Wavelength, Our Funny Valentine
Jessie Stein of The Luyas, playing Wavelength 450 on Feb. 14.
Wavelength 450: February 12-15, 2009.
It's always exciting when the lineup for the annual anniversary festival of Toronto's Wavelength music series is announced, and today turned out to be that day. This year Wavelength turns 9 with some lineups awesome enough to make me imagine I still like rock shows. All hype supplied by Wavelength, not me, but I would vouch for most of the descriptions.
Thursday Feb. 12, doors at 7 pm,
Music Gallery at St. George the Martyr Church, 197 John St.
Timber Timbre (Ontario Gothic murder ballads, cd release show), Ghost Bees (Halifax: telepathic twins' trip-folk transport), Dorit Chrysler (New York: world-renowned Theremin player and avant-pop vocalist).
Thursday Feb. 12, after-show at 11 pm,
Cameron House, 408 Queen W.
The Diableros (College Street: psych-rock steamrollers), Loitering Heroes (Trinity-Bellwoods: jazz-fueled, jangle-pop poetry).
Friday Feb. 13, doors 9 pm,
Wrongbar, 1279 Queen W.
Slim Twig (Toronto: Concrete rockabilly pop pleasure, T.O.'s Best Pop-Rock Act according to NOW magazine), Bonjay (Toronto: Dancehall electro-pop, check out that TV on the Radio cover!), Child Bite (Detroit, massively heavy no-wave soul quintet), The Magic (Guelph/Toronto: blue-eyed soul brothers and sister), DJ Benjamin Boles
Saturday Feb. 14, doors 8 pm
Polish Combatants Hall, 206 Beverley St.
$100 (Toronto: new urban folk heroes, recently sold out shows at the Silver Dollar & Dakota Tavern), Brides (Guelph/Toronto: noise-addicted no-wave warriors), Hooded Fang (The Annex: arch indie pop with a Can-lit fetish), The Luyas (Montreal: dreamy fireside pop featuring Jessie Stein with members of Bell Orchestre & Torngat), Element Choir (Parkdale: Christine Duncan's double-digit conducted-improv choir), DJs Greg Ipp & Ian Worang
Sunday Feb 15, doors 9 pm
Sneaky Dee's, 431 College St.
Foxfire (Toronto: disco-sleaze version of Broken Social Scene), I Am Robot and Proud (Beaconsfield Village: Shaw-Han Liem's mood-boosting electronic pop, now backed by a live band, big in Japan!), Thank You (Baltimore: Thrill Jockey Records, instrumental art-punk madness), Mi Ami (San Francisco: Quarterstick Records, fuzzed-out space-dub trio, members of Black Eyes), DJ Babylon Telecom.
With your host, Doc Pickles. Projections by General Chaos Visuals. Admission for each night is $10 (or pay what you can), at the door only. More info at the Wavelength website.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, December 23 at 3:06 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Tuesday's Choice: Hmm, Valentine or Blah Blah?
Fred Lonberg-Holm, in a photo borrowed from Peter Gannushkin.
In a case of very inconvenient timing, there are two strong contenders for can't-miss avant-jazz events in Toronto tonight.
At the Imperial Pub near Yonge-Dundas Square, from Chicago's fertile improv scene, the Valentine Trio led by cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and trombonist Jeb Bishop's trio, both with Jason Roebke on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums. Anyone familiar with Ken Vandermark's various groups or with Peter Brotzmann's Chicago Tentet will know Jeb and Fred's stupendous playing. 8 pm, twelve bucks.
Meanwhile at the Lula Lounge there's a triple-headed party with some of the city's very best improvisers to launch the Xmas-season bounty of cd's from local improv label Barnyard Records, including the debut of Blah Blah 666 (reviewed as "witty and playful" today in the Globe by my colleague Robert Everett-Green), Jean Martin and Justin Haynes' set of duets on ukelele and drummed-suitcase with tunes by Saint Dirt Elementary School composer Myk Freedman (reviewed by David Dacks as having "an intimacy reminiscent of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto's collaborations" in last week's Eye) and Kyle Brenders' Toronto Duets with Anthony Braxton, about which, well, need I say more than "Anthony Braxton"? (Though he won't be there tonight.) That's on Dundas between Lansdowne and Dufferin, at 9 pm, $10 (or $15 with a cd).
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, December 02 at 5:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
She Said, 'Johnny You Got Big Eyes'
In the NYT Magazine's "Screens" issue, coming this weekend, some prominent types name "Moments that Mattered" in their encounters with flat, candescent images of all sorts this year. Novelist Heather O'Neill picks the above YouTube video, titled "Dance Dance Revolutions Co.," and tells a touching story about it and her daughter. As she says, the song ("The End of Poverty") is by Toronto band Tomboyfriend (see the Zoilus entry about chief 'boyfriend Ryan Kamstra earlier this week). But she neglects to mention that the video itself was created by Toronto artist (and Zoilus comrade) Margaux Williamson using found YouTube footage of teenagers dancing in their basements (as she explains here); it was shown in an exhibit at Harbourfront in Toronto earlier this fall.
(Margaux was also inspired by YouTube in her full-length video, Teenager Hamlet 2006, previously mentioned here.)
But what O'Neill says of it is lovely and true: "Each time you watch it, you have a different favorite kid. They flail their arms around and gyrate their hips and completely, completely let themselves go. ... the side of them that just lives in the moment and laughs all afternoon and feels a rock song the way adults never can and spends all day looking for the most original way to shout out: I am here! I am me!."
Speaking of "I am here! I am me!" and of Harbourfront, try tonight or tomorrow to catch one of the last two performances of Hospitality 3: Individualism Was a Mistake, a performance by ex-Torontonian, now Montrealais, Jacob Wren and PME-ART's , in its world premiere. I'll be there tonight.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 21 at 3:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Ryan Kamstra's
Apocalypse Madge
(And Girl Talk Etc.)
Madonna underdeveloped, underperforming
underwater, untamed . . . deserted North America.
There are Post-it notes in each drawer. Either my regime's
been changed or else I colluded.
My ass is missing. I really don't recall.
Between hunger or adoring welter, another interior hunchbacking
to another interior.
The crucial updates only:
There are a series of outstanding waiting lounges into which
I'm now departed.
A turntable made of only more but ever smaller dreams.
Orange slums beyond metal cities.
Cities barnacle the empire.
No matter which floor, it's repeating like this.
Sarah Liss wrote a very sharp, insightful profile of poet and musician Ryan Kamstra in this week's Eye, in anticipation of his launch on Tuesday night at Mitzi's Sister for his new book iNTO tHE dROWNED wORL_D, an end-times phantasiac poetry cycle in which the world ended eight years ago, dedicated and addressed to Madonna, or at least to a tattered poster of her Drowned World Tour (which ended the week of 9/11).
As Liss's article mentions, I've created a Madonna trivia contest for the occasion, though unfortunately I can't be there in time to deliver it in person. Skill level: middlingish. In addition there is a Madonna-costume contest with actual prizes and two sets by Ryan's ever-more-excellent band Tomboyfriend (currently recording their first full-length, Don't Go to School). Doors at 7, readings & shenanigans at 8, music at 10, drinks throughout.
I have had a lot of other things to talk about but no time to talk about them - for instance the way that Eye has been mixing up filesharing and appropriation art in its discussion of Girl Talk (Girl Talk doesn't threaten the "economic engine" of the music business because he's just making collages, not giving away the original music, and indeed is probably making people more likely to seek out the original music); how the usually perspicacious Mike Barthel became oddly literalist in his discussion of the same subject on Idolator - if Girl Talk "is not fair use" in the current legal definition then that definition needs to be expanded, mainly because its fixation on parody as the primary legitimate use of appropriated material is out-of-date, as I think Idolator's lawyer understands; how this is really just the sampling debate of the 1990s all over again - in fact it makes me dizzy with a sense of proximal amnesia - and Girl Talk's use of the technology is not anywhere near as exciting as the Beastie Boys' was; how music writers as a broad group seem to be way behind the curve conceptually on this stuff; and how everyone should read The Gift by Lewis Hyde, or at least, as a starting point, the quite beautifully written NYT magazine feature about him this weekend.
(On a related subject, was I the only one who initially missed Suzanne Vega's charming NYT blog post [many weeks ago now] about how the infinite number of remixes of Tom's Diner came to be, and how she inadvertently helped invent the MP3? You can tell it's written by an artist because she's not afraid of what she doesn't know.)
I wish Ryan had incorporated lines from Madonna songs throughout Into the Drowned World and I could make all these points tie up neatly, but he didn't, but you get the general idea.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 17 at 1:47 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Darren O'Donnell:
Can he tell us how to get to Sesame Street?
I've got a piece about Toronto writer-artist-performer-impresario Darren O'Donnell, creator of Haircuts By Children along with much more, in the new issue of Toronto Life. It's a radically reduced version of my original but gets the job done as an introduction to O'Donnell and his take on participatory/relational/social art-theatre - which he charmingly reduces to an attempt to recapture the Sesame Street urban-community fantasies of his childhood in his real life in Toronto. Forget Allan Kaprow and the Internet, he hints - all this social-art stuff of the current generation might be traceable to the Children's Television Workshop.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 11 at 4:35 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Bienvenue Les Poules
What with all the Obamabanananess this week I've been remiss update-wise. So you're getting late notice that AIMToronto (the Association of Improvising Musicians) is doing another of its "Interface" series, in which locals improvise with visiting heavyweights. This time around the guests are Les Poules ("The Chicks"), the longstanding trio of Joane Hétu (sax & vox), Diane Labrosse (sampler) and Danielle Palardy Roger (percussion) from Montreal, who have been major contributors to the Quebec musique actuelle scene for some 28 years, not to mention a strong feminist presence in the improvimentalist thing internationally.
They'll be at Parkdale's own avant-living-room Somewhere There in various configurations with T-dot types tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm and Sunday afternoon at 3:30 pm. Tix are $15 ($10 for members, students, seniors, unemployed, "etc.") or $30 for all three shows. My particular recommendation goes to the Sunday matinee, which features a full Poules set as well as Labrosse and Roger playing with local accordionists Erin Crickett and the great Tiina Kiik, and Hétu with clarinetist Ronda Rindone and sax fella Jeremy Strachan (Feuermusik). Don't sleep.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 07 at 2:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Byrning Bright
Amazing time at the Songs of David Byrne & Brian Eno Toronto tour stop at Massey Hall last night. My review is up on The Globe & Mail website (bearing roughly the same headline as approximately one-third of all reviews of the tour thus far) (but at least it's accurate) (I wonder if he thought of the "Byrne/burn" pun when he was writing the song?).
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 30 at 8:55 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
November Gig Guide ...
... is in action! Check the gig-guide page and as always please notify us of errors and omissions. So far a quiet month compared to the past few, but I'm sure that won't last. Most notable so far perhaps are the Nov. 10 and 11 visit by Eugene Chadbourne to the Tranzac and Somewhere There, as well as The Bicycles' new CD launch, with a million friends as always, on Nov. 8.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 22 at 6:00 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Somethin' On My Mind: RIP Frankie Venom
I've been too swamped with other deadlines for le blogging this week although there's been tons to post about. (If you haven't caught the Take On Me, Literally video yet, give yourself a few minutes of happiness.)
But I wanted to drop in to share my sympathies to those who today are mourning Frank Kerr, aka Frankie Venom, of one of Canada's original and most indefatigable punk bands, Teenage Head. My favourite tribute so far is on The Last Pogo website: Frankie Venom talked the talk and he walked the walk. He also climbed staging, hung from rafters, rolled on broken glass, danced on tables and once, at the Colonial Underground in '76, either fell through the shoddy wooden stage (according to some) or crawled underneath and punched his way through.
(Forget it, Jake. It's Hammertown.)
That classic punk documentary is now finally out on DVD, by the way, and watching it would be one way to honour Frankie's memory. There'll also be a Last Pogo 30th-anniversary event at the scene of the original concert-crime, the Horseshoe Tavern, at the end of November.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 16 at 8:58 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Nadir's Big Chance (in Toronto)
I lost track of dates and overlooked telling you about tonight's Peter Hammill show in Toronto, at 8 pm at the Phoenix. Hammill's best known of course as the lead singer of British prog-proto-punk band Van Der Graaf Generator, in which capacity legend has it he was a prime influence on John Lydon's vocal style - more in the PiL era than in the Pistols - throw in a tincture of Berlin-period Bowie and lyric opera, and you've got a fair notion. My personal favourite Hammill period was when (like fellow prog veteran Peter Gabriel) he threw his lot in with the punk/post-punk/new-wave crowd and turned out a series of chilling monologic solo records, such as Nadir's Big Chance, A Black Box, The Future Now and Sitting Targets whose general mood is well summed up by the title, "The Institute of Mental Health, Burning."
Revisiting some of Hammill's stuff, I have a tad less appetite for all the drama than I did when I was 12, and his mellower, more measured and narrative writing of recent years, from what I've heard, gets a bit, well, English. But still, a heavyweight who continues to be as neglected as he was when Lydon was championing him, except by the more daring quarters of the prog constituency. I'm sure he'll have more to offer than the election returns do.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, October 14 at 10:35 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
ARTS GALA!
'No One Dances Like Michael Ondaatje'
I'm not sure the controversies during this election have been all that clarifying to Canadian artists about how we see our work, our role in society, the place of grant funding and our mode of relationship to the rest of the public. But Stephen Harper's sure making an entertaining foe - matching his belief that artists spend most of their time wearing gowns and going to glitzy galas with his impulse that the great thing about a global financial meltdown is that it's like a tag sale on stocks. It's not that Harper's an elitist or an anti-elitist - it's more that society as a whole is kind of a mystery to him. (I feel kind of sad for him.)
It's also produced quite a burst of agit-prop-making energy. As we go into the final weekend of the campaign, check out activist coalition Department of Culture's fundraisers across the country, as well as some of the quite impressive submissions to their Gone in 30 Seconds video contest. Meanwhile, I've just gotten this video from young Toronto band Hooded Fang (a reference of course to classic piece of Canadian literature - tho they're not the first musicians to drop that name). It gives Harper's gaffe a treatment that kinda reminds me of Electric Six's "Gay Bar" from a year, three ago. (Not that the arts are, like, gay or anything.) Ladies, gents and ordinary Canadians, let's go to an "Arts Gala."
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 09 at 2:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Can I Get an Ame ... Er, I Mean a 'Hail Satan'?
John Darnielle growls the praises of Toronto's "anti-war, but pro-horror" Blood Ceremony.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, September 29 at 3:52 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Inside Extermination Music Night
(In-Depth Version)
Zoilus amanuensis Chris Randle ran an interview with the organizers of Toronto fabled surreptitious-music-series Extermination Music Night in Eye weekly last month, but it was much truncated. This weekend, on the occasion of the latest in the EMN series (Sat at midnight; see the gig guide), we thought we'd run the full shebang. (Man, that's the dirtiest word.)
Chris: What inspired you to start doing the series?
Dan: I'd gone to these Wasteland events put on by Jubal Brown in the late 90s, that were done in factories...I started going to those when I was 17 or 18 and that had a pretty profound effect on me. Initially for me it was more of an aesthetic thing than a conceptual thing - maybe I thought about the conceptual aspects a bit later after the fact ...
Matt: I was living in Calgary for a while when I got out of school and I'd been interested in just going and looking at buildings like that, I did the same when I came here. I'd heard about the Wasteland parties that Jubal had done and I'd probably heard or read in magazines about people doing shows with generators...During certain years in Toronto people started putting on shows at alternate spaces so it kind of led off of that - why not do something where you rent the generator and then do it in an abandoned space?
[... continues ...]
What's the process for scouting out new locations? I know some of them are already used by skaters or rave kids...do you only use those established venues, or go looking for new ones?
Matt: We try to go and look for new ones. Dan does a lot of driving around looking at places. The thing is, most of the places that we've used are documented on the [urban] infiltration sites and stuff, just because they end up being the most reliable in a lot of ways.
Dan: Yeah. The last one I found out about from an urban exploration photoblog. A couple of friends had told us about the second one in the Buns Master factory. Our friend Ian had gone to a rave there a year previous or something. But yeah, mostly we'll find something on the internet and go check it out.
Matt: We sometimes come across places that we see and aren't sure if they're possible. There was one that...actually, that was the last one. I'd seen that site a while back and a friend had told me that...I don't know what it was, an assembly plant? And a friend of mine lives near there, he'd shown me that a couple years ago...I mentioned it to Dan but at that time it seemed really impossible. And it turned out to show up on one of those infiltration blogs. Then you realized "oh, okay, you can get in there."
Dan: They didn't have the location specified but they'd taken a photo from the tenth floor. And then I emailed Matt...
I know it's not a uniform thing, but what has the reaction from the cops been like? I remember there was one where they found you guys and then let it happen...
Matt: Yeah, there was one cop that came - we had just finished setting up when we could see their shadows wandering around the building. They opened up the door and they didn't come in, but they talked to Dan and asked us if we were allowed to be there. There was some hemming and hawing and then they said "In a word, no...You'll probably get a noise complaint, but good luck to you," and they left. It varies a lot depending on who it is.
Like, the last one, the cops were probably a bit more pissed off than they've been - although that's hard to say. They react depending on the situation. There's one that we did under the Lansdowne bridge and there was a fire lit under there, people chopping wood, and when they looked down on that and saw that it was on the train tracks they weren't too happy. But there've been other guys who almost... you look at them and you think they're kind of into it.
Dan: Yeah.
The last one was kind of insane - I don't know if you were out there for most of it but there was a Cockney bobby for some reason...
Dan: He came up to the eighth floor. He was pissed off. He was so pissed. Or he was acting pissed.
Yeah, they kept being like, "we're gonna let out the dogs..."
Matt: Did you see a dog?
I think they had - there was an ominous van, but...
Dan: Steve Kado's theory was that it was an mp3 dog. Just dog sounds.
Matt: I want to hear confirmation that somebody saw a dog. I heard a lot about hearing dogs, but nobody can claim to have seen a dog.
There were some pretty hilarious threats, like the whole "art party" thing ...
Matt: Yeah, that was pretty good. I enjoyed that.
It seems that they don't really care about it overall, though. They're not assigning a task force to it or anything.
Dan: No. Yeah, I guess ever since the rave scene died it's not really much of a concern.
Matt: And that could change on a dime, right? Any time these go off, we're just so happy because you know how those things can change. If something bad were to happen - if somebody were to do something stupid and hurt themselves or whatever...You know that they would make it Priority One. Stamp out illegal art parties!
Dan: There was one [urban-explorer] guy who died, a photographer. ... There wasn't much follow-up after that.
Matt: Yeah, I was worried. When I read about that happening just before the last one I thought, oh, this is going to make it into public consciousness and they're going to be all over this.
I think that sort of adds a sense of occasion, though, because not only is it something that only happens once in a site-specific sense, but it could also all end if some politician tries to crack down on it.
Dan: Yeah. I don't see how they'd be able to crack down on it, really. If they decided to charge us or something...
Matt: I think if they got really belligerent about it and were able to find out who was organizing it they would just slam those people really hard... Slamming them with the largest fines that they could. Not to say that I think this will happen.
There's that danger there, I guess. I think that's part of the appeal.
Matt: I'm sure that people either enjoy the sites or the architecture or just being in these places that they would never see ... the music, whatever goes on, the occasion of it, but on a fundamental level it's like when you're younger and the older kids come to your door and want to play a game of Fugitive or Manhunt or whatever... You're running around after dark with these kids ten years older than you -
It's play, not work...
Matt: I don't think that people really feel any fear going to this, but there's a certain level of -
Dan: There's a charge.
Matt: Yeah.
Dan: Just by the fact that there's no bureaucracy or mediating thing between the space and the event.
You're not actually risking your life, it's just this adrenaline -
Dan: Yeah.
Matt: I think - the analogy with the younger and older kids, and you know that it's a game but if they capture you they're gonna at least give you a really bad snakebite... it's the same with the cops. You could get a fine, they're going to be really nasty to you or whatever... It's that small amount of fear that gives it the charge.
Dan: Certainly for me, within the narrative of the series the authority factor doesn't figure in that prominently for me. For me it's not reactionary against the way music is normally performed, it's just an operation outside of that.
Matt: Yeah.
So it's not an oppositional thing.
Dan: No. That's not the intention, I don't understand how it could be read as that. The police don't factor into the narrative for me at all. Although, it's undeniable that when you put that many people in a space within that context, there will be a certain atmosphere that self-produces as a result of being unsanctioned.
Do you guys worry about it becoming too popular, just for logistical reasons? I know there was that one - not the last one, the one before - with 500 people or whatever...
Matt: I guess I would worry about it if it came to the point where this wasn't possible for some reason, but otherwise I don't give a shit about that. I'm not into saying "oh, this person should be here and this person shouldn't," or any of that shit. I don't care if 500 people show up or not, myself, other than that I want the thing to happen.
Dan: Fundamentally I don't care, but I have to admit that that one felt like it was too many people. Or not even too many people, but - I don't want to say the wrong type of people, but there were a lot of people there who didn't seem to get it, like it was just another party. I don't know.
Matt: I think that that's true, but at the same time I think if you say 50 people came simply because it was a party, and even 40 of them left just thinking "cool party!", there were probably at least ten people who were like, "weird," who were like, "What is this about?" It's their choice how to interpret it, and maybe most of them will interpret it as just "party," but it's worth it if ten people come away thinking "oh, there's something interesting here." Maybe it does something to somebody.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. I think you have to consider relational aesthetics, how the audience is interacting with one another in the space. I don't know, I don't really give a shit.
Matt: [laughs]
Are you guys experimenting with the formula at all? I know that one had the record sale, and at this last one there was the art on each floor...Do you have any idea what you're going to do with that in the future?
Dan: This summer - excluding the one that's coming up, because there isn't much of an art component to that - with the first two, [we were] definitely ushering in another phase...EMN 3.0?
[laughs]
Dan: But yeah, that was done to create a more total environment, and to more palpably recontextualize the space rather than just set up music...
Matt: In a lot of ways, it doesn't matter that that last one was busted. It still happened, it was there for a couple hours, and a lot of people still got to see interesting things for a short time. But it's a shame in a way, because that one I really felt was the place to be very different. It really was going to be mostly about those performance artists on those ten floors for the majority of the night - most of the music, or at least half of it, was going to happen on the roof, almost like... "Celebration" is too much, but I looked forward to it as being "everything else happened, now go look at this view up on the roof."
I was looking forward to the fact that it was based so much on the artwork, and it would be nice to do another one like that. This thing started off as being a lot about music, but people have come to it for other reasons. I think there's a lot of room to do interesting things because of that.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, definitely the original motivation for me was presenting music in a context that wasn't a bar - and actually, that last one, I have to say that I think the police presence kind of figured into the narrative
It was pretty awesome how you guys kept playing up there -
Dan: Even though I said that this isn't a reactionary thing, that felt really reactionary and overtly anti-authoritarian, maybe even in a corny way? I thought it was great.
Matt: We can't really take credit for that. The band was up there and they came to me as everyone was getting busted downstairs and were like, "what should we do? Should we play?" The thought of them playing at that point hadn't even occurred to me, I just assumed that it would all wind down, people would get ushered out. I wasn't really thinking about what we should do next, more responding to what's going to happen next. And then I was just like, "yeah, why not?" And they went ahead and did it.
[crosstalk]
Matt: I would love if somebody had footage of what was going on down on the ground with the cops at that time, because what I've heard from people is that there was a real reaction from them at that moment. Definitely not from the standpoint of "fuck you, cops," but I'd like to see the reaction on their face. I heard that it was just surprise. They were like, "Are you kidding me? The band is actually starting up with all these cop cars down here?"
One of the cops actually knew one of the people at the show.
Dan: I heard about that.
Matt: Really?
Dan: Yeah, there was a girl in a gold-lame bathing suit and she was like, "Karen!?" And the cop was like, "Kimberly!?"
Matt: Seriously. Really. That was that woman cop?
Dan: The woman cop, yeah.
There was this hilarious mix of reactions. I was just there with my hands up thinking it would be kind of gangster if Sandro Perri got a Polaris nomination and arrested in the same month.
Matt: What happened after these two recognized each other?
They were, y'know, hugging and stuff, at this crime scene...
Matt: That right there is the reason that this should get busted from time to time. That needs to happen on some level, you know? A cop should see - "oh, a friend of mine is here?" It's not criminal activity.
Was it conscious on your part to have the series be so widespread geographically? You've done one in the east end, you've done stuff right up on the beach or on Leslie Spit...
Matt: Totally. Yeah. I think the moment that really took hold was when Dan suggested doing one at the Guild Inn in Scarborough, and at first my initial reaction was, "Oh, that's too far, no one will go." And then I was like, "yeah, of course they'll go!" You can do these anywhere. I've been driving around a bit, and it may not even be possible - I just don't know if anything's available - but I'd really love to do one in Mimico or something like that, go in the other direction.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. Mississauga?
Matt: Yeah, yeah. And I'd love to go back and do one in Scarborough. Secretly, I'd love to do the Guild Inn. I think that - being very different from the other locations was also -
- with the columns?
Matt: Yeah. I'm kind of obsessed. I think it would be very interesting.
A lot of writers now talk about how the notion of a local scene is dead, because of the internet, or whatever, and I think EMN is a good response to that. It's like you're representing the totality of the city, rather than just a few bars and a few streets downtown...
Dan: I don't think Extermination Night would be as interesting in a city like Detroit, because abandoned buildings are par for the course there. Whereas here, it's like stepping out of - not necessarily a comfort zone, but stepping outside of the norm a bit, as far as the venue is concerned, and also as far as the location of the venue is concerned. Because of course the trip to the location is important. And also, just on a purely practical note, most of the locations that we can use happen to be outside of town.
Matt: We should be doing this interview in that abandoned house around the corner.
Dan: I think it would be really funny to do an Extermination Night in the alley behind Sneaky Dee's.
[laughs]
Dan: You should think about that. Put that on the backburner.
Matt: For some reason I've been interested in doing one that's, like, outdoors but walled in. It's not an original idea, I've seen pictures of shows that happened in spaces like that, but there's something really interesting about it. I wish we could find a place that's between some abandoned buildings, where you're not in the building, but in these - a maze, or an alleyway. That'd be really awesome. Especially if it was daytime.
[crosstalk]
It's almost as if it changes the way you think about the landscape. If you go to a bunch of these, when you're walking along you might start thinking "hey, this would be a good place for a show," instead of "hey, this is a weird, creepy abandoned building."
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's what I always think about when I look at these. My interest in ruins is primarily event-based. And that ties into the fact that it's unsanctioned. You can use this space, you just have to do it. You just have to do it! That's it.
Matt: By the same token, I'm interested in a more traditional sense - tradition in that, yeah, there's a history, a subculture of people who do this infiltration. I'm happy to hear if somebody goes to one of these things and is like, "I never even thought of looking at these buildings," and even if they're not looking at these spaces as "an event can go there," that there's an appreciation. I'd be happy to hear that people are like, "Yeah, one weekend I didn't have anything to do so some friends of mine, we thought about these events and just wanted to go look at some of these buildings." That's cool too.
In a normal show the centre of the attention is obviously the band and you're sort of spreading that around. ... You emphasize the building and even the audience more than usual.
Matt: I think as time goes on that becomes more pronounced. I really believe that a lot of people who come to this - as time goes on they come back for reasons other than a band playing there. They're just really interested in seeing these sites.
Dan: I'd say the emphasis is more towards the space than the people because...so many local shows I find that the emphasis is on the people rather than the band....Increasingly I find that shows in regular venues are more of a social call.
Matt: There's been some pretty brutal examples of that recently. To a level that I've never seen in Toronto before, to the point where there's an alleyway full of 200 people and inside where the band is actually playing there's 10.
Are you talking about that Cinecycle show?
Matt: Yeah. I've never been more upset by a show, actually. I was really - I don't mean to be negative or a nanny or anything, but I was really disappointed in us. As a city. At that show.
Do you just look at local bands, or -
Matt: No, we think about out-of-town stuff all the time, we just haven't had much luck with it. Primarily because ... given all the ways that this can fail - not fail, it never fails. Given all the ways that this can go wrong, it's hard for people to get up the gumption... They're really putting themselves out on the line by even participating in something like that.
It sounds like a story some serial killer would lure people in with.
Matt: We can't offer money or any sort of guarantee about anything, that they'll even get to play. And so understandably, touring bands or people from outside the city, it's kinda hard to do. I mean, the most we've been able to muster is bringing in a band from Guelph at this point
[laughs].
Dan: I was talking to this guy in Buffalo...Who's the big minimalist violin player? He named the Velvet Underground?
Tony Conrad?
Dan: Yeah, I was talking to Tony Conrad. I actually talked to him on the phone and he was into the idea, and then I never heard back from him.
Matt: I've talked to some bands from out west in the States and some bands from Texas, friends of mine, and sent a lot of information about this thing and people are very excited about it, but it's just a matter of, does the actual date line up with them being on tour and halfway across their country? It's hard if you're trying to find someone close to where we are who's also willing to do this at a specific time.
Dan: We've definitely thought about people who are relatively close-by, like Wolf Eyes or even New York bands.
[banter]
Dan: That's pretty comprehensive.
Matt: A lot better than the CBC interview.
What'd they interview you guys for?
Matt: The Leslie Spit one.
Dan: The whole event sounded very quaint..."You know, we're just listening to some music on the beach here, whatever..."
Matt: And we sounded at the same time like pretentious hosers. I don't know how you managed to sound like a hoser.
Maybe they edited it down, so every third sentence you'd be like "So as Debord says..."
Dan: Kinda. I didn't quote anybody. Oh, there was one quote...there's an article in Spacing coming out, and I quoted Zizek. This was the quote. The quote was this. Let me tell you what the quote was. A true act...a true act, uh...creates the, um...oh, fuck.
Matt: What, did you bring the book along? Was it an email interview?
Dan: It wasn't an email interview! It was an interview in person...The quote is something like "a true act creates the conditions for its own possibility." There it is.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 19 at 4:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Horsetail Feathers!
Final Fantasy meets Alex Lukashevsky
(and Nico Muhly and many others)
At the request of longtime Zoilus favourite Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett), I'm very happy to offer you this preview of the opening track from Owen's new EP, Final Fantasy Plays to Please, which is a set of covers of songs by Alex Lukashevsky, a fellow Torontonian singer-songwriter and also of course leader of Deep Dark United, played with as many as 35 other musicians, dubbed the St. Kitts Orchestra (an expansion, then, on the St. Kitts String Quartet, who played on the last FF album He Poos Clouds), featuring members of the Hidden Cameras, Drumheller, Andrew Bird and others. The results are a jangling candybox of sound spilling from Pallett to aural palette, presenting Alex's songs in more accessible surrounds than usual, and perhaps introducing him to a host of other musicians who might begin to draw on his rich catalogue. Here then is a taste: Horsetail Feathers.
(This is the first time Zoilus has hosted an MP3 file, and it required a lot of tricky tech I've never used before, so if there's any trouble downloading the file, please drop me a note. Update: I think the problems people had should be fixed now.)
The EP is one of a pair being released at tomorrow's show at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto (the CD gods willing), the other being Spectrum, which features the members of Beirut and is the first installment of Owen's long-threatened imaginary-world conceptual suite, which will continue on the upcoming album, Heartland. (Exclaim! explains in detail.) A song from Spectrum and another from P2P were posted on Stereogum this morning.
Owen's show tomorrow is together with NYC compositional prodigy Nico Muhly, who in his mid-20s has collaborated with the likes of Bjork and Philip Glass and Bonnie Prince Billy but more importantly, as documented in this well-circulated New Yorker profile by Rebecca Mead, has a sensibility all his own, a classical version of the mashup and YouTube mind, and also a fresh-feeling kind of amodernism - neither post- nor anti-modernist, he seems unusually capable of bypassing not only the old 20th-C debates but also the conventional bypasses of said 20th-C debates. His new album Mothertongue blends the babble of digital information overload with the brouhaha of history, via his love of 16th-century English church music. (He's also a ridiculously entertaining blogger. If he weren't so charming I might want to kill him.)
Besides some evident sonic sympathies (the violin music, the use of looping figures, the unabashed embrace of prettiness, the knife-edge-thin layer of camp), Muhly shares with Owen a concern for communication and affinity and collectivity: Just as Owen has been stalwart to his compatriots in the Blocks Recording Club of Toronto, Muhly has made common cause with labelmates in a project called Bedroom Community, an Iceland-based label (not so local-aurist, then) that gathers "like-minded, yet diverse individuals from different corners of the globe who all creatively orbit around an inconspicuous building and its inhabitants on the outskirts of Reykjavik Iceland- Greenhouse Studios where the music is mostly created." (Another Bedroom Communitarian is Sam Avidon, a frequent Muhly cohort [/boyfriend?] who also appears in Toronto on Wednesday.)
I'd been planning to say more about Muhly but as the technical challenges of this post (yes, I'm a digi-wimp) have taken up too much time, I'll reserve further thoughts till after tomorrow's show. Meanwhile as a warmup, here's a video of Muhly's "It Goes Without Saying," from his previous album:
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, August 26 at 6:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Teenager Hamlet 2006-2008:
Something Un-Rotten in the State of Toronto
I'm giddily happy and/or terribly frightened to tell you that the long-awaited movie Teenager Hamlet 2006 - created by Zoilusian friend and occasional collaborator Margaux Williamson and including deeply humiliating cameo appearances by, um, me - will be making its premiere next week in the Toronto International Film Festival, and screening daily throughout the week at the Katherine Mullherin gallery.
Musically, the soundtrack of the film was supervised by Steve Kado (aka The Blankket, former head of the Blocks Recording Club and member of the Barcelona Pavilion, Ninja High School, etc.) and it includes music by Kado as well as Toronto artists such as Tomboyfriend, Traditionm, Nifty (Matt Smith), Permafrown, Pony Da Look and Republic of Safety, plus some Diamanda Galas, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Beethoven and Shostakovich.
Above is the trailer, if you're the sort who likes to get sneak peeks, or (blatant solicitation) the sort who might program movies for exhibition in other cities or countries. Zoilus-skin-flick aspect aside, the film is truly beautiful and unassumingly smart. As it says in the synopsis: "A startling hybrid of make-believe and documentary, art and politics, Teenager Hamlet 2006 is an insightful and off-beat look at what it means to live and make art in the 21st century."
Don't miss out: Put it on your calendar if you're coming to the festival.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, August 26 at 5:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
'Do You Suffer from Post-Mortem Depression?'
The gold-medal record-release announcement of the month, reproduced below, including persistent misuse of semi-colon as colon.
"Wintage Records & Tapes proudly present; Disguises' highly anticipated debut lp, Post-Mortem Depression, launch party!!
9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ?????
"Taking place @ 5 non-traditional venues all in secret locations ??? Incorporating a night of live musical performances,very unique non-traditional venues, guided walking tours, DJ set by King Greyskullz, live visuals, and interactive theatre/performance art that will culminate in attendees being "kidnapped" and driven off to the final secret location for the Disguises performance.
"Included with ticket purchase you get a map, w/times & locations (in case a ticket holder has to play catch up) & instructions. Guaranteed to be a once in a lifetime concert going experience!
"Making fans through the suggestive power of "Stockholm Syndrome" DISGUISES are proud to release their debut lp; Post-Mortem Depression featuring hit songs such as; Meathead, What Happened to Your Face, T.H.R.E.A.D.S., Dead Patterns, Flesh Bodies ... and more.
"With very special performances by; Lambsbread (Delaware, OH) Ecstatic Peace recording superstars are a three-peese mixed gender spazz/jazz punk aktion unit. There bio reads, Sabbath meets Coltrane. They have had nothing but ++ reviews, strong word of mouth, and in the words of Paris Hilton are "Hot" right now! WHERE:?????
"Bottom Feeder(Hamilton) Ex-Fossils duo consisting of minds eye
splintering Horn headwallop and Scum/Sic/Surge electrifiried pedal slomp! WHERE:?????
"R.O.M.I.N.S. Random jet blasts of confusion and wrestling
the dada bird are this duo's thrash palace. Molding mind matter into conscious thought, the tools they will be using for this night a secret..it is left up to our own psychic prowess to decipher the mysteries ... WHERE:??????
"WHERE:???????????
"Tickets available in very limited quantities (hand ##) 08/22/08 !!! @ Hits & Misses (on Bloor), Rotate This (on Queen), & Soundscapes (on College). Tix are $7 (only in advance!!!). Doors 8pm."
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, August 20 at 1:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Whoopsie!
I found out today that the ALL CAPS Dufferin Grove Park show I had listed for today is, in fact, next Saturday. I apologize if I led anyone astray. If it is any comfort, I led myself astray too. Sorry, then, also to me.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, August 02 at 5:30 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Matmos and Leprechaun Catering:
Their Minds Are Not For Rent/ To God or Government
Great set last night by Matmos at the Music Gallery, as always, though certainly less of a spectacle than their usual inanimate-(or animate)-object-sampling, cabinet-of-wonders performances, due to the "no microphones" constraint on their new synthesizer-celebrating album Supreme Balloon.
Drew Daniel & Martin ("MC") Schmidt of Matmos are aware that nobody wants to sit and watch someone play a laptop for two hours, so they had plenty of video and a few ritual physical acts and other shenanigans to keep the optic nerve sated while the ears drank in the sounds. For 'zample, I'm not all that aurally enamoured of the long mesmeric title track, with which they closed the show, but it perfectly suits the psych-out op-art film they showed along with it of expanding dots and planets and seas, and the other dancey, crunchy, noisy, spacey tunes and acts of telepathy and numerology all came off dreamily.
The encore was especially fun - I assume it was improvised, as Martin went off to the dormant piano in the back corner of the church, pounding out some classical riffs that Drew then sampled and turned into a noise symphony that toyed with our spatial perceptions of the sources of the sounds.
My only real complaint is that it was the wrong encore: How dare they play Toronto without playing the new disc's tribute to our own experimental-animation-and-direct-sound proto-homocore king Norman McLaren, Exciter Lamp & the Variable Band, which contains a round-the-bend cover of O Canada. (See video below.)
However, that was compensated by tourmates Leprechaun Catering from Baltimore (where Matmos now live, as Drew's become a professor at John Hopkins). The openers named each of the pieces in their noisy, mad-laboratory improvised set with titles that acronym to "Toronto" ("Tits on Reindeer Offer Nourishment to Offspring," for instance, but my favourite was "Therefore, Our Rap Operas Need Tighter Oratorios"; I couldn't help spending much of the set trying to come up with more - my best was, "Teach Old Rover One New Trick, Okay?").
And they topped that off by playing a Theremin-led cover of Rush's Tom Sawyer (with Drew acting as "human microphone stand" because a metal microphone stand will fuck up your Theremin's mojo) - I dearly hope someone will post it on YouTube (like maybe that guy sitting in front of me who spent the entire show watching it through the little screen on his digital camera, taking 30-second clips - why bother coming to the concert if you'd much prefer watching it on a four-inch TV?): As Gallery programmer/host Jonny Dovercourt put it, "We stand on guard for Lee."
Please read the very funny and informative Matmos interview transcript posted by Zoilusian protegé Chris Randle on his rival blog.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 22 at 6:21 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Two Jazz-Funk Great Happenings
Besides the Matmos show at the Music Gallery on Monday (celebrating their recent release, Supreme Balloon), the duo's younger half, the lovely and brilliant Drew Daniel, seen above getting groped by (who knows? but we'll guess) a drunken fan, will be appearing Monday afternoon at 1 pm at This Ain't the Rosedale Library in Kensington market to read from and discuss his very fine book in the 33 1/3 series (which also published my book) on Throbbing Gristle (whose logo is also above) and their album 20 Jazz Funk Greats (not to be confused with the very fine blog of the same name). Drew is as entertaining a talker as Matmos is a band, and if you can spare some sunny summer afternoon time, I bid you to hit up both events.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 16 at 5:00 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Woah, oh, oh, we're counting to four
This has been everywhere, of course, but why not here, too? The thing about the Sesame Street remake of Feist's hit is that it seems like a revelation of the real nature of the song - it's always been a counting song (a form found all over the world - music and math being a natural marriage). It was just disguised as a love song. So the self-parody is an improvement, as if the original version had just been an excuse to get to this point.
Of course, you can't go too wrong when you put Sesame Street, music and counting together:
That last was the Pointer Sisters. And that's not even getting into the oeuvre of the Count. Meanwhile, since we're at it: Philip Glass does Sesame Street (from either 1977 or 1979, depending who you ask):
Seventies Sesame Street is one of the few things capable of making me feel positively overcome with nostalgia - like, chloroformed with a nostalgia-soaked rag. Congratulations to Leslie for joining that great lineage.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 15 at 4:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (11)
You Scream, I Scream,
and Then You Scream My Scream
I've neglected to mention up till now the action going on in the Scream festival, which culminates in Monday's Scream in High Park reading night. Partly in dishonor of the current blaze over Bill C-61, the fabulously flawed proposed copyright reform, the theme of this year's Scream is "Copyright, Collaboration, and Appropriation." So for instance tonight at the Gladstone local poet Kevin Connolly offers his poem "Plenty" up to re-inventions by playwright Conor Green, artist Olia Mischenko, filmmaker Tamara Romanchuk and musician NQ Arbuckle (followed by a set by the pleasantly gruff Mr. Arbuckle).
Then tomorrow at The Boat, Kenneth Goldsmith, Alexis Muirhead, Sonja Ahlers, M. NourbeSe Philip and Michael Maranda take part in a panel on Fair Use (chaired by York prof and sometime music writer Marcus Boon at 7 pm, followed by readings from various pirate-minded creative projects and finally a DJ set by local appropriation ace Brian Joseph-Davis. Friday night at Type Books Paul Petro Gallery (see explanation in the Comments), there's an 11 pm screening of fanfilm and machinima; Saturday there will be a theatrical performance using poet Jack Spicer's last lecture as a "script"; and Sunday night at Arraymusic there's an intriguing exploration of the space between text, voice and tune, as composer Paul Swoger-Ruston tries to "transl(oc)ate" three local poets' reading styles into music.
Finally on Monday at High Park, there's the marquee event, where I'm humbled to say I've been invited to read. (Reportedly I'm the first nonfiction writer to read in the Scream's 16-year history.) I'm planning to enact the theme, in part, by stealing material directly from readers of this blog - prepare to sue me!
PS: Before the Monday reading, there'll be a semi-surreptitious guided walk through the woods at High Park, which is actually an impressive natural conservancy beneath its guise of local dog-walking, picnic-having locale and Scream/Dream venue - a fact too many artsy attendees don't learn about. Get in touch if you want details.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 09 at 5:09 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
All the Young Dave Matthews Dudes
(Were Not at the Alejandro Escovedo Show)
(Plus: RIP Schroer; Polaris noms)
When Alejandro Escovedo asked the crowd at the Mod Club last night whether any of us had seen him opening on the last Dave Matthews Band tour, he seemed surprised (and a bit amused) to find that not a single soul in the club had. Clearly it's reasonable for a performer to hope and expect that a crossover experience like that will bring new fans to their own shows, but Dave Matthews isn't as big a deal in Canada as he is south of the border, and the people who go to DMB shows aren't that likely to come to the Mod Club - despite it being a larger venue than anywhere else Alejandro's played in Toronto (I used to see him at Ted's Wrecking Yard, and he reminisced from the stage about playing the Ultrasound, which predates me), the sizable crowd last night was just the accumulated result of a slow building love affair between Alejandro and Toronto.
I wonder what he'd have done differently if he'd known. The set list and style of the performance last night was very much in summer-rock, even jam-bandish mode, with a lot of emphasis on guitar solos. Lead guitarist David Pulkingham certainly has the chops for the job, but he's more of a stylistic chameleon - while he can switch from blues bruising to flamenco-ish classical guitar, he doesn't make his own stamp on the music. Whereas when Alejandro plays even the simplest lick, it rings with his soulfulness. You could almost feel him urging Pulkingham on to reach in deeper, but I think he's too gentle a guy to play the disciplinarian. The cost, for me, was a much less emotionally moving show than I've ever gotten from Alejandro, who usually leaves me buzzing with feelings. But I couldn't really complain about the closing round of covers, exuberant versions of All the Young Dudes, Beast of Burden and I Wanna Be Your Dog that sent us out glowing into the summer heat. And it did get me excited about his new record - Real Animal, which chronicles his musical life from his days in the Nuns in San Francisco (opening for the Sex Pistols) through twang-rock bands of the 80s to days living in the Chelsea Hotel and then the Austin scene of the 1990s, people loved and lost, and so on.
I'll look forward to the next time he returns on his own, or with a string trio, or one of his other many versatile combinations, rather than the showbizzed-up version we saw last night. Although that may be awhile, since his recent very conspicuous endorsement by Bruce Springsteen might keep him in the arena-rock, er, arena for a while yet. (It's got to be a lot less painful than his last high-profile media appearance - getting the nod from George W Bush for his song "Castanets," which Alejandro said last night kept him from playing the song for a while.)
Much else to talk about - the death of Oliver Schroer. Owen (Final Fantasy) Pallett dropped me a line over the weekend to say how sad he was about his fellow violinist's death, and lamenting that Schroer's explorations weren't the kind that tend to attract Internet-music-fan attention; read the lovely final-days interview with Diane Flacks from the Toronto Star last week. And then of course there are the Polaris nominations - I'm half-tempted to rage against the outcome, but I'm afraid the leaning towards broadly appealing, smart youth rock (as opposed to non-rock genres, as well as pricklier rock sounds) is a product of the process that's involved in the Polaris, which I'm beginning to think is, well, perhaps too democratic for the award's good (imho).
The winner will depend on the makeup of the final 11-judge panel, of course, but if I were to bet now? I'd say Caribou.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 08 at 1:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
My Weekend & Open-Source Cobra!
After a busy three-legged stool of a sort-of long weekend, I'm back. Went to see Lee Scratch Perry on the waterfront on Monday night along with, it seemed, every single other citizen of Toronto between 20 and 50. Now that he's in his 70s, Perry's rantings sometimes seem a little bit less like mystic communiques and more like the distracted brain-emissions of your grandma, but he commanded the stage and the crowd (and the smoke machine that seemed to be stowed inside his hat) and his young band (he told us it was new, and seemed to imply the players were Canadian, but it was difficult to be sure) summoned up the Black Ark vibe nicely - though after about 40 minutes, I hit what I call the "reggae wall," aka the limit of how long someone who doesn't use THC (allergic) can listen to the same rhythm and relatively similar melodies, standing on pavement out in the sun, without starting to nod off.
Also hit up the latest in the clandestine Extermination Music Night series, which this time was held in a disused office tower and was intended to be part art show as well as concert. But most of the intended action was cut short by the unusually swift arrival and harsh attitude of the police, some of whom were slow to realize that what they were busting was pretty much the most geeky, mild-mannered bunch of art-nerd criminals imaginable. Hearing the newish local band Brides defiantly playing their set up in the tower while the rest of us were sitting in the grass getting ID'd by the cops will certainly be a music memory for '08. In the end nobody was in serious trouble, and you can't blame the cops for shutting down an event founded on breaking into somewhat dangerous, beautifully derelict places (the lead cop got into amusingly befuddled arguments with audience members, like, "You can't call it art - it's trespassing!" as if being illegal and being art were somehow mutually exclusive terms). It was just disappointing not to see more of the art and performances - in the final moments we were rushing from floor to floor to see the sights like tourists who realized they hadn't yet looked at the Mona Lisa, just as their bus was about to leave.
Finally, please direct your attention to this page, where you can learn about an exciting upcoming set of classes, taught by Misha Glouberman (of Trampoline Hall, Room 101 Games, and Nuit Blanche 2007's "Terrible Noises for Beautiful People" fame), in which you can learn to "play" John Zorn's crazy-quilt game/composition Cobra - an opportunity to growl, howl, spit and buzz with a bunch of other people while pointing at your nose, taking your hat on and off and forming guerrilla squads. And, along the way, drop some inhibitions, meet new people and learn something about the art of improvisation. Plus, you get to become part of an underground society, as Zorn originally intended the rules of Cobra to be kept secret. If all that intrigues you (or scares you in a good way), go read that page, or just drop a line to improvise@mglouberman.com. You won't regret it - Misha is a gifted and amusing teacher, and I know that the people who took his last Cobra class (he also teaches other classes in vocal and physical improv) were thrilled with the results. Prices and scheduling are still up in the air (probably eight classes, once a week), but they'll start soon, so act fast.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 02 at 5:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Suoni Per il Toronto:
Evan Parker Trio, Feuermusik, Neptune
I was disappointed to see so little coverage in the downtown weeklies in Toronto yesterday of the Suoni per il Toronto mini-festival at the Music Gallery this weekend, a spinoff of the Suoni per il Popolo festival in Montreal (a month-long celebration of adventurous and oppositional music). In particular, it's a shame that the rare visit from British saxophone improvising giant Evan Parker (and his likewise-eminent trio partners Barry Guy, bass, and Paul Lytton, percussion) got no coverage. For the uninitiated the video above should give you an idea (it's the same trio but with the addition of pianist Agusti Fernandez at the Mulhouse jazz festival in Alsace, 2007). I'm too short on time today to detail Parker and company's extensive history, but here are a few testimonials. The show tonight begins at 7 pm (with solo bass by Aaron Lumley), doors at 6 pm, Parker Trio at 8 pm; show up early for the Gallery's summer BBQ.
Also, tomorrow afternoon Parker & Lytton present a free workshop for local improvisers (plus us looky-loos and listeny-lees) at 2 pm. Musicians would be foolish to miss it!
"UK saxophonist Evan Parker is one of the true pioneers of European free improvisation. He is recognized as the creator of a new solo saxophone language, extending the techniques and experiments started by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, but taking them away from the rhythmically jazz-related areas and into the realm of abstraction. In particular, his use of circular breathing techniques to create extended, complex and overlapping soundscapes is generally seen as the apex of saxophone virtuosity." - bio on Music Gallery website
"Parker: speed, dexterity, instantaneous interplay, refinement, razor sharpness, almost scientific technical achievement (especially on the soprano saxophone, which he has virtually reinvented), and a graciousness and cooperative spirit in collective settings that he has labelled the 'agree to agree' approach." - John Corbett
"Evan Parker breathes like Tiger Woods swings a driver: smooth, seamless, a complete motion that converts potential energy to kinetic with the inevitability of an apple dropped from a tree. And both artists work with the bold precision that comes with having endlessly refined their technique. Parker ... might be the most important European jazz improviser alive." - Joe Gross, Austin AmericanStatesman
Eye weekly did, fortunately, give some ink to tomorrow night's cd release show for the new No Contest by Feuermusik, the sax-and-buckets duo of Jeremy Strachan and Gus Weinkauf that's been making some of the most exciting, direct jazz-improv music in Canada in recent years. Read Helen Spitzer's fine interview with the guys.
On the bill with Feuermusik (who will be bringing their "big band" incarnation for the occasion) is intriguing Boston-area band Neptune, who build all their instruments themselves - baritone guitars, basses, "lamellophones," pipe xylophones, even synthesizers - out of "circular saw blades, gas tanks, oil drums, bike parts, VCR casings, and miscellany from the trash." The video below provides a pretty compelling depiction of the results.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, June 27 at 10:17 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
I, I, I, I Am Gonna Play Sun City ... Girls!
(Plus: Laurie Anderson, Parkdale Public, and RIP The Silt)
Laurie Anderson in Homeland.
I was out of town much of the weekend so I missed all manner of North By Northeasterly, Luminatic and other action; however you can read my review of Friday night's Luminato show by Laurie Anderson in yesterday's Globe and Mail. ("When reality catches up to an avant-garde icon.")
Tonight I am going to try to run between the Parkdale Public School vs. Queen West's seventh round, "Parkdale Strings vs. Blocks Recording Club" (featuring child musicians of the Senior Strings class working with Kids on TV, The Phonemes and Bob Wiseman) at 7 pm at the Gladstone, and the great Alan and Sir Richard Bishop of the now-defunct Sun City Girls paying tribute to their fallen comrade Charlie Gocher, at the WhipperSnapper Gallery. Full report to follow.
And I might even try to run from there to the Tranzac to catch some of what I'm sorry to hear (rather suddenly) will be the final show by The Silt, one of the most beloved configurations (Ryan Driver, Marcus Quin and Doug Tielli) of the core personnel of the Rat-Drifting label. In tribute, I'll post the very first piece I (or, I think, anybody else) ever wrote about the Silt, from 2000. Hard to believe it's been eight damn years. Thanks for all the weird pretty and pretty weird music, boys. Read all about it on the jump.
Silting up a cacophonic comfort zone
SCENE
CARL WILSON
17 August 2000
The Globe and Mail
"We think we know almost exactly what some of our songs sound like," proclaims Ryan Driver, who plays guitar, drums, synthesizers, flute and duck calls with Toronto group the Silt. The trio also features multi-instrumentalists Doug Tielli (a trombone specialist) and Marcus Quin (clarinet).
Having attended four or five Silt shows in recent months, I think I know almost exactly what some of their songs sound like, too. But I'm not sure how to put it into words, to persuade you to go hear them in this Sunday's edition of the weekly Wavelength series at Ted's Wrecking Yard. Driver's statement, with all its double-take syntax and self-sabotaging qualifiers, is probably your best clue. Take it as a mini-manifesto.
The Silt is turning out to be one of Toronto's natural resources, alongside the likes of Hawksley Workman, with whom they share hummability, flamboyance, classicism, and a willingness to be fey and vulnerable that, at its best, makes audiences giddily nervous.
All three members of the Silt, though no strangers to song (Tielli's last band was the semi-popular People From Earth, and if his last name reminds you of the Rheostatics, so be it), are fixtures on the youthful improvised-music scene in Toronto. That means they're used to wielding their axes to clearcut across musical expectations, sever melodic lines and splinter steady beats. They are comfortable with cacophony.
Maybe too comfortable. And that's what gives this group its special frisson: Having learned to play without rules, they have reinstituted them, to render themselves neophytes all over again.
Any given Silt song sounds like it might break down and lapse into improv. But it never happens. Instead, they might pause, suspend a note or a silence in the air, as if considering the potential for chaos . . . and then sing the next verse. They're on probation for breaking the laws of music, and the Silt is their halfway house.
Combine this with the perverted-Beach-Boys falsetto harmonies, delicate repetitive riffs, slow pace, false endings, unlikely instrument pairings, and archly exaggerated poetry (A Song About a Red Whistle is a typical Silt title) and you get something at once rather haunting and beautiful, and absurdly funny.
They achieve that rich and rare thing, sincere sarcasm. "I know this is stupid, and unsophisticated, with all these heartfelt, childish lyrics and old-fashioned tonality," a Silt song tells you, "but I really mean it. I can't help it. I think life is like this."
This is a very difficult effect to get. It's what people such as Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and McSweeney's magazine), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), and George Saunders (Civilwarland in Bad Decline) have been trying to do in literature.
It demands not only deft manipulation of materials, but an audience willing to entertain contradictory thoughts and feelings simultaneously. It requires an agreement on both sides that it's just too easy to give in to cynicism and disdain. Sometimes those much-hyped young writers manage it; often they just seem excessively pleased with themselves.
The Silt are so low-key that they avoid that pitfall. What they risk is being misunderstood, looking as if they don't know what they're up to. But they do. It took me a couple of hearings to realize how funny they were, and another couple to decide that the awkward bits were the prettiest parts.
As with Pavement, or Palace, or poet David Berman's Silver Jews, the Silt's humour is bone-dry, the sentiments slippery. They truck in the kind of truth that wriggles out of your hand, only to sliver its way under your skin. Like a tape that plays in your sleep and suggests that when you wake you'll quit smoking, or fighting, or giving up on yourself.
That's what they sound like. Almost exactly. I think.
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, June 17 at 12:57 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (10)
Love Don't Change
Tonight marks the release of Eric Chenaux's latest album, Sloppy Ground, a lovely term for its main subject matter, which Eric describes as not the beginning or the ending but the middle of love - the main part, that is, but the most overlooked, the part for which we need much more music: the "ever after" that follows the closing clinch of the courtship dance. There's a nice interview with Eric in Eye today too. Meanwhile Eric's frequent collaborator Ryan Driver (of Deep Dark United, Silt, Reveries, etc) has his first solo album, enticingly titled Feeler of Pure Joy, coming out on home-base label Rat-drifting. (Both releases are celebrated tonight with a show at Wrongbar in Toronto.)
Additional Thursday reading: David Dacks has a perspicacious survey of the new generation of Toronto soul on AOL Canada of all places.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 29 at 2:01 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
The Sadies' Most Wanted
Toronto's pride The Sadies exercise a light-hearted version of YouTubin' vigilante justice by posting this security-cam footage of some asshole breaking into their van and grabbing their GPS unit, and the group's discovery of the theft, all given a Dukes of Hazzard-esque rollicking soundtrack. If only cameras were on the spot more often when bands' instruments and gear get ripped off, but that's usually from the back alley behind some club. The video's very funny-sad - them Sadies never met a lemon they couldn't turn into a bourbon sour. If you do recognize the perp in these pics, let their management know.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, May 26 at 1:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Concrete Tonight!
Just a reminder of the show at the Polish Combatants' Hall at 206 Beverley St. (a block south of College at Cecil St), 8 pm. Door price has been reduced to $15 (same as the advance price)! Think concretely - wear grey! (See details in sidebar.)
If you can't make it tonight, remember that it's also happening next Sunday at the Science Centre in the afternoon.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, May 25 at 2:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Speaking Concretely
Here's the email interview Sarah Liss did with me about Concrete Toronto Music, the show Jonny Dovercourt of the Music Gallery curated with me, happening tomorrow (Sunday) at the Polish Combatants' Hall downtown and the following Sunday at the Ontario Science Centre (we've got a bus chartered to take people there).
Can you guys both give me a bit of a backgrounder on the genesis of this project and your involvement in it? How much were architectural and acoustic concerns on your mind(s) before taking this on? Was the book your key source of inspiration, or were either of you already thinking about a project that would encourage musicians to interact with some of the city's not-typically-musical spaces?
The idea was born at the Coach House launch party this winter where the Concrete Toronto book was being launched - at the same time as the bpNichol anthology, which got me thinking about the concrete buildings/concrete poetry parallel in '60s and early '70s culture. And then of course the "musique concrete" connection occurred to us too.
Jonny and I were both saying how much we liked the book and then one of us - I think me but I'm not sure - said we ought to do a site-specific show in honour of it.
I think we've both been interested in site-specific shows (such as the Extermination Music Night series or a couple of the shows Jonny's old band Republic of Safety played) for a long time, and in particular Toronto-celebrating and Toronto-exploring culture. So it wasn't a huge leap.
Concrete Toronto: just a clever play on musique concrete, or a name with deep connotative meaning - discuss.
Most of the music in the show won't, I don't think, have much relationship to musique concrete, though some of it will. The name of the show is just taken directly from the book, but I like the phrase too - that what we're paying tribute to here is the "concrete" Toronto - the tangible, physical Toronto - rather than an abstract idea of the city, like the one sometimes evoked (by me and Jonny among others) the past few years by the phrase "Torontopia."
[... continued...]
I'm not familiar with the Concrete Toronto book -- would you mind setting it up for me and talking about why it's so interesting?
The main thing I love about the book is that it takes a long look at exactly the structures that a lot of people in this city might consider the ugly ones - all the 1960s university buildings, Robarts, the Science Centre, New City Hall (ok, most people like that one), the Gardiner Expressway - and considers them as our architectural heritage, with their own kind of beauty and meaning. It makes the case that at least some of that heritage should be preserved just as much as our Victorian and Edwardian buildings are.
Preservationists discuss how the real danger period for losing heritage buildings is in the 30-to-40-year period after they were built, because that's when they seem just deeply unfashionable but not yet part of official History. So Concrete Toronto comes along just at that moment of danger as a low-key kind of intervention.
And because I was a child when these buildings were new, I have a strong emotional reaction there, too - I feel like, ugly or beautiful, that's the Toronto that partly made me. I was born here but didn't live here as a kid - I was in not-so-concrete-filled Brantford, Ont. But Toronto was still the big city over the horizon, and I found it all so exciting when we would visit - there'd be big bus trips to the Science Centre every few years and it was pretty much the most fantastic place a kid could visit, for example. Especially since I wasn't a nature-loving kid, these concrete Toronto buildings lie somewhere near the core of my urban-space-loving heart. I think that must be somewhat true for a good chunk of this generation, but it's not something that has a public acknowledgment, unlike other parts of our relationship to the built and natural environment around us.
How (and why) did you choose the roster of contributing artists for this project? What concerns did you have to keep in mind that don't necessarily come up when you're programming, say, an event at the Music Gallery? Were you more interested in finding musicians who'd already proven themselves in space-navigating ways, or did you have a sense that you wanted to challenge folks like Tony (whose singer/songwriter background seems much more traditionally pop-oriented than many of the other artists on the bill) in order to see what they'd come up with?
Jonny and I just kicked names around and then saw who was available. There were people we couldn't get - our first pick was the now-defunct Barcelona Pavilion, since they sang and thought a lot about architecture, but some of the ex-members were out of town. But we thought about people whose work evoked the themes. In CCMC's case, they were a band founded in the era these structures were built, and through Paul Dutton very strongly connected with the concrete-poetry/sound-poetry nexus that bp Nichol represented. In Tony's case, I thought that he sang a lot about the body and the environment but not about its harder surfaces, so it would be neat to put him together with Sandro, whose electronic side as Polmo Polpo connected with the musique-concrete aspect. And so on.
How did you settle on the Polish Hall and the Science Centre? What's so special about them?
They're buildings that are represented in the book. The Science Centre was our first thought. Jonny did some digging on other possibilities, and then it was a question of what was available. The Polish Combatants' Hall is a great combination of old-world and new-world, and the Eastern European connection calls up for m