Postcards (The Hoa Hoa's / Volcano)
Rancho Relaxo. Friday, November 6, 2009.
Went down to Cinematheque to see Chris Marker's masterful Sans Soleil, a film that I had no means to categorize until it was included in this series on "The Essay Film". Consisting of documentary-style footage accompanying a voice reading a series of letters, the film is, in fact, a meticulous fiction — the mysterious author of the letters read on the screen is a creation of the director, and the vortex of images and text are carefully constructed to decenter any attempts to pin down what the film is actually about. Arguably, it's a deconstruction of how we make and use memory, although I've always thought it also had something to do with examining the boundaries between magic and associative logic.
Having seen the film before1 I was mostly going in to soak in the heady rush of the whole thing. I brought along some Thinking Juice2 to help me maintain my relaxed state of mind. Jean-Paul Gorin, film-maker, scholar, and the originator of the programme was in attendance to introduce the film and talk about it afterwards. Gorin wore a dashing scarf and had a propensity to speak in scaffold-like paragraphs of mounting ideas, only to perpetually undercut himself — shrugging and asking, 'can we really know this is the point?'.
As the closing credits rolled, Gorin stood up in his seat and roared, "I don't want to talk!", mounting the stage and proceeding to discuss the film anyways. Bursting into his monologue, one young gentleman seemed eager to show off his learnin' and match wits with Gorin, asking, "so, the film is a deconstruction of how we make and use memory, right?" And Gorin immediately cut him down, replying, "no, no! If that's all it were, we could have all fucked off five minutes ago." And batting down each subsequent riposte from the guy. After that, when any questioner made some sort of statement as to what the film was about, Gorin would reply with a yes-but-no sort of response, as if the only epistemological geometry appropriate for the film was a spaghetti tangle of Möbius strips being eaten by an Ouroboros. Which isn't to say he was terse or merely contradictory — various enquiries would lead to stories and amusing tangents and, ultimately, his verbal legerdemain probably was the most appropriate way to consider this work. But when one woman near the back prefaced her question by praising Gorin to the skies, he looked over to where his testy interlocutor had been sitting — he and his companion had fled a couple questions after his smackdown — and muttered, sotto voce, "motherfucker left already." It was vaguely weird, mildly awkward and immensely entertaining.
After this rhizomatic mindbender, I hit the street, unsure of what I was going to do with myself. All things considered, I hadn't particularly planned on heading to a gig — I'd been mildly sleepy and there was nothing fully demanding my attendance. But I was filled with a sort of undemanding mindfulness, everything under the streetlights vibrating and seeming-to-be a bit more than usual. I walked over to Spadina and up, wondering if I should hop on streetcar and just go home when I spotted a Lucky Cat inside a restaurant window wink at me. What the hell, I figured, why not some rock'n'roll?3
So, I made over to Rancho and up the stairs with just a few minutes to spare before things got underway. Enough time to grab a drink and introduce myself to Bobby B., consistently astute observer of things musical, who also happened to have slipped The Hoa Hoa's on his Hottest Canadian Bands ballot.
Soon enough openers Volcano took the stage. This relatively-new local foursome played a short set of swelling, somewhat psychedelic slowburners. The band possessed the assuredness to let the songs unspool at an unhurried pace — two of their five songs stretching over six minutes4 — and to let the tension build without resorting to over-the-top freak-outs. Given that sonic attitude, some might say that the band's name has been misgiven, as one thing they don't do is erupt. But volcanoes (and Volcano) do rumble a lot, and you'd best keep one one on 'em, just in case they do explode.
Listen to a track from this set here.
It's possible that at some point familiarity will begin to breed discontent, but for the moment I have experienced no diminishing returns with frequent exposure to The Hoa Hoa's. Perhaps helped by the fact that they just seem to cause a happening whenever they play — as they took the stage a fairly quiet room was suddenly brought to life with friends and fellow members of the Optical Sounds family suddenly filling the floor. The set opened with "Hey Joe" — not that one, an original5 — followed by "Thinking About Today", a cover by Nederbeat cult heroes The Outsiders, and a rocking run through new album opener "Postcards". The band was playing so powerfully that it seemed for a moment like they might overwhelm the room's sound system, the song ending with a cloud of static-y crackling emerging from the speakers. The set even ended with a new one playing a bit against type with a crafty death disco keyb part from Richard Gibson — and ended with a flat-out rocking version of frequent set-closer "Blue Acid Gumball" in the vein of what fans of The Clean might recognize as "the speedfreak sound". Speaking of rhizomatic mindbenders, The Hoa Hoa's are fully capable of altering your perception on any given night. The band are celebrating the release of their new album on Friday, December 4 at The Silver Dollar, and it is most assuredly not to be missed.6
Listen to a track from this set here.
Though that was pretty much everything I'd come out for, decided to stick around to check out Montréal's Postcards. The four-piece played a lean sort of reverb-heavy rock bringing to mind a sort of northern British '80's feel. After the fullness of the previous set's sound, it took a bit of a perceptual shift to adjust to the spare thinness that the Postcards were working within — like going from lush Technicolor to overexposed black-and-white. After a few songs I started to think there was something here that I just wasn't getting, although I appeared to be in the minority — Lee from The Hoa Hoa's, for example, was joyfully shuffling around the room, grooving to the sounds. Eventually I managed to get into them a bit and dig a few of their songs. I think it helped that the band managed to gain a bit of strength as they went along, moving forward from the plodding plunk-plunk-plunk with which they begun their set. Plus there was some undeniable tunefulness at play. Not a slam-dunk of a set, but I'd say it ended up on the positive side of the ledger.
Listen to a track from this set here.
There was one more band on the night's line-up — local crew Easy Targets — but I was feeling about done and decided to head out before I started getting too sleepy. But all told, a very fine lineup.
1 The Toronto Public Library has the Criterion DVD. I highly recommend it.
2 Let's just say — purely theoretically, just for the sake of argument — that the main ingredients were Orangina and Southern Comfort. Just to give a f'rinstance.
3 Oh, hey — speaking of crazy rock'n'roll times down at the Cinematheque, I note that there's a free screening of Guy Debord's In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni on Thursday, December 5. If you're like me, you might've heard of this flick from Greil Marcus' essential rock tome Lipstick Traces. Otherwise, might be worth it for anyone with an interest in Situationism, contemporary French social theory, palindromes, or crazy experimental movies. I'll see you there, I'm sure — B.Y.O.T.J. (bring yr own Thinking Juice).
4 And it's no slight against Chris Hobson's vox and lyrics to say that the highlight of the set was an instrumental where he exchanged guit for keybs and just let things roll along for a good few minutes.
5 Conceptually at least, this would go well on a mixtape next to Girls' recent "Lust For Life".
6 I got my mitts on a copy of Pop/Drone/Pedals and it's pretty fabulous stuff, so all the more reason to head down and grab a copy.
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