Gig: Wavelength 500 (night 2)

Wavelength 500 (night 2) (feat. Holy Fuck, The Russian Futurists, Diamond Rings, FemBots, Professor Fingers)

Steam Whistle Brewery. Thursday, February 11, 2010.

After a fine start to the Wavelength Festival, this was, truth be told, the one night of the five that I was least excited about in advance — had I not had a wristband, I might well have stayed home. Added to that lack of excitement, I was sort of in a bad mood, because of [deleted] and [deleted], so I might not have been the most receptive listener I could have been, so factor that in against any crankiness that you might find below.

The action on this night moved to some less-usual digs. The Steam Whistle Brewery — in the historical roundhouse at the foot of the CN Tower — is no stranger to hosting music gigs (and even indie gigs, with the ongoing Unsigned concert series) but not a standard Wavelength kind of spot. Certainly a large, beautiful room, with old wood pillars and brick walls, with Industry on display on one side of the room (looking upon the pipes and tanks of the brewhouse proper) and a lovely view of the city rising above from the windows at the other end, lending a slightly corporate, posh kind of air to the proceedings.

And food, too, from Dangerous Dan's, as Doc Pickles pointed out in his introduction to the night, bending over to speak in the table-level mic. ("it's a thrill to have some catering for a change... they also have vegan items, which is very exciting... I think it's the napkin, but it's good with ketchup.") And then, announcing "the only sound he'll respond to is barnyard animals," Doc Pickles coaxed some gobbles and hee-haws from the crowd to bring on Professor Fingers, who, hamming it up, took the stage responding to the clamour. ProF, also known for being half of local duo iNSiDEaMiND, created a live mix — call it turntablism, I guess, though this wasn't based on breaks and scratching so much as live electronic composition. The music came in song-sized chunks, most around three minutes or so, and was at its best when they mixed seamlessly from one to another. As a live experience, this occupied an awkward sort of middle ground — not something to dance to, but too busy to be purely aural wallpaper.

The biggest problem, then, wasn't so much musical, but how the audience sorted themselves out while this is going on — a lot of people settled for paying semi-attention while continuing their conversations, reinforcing the "background music" aspect of what's going on on stage. To his credit, ProF did incorporate some more theatrical elements, from his cartoon villain eye mask to some skit-like framing devices, including one where he held a phone conversation on stage, and this helped to push the balance back to making the set a "performance" that was worth paying attention to. Some interactivity with the audience, from those barnyard noises to one vocal segment ("My music is good — and it's for sale!") that helped to engage by adding a bit of call-and-response. As always, when all one can see is a guy standing behind a table of electronics, I have that curious itch of "what's he actually doing?" especially as, opposed to a lot of bands who just seem to hit play on a laptop and dance around some, ProF was working hard constructing what we were hearing in real time. Though there were some cuts that were more interesting than others, I found it generally okay stuff.¹

Announcing, "we're not going to talk, we have a short time," Dave MacKinnon kicked off a briskly-paced, tightly-packed set from the FemBots, a band that, I must confess, I've always liked more in theory than in practice. Over four albums, the band — essentially a core duo of MacKinnon and Brian Poirier plus a rotating cast of friends² — charted a unique trajectory melding carefully-crafted lyrics to outside-the-box sonics.

Starting off with "So Long" and "Count Down Our Days", the one-two opening punch from 2005's The City, the band pulled mostly from their last two albums, with only the title track from '02's Small Town Murder Scene representing their earlier material. On this night the band included Paul Aucoin on vibes, doing an especially fine on job "Ship Breaking".³ The band — who I must confess I have never seen live — sounded very tight and well-rehearsed, by no means like one that hasn't been playing lately. Their solid, vaguely Americana-ish, rock sound might have made them seem like a bit of an odd-band-out on this bill — although you'd expect nothing less from Wavelength — but whoever programmed them was certainly alive to some of the less straightforward undercurrents of FemBots' music.⁴ Packing seven songs into their half-hour, the band put a strong foot forward. A nice reminder that had me humming some of these songs a few days on.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Meanwhile, the room, which had been steadily filling in, was suddenly packed, with the area in front of the stage crammed with bodies. Painfully crammed, in fact, and with the blaring music and elaborate light rigs, the room suddenly felt less like an indie show and more like a crowded dance club. Ick. But it did make for an enthusiastic throng cheering for Diamond Rings. Taking the stage in a Steam Whistle hard hat and kicking into "Wait and See"⁵ John O'Regan felt like a bigger star than ever on the bigger stage. Testifying to the role of Wavelength in the local music ecosystem, O'Regan noted that his first Diamond Rings gig was indeed at WL.

Fighting a shock-issuing microphone, O'Regan was putting on an excellent show, and evidently impressing a lot of the crowd who had heard about him, but hadn't yet seen him live. I know this because there were about a thousand people crushed up against me, all loudly expressing some form of admiration. Needing a bit more space, I bailed, fighting my way out of the crowd. Which didn't end up helping, really. Moving back, I ended up beside some guys in their forties loudly complaining to each other, "could this be any more 80's?" I won't even repeat what the teenaged girls were saying to each other. I kept moving, trying to find a sweet spot with a combination of elbow room and non-irritating people. Ended up back near the front, on the other side of the room, right near the massive stacks, which at least drowned out most of the talking, as deafening as it was. In relative peace and security I managed to catch the end of the set, a triumphant "All Yr Songs". More a cause for celebration than disappointment — I've caught Diamond Rings a few times already, so I didn't feel like I was missing a once-in-a-lifetime experience — plus it's fascinating to watch an artiste becoming more popular in front of your eyes. But all things told, I wasn't in my happy place.

And, speaking of being irritable, I have to admit that Russian Futurists never worked for me. I'm someone who likes hooks and a good chorus, but I always found RF tunes to be like eating cotton candy for dinner — too much of a good thing, whole songs that seem like choruses set to sugar-y synths and beats that sounded like Marley Marl outtakes. So as I sought out the least crowded, least jostle-y spot on the floor, I wasn't particularly optimistic as the band took the stage.

Bringing it live in a four-piece unit, Matthew Adam Hart has expanded the scope of what was originally bedroom-fi pop with a band including Planet Creature's Sofia Silva on bass and backing vox, plus Clint Frazier of Shout Out Out Out Out on drums. Hart was an entertaining frontman, his banter coming from the same mind that produced whimsical song titles as "Register My Firearms? No Way!". And to the band's credit, they came out with a lot of new material, although it seems mostly to be audience-pleasing stuff that fits in well with the older material. One new one⁶ featured Cadence Weapon, but the most successful of the lot were probably "Horseshoe Fortune" and "Hoeing Weeds and Sowing Seeds", the latter recalling but not rehashing the sound of their probably-most-famous tune "Paul Simon" (from '02's Our Thickness), revisited here in a muscular live arrangement that made me like the song a bit more.

All of which sounds positive, I suppose, so it might seem disjunctive for me to note that I was having an utterly miserable time during this set. Besides my iffy mood and a band I wasn't overly fond of, I was crammed in around a crowd of nineteen/twenty year olds drinking copious amounts of beer.⁷ Oh, plus I was stuck in front of one of those folks who liked to show their appreciation for the band in a series of high-pitched, loud shrieks. I was feeling frustrated to the nth degree, and by the end of the set, I was feeling like I could really just pack it in and go home.

Listen to a track from this set here.

At the set's end, I was making my way to the back of the room, and must have looked as discombobulated and surly as I was feeling, as Jen P. spotted me and broke out into a laugh. Finding some familiar faces and some elbow room⁸ did quite a lot to improve my disposition, and by the time the set break was over, I was more-or-less ready for more.

And it helps, too, that I was certainly more of a fan of Holy Fuck. As they tore into it, I managed to find a spot at the edge of the crowd that wasn't too jostle-y or talk-y. There were a lot of tightly bunched people in the middle dancing, but the room felt less claustrophobic than before. With a late start time — the band took the stage about twenty past midnight — it also thinned out more as the set drew on.

The four-piece played with a giant oscilloscope wave projected onto the stage, suggesting the machine-like nature of their genre, but their no samples/no laptops brand of dance music — on record like Teo Macero cutting and pasting Derrick May — is never actually robotically stiff on stage. Although I can identify their "sound", I find it tricky to be able to distinguish individual songs — not only a by-product of an instrumental band generally, but also in the case of HF the fact that the band is by no means merely reproducing the songs as they appear on their recordings (often live takes themselves) so much as planting the same seeds and and shaping what grows out of it. I managed to pick out "Echo Sam" and "Lovely Allen" with their 8-bit video game fanfares, but only a couple more otherwise. Some of it was also new material from their forthcoming third album, such as the scorching "Red Lights", which came complete with an awesome fake-out ending.

Not a lot of banter from the band, mostly just "thank you"'s that came warbling out through layers of effects. A headliner-length set, stretching over an hour, though it zipped by much more quickly than that. Definitely a lot more space as one thirty approached, enough that I could step aside as what I thought was a mosh-y group hug lurched out from the centre of the dancefloor. Turned out to be a tussling group of young men in the beginning stages of a fight, which suddenly made the venue's copious security handy to have around. That notwithstanding, a positive vibe and, musically, a much better way to end the night.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Afterwards, I found myself standing outside the venue with none other than Doc Pickles. And despite feeling that this was kinda an "off" night — as an acquaintance had said to me earlier, "this isn't Wavelength; it's a Holy Fuck concert" — Duncan was resolute in accentuating the positive, noting that this is the sort of thing that widens the circle and brings new people into contact with the sort of culture that Wavelength is promoting. And he proceeded to point to the sky, singling out red Mars hanging over the night, and pondering on his bellicose influence over the night's affairs. In the face of such unshakable enthusiasm, it was hard to not feel more well-disposed toward things, so at least the night ended with me feeling better than when it began.

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¹ In terms of making me feel old in this accelerated culture, Professor Fingers' hand-lettered sign directed the interested to check out his twitter account. Why, back in my day, musicians had myspace, and we got along just fine with that.

² To look through the credits of their albums is a bit like flipping through a who's who of notable local musicians.

³ I didn't make a note of who was playing in the rhythm section — would anyone care to give credit?

⁴ If there was a connecting thread between all of the bands on this night, it would arguably be pop as bricolage, a sense that music needs not be played so much as constructed out of the building blocks at hand. While this sounds like an obvious description for, say, Professor Fingers and Holy Fuck (and even Diamond Rings and the Russian Futurists), the untrained observer might not see FemBots occupying that same terrain. But the band's first album (2000's Mucho Cuidado, incorporated found sounds and toy instruments, a path that they would never totally veer away from, even as their music grew more conventional. For Calling Out, the band constructed "junkstruments" that added an off-kilter undercurrent to the album's sound.

⁵ Have you watched the fabulous video for it yet?

⁶ "This one's Delicious", Hart said at the outset, which I'm assuming is the title, though it could have been merely descriptive.

⁷ Yeah, I know, I know — one shouldn't be too outraged at finding beer-swilling drunks at a concert being held at a brewery. But still.

⁸ Plus a bottle of water, which — to the venue's credit — they were passing out for free.