Gig: Songs for Jesse Presley

Songs for Jesse Presley (feat. Joe Pernice, The Reveries, D-Sisive)

The Music Gallery. Wednesday, November 11, 2009.

Not just yr normal night of noise, this one came with a pedigree. In conjunction with Candice Breitz's Same Same exhibition at the Power Plant, the gallery asked Carl Wilson, T.O.'s thinkingest musical enthusiast, to curate this show. Playing off the exhibit's themes of fandom¹ in the earlier work and twins in the new Factum, Wilson came up with the notion of a tribute to Jesse Garon Presley, rock'n'roll's original lost twin.²

For this show, Wilson managed to line up three very different artists who all came up with sets playing off the idea of unreal-mirror-others who make us who we are. The trick, of course, with art is that there's always a tension between the "formative influences and alternate selves" that we manage to choose for ourselves and the ones that are impressed upon us beyond all contingencies.

First up on the night was Joe Pernice, making a relatively rare appearance. I'd arrived figuring that Pernice's presence on the bill might draw a nice crowd, given how rarely he has played since relocating to Toronto, a couple recent appearances promoting his new novel notwithstanding. It tuned out to be fairly thin inside St. George's despite having at least three separate crowds to appeal to (the Power Plant art crowd; the Music Gallery crowd; the pop-oriented music fans). Perhaps that overlap turned some people off (too artsy for the music crowd, too music-y for the art crowd) or maybe word just didn't get around enough, but ultimately the event didn't get the turn-out that it deserved.

Regardless, this was an excellent venue to listen to Pernice tell some stories and play a set filled with musical twins, matching up cover songs with ones of his own they had influenced. With a timely nod to Remembrance Day, Pernice led off with a cover of The Zombies' "Butcher's Tale" paired by his own wartime song "Drew Got Shot"; a "Catholic version" of "Greensleeves"³ preceded "The Empty Faith"; and a story about not meeting Jimmy Webb and a cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" was paired with "I'm Not the Loving Kind" and "Easy to Leave". Albert Hammond's "It Never Rains in Southern California" was revealed as a prime musical source for "Somerville". And "C'mon, Get Happy" didn't seem to have any music descendants in Pernice's catalogue, but managed to make it in there somewhere, too. All of the songs in the forty-minute set were played with a sort of gentle sadness, which is Pernice's characteristic existential stance. A treat to get up close and under the hood of the works of a real talent.

Listen to a track from this set here.

After a quick break, a large change of gears, musically, as local hip-hop artist D-Sisive, looking like a young Peter Griffin in a Holden Caulfield hat, took the stage and turned up the volume. Using a series of stories and covers, Derek Christoff built his set around the idea of inspiration. Christoff's relationship with his father, both in youthful friction⁴ and in the effects of his passing was one kind of inspiration; a few covers reflected on the more direct musical ones. Kudos for acknowledging not only the "cool" formative influences (like Notorious B.I.G. and Slick Rick) but also those skeletons in the closet — after a verse of "Rapper's Delight", D-Sisive flipped the script and threw down some rhymes from Tom Green's pre-fame group Organized Rhyme, the sort of thing that any kid glued to MuchMusic in the early 90's for a window into the hip-hop world would get inadvertently exposed to.⁵ The set ended with a run through "Ice Ice Baby",⁶ but the real emotional heart of the set was "Brian Wilson", and Christoff's retelling of how listening to Pet Sounds one day while doing the dishes was the thing that broke him out of a long spell of writer's block.⁷

Listen to a track from this set here.

The night was closed out by The Reveries, a band whose instrumentation includes ruler-bass, noseflute, and, most prominently, mouth-speaker⁸. The Reveries play pop in a funhouse mirror, abstracted with a mushmouthed falsetto. Core members Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver and Doug Tielli were supplemtented by Jean Martin, playing percussion on top of an old suitcase. In the classic jazz style, The Reveries play "standards", using the framework of the songs as the basis for slightly wobbly improvisation. The source material for this show demonstrated their catholic sensibilities, including a bossa nova, a Sade song, and some Willie Nelson. Warped through all of their collective ambigulations, this is the sort of uneasy listening that is definitely an acquired taste — imagine an LP where the instruments were playing at 16 RPM while the vox were at 45 and you sorta get the idea. The music was full of weird tensions, and a couple times I found myself leaning forward in my seat, my eyes trying to spot the gestures that could decode what I was hearing. In that regard, the set was a success. At the wider level whether I liked it, I'm less sure. But that's okay too, not everything has to come to us so easily. After all of the preceding plainspokenness, it was a bit of a shift to the murky waters where the band's skewed sensibilities hinted at a relationship to their influences that was less reflection and more refraction. Between songs, the band even argued amongst themselves whether it was befitting for them to talk about their music at all. A fitting end to the night.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Much credit is due to Carl Wilson for putting this together. I think the conceptual frame around the music gave everything an extra skin and I left feeling pretty satisfied, keeping half an eye on my shadow because, y'know, sometimes I think that guy is up to something.

---

¹ Such as in "Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley)", a multi-channel video composited of numerous Jamaican fans singing the same Marley song simultaneously.

² Twins, of course, are like the sweetest fruit of the mytho-cultural substratum — even if the idea is easily grasped, it's still filled with mystery and is capable of taking on a lot of meaning-beyond-meaning. As children it's easy to fantasize of the other, of the secret evil twin following you around and foiling your plans; as adults it's easy to start worrying that we were the bad twin all along, and that the good, unsullied one is the myth.

³ Or, given the religious undertones, more likely an instrumental runthrough of "What Child Is This?".

⁴ A story about youthful exposure to Naughty By Nature ("the first rap song that I thought was really rooting for the police") was directly parallelled in song — "My daddy said, 'pull your pants up.' / Did Treach have to pull his pants up?".

⁵ "I apologise to everyone for knowing the lyrics to 'Check the O.R.'," D-Sisive slightly sheepishly said at the end of the song. No regrets for our youth, I say. Plus, it coulda been worse — he could have dredged up something by Kish.

⁶ I must confess, I still knew most of the lyrics. Although it's the sort of thing most of us try to kick under the couch of our past selves, I do recall that I bought To The Extreme down at the mall and listened to it with as much earnest enthusiasm as I gave to any other hip-hop album I picked up in 1991. I saw through nothing, and my gullability led me down every road. And now, I'm that much more sophisticated — I'm somehow not being suckered in by all kinds of stuff that's going to look silly with the hindsight of years? Pfft.

⁷ It's worth noting that D-Sisive's just-released new album Jonestown is being offered for free download, including in FLAC. Insert "drink the kool-aid" joke here.

⁸ Explaining the mouth-speakers probably warrants quoting at length from their Rat-Drifting bio:

But the real engines of the waking dream that is the Reveries’ music are the mouth speakers. These are small speakers, taken from the earpieces of cellular phones, hung inside their mouths. Every instrument has a contact microphone on it. So, for example, Eric's guitar can be heard coming out of the speaker in Doug's mouth, Doug's guitar or saw can be heard coming out of the speaker in Ryan's mouth, and anything Ryan does with his mouth can be heard coming out of the speaker in Eric's mouth. Because each Reverie is always using his mouth (either to sing or play an instrument), the speaker signal is filtered in a wild array of wah-wah effects caused by the changing shape of their mouth cavity [...]