Wavelength 500 - because believing
in the good of life is mandatory

February 16th, 2010

So, yes, Wavelength 500 ended Sunday night with a set of tributes to the Torontopian Age that left many of us misty-eyed (and/or hungover, as it actually went on until well past the legally appointed closing time, thanks to the Garrison’s generosity). Steve Kado flew in from California bringing with him a poster he’d made for the occasion - the full calendar for 2003.

“Dinosaurs of Rock” Barcelona Pavilion reunited, saying, “We will have to tell you the truth because we are old now and our faces aren’t capable of deception. When we were young we deceived people constantly and now we’re being punished.” They revised the words in How Are You People Going To Have Fun If None Of You People Ever Participate? (a rare actual living specimen of a Song That Changed The World, of Poetry That Made Something Happen) from “How’s your hangover? How are your bedsores?” to “How’s your mortgage? How are your children?” They conceded their long-running beef with Rockets Red Glare - quoth Steve Kado, “Those guys are doing philosophy in grad school now. I’m a visual artist. Obviously they win.”

The BP played almost all its songs, with almost-but-not-quite the fluidity of their peak, including a song I thought only 12 people who saw their first show in a living room had ever heard, based on a dream bassist Kat Gligorijevic had in which she was participating in some sort of race in which the aim was to stay in constant view of semiotician Raymond Monelle. It includes a kind of whispered-shout chant that I have seldom heard in song. There was a mosh pit in which people got playfully violent to songs about cleaning up your room. And then for an encore the band played a song I’d never heard before, which was not one of their songs, and by played I mean they played it on their iPod and sang along with the chorus, “Capital in ruins/Thousands dead, thousands dead” (when BP sings this you assume they mean financial and/or cultural capital in ruins) until there were no words to sing along to, and during that instrumental section Steve wrapped cables, Maggie danced exuberantly, Kat drank a beer and Ben did absolutely nothing, and I thought, “Ladies and gentlemen, that was the Barcelona Pavilion.”

After that happened, Kids on TV played, and Thomas played, and then Owen Pallett played (as was announced just hours before the show) and God looked upon it and said that it was good. And then the 2003 lineup of The Hidden Cameras - Steve Kado, Owen Pallett, Maggie MacDonald, Mathias Rozenberg, Magali Meagher, Gentleman Reg, Dave Meslin and Joel Gibb - reunited and played I Believe in the Good of Life, which certainly describes the collective sentiment in the room. Apparently this took place at Owen’s instigation, when he realized everyone would be in town. Amazingly, everyone agreed, though I have it on confidential authority that a few of them felt they were violating sacred oaths. But they did it for us. And for Wavelength. Sentimental and nostalgic? Only if honoring your parents is also mere sentimental nostalgia. No, this was just being put in mind of the things that matter.

In his lecture at Trampoline Hall - also at the Garrison - last night, my friend Michael McManus expressed the view that in Canada, especially in Ontario, and in Toronto particularly, we are ashamed of the things that we should be proud of and proud of the things that we should be ashamed of. It’s a general human problem - ever met someone with hangups about sex but proud of his offshore bank account? - but it does also seem a particular local one. Wavelength, and the people who were there Sunday night, stood up to point that out and lead by example in how to see what really deserves celebration - and how overwhelmingly much of it there really is. You’re soaking in it. Don’t worry, drink up, drink up, drink up.

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Wavelength 500 Interview:
La Longeur d’onde est morte,
vivre la Longeur d’onde

February 10th, 2010

I found this CitySonic interview which includes Brian Borcherdt drawing a handy flowchart on a wall for understanding Wavelength and Toronto indie-cestuousness at History Jen’s wonderful Narratives site, which also presents her personal reminiscences about the series and a whole bunch of other videos.

I have a full article coming out in The Globe and Mail on Friday about the Wavelength 500 festival, which marks the 10th anniversary of the weekly Toronto indie/experimental music series known for kickstarting the local scene as we know it today, and also (as was announced last year) marks the end of its weekly incarnation and the beginning of something new (some details below). But only a few bits of my long conversation with Wavelength co-founder and stalwart programmer Jonny Dovercourt will make it to print, so in honour of the festival’s launch tonight at the Music Gallery (where Dovercourt, a.k.a. Jonathan Bunce, is also the artistic director - a development that, as well, can be credited to his experience with Wavelength), here is the nearly-full transcript for your edification and enjoyment. Happy birthday Wavelength, and here’s toasting to a long future.

Carl Wilson: How are things coming together for Wavelength 500?

Jonny Dovercourt: Surprisingly smoothly. That’s the advantage of super-long lead time. We started planning it almost as soon as we were done Wavelength 450: We had a list of people we wanted, and started putting feelers out in the spring.

There was a period when we were kind of disappointed because we realized we weren’t going to get all the big names we had hoped for. But then it was better in a way, because then the idea of band reunions came up and we had way more success with that than we expected. I didn’t really think that all these people would go for it. From Fiction originally turned us down and then called back a week later saying they’d practised and wanted to do it. So that way it didn’t have to be all about “here are these gigantic bands that played Wavelength when they started out” - because we’re not trying to overstate the case, or to take too much credit for their success.

Are all the founders of Wavelength still in the scene, or have some dropped out of music?

There were six bands that were the original crew: Neck, and all those guys are still playing music (Soft Copy, Ghostlight); Mean Red Spiders (Ghostlight); Parts Unknown (Creeping Nobodies until recently, and Derek Westerholm’s new project Karaoke is fucking great, shockingly good), Alex Durlak (ICPMABOYC, and now Boars); Nicholas Kennedy stopped playing music but is still involved through doing letterpress. Everybody’s still active.

It’s funny that none of those bands became the big international touring bands, or got Junos, or got nominated for the Polaris Prize. It’s an irony about it. Not that none of them had those aspirations, but I don’t think any of them were really wired for that level of “going for it.” That group of people were always going to be focused on playing music locally because they were rooted locally.

Maybe that’s what enabled them to start WL, in a sense - if their attention had been elsewhere, it wouldn’t have clicked.

A lot of them had through the ’90s tried to tour and had mixed success and kept coming back to Toronto. So we said, “I guess this is where we are, so let’s try to make it the best place to live and play music. Let’s not be ashamed of being a local band. We’re not any less valid as artists because of it. So let’s embrace that.” Then again, the initial crew didn’t go on to be that actively involved. They all supported it, and attended, but most of them were too busy to make it a full-time commitment.

What’s changed about being a musician here from then to now?

The main difference is that it’s just easier to organize your own shows and get people out to them. There’s a bigger group of promoters who will take notice of what you’re doing and invite you to play. The Internet obviously makes a big difference for spreading the word.

But in some ways it feels the same. [continues]

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Trippin’ to Double Double Land

February 9th, 2010

Please give a warm welcome to this lengthy guest post by Chris Randle about Double Double Land, the Toronto art space where tonight they’re celebrating the KLF and its burnt million pounds (with a lecture by Chris).

When I visited Double Double Land a couple of months ago to interview the new cultural space’s curator-inhabitants, the flux was obvious: A comprehensive renovation was far from finished, there were dumpsters full of the previous residents’ junk out back and they still weren’t entirely certain about that name. (Its main rival was “Fourth World,” taken from Heavenly Creatures.) Geographically, though, almost nothing has changed: Go down the stairs from Double Double Land’s second floor, past the bakery below and the punk house across from it, walk south for about a minute, and you’ll reach the address of its predecessor, the makeshift gallery/kitchen/venue/etc. Jamie’s Area, which blinked in and out of existence in 2009.

I’m exaggerating the continuity. Jamie’s Area was founded by Daniel Vila (of Bite Yr Tongue), Sarah Butterill and Bonny Poon, closing around the time she left to study art at Frankfurt’s Stadelschule in the summer. A few series (such as the Globe and Mail-documented Food evenings) will continue on, but the curators are palpably excited about their new digs, by the fact that they actually live in them, and seem uninterested in bounding the programming with even a rough mandate. DDL’s Jon McCurley is one of several people planning Hello Decade, a long day of performances, art, music, print and loot boxes that’ll be co-anchored by the Kensington space, the White House, DeLeon White Gallery and Everlasting Fortress in late June.

Double Double Land is run by Dan Vila, Jon McCurley (of Life of a Craphead and also author of the play that gave the venue its name), Rob Gordon (formerly of Les Mouches, currently of Pony Da Look) and Steve Thomas (of Steve Thomas). Four of us sat down with an enormous bag of baby carrots to discuss the humble rebirth of Jamie’s Area inside a Kensington roach manger, their plans for the space, and why most relational art is pseudo-political meanderings.

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Now Read This: Significant Objects!

February 1st, 2010

angels-thermos

My boyhood SF freak seems to have crept out when I was asked to write something for my friends Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker’s great project Significant Objects.

The idea, in case you haven’t run across it before, is to explore how things are invested with meaning, and therefore value, using eBay auctions as a laboratory. Josh & Rob have gone out and bought a bunch of junk, and then assigned each object (in my case, a vintage Charlie’s Angels lunchbox thermos) to a writer, who constructs a story around it. Then bidding is opened on the object at its “actual” value (in my case, $3) to see whether the story makes it more desirable, and by how much.

The result is - get this - I think my only piece of published fiction ever, though I was trying to draw on a little critical meta-thinking in terms of the various modalities of meaning-making that appear in the story. Oh, and the proceeds of the auction go to support 826 National, the non-profit tutoring and creative writing organization started by the McSweeneys/Believer gang.

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Pazzed Out Cold (Balm in Indiead)

January 20th, 2010

The new Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll is up, and while it’s not the event it once was (because of past turmoil, competition [congrats on outlasting the now worse-than-useless Idolator, P&J], and finally the fact that it now comes lagging behind ten billion other lists and polls) and the top 5 are perhaps the most predictable P&J top 5 ever, there’s always some value in the essays and quotes. I liked (mostly) this remark from Michael Azerrad:

A lot of people sneer at so-called “NPR rock” for being wimpy or something, but it’s a hoary cliché that underground music has to be loud, fast, and out of control. Once upon a time, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied — look at the Velvet Underground droning about heroin while America tried to paste a fluorescent smiley-face over Vietnam; look at the Sex Pistols railing that “England’s dreaming” in ‘77 while the Queen’s silver jubilee distracted from rampant unemployment and racial unrest. But in 2010, mainstream culture isn’t complacent; it’s stupid and angry. So underground culture has become smart and serene. That’s not wimpy — it’s powerful and constructive, a blueprint for kicking against the pricks.

That’s an interesting thing for the guy who wrote the book about Black Flag and Husker Du to say. He’s right that there’s a basic impulse to make music as much unlike Glenn Beck as possible, and that there’s a philosophical/moral undercurrent to it.

I’m not quite so convinced of the historical myth of complacency - America wasn’t stupid & angry during the McCarthy era? Under Nixon? But I also wonder if the dropout oppositional logic of Animal Collective and others, which I applauded in 2004, isn’t now out-of-date - way less serviceable under Obama, who needs to be held to account, than it was under Bush, who was never going to give a shit what you said.

The mainstream mood now actually seems more a mixture of complacent and shell-shocked, and while that (and the nature of media) means that the stupid-and-angry faction resonates way beyond its proportions (as it did, agonizingly, this week in Massachusetts), it also makes it seem much less “powerful and constructive” for the “underground” to sound so compulsively self-soothing.

(Mike Powell makes an affecting case to the contrary although mainly by focusing on content rather than sound; I’m talking more about the thing his dad brings up at the top - all that reverb, smeared over the music like so much Vaseline on a lens, or Bert’s Bees lipbalm or something.)

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Kiss and Say Goodbye:
Kate McGarrigle, 1946-2010

January 19th, 2010

katemcgarrigle

how I attempted seduction
with a select and
careful playing of
The McGarrigle Sisters

how you seduced me
stereophonically the laugh

the nose ankle nature

repartee the knee

- from “The desire under the Elms Motel,” by Michael Ondaatje

That poem, from Ondaatje’s striking 1984 lyrical suite about marriage and infidelity Secular Love, always seemed to me evidence of the quiet way that Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s music insinuated itself into Canadian lives (or at least some Canadian lives), less as a main focus than as a climate, an atmospheric pressure. By power of understatement, they were able to attain, with remarkable frequency, something like perfection. (Kate’s children Rufus and Martha Wainwright’s songs sacrifice some of that perfection in favour of the sense of drama bestowed/wreaked upon them by their American dad, but it’s always available to them as singers when they reach for it.)

Following Kate’s sad death on Monday, after four years of suffering from liver cancer, many people will speak reverently of their singing voices, and perhaps of how they brought Quebec Acadian folk music for the first time to larger English audiences. But the sisters’ remarkable touch as songwriters is often neglected: so subtle, positively allergic to flash, but so sure and firm, with lines that shift and intensify in repetition and by geographic references and juxtaposed allusions to folk songs that do the emotional work of narrative without many of its explicit trappings - much the way Ondaatje’s poem has it, “ankle, nature, repartee, the knee.” You can hear the deep satisfaction other singers, such as Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur and Emmylou Harris, always took in covering them.

It’s hard not to be saddened by the death of someone whose cherishing of family, place and history were so obvious and so generously shared with her listeners, in concert and on their Radio Hour and family Christmas albums. You couldn’t help but feel a little like one of their cousins (especially for those of us to whom Montreal is also personally dear). Kate was still appearing on stage to sing with her loved ones up to almost the very end, when she must have been very ill, which reinforced the feeling that this was a sustaining activity for them - that sharing a song was as integral to life as sharing a meal, or a drink, or a heartfelt conversation. Some music is interior and some is social but it’s a rare trait for music to be deeply intimate and deeply communal simultaneously (no wonder Ondaatje’s narrator found it erotic). Kate McGarrigle and clan achieved this with liberty, equanimity and sorority.

Talk to me of Mendocino
Closing my eyes I hear the sea
Must I wait? Must I follow?
Won’t you say, “Come with me.”
- from “Talk to Me of Mendocino,” by Kate McGarrigle

Profound sympathies to Martha, Rufus, Anna, Jane, Sloan, Loudon, Lily, Dane, Chaim and all the other McGarrigles, Wainwrights, Lankens and friends. Donations can be made to the Kate McGarrigle Fund, supporting cancer care and research at the McGill University Cancer Centre and McGill’s teaching hospitals.

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This is the Story of Haiti & Regine

January 14th, 2010

The Arcade Fire has some advice for you about how to help with the crisis in Haiti (vocalist-violinist Regine Chassagne’s family emigrated to Canada from there). It parallels what I’ve heard from other people with Haitian aide experience, so it’s probably the best plan:

Friends,

Haiti needs your help in her darkest hour.

We just got off the phone with our friends at Partners in Health.

Most of the medical infrastructure in Port-au-Prince is down. Since Partners in Health’s clinics are in situated the surrounding areas and haven’t been damaged, they are mobilizing their resources towards the capital, setting-up field hospitals to treat the injured on the ground. Also, Paul Farmer (the founder of PIH) is at the UN and has access to the best information on where to direct the money… so for the moment if you want to help, we suggest sending funds here.

Canadian residents with Roger cell phones can text HELP to 1291. $5 will be directed to Partners In Health’s Haiti emergency fund.

Please be generous as time is of the essence.

love,
Win and Regine

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If You Were Thinking of Studying
Aesthetic Philosophy

January 11th, 2010

… you don’t have to any more, now that you’ve got Douglas Wolk’s 5-Minute Guide to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (as interpreted through images from Marvel Comics). Somehow I missed this when Douglas first posted it, the latest proof that he’s the one to beat in the genius-multimedia-lecture game.

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In His Way, Yes: RIP Vic Chesnutt

December 28th, 2009

If you care you probably already know about Vic Chesnutt’s death over the holidays, at the age of 45. I first heard of him when a tribute album was organized to help pay the wheelchair-bound (from a drunk-driving accident in his teens) singer’s medical bills in the mid-1990s. But those financial burdens only got heavier over the years, with Chesnutt reported to have owed $70,000 in hospital fees at the time of his death - which happened to coincide exactly with the passage of the defanged U.S. health-care-reform bill in the Senate. Whether the new legislation could have provided someone in Chesnutt’s situation any “sweet relief” I can’t say, though I am inclined to doubt it, and judging by the timing of his apparent suicide, perhaps he did too, although speculation on what is sounding in the depths of someone’s heart when they take these desperate measures is really out of bounds.

I could rhapsodize for days about what a fascinating songwriter Chesnutt was. While he was more than capable of crapping out or trifling with his own talent - and even that said something about his fearlessness - his strongest moments offered this unusually philosophical music that reminds me of the aphorisms of E.M. Cioran (the author of books such as The Trouble with Being Born), who wrote, “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.” But Chesnutt’s was, unlike Cioran’s excoriate-the-cosmos Romanian po’face, a southern-gothic existentialism that also partook of moments of transcendence in which the same things that make life intolerable also make it worthy of the love that pokes its crooked nose out between the bars of his songs - songs that find the pungency in a pun and heroism in just squinting hard enough to see your way clear to survival. … Most of the time.

The video above was made just a month ago, which makes it hard to endure, the thought that all that liveliness could be so suddenly given up and gone.

PS: His close friend Kristin Hersh (ex-Throwing Muses) provides a Paypal link to donate to Chesnutt’s family, along with her own moving tribute.

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News Flash: The End of “Final Fantasy”

December 18th, 2009

owenshadow

I’m on deadline at the paper right now but wanted to share this with you right away: A press release just received from For Great Justice Records, home of ~~Final Fantasy~~ Owen Pallett. I’ve thought changing the name would be a good idea for a long while, mainly because it makes his stuff so hard to find online (I realize the recent trend to neutral single-word-noun band names is partly about making yourself Google-slippery as an anti-commercial, anti-surveillance-age gesture, but as a guy with a Google-challenging name, I also know what a pain in the ass it can be). But it also sounds as though some legal pressure came to bear.

(Later): In related news, “Issa” (who plays Hugh’s Room this weekend) has decided to change her name back to Jane Siberry. What with Bill Callahan now performing as Bill Callahan and Lou Barlow as Lou Barlow, it seems like the day of the bandonym may be dimming (although of course there are still plenty of younger ones out there, such as St. Vincent and Wavves). Perhaps that’s a good thing? As Franklin Bruno wrote in a little rant in October on why he doesn’t use a bandonym, which I chose not to take as a personal rebuke of the Pop Conference paper I wrote on the subject a few years ago: “If you disdain me before you know anything about me because I’m not bearing the mark of cool, it is as well that I don’t know you, and that you don’t know my music. If you can’t figure out that an individual who records pseudonymously may be implicated in all manner of objectionable (or not) Romantic self-expression, and that one who does not may not admit of any direct equivalence between the ‘I’ of songs and the person who happens to be performing them, then, again, it is well that, etc. Also, good luck with fiction and poetry. Should one at this point exclaim ‘but the self is fragmented/decentered/illusory,’ I reply: Perhaps, but if so, then this is the case whether or not I fuck about with self-presentation. “Franklin Bruno” may well be held together with spittle and memories, but this is so, and is reflected (or not) in the work, quite independently of whether or not he goes to the trouble of rebranding himself Ziggy McPersona.” So there’s that.

Owen’s new album about the fictional world of Spectrum and the “young, ultra-violent farmer” who lives there comes out Jan. 12.

Friends,

I began playing solo violin shows in 2004. Although it was essentially a solo project, I named the band Final Fantasy, as the experience - and the tone of the material - was reminiscent of the hours and hours I had spent as an adolescent playing those epic JRPGs.

But the laws of trademark infringement exist for good reason, and so I am voluntarily retiring my band name. In the new year, my record Heartland is coming out, and it is my first to be released in many territories, including Japan. With this in mind, I feel it is in my own best interests to definitively distinguish my music from Square/Enix’s games.

So, I am no longer playing shows as Final Fantasy. Subsequent releases, including Heartland, will be issued under my own name, Owen Pallett. Prior releases will sometime soon be re-packaged and re-issued.

I thank Square/Enix for their kindness and support, and I thank you all for your understanding.

Salud!

Owen Pallett

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