Mechanical Forest Sound: Gig: Rock Lottery

Friday, December 11, 2009

Gig: Rock Lottery

The Third Annual Toronto Rock Lottery

Sneaky Dee's. Saturday, November 28, 2009.

A local tradition now in its third year, the Toronto Rock Lottery does about exactly what its name implies. In the morning, twenty five local musicians gather and put their names in a hat, drawing out five brand-new bands with five members each. These bands have all day to come up with a twenty minute set of new material — and maybe one cover. Depending on the range of participants assembled, the resulting insta-bands could be almost anything — or several things all at once. Organized by the community-mined Jane Duncan, the event is a fund-raiser for the Regent Park School of Music, providing music lessons for kids who can't afford them — and hopefully training a future crop of lottery participants.

Now, fortunately, the definitive article on this event has already been written by Melody Lau of The Singing Lamb, so all I need is to throw up some audio samples and a few annotations. Such as to note that the night had a surprise celebrity compère, Edmonton's poet laureate Cadence Weapon, who came off like Krusty at a random beauty pageant, grabbing the drink tickets first and then asking, en route to the stage, what he was there for. He did a nice job, filled with goofy fabricated factoids as he introduced each band.

It's pretty amazing to think that this event has featured a different cast of players every year, attesting to the depth of the talent pool that there is to draw from. And on this night, there were even a handful of competing gigs, drawing from the same set of musicians that might have been taking part. That might also have accounted for a slightly smaller crowd this time out, with plenty of open space at the back of the room while the bands were on stage.

Just a quick note: with twenty-five musicians pitching in, there's no way I could keep up and give nearly as much individual credit where due for individual flourishes, so my apologies for not being more specific more often on the who-did-what score. As for trying to figure out who everybody involved was, I did some quick googling around, and some helpful stilleposters pitched in to the lists below. But feel free to comment on any mistakes or omissions. Also, I was standing just close enough to the stage that I could usually fit about four people on stage into my pictures so sorry to those that got cut off.

First up were Seductron¹, who started off fusion-prog-disco, made a side-trip into cod-reggae, and ended with a the funk-metal breakdown of "Relax, It's Just Sex". Setting a high standard of musicianship for the following bands, the five were impressively tight. I'd commented before that the litmus test of a Rock Lottery band is this: are they as good as a random opening act that you wander in on at any other gig that you go to? These guys definitely had the chops, and carried themselves like they'd been tasked with serious work — but like they could pull this off any night. After their first song, someone beside me turned to their neighbour and asked, "is your band this good?" which is a pretty good indication. A solid start to the night.