by Kevin Yatarola from Brook’s MySpace.

Erella Ganon (aka “Erella Vent”), a graphic artist, writer and much more, has been a nurturing presence in Toronto music since the Queen Street scene of the ’80s, and it’s been a pleasure and an education to have her helping me out with the Zoilus gig guide for the past couple of years. She knows Michael Brook, the Toronto-born guitarist probably best known as a Brian Eno collaborator and Real World producer, from those days. When she mentioned that she worried his show here might be at risk of cancellation because of weak ticket sales, I suggested she write a post to fill people in. I’d second the notion that Lisa Germano’s presence alone makes this show worth attending - I’m a huge fan of her music. And local hero Mary Margaret O’Hara is on Brook’s new album, so the prospect of a cameo appearance should also sweeten the deal. (Though with the mercurial O’Hara, of course, nothing’s ever guaranteed.) (Sorry, I was misinformed about that.) In any case, hope to see some of you there. - CW

It is hard not to sound like a namedropper when talking about Michael Brook. As a pretty hands-on-style producer, he’s contributed to the musical releases of an enormous collection of musical artists.

Look at the range: He’s produced or collaborated with Brian Eno, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N’Dour, Dan Lanois, Cheb Khaled, The Edge, The Pogues, Djivan Gasparyan, Claude Chalhoub, Jane Siberry and countless others. I was introduced to Chalhoub because of Brook’s involvement - a classically trained, Lebanese Stradivarius player who is amazing for his sensitivity and scope. What he adds to Brook’s current release, Rock, Paper, Scissors, is another haunting layer among many.

Harnessing his abilities as a rock guitarist in local bands, Brook modified the instrument so much that he invented a new one. The “Infinite Guitar” simulates a kind of feedback loop that replicates sounds similar to ones heard in some Indian music - U2’s the Edge used it on The Joshua Tree album’s With or Without You.

Of late, Brook has written film soundtracks including the music for Albino Alligator, Mission: Impossible II and the recent eco-documentaries, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as well as Who Killed the Electric Car? Actually a great soundtrack to a pretty good IMAX film is one he composed for India: Kingdom of the Tiger, which has shown on the big Ontario Place screen for the last few summers and will likely be there again this year.

With a kind of graciousness or an implied elegance, Brook is able to make the artists he produces sound more like themselves than had he not been involved. That’s a remarkable feat. Experimenting and really listening to the musicians, he seems to draw a very human sound of what is presented. His third album is a compilation of distinct songs that distill much of what he presumably takes from personal musical musings and travels.

Not really much of a touring artist of late, Brook doesn’t offer many opportunities to see him live - even though this is his home town. Joining Brook here at the Revival Jan. 30 is Rich Evans (of Peter Gabriel’s band), his collaborator on the new cd. Multi-instrumentalist, Lisa Germano (with releases on 4AD and now on Young God Records) will play a solo set and then join them later on in the show. She’s worth the price of admission, if only to see who could possibly work with Simple Minds, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Finn, John Cougar Mellencamp and Smashing Pumpkins and still keep a distinctive solo style together. Tickets are a reasonable $20 at Rotate This, Soundscapes and Ticketmaster.

Brook also appears in Vancouver on the 28th, Montreal on the 31st, and plays Boston, Philly, New York, Baltimore and Chicago in the week following that (tour dates here). Tomorrow morning he’s on the radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15 am PST (2:15 pm Toronto time) - you can hear it in simulcast from the KCRW website. - Erella Ganon

A reminder that I’m hosting a panel and community discussion on gentrification in Parkdale tonight with panelists Matt Blackett, Misha Glouberman, Craig Peskett, Victor Willis and Margaret Zeidler. Due to anticipated high turnout, the event has been moved: It’s no longer at Gallery 1313, but next door at the Parkdale branch of the public library, 1303 Queen W. It starts at 7 pm sharp, and your questions and input will be welcome.

Chris Eaton of Rock Plaza Central, photo by Fourth Place.

Pitchfork’s already had the news, but for those who don’t read it - congratulations to our friends in Toronto band Rock Plaza Central, who’ve signed a U.S. deal with the fine label Yep Rock. YR seems to have a Canadian happy on these days, since they also released Sloan’s last album in the States. RPC is performing live on MTV Canada tomorrow (Tuesday) at 6 pm (you can attend in studio by emailing here) and playing an in-store at Criminal Records (493 Queen W) on Sunday at 4:30 pm and at Lee’s the same day opening for Oxford Collapse and Thunderbirds Are Now. They’re in Montreal at the Main Hall on Saturday, and playing some NY-area dates in mid-February.