Gig: Bite Your Tongue 1

Bite Your Tongue 1 (feat. Final Fantasy, Gowns, Huckleberry Friends, Wyrd Visions, Carl Didur)

The Guild. Saturday, September 5, 2009.

The first concert in a new series from the people who brought you Extermination Music Night, this seems to be more of an "aboveground" effort, given the advance tickets and the Toronto Arts Council grant.¹ The location — revealed only on picking up the programme — turned out to be outside in the park behind the Guild Inn, a fair distance from downtown for the concert-going crowd.

Indeed, climbing up from the subway at Kennedy station and grabbing the 116 bus, it seemed pretty clear to me which were the Scarberian citizens headed home and which were the concert goers — and I wondered to myself if I were equally easy for everyone else to "type".² A weirdly non-overlapping Venn diagram that makes one realize our concerts and suchlike are less socially inclusive than we like to convince ourselves. But still, an amusing ride through strip-mall land, watching concert attendees trying to comply with the organizers' requests to not drink at the event site by swigging their drinking boxes of wine while on the bus. Despite having checked the destination against the map and thinking it was a bit soon, when a whole bunch of people got off the bus as soon as it turned onto Guildwood Parkway, I followed suit, meaning we were about a fifteen-minute walk away from where we wanted to be. But a nice walk on a fine evening is no problem for me, and it was a nice chance to stroll through a pretty corner of the city — conditioned as we are to rage, rage against suburbia as blight, we forget how lovely it can be with mature tree cover and wide, sleepy streets.

The only downer was that this put my arrival time about twenty minutes after the scheduled starting time at seven. But it turned out that things were mildly behind schedule, and after my ad hoc hiking group found its wayward way to the concert site, I actually had a few minutes to settle in and absorb the surroundings before things started happening.

Hearing noises coming from towards the Bluffs, wandered away from the stage to find Carl Didur playing in a little hollow, his back to the lake, giving a rather lovely view to soak in as he created an ambient soundscape. Using tape loops in a pair of old reel-to-reel machines and sundry other gear, Didur created a slowly-shifting sound-field. It ranged from slightly harsh to pastoral in tone, with loops of drums, guitars, birdsong and human voice all winding their way in at various points. Bent over his gear with a cigarette dangling from his lips, occasionally tossing a loop of tape to the ground when switching to a new one, Didur looked like a man concentrating hard on some sort of abstract problem that he could — maybe — solve with his hands. There was generally a well-thought-out throughline through it all, and except for a couple transitional moments it was quite absorbing, with a pleasing circularity when old loops would appear back in the mix at a different speed and in a different context. Good stuff.

Listen to an excerpt from this performance here.

Moved back to the stage area and grabbed a spot of grass just as Wyrd Visions was starting to play. The solo project of one Colin Bergh, he played sitting on his own in the centre of the stage, the gathering darkness slowly making the glowing eye of the horsehead under the central arch the only source of light around. Playing on a double-necked guitar³, with occasional accents from a looping pedal, his songs were droney folk rambles — folk in the olde Brittania sort of way. Imagine Jandek as a minstrel singing songs of the boggy dew, and you're kinda on the right track. The fact that his set, just over a half-hour, consisted of four songs⁴ indicates that his tunes are designed to unspool themselves in their own dreamtime. All of these elements could go so wrong, and could veer to the unlistenable or the precious. But in these circumstances — the near-dark and the first stars winking on in the sky; the fecund descending dampness; crickets chirping in the background — it was perfect, almost sublime.⁵

Listen to a track from this set here.

Switching things to an entirely different kind of murky gloom was Huckleberry Friends. This local trio (guit, bass, effects, stand-up drum kit) traded off instruments frequently and played like a goth band with sub-Mo Tucker beats, both guit and bass working in the same sludgy low-end. The effect was ultimately a bit too monochromatic for my taste, but this band does have some ideas, and, if nothing else, a rigourous aesthetic.

Next up were Gowns, a duo from San Francisco, with "straight man" Ezra Buchla on synths and gear and the engaging Erika Anderson on guitar (and, on one song, playing live percussion via an iPod app). Folky drones played with synth-punk passive-aggression, the music a blurry smoosh of bad vibes. Lit from below with a footlight, a giant silhouette of Anderson was projected onto the rising columns behind her, suitably visually exciting, and befitting the songs' almost melodramatic downer sentiments. The generally dark songs were countered by the artistes' cheery disposition and chipper banter ("Sorry for the feedback — we don't normally play at, like, the Parthenon") and their unbridled enthusiasm to be playing this show in these surroundings. They closed with an epic, lacerating number, nearly ten minutes long, that worked itself into a storm of broken emotional fragments. An impressive set.⁶

Listen to a track from this set here.

A lengthy changeover between sets had me looking at my watch in worry, as I wondered how strict the eleven o'clock curfew was going to be. Taking the stage at about quarter-to, Final Fantasy launched right into creating a loop on his keyboard and supplanting that with his violin. For me, one of the best things about seeing Owen Pallett live is that his concerts are done in the Hüsker Dü vein — filled with songs from the next album, instead of the last one. This show was no exception, filled with songs that were unfamiliar to me, the artist openly disdaining his "hits" — a woman shouted out "CN Tower!" between songs, only to have Owen respond with a strongly-worded negative. Playing on the unlit stage, this had all the elements of a classic set in the offing, with even one of those random live moments, when Owen cut his loops off mid-song to shake off a spider on his ear and then dipped back into the song without missing a beat. Alas, the curfew was indeed being observed, and even though Owen managed to squeeze in one last song after being told it was time to stop, the plug was pulled at about ten past eleven. Still, it was an excellent-sounding set, ending with a song that I'd never heard before ("Independence is no solution for modern babies/ because babies they only want to dance") that the internet suggests might be a cover.⁷ After being cut off and inviting everyone out for his all-day birthday affair, the crowd burst into "Happy Birthday" as everyone dispersed. All told, a very satisfying night, and high praise is due to the organizers for putting it all together.⁸

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ Assuming that logo's presence isn't a jape — the programme made several other spurious claims.

² The non-concert-attending guys on the bus beside me could almost have been wearing tattoos reading "SCARBOROUGH STEREOTYPE" in big, old english letters, as they discussed which places were "good for dealing" and which were "too hot".

³ Although, in the murky circumstances, it was hard to see how much, if at all, he was playing on the upper neck.

⁴ I think, anyways, the songs also more or less melded one into another.

⁵ The only drawback were the dusk-loving mosquitoes which were swarming with ferocity. By the end of the set, I was kinda glad it was quite dark out, as I felt like my forehead was covered with mashed bug bits from my constant swatting.

⁶ For the curious, Gowns have nearly an hour's worth of MP3's free to download here.

⁷ And some further research indicates that, indeed, it appears to be by Sylvester Boy.

⁸ The trip back wasn't too bad, though I'm guessing the driver was a bit taken aback at the bus-filling crowd that greeted him on a quiet street late on a Saturday night.