Talk: Music as Community

[Somewhere There asked me to give a talk to kick things off at the start of their fourth annual festival. I felt a certain amount of apprehension, mostly at not being able to fill the large shoes of all those who had spoken at the festival in years past. Once it was done, I felt profoundly unable to evaluate myself, so I'm forcing myself to accept the positive sentiments that have been directed at me. In any case, here it is, both as audio and in written form. I had to restrain myself from continuing to tinker with the latter, so here it is, pretty much as presented.]

[Permanent downloadable link for audio file.]

Music as Community: Contingency, Fungibility and Solidarity

[Presented at the Somewhere There Creative Music Festival (The Tranzac, Toronto, Canada) on February 26, 2016]

Although I'll be darting about a bit, I'd say there is a structure here, so unless I go right off the rails, maybe we'll let me stagger through this and then we can talk some at the end. (But if I do that thing where I start mumbling or talking very fast, someone do give me the gesture.)

I have been greatly enriched by everyone who has spoken at this festival before me — Scott Thomson, Martin Arnold and Casey Sokol in 2013, David Lee and Jeremy Strachan in 2014, Marie LeBlanc-Flanagan and Allison Cameron last year plus workshops by Dave Clark and Nilan Perera — so I worry those are all big shoes to fill. I'm also not giving a history lesson or talking about music at a technical level so much as trying, I guess, to articulate something about my own point of view, so I hope there's something in that for others go grab on to. My biggest worry is that some of the stuff I'm talking about and the big reveal at the end! might be seen as superficial or frightfully banal. But to be honest, there's some stuff here that it took me years to figure out, so maybe it'll be useful to try and articulate it.

At these talks people generally say something about their background and why they're here, so I'll do some of that. But just to sort of frame everything I want to start off with a metaphor and a definition.

First: the metaphor. It's probably a little trite, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about Sisyphus pushing his rock. If you're not familiar, this is an ancient Greek myth. Sisyphus was a king who was prideful and crafty in a way that pissed off Zeus, and he was condemned for eternity to endlessly roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. It was cursed to roll back down, just before it reached the top and Sisyphus would have to trudge down and start over again. Over and over, forever, never completing the task, always having to go back and start pushing that boulder up the hill again.

Nowadays, this little story is often remembered because Albert Camus, the great French philosopher and writer, adopted Sisyphus as an absurdist hero. Sisyphus is us, caught up in the endless banalities of this world, tasked with a pointless job that can never be completed, failing every time with the result of all his toil crashing down around him. This constant, unremitting failure is probably pretty relatable for anyone in this room that has tried to make a go of it — artistically, financially — in creative/weird/improvised music.

But the thing to remember is that to Camus, Sisyphus is a hero, because in those moments after the rock has rolled down the hill, while he has to go back down to start again, he has a moment of freedom and nobility, a moment where he is conscious of his fate and thus able to rise above it. Indeed, Camus concludes that "the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the absurd struggle that a lot of us in this room go through just to create space for what Somewhere There calls "impossible and unreasonable music-making", and about how to find those little moments of nobility in the middle of it all. Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill is sort of the frame I saw a lot of this through, so keep that in the back of your mind for now — I'll loop back 'round to this later.

And I also promised a definition: I tossed a word into my title for this talk that you might not know if you're not into economics — or haven't read Moneyball. So, fungibility, for the purposes that I'm gonna use it here, is the quality of an commodity where individual units are capable of mutual substitution, where one can be substituted for another. So let's say I wanna borrow twenty bucks and a friend hands me a twenty dollar bill. And the next time I see them I hand back a ten and two fives. Not a big deal, right? 'Cause it didn't matter that it was that particular twenty dollar bill.

But let's say another friend lends me her Picasso. And then the next time I see her, I give her back two Cézannes. Or a print of a Picasso. She's gonna be pissed at me, 'cause there was something valuable about that specific Picasso.

So — is music more like the twenty dollar bill or more like the Picasso? Park that in the back of your head, and I'll come back to that in a bit.

And so: who am I, and what did I do to get asked up here to talk? I play a little, and in fact, Paul Newman put me on the bill of a show Somewhere There did couple months ago. And as a very occasional promoter, Karen Ng and I booked and co-presented a show together last year. So I have my fingers in this and that. But the main thing I did was show up a lot.

If there's anyone here who knows Doc Pickles, he's fond of saying that the most incredible thing you can do is to show up, and he's right. Especially in this little world where there's lots of shows where six or twelve — or three — people show up, you tend to get recognized. And all sort of neat things happen.

I came to such prodigious showing-up through a sort of roundabout route. Seven, eight years ago I was going to a decent number of shows, sometimes with friends, but increasingly on my own. Mostly indie rock, and mostly touring bands, but I was going to enough shows that I was starting to find out what sort of situations I liked: one of my early rules of thumb was that if I had a choice between going to a show at a bigger venue and one at a smaller one, I should always pick the smaller venue. At that point it meant, like, steering myself away from The Phoenix and going to The Horseshoe.

Along with going to smaller shows, I was going to more shows on my own, 'cause I was going to stuff my friends hadn't heard of, and there was a downside to that. I was really unable to hook into other people. There were shows — really good, amazing shows — where my main memory was not of the music, but of a painful awkwardness and loneliness. That wasn't sustainable.

Around the same time I was getting very bored with my job and with my life in general. I had one of those "something has to change" moments. If I were a practical-minded person, what I should have done was quit my shitty-but-consistent job. But this was 2009, and I convinced myself that it wasn't an auspicious economic climate to look for a job. So I started a music blog.

At the outset, my blog wasn't particularly remarkable. Some show reviews, some album reviews, a little casual snark. I didn't advertise or try to call attention to myself, really, just started plugging away at it, and it was a nice enough outlet.

And then a few months in, I acquired some recording gear and that changed everything. I kept writing show reviews — sometimes exhaustively — but that was the start of what's really been my unique element: recordings from the shows I went to.

Over the next few years, just through hands-on discovery, the mix of shows I went to slowly changed, with fewer rock shows and more experimental/improvised/weirdo call-it-what-you-will shows. Slowly, instead of choosing The Horseshoe over The Phoenix, I was choosing The Tranzac over The 'Shoe. And when you go to those shows, it's easier, by orders of magnitude, to connect with the other people who show up and with the musicians. You get remembered if you're always one of the three people in the crowd!

So, over time, the recordings have built up — it's heading towards three thousand tracks posted — and as time has passed, it's been more skewed to stuff that happens before smaller audiences and quite often it's improvised or ephemeral moments that might be rare or might be one-offs. It's an archive that sometimes really surprises me when I go back to dig for something.

I'm not a big self-promoter and it's not for me to try and evaluate how "important" all this is — and like Professor Lombardo, I don't take praise very well. I do this in my own way for my own reasons. When I started, I tried to wrote a blog that I was wished someone else was already writing. But I do see it as a community service.

And that's the thing that's worth noting: in doing all this I found and have become a member of a community.

This is probably way too obvious and way too banal for some people, but this was something that it took me a long time to figure out, so I think it merits discussion regardless. People are going to figure shit out in their own time, and I dunno if my own conclusions would have come any quicker if someone would have connected the dots for me, but I figure I might as well put out there some of the basic things that it took me a long time to learn.

One, that being around people makes it easier to be around people. Two, that sometimes when people are awkward around me it's not necessarily because of my own manifold failings but because they might be feeling socially awkward too. And three, that it's fundamentally better to belong to something larger than yourself. In my younger days I would have especially blanched at the last of those. I can't really explain what sort of atomistic reserve I had to breach to get past that. Or I would have tried to say that something as amorphous and oft-times as casual as my music-based social connections are just aren't worthy of being elevated to "community". But that's bullshit; you might as well take the community you find.

In any case, belonging to a community has made all sorts of things happen that would impress my younger self.

Being able to get a recording back to an artist when they wanted it has always been a kick. And that some of them have been used as "proper" recordings is pretty awesome. There's a Japan-only Mantler compilation that has a track that I recorded sitting right there, and don't think that doesn't give me a smile whenever I'm in this room. Even when it's something that a group can throw up on soundcloud, just to have something online, it feels good. Or when someone asks for a recording to use for a grant application, or when a musician says they got a gig because someone else listened to a recording I posted, that's pretty sweet. It's pretty fabulous to feel useful.

Through that sheer persistence and that power of showing up I've gotten a rep — not entirely deserved — as someone who's at all the shows. Even if I'm at home painting my nails it seems like if people don't see me at their gig, they just assume I'm at some other show that night. Not true at all, but you do this for a few years and you start to meet a fair number of people — and as networks of connections get denser, more and more interesting things happen.

Over the past year, after getting out of that shitty job I was feeling stuck in back in '09, I've had some time on my hands — side note, I'm looking for a money gig if anyone's got any leads — and after putting on a couple shows, through some random flutters in my personal network I ended up running a monthly music series. And that's been a really positive experience (and a get-over-yourself exercise in a different way) to accept that musicians I like are into what I'm doing enough to come play my gig, as un-prestigious as it is.

Running the series has also given me a chance to think about gigs from the other end of the process, thinking about things like draws and pay-outs. And while inviting people to play an experimental music series with a Pay-What-You-Can door on a Tuesday night tends to dampen expectations all around, there is a part of me that just feels awful every time I divide up the money at the end of the night and do the rounds, like, "that was an incredible set!" Followed by, "here's sixteen dollars in twonies!"

I did a show last year — some friends of friends from out of town wanted a Toronto gig on a little tour they were doing, so I basically wanted to get them some gas money — and I asked an acquaintance to come out and play. And she was really enthusiastic... and she asked, "can you guarantee me enough to pay for the GO Train back to Hamilton?" And I literally had to pause for a minute and think, like, "is there enough money for that?"

It's not news to anyone in this room, but the economic situation for making the sort of music that Somewhere There celebrates is extremely shitty. And I guess people get inured to that, but I think there's always that clutching at the back of the mind. It's psychologically draining to think about how to just get by in this city, how to try and fit in creative, soul-nourishing work around pay-the-bills work. But it goes deeper, too: we're conditioned in this society, no matter how much we think we've liberated ourselves, to cash out the worth of things in monetary terms, so it becomes existentially damaging to always feel degraded. The money side of things, that's Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill.

All of the wonderful stuff that comes out of weird and creative music scenes falls into this terribly-fraught zone of just-not-failing. Whether that's the internal economy of keeping a band going, or running a label and putting out recordings, or putting on gigs... it all works by the skin of our teeth, by making just enough with one show or one album to seed the next while keeping the circling sharks at bay. And while there's the whole romantic, rah-rah side of this — leveraging moxie and ingenuity to keep things going by hook or by crook — it gets really draining, even soul-deadening.

And then, on top of that, there's also the fact that in our musical hinterlands, the non-money rewards can be thin, too. You put on a show and bust your ass to promote it, but you're playing to your same small group of friends anyway. You manage to make a recording, and no one buys it, and you've got a box of CD's in your closet forever. And no one bothers to review music anymore, so it's hard to tell if anyone cares at all.

I think ego-gratification is a big reason that people bother to make and create art. And in just proportions, that a well and befitting thing — we all need ego gratification to some degree. Acceptance by others is a powerful thing. But in our current cultural climate, it's a hard slog against indifference —even if you get those semi-personal likes (or, now, if you're lucky, those semi-personal "wows"). And in all that, plus in the whole rarified matter of "aesthetic satisfaction" there's the sheer matter of diminishing returns — the law of entropy says it's hard to keep getting the same satisfaction over time. So people get burned out — it's a very real thing that the hill gets really fucking steep and that bolder gets really heavy.

I do want to pause for a second and just sidestep myself to note that while these existential burdens are very real and very cumbersome, probably to most of us in this room to various degrees, we have to stop and remember that the burdens are not distributed equally.

There are people in our communities who have to deal both subtle and overt forms of racism. There are people who get treated differently because of their bodies, sexuality or their perceived social or economic class. There are differing outcomes for getting gigs, for access to media — for pretty much everything related to artistic/musical production — for persons who happen to be female instead of male.

I assume that everyone has to deal with these same existential burdens to greater or smaller extents, depending on their own personalities and circumstances; but racialized persons and women have whole other layers of bullshit they have to navigate before they can even worry about pushing their boulders up the hill.

There are whole talks to be devoted to this, and there are people in our communities that are talking about it. I think my job is to listen to them, and to stay aware of my own relative privilege, so I just want to be make sure when we're talking about the obstacles people face that this is acknowledged. Otherwise, I only really have one other thing to say about this, that I'll get to in a couple minutes.

Having said that, maybe now I'll come back to my definition at the start. So: is music more like an interchangeable twenty dollar bill or more like a unique Picasso? Obviously, it's a totally unfair question, and at least two of the things in the question are pretty wiggly. "Music" is an amorphous thing, and it could mean those physical objects for sale in the crates over there, or it could mean something you go and dance to, or it could mean something you make with your friends.

But that being said, there's a strong cultural impetus with all of those to make us think music is more like the Picasso — unique, irreplaceable. The way that we talk about a favourite song (or band or album) is often in the same terms of a one true love in a romance novel, like a spiritual connection destined by fate. I know for a real long time, that was how I felt about music.

But one of the things that has changed as I've been doing all this is that I've come to feel rather the opposite... and given my proclivities, I'm largely thinking of this in terms of going to one show instead of another. Which isn't to say that I'd consider any show picked at random to be as good as any other so much as the quality of music (and my emotional relationship to it) isn't the main thing that drives me to any particular show. Vivid example: at one point, if a band I really, really loved was coming to down and playing a festival, I'd go to that festival. Nowadays, the notion of being fenced into a field, surrounded by branding opportunities is the last thing I want to do. I'd substitute some other band that I might not "love" so much and still have a better time.

Is the show at a place where I feel comfortable? Is it safe (and safe-feeling) for all members of the community to be there? Will there be friends or acquaintances there? Who's putting it on, and do they facilitate a good vibe? Things like that mean way more to me now. A place where I'm participating in the social life of the music, rather than consuming it like a commodity — even if that commodity is a fine wine — means a huge amount to me.

I hope I'm not belabouring this point too much, and I hope this isn't one of those things that seem like a big dilemma to me but if totally obvious to all of you. But this consideration, which is something I've been trying to articulate for a few years now, is a big deal to me, and definitely affects how I choose what shows I'm going to.

Now, the fact that I'm also into a different sort of musical experience also plays into this. When we talk about improvised/creative music — the sort of shows that Somewhere There is putting on — I think that those of us who are immersed in it forget how much of a different beast this is. When we're talking about experimental and improvised music, we're talking about music that is always in development, is always becoming. It's unfinished music, it's not pinned-down-and-described music. No one's going to play the big single and send us home humming that song we remember from when we were in high school.

For those of us that are immersed in this stuff, I think we tend to forget how foreign, how scary and how undesirable this is for a lot of people. Sometimes we lament that there aren't enough people at our shows and we act as if this is a textbook case of market failure — or marketing failure: that not enough people got word about our shows to make the rational choice to come and see it. We try to avoid considering that maybe the continuing unpopularity of our marginal music is because it is well and truly unpopular.

Which isn't to say there isn't room for improvement. I remain a die-hard romantic who thinks that every one of our shows that has six people at it could have twelve if we hustled right. Which sounds, I admit, a bit jokey, but really is not. We want a few more butts in the seats, we want a few more bucks in the kitty, we want musicians going home with something more than beer money and cab fare, but what I'm getting at here is that the low-stakes-ness of our shows (is that a word?) is a feature, not a bug. There are some shows that are simply meant for twelve people.

Low-stakes shows go hand in hand with the process music I was just talking about. Creative music needs shows to try things out, shows that sometimes flop at the musical level. Collaborations that were a good idea on paper — or even charts that were a good idea on paper but that don't quite fly in open air. Shows where musicians are trying out their moves instead of worrying about executing the game plan. Shows that pause for troubleshooting. And so on.

This isn't all I go to, but this is indeed the sort of show that I dig a lot these days. And maybe that gives me another way to try and explain why I feel as if live music is fungible: I threw away my bucket list. There's no particular show that's essential to the whole experience. They're all little slices of this continuous becoming.

Now the downsides of this are manifold, and I've probably dwelled on them enough: there's no money in it, it's hard to have more than a handful of spaces that embrace it, and these gigs can feel like a slog to organize and, sometimes, I'm sure, to play. But there's a whole bunch or rewards, as well, and these mostly revolve around the social life of the music. (That's a phrase, by the way, that I owe to Scott Thomson.) These process shows make it easier for audiences to recognize each other and hopefully to get to know one another (Even if it can also be a sort of gated community that throws up very real social barriers to unfamiliar faces, which is something we always have to work at overcoming.)

These shows also make the divide between audience and performer more porous — and this is another thing that creates a feeling of community, a sense of being all in it together. If I hadn't found these musical communities that treat me like a respected member because I'm good at showing up, I surely wouldn't be standing here today. And if I didn't feel like I was part of these communities' greater projects, I definitely wouldn't have put a fair amount of effort into documenting them.

I also think embracing this small-stakes-ness can give us some perspective on where we should direct our struggles to make our larger communities better. I think dedicated artists shouldn't be consigned to a life of poverty — I really believe this, but a lot of the avenues where this get expressed seem like pointless fights to me. As the way people consume music changes, there seems to be enormous energy expended on lobbying for artists to get paid .01 cents per stream instead of .004 cents per stream — or to pick something closer to home, there's a never-ending struggle to make it acceptable to charge ten or twelve bucks for a show instead of five or seven.

And this is possibly contentious, but I think those hills are too small to fight and die over. If the music's not going to be paid for, if we can't raise more than dinner money at the door, then maybe we shouldn't worry so much about it. So far as I can tell, if we were going to agitate for something in Toronto — instead of sitting down with venal "suits" from the industry cabal to talk about building a "music city" — it should be for affordable rents, for a living wage and for a guaranteed annual income. And these things, by the way, that would make a very big difference in a lot of artists' lives, would also tie us to a larger community in a way that those pie-dividing struggles wouldn't. 'Cause affordable rents, a living wage and a guaranteed annual income would also make a material difference to racialized Canadians, to newer Canadians, to women... and to seniors and to the millennials who are getting the generational screw job. And being in common cause on these bigger issues might help us to make more of those people feel welcome in our smaller musical communities.

But I digress. What I'm trying to express is that there's a real value to the sort of shows that groups like Somewhere There put on, and something special about the "space" that they create, even if that space isn't contained in one venue. The community they're building and the support they give to "impossible and unreasonable music-making" is a valuable thing, and I think what they're doing is making some folks' boulders a little easier to push up their mountains.

In that spirit, I want to loop back around to Sisyphus and close by making a suggestion to switch that very familiar metaphor that I lead off with. I don't have too much to say about the burdensome part, the pushing-the-rock-up-the hill part. But I have a suggestion on how to enhance those moments, those validating moments walking down the hill before starting over again.

Albert Camus, who wrote the essay about the Myth of Sisyphus also wrote a novel called La Peste — The Plague. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a story about a colonial French port in Algeria that is struck by an outbreak of Bubonic plague, and about how various people in the city react to it. Some try to flee, some try to hide, and some fight the plague, even though that means a high risk of death. It's a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, and it's a metaphor for the existential struggles we are all in engaged in. It's an absurd fight that the protagonists are going to lose, just like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill.

Tarrou, a visitor who happened to be trapped in the city when the Plague struck, and Rieux, the local doctor, are stoically helping the victims. One night when they have an unexpected respite from their work, Tarrou says something quite simple and quite beautiful to the doctor. He says "Voulez-vous que cette heure soit celle de l'amitié?" —— "do you want to take an hour off... for friendship?"

They spend some time sharing stories about their lives, and then Tarrou suggests that they go down to the beach and have a swim. In the midst of this unbearable spiral of plague and death, they share this special moment of fellowship and serenity, floating together out in the sea before they swim back and go back to their work fighting the plague.

It's a beautiful moment, and something that I've gone back to many times over the years, but until I was working on this, I never really connected that back to Sisyphus. And yet, the parallels are obvious: the absurd, implacable, killing struggle... and that moment of calm, of humanity, of worth-while-ness in the pause before returning to the grind. But there's something different in the two scenes, something so obvious I missed it for years: in the one that gave me nourishment and a feeling of hope in that moment of rest from the struggle, the hero is not alone.

So let's not be alone. When we're pushing out boulders up the mountain, or fighting the plagues, or organizing our shows, or playing our music, let's not be alone. Let's take an hour for friendship in the quiet moments and let's try to be less alone when we get caught up in our absurd and fatal struggles. All we've got is each other.

photo by Melissa Goldstein.

Recording: Russ Strutt

Artist: Russ Strutt

Songs: Sunshine of Your Love [Cream cover] + Silver Wings [Merle Haggard cover]

Recorded at Rising Star Studios, sometime in 2006.

Russ Strutt - Sunshine of Your Love

Russ Strutt - Silver Wings

My father died yesterday.

Perhaps one isn't supposed to admit it, but we weren't as close as a father and son are supposed to be. ("were supposed to be". Not used to that yet.) There was Family Stuff, and from the time I was in university there was about a decade I wasn't in touch. It was one of those turning-thirty things, maybe, that I decided to call him up one day. Or maybe just a sense if I didn't talk to him and missed my chance, I'd regret it. So although things weren't storybook perfect, we did have an adult relationship. And we mostly bonded over music.

Russ had a bit of a wandering spirit and wasn't the sort of person who wanted to live in one place for too long. After he retired, he spent his winters down in Terlingua, a dusty desert town in southwest Texas. He'd been a casual guitar player for most of his life, but he took it up more seriously down there, eventually holding down nights in local cantinas mostly playing old country songs, and finding a community of friends to play music with.

When we reconnected, he had an RV out by the Thousand Islands and we hung out for an afternoon together. I'd taken up playing the guitar by then (another one of those turning-thirty things) and we played songs back and forth for each other. I thought it filled in an otherwise awkward gap, but for him it seemed to bring a level of happiness I couldn't really understand, or that I couldn't imagine my presence should justify.

We kept in touch after that, and he'd pass through town every year or so, travelling from one place to another on long highway journeys. He liked for us to play together, so that was a part of many of our visits. Once, in ought-and-six, when I was probably most into playing, I booked us some time at a rehearsal place out in Etobicoke I'd been to a few times and brought my friend J along.

These recordings come from that day, and though we tackled a bunch of songs in ramshackle style, these two stick out in my mind. I always thought of "Sunshine of Your Love" as my father's song more than as a pop artifact because I first heard it over and over from the basement of my childhood home as he cranked it out on his red Hagstrom electric. (And now I can laugh to hear him throw himself into the vocal with slurred-howling gusto, and just maybe find a tiny bit of pride in listening to myself almost keeping up on bass.) "Silver Wings" wasn't one of the songs that we'd planned ahead for, but at the end of the session when J. and I began packing up, Russ just spontaneously launched into it. I didn't have a tab to play along (which probably improves the recording) but at least I could sing on the refrain.

Russ liked to sit back and have a beer and pick the guitar. He liked the companionship of old dogs. He loved living under the open sky, whether at his property in Manitoba or down in Texas. He wasn't the best father; I certainly wasn't the best son. We tried, in our own ways. We both had the music in us.

I'm not a spiritualist or metaphysicist, so I can't say with honest conviction that I hope Russ is enjoying himself on a new journey (or hum to myself "I know there's a lotta big preachers that know a lot more than I do / but it could be that the good Lord likes a little pickin' too" with more than a faint smile). I think that coincidences are just coincidences, but a week or so ago, I had the urge, for the first time in a while, to pick up my guitar. So at least I feel ready to face this event in a proper way. Sorry for imposing these half-coherent thoughts on you but this all just came out when I was thinking through things to myself. Now I have some songs to sing.

Interview: The Somewhere There Collective

I was lucky enough to get a chance to write a little thinkpiece for Weird Canada about "Creative Informal Music, Space, and Community", which you can read here:

Everyone Knows This is Somewhere

The goal was to grab your attention to get you eager to head out to see Somewhere There's second annual music festival (which is on now!). But my long-latent propensity to turn essays into manifestos reared its head a bit, too. At part of the legwork for this, I sent some questions to the festival's organizers. I only scratched the surface of their savvy observations in the piece, so I figured I'd let them have their full say here.

Late one night in mid January, Paul Newman and Pete Johnston joined Joe Sorbara at his kitchen table to talk through some questions posed by Joe at Mechanical Forest Sound. The other members of the Somewhere There Collective — Michael Lynn, Heather Segger, Arnd Jurgensen, and David Sait — have all provided some feedback on these words and given their thumbs up. Of course, if any one of us were to sit down and answer these questions alone we would come up with very different documents. Keeping that in mind...

Mechanical Forest Sound: What was lost when Somewhere There lost its space?

Somewhere There: At this point it's been a year since we lost our venue. During this past year, between the summer series, Audiopollination, and the Somewhere There series that is currently running monthly, we've put on 32 shows at the Array Space. Comparing that to just over 2000 shows that happened between 2007 and the end of 2012… well, you do the math. Even adding the Somewhere There Creative Music Festival events, we're now putting on a fraction of the number of concerts we were at the venue. That said, the vast majority of these events have been very well attended, there is clearly ongoing support from a community of musicians who want to present their music this way, and it all feels very healthy.

MFS: How important were the residencies, where artists could “work out” musical ideas over time?

ST: The residencies helped to get a lot of different projects off the ground and generated a lot of energy in the creative music community. Many of the projects that started as a residency at Somewhere There or that used a residency as a way of rejuvenating an existing project are still thriving today, so that investment is continuing to pay off. In the later stages of the residency program, though, the energy was actually starting to wane a bit. Things tended to be a little more ad hoc and less focused than they had been. That's not true across the board, of course. Some of the very last residencies were very focused and very fruitful, but generally that was the feeling we had. So yes, the residencies have been a very important and incredibly rewarding aspect of Somewhere There, but much like the larger project, it was starting to fray at the edges a bit by the end.

MFS: In presenting fewer events that are a bit more like "shows", is there less of a chance to treat performances as being part of a "process"?

ST: You're correct that these recent presentations feel "more like shows". They're less informal than the events at the venue set out to be. The idea that fewer events offer less of a chance to treat performances as part of the process of getting some music together, as you say, is also true. Local creative music communities require space for informal music making. That hasn't changed and that's why we still have a search for a permanent home on the back burner. The problem is that that space was being supported by a very small group of volunteers who, let's be honest, were burning out. The model wasn't sustainable. For now, what we're doing works. This is a sustainable model. For now.

MFS: A show at ST was a bit like watching a show in someone's living room. But also different from that. Even if the audiences were small it was, to some degree, a nominally “public” space. How does the idea of having an audience (even a handful of friends) change things?

ST: We didn't set out to create a “nominally” public space. It was a fully public space and we always wanted more people filling it up. This was never an exclusive club or some kind of secret society. This community makes great music and the purpose of Somewhere There remains to support and nurture that music, give it a place to grow, and absolutely to provide a place for people to hear it. Playing music to an empty room isn't horrible, we've all done it, and we'll all do it again. But we're interested in sharing the music with a room full of listeners, with an audience who focus the occasion of performance. The first Somewhere There Creative Music Festival was originally conceived as a way of bringing new people out to the venue and building our audience so that the space would be filled with more people more often. We lost the Sterling venue right around the time we were putting the festival together and the TRANZAC stepped in and helped us out immensely. But that was the original idea.

MFS: What does it mean to do shows where there are more performers than audience members? Does the "public" element encourage people outside the circle to come in? Do you think the non-anonymity of being in a small audience scares people away? Viewed from the outside, do you think there are social “barriers to entry” to a small, maybe cliquish community? Is this good/bad/neutral?

ST: Would something about Somewhere There be ruined if there were large crowds consistently? Let's find out! It's always going to be an intimate space and of course "large" is a relative term. How large would a large audience really be in a room that is the size of a small restaurant? The main point here is that we've always done what we could do — albeit within our limited means — to create a space that would welcome people. The one thing we have no interest in doing, of course, is pandering to an imaginary idea of musics that would somehow be more "accessible" so that more people would come out to hear it. “Within our limited means” is really a key point here, though. When we lost the Sterling venue we began a search for a new space. One of the main aspects of that search was that a more inviting, more accessible room with a warmer vibe would hopefully be more encouraging of greater turn-outs for shows. And frankly, this is what we've found at the Array Space. It's not ours, and we aren't presenting there seven nights a week... and there is definitely something foreboding about a handful of Ice trucks blocking the way to the door, but once you re inside the space it's really quite beautiful. And we'll take this opportunity to point out that the Array Space will have a new, completely accessible, entry way very soon as well as an elevator to the second floor. That kind of accessibility is going to be fantastic. The most important things for us at this point are that we are presenting great music and there is a sense of community around it. Our long-time listeners are coming out regularly to listen and we are gaining new audience members at almost every show.

MFS: Moving forward, could ST thrive without a space? Given the cost of rent and other practical difficulties, is there something liberating in not having to worry about all of that? With a space, how much attention is shifted to putting “bums in seats” to get dough to cover expenses, and how can things be set up so that isn't a concern?

ST: There is absolutely something liberating about not worrying about paying the rent for the venue every month. We're all just a little bit healthier one year on. Based on our experience, the only way we're going to have space for informal creative music-making in Toronto is to get some funding in place, either from an arts council or two or from a private benefactor or through some combination of these things. At this point, that's our long-term goal. In the meantime, we're committed to presenting a few shows per month at the Array Space through the Somewhere There and Audiopollination series and to making the Somewhere There Creative Music Festival happen once per year. We're working on ways to bring the Leftover Daylight Series back in some way, too. This activity all seems to be happening in the context of a scene that is really thriving right now. Looking at the Soundlist a year and a half ago, one saw a large number of listings for shows at Somewhere There and, maybe, a few at the TRANZAC and a smattering of other venues. The bulk of it was ST listings, though. Then, in the first few months after we closed our doors, the Soundlist was a very short e-mail to read. Now, a year later, it's back up to being a strong, healthy bulletin of creative music events at quite a diverse list of venues around the city. That's something to celebrate and be excited about. And to support by going out to hear the music; which you know and do more than most.

MFS: In the current socio-political environment, is trying to find a space for resolutely non-commercial music an act of defiance? Do people at ST think they're challenging a model of capitalism and looking for new forms of organization/community, or is it just a practical matter of trying to find someplace (er, somewhere) to play music?

ST: Your final question opens up a massive area of discussion. First of all, defying capitalism is a practical matter at this point. It's not a sustainable system. Period. Really, though, by any and all understandings of a society centered around the building of capital, what we do wouldn't and shouldn't exist. If we were interested only in money, we wouldn't be making the music we make and we wouldn’t be presenting the music we present. Nobody is getting rich off of creative music. As we mentioned above, the music that we listen to, make, present, nurture, celebrate, works in direct opposition to any musics designed to be accessible to as many consumers as possible. We're interesting in listening ears and open minds. We're interested in challenging music, critical music, impossible music. We are music-ists, not capitalists. But we do live and work in a capitalist society. It wouldn't be helpful to anyone to pretend that that's not true. So, as we've said, for now, what we're doing works and this is a sustainable model. For now.

Thanks to the Somewhere There collective for their time and thoughtful answers.

NXNE 2013: Moments of Transcendence

[Note: I got sidetracked thinking about stuff. Apologies for the rambling musings; some more proper notes and many sounds from NXNE will start flowing soon.]

I
Sacred Harp Singers @ 159 Manning

I was heading down for the Manning BBQ — Tim McCready's all-afternoon, all-evening party with all-around good vibes — which is generally considered to be one of the coolest things happening during NXNE. Enroute, I stopped off to grab a mickey of rum, knowing that there's a 7-11 on the corner of Dundas and Manning, and that I could grab a slurpee and fix myself what is known in Winnipeg as an "after-school special". That, plus some free beers made a sunny day even brighter and kept me pleasantly socially engaged.¹ With bands on a backyard stage and playing in Tim's living room, this was as casual and close-up as you can get — pretty ideal by my standards. I saw some friends play some cool stuff, and some people that I didn't know play some cool stuff, and when I came in from the backyard at the end of a set out there, I found a group of Sacred Harp singers were huddled in a square in the living room.

Sacred Harp is a variation on shape-note singing, a sight-reading method with a simplified musical notation designed for communal singalongs. I've come across this before (mostly at Kith & Kin's holiday wassails, from which I recognized a couple faces in this ensemble), and I really love this beautiful music, even if I don't have any connection to its churchy Protestant origins. As the ensemble finished their song, I was spotted and got waved into the middle of the group and suddenly found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor, voices on all sides of me. In a full ensemble setting, this is where the group leader would stand, not just to conduct, but also to enjoy the honour of listening in the best-sounding spot where all the voices meet. And though I felt a little conspicuous being in the middle and not off to the side, I got over myself once I could basically just close my eyes and soak in the music.

And I was powerfully moved. As someone who experiences a lot of live music, I enjoy a lot of it, but it's not all that often that I'm swept right up into it like this. It's not just a matter of having had a few drinks and not just a matter of, like, digging it — it's being pulled into it in a whole different way, unexpectedly and all at once.

Regardless of your opinions pertaining to the disposition of souls, it's hard not to react to this without pulling out that whole vocabulary of metaphors of religious experience — although surely the music was engineered to prime just that sort of response. It's not my vocabulary — I'm sure I'd be more comfortable labelling it as an unmediated I-and-Thou moment — but, like, whoa. There was a feeling of ascension, like a column of light from on high had been sunk into my skull, beaming something down. Like floodgates opening, I was filled with melodies and colours and joy. Very trippy and healing, like a spiritual carwash.²

It was so emotionally involving that I wasn't really paying attention to the way I was sitting, and as the recital wound down (the punk band in the other half of the room being nearly ready to play) I sort of came back into myself and realized my foot was totally asleep. I was being extra careful as I stood up, and it was only when I put my weight on my other foot that I realized that one was even worse off and I nearly went down in a heap on top of the alto section. More than a little embarrassed, I quickly shuffled out of the room to find a place to stand for a minute, flexing my foot and realizing I'd managed to fuck up my ankle. Such is the worldly cost, I guess.

Machines don't capture all the spirit, but you can listen to a couple sacred songs from this set here.

II
Majical Cloudz @ Sneaky Dee's

I did manage to see one more fab living room set, and then it was time for me to head off for my night of NXNE proper. I limped up the street, got myself another slurpee, mixed myself a medicinal-strength after-school special, and took it for a shuffling walk up Dundas street. My timing was pretty good and I managed to catch a couple sets in the DIY basement retreat at Wavelength's showcase, which felt like a more humanistic setting than some of NXNE's more corporate outposts. Low ceiling, loud music, swirling lights. (And, speaking of transcendent possibilities, I also [deleted: 108 words].)

And from there I headed over to Double Double Land, which was surely an even less-likely festival venue, where I caught the compressed noise-diamonds of Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt. That more or less took care of the planned part of the night, and after grabbing a drink at the convenience store to give a good home to the last of my rum, with a sort of homing instinct I pointed myself toward the Silver Dollar, where a friend had suggested that Jef Barbara at one o'clock might be worth checking out. I arrived there just as Mikal Cronin's midnight set was finishing, and ran into another friend who said he was heading over to Sneaky Dee's. I shrugged and joined in with a "why not" sort of attitude and thus ended up catching The Luyas, who I like fine enough.

And after that, through a complete lack of any planning whatsoever, I ended up being there for the "secret guest", who turned out to be Montréal-based buzz act Majical Cloudz. This pleased me in a way: I'd checked out a few tracks and was surprised at the depth of my dislike for them ("Coldplay for hipsters," was my reaction) relative to the excitement they seemed to be generating among some people I know. That made this a chance to revisit my opinion, as I am definitely a person who can be won over by a good live performance.

I was not won over.

I would go so far to say that while I'm guessing that this was probably someone else's transcendent moment at the festival, I left thinking that it was totally bogus. Vocalist Devon Welsh (his nose and eyebrows making him a dead ringer for Bert the Muppet, shaved head notwithstanding) is being sold as an intense frontman making direct emotional contact with the crowd, but at this show at least, that mostly just translated into a broody diva act: complaining about the on-stage sound throughout, he moaned, "something feels terribly not right," at one point, proceeding to comment that his voice could give out at any time, and implying that like a too-delicate bloom he could simply perish from this earth at any given moment.

I'm not against shtick. In fact, in the right context, I quite like it. But when shtick swaddles itself in those tired vestments of "authenticity" and tries to pretend that it's utterly disingenuous spontaneity, it tends to completely turn me off. Plus, no amount of ersatz "intensity" can elevate what is some fairly dull material (provided by stoic knob-twiddler Matthew Otto) — although I might have been wrong with the Coldplay crack, as live it sounded more like slowed-down versions of INXS' power ballads.³ By set's end — oh goodness, oh quel surprise! — the burdens of it all were just too much for Welsh, who jumped to the foot of the stage and crouched down, the audience around him following suit, a contrived simulacrum of intimacy that just left me rolling my eyes.

You can judge for yourself, and listen to a track from this set here.

III
Lean Left @ The Tranzac

Saturday, my ankle still a little sore, I went to see some bands play on a patio and I dropped somewhat-warily into a VICE party in a parking lot where I felt under-tattooed and under-American-Apparel-ed.⁴ Anyways, after that, I headed to the Tranzac, for another show whose very existence under the NXNE banner pleased me greatly.

Tad Michalak's Burn Down the Capital shows consistently look beyond fashion and trend to bring the unusual and unclassifiable to town, and I was obliquely pleased that somehow his shows over the weekend were, at some level, equal options to everything else on the festival grid. As a great fan of both the sax work of Ken Vandermark as well as the guitar interplay of Terrie Hessels and Andy Moor (of Dutch punk lifers The Ex) , I would have gone to this in any event — but I was pleased that this was part of my "festival experience".

Running into some friends, I ended up with a spot right up front, and after an engaging performance by Andrea Parkins and an amazing set by THIGHS, as Lean Left set up on the floor in front of the main hall's stage, I realized I was going to have Hassels (and his amp and his astonishing guitar) right in front of me. Once the band was set up, Hassels rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet a couple times like a tennis player preparing to serve, and then everyone launched into it. Vandermark's sax and Paal Nilssen-Love's drums were flanked by the two guitar players. They were acting as much percussionists as anything else, especially Hassels, who played his guitar with a drumstick for much of the set — sometimes thwacking the body, sometimes the strings, or occasionally just using it like he was trying to pry the strings off.

This was so fascinating that some early sound problems (the sax was very low at the start of the show) didn't matter to me at all. There was so much unfolding from each of the musicians from moment to moment, but I was mostly mesmerized by what was right in front of me, which was hard not to do when I could occasionally feel the long, untrimmed ends of Hassels' strings brush against my legs a couple times as he swung around especially close to me. And a few minutes later, Hassels held the headstock of his guitar down against the surface of the table beside me, grinding the tuning pegs back and forth, leaving a few new scratches on the table's surface in the process and sending rorwing rumbles through the amp.

And once again I was totally engaged in the moment. While the music that Lean Left created was melodically unstructured, it had an instantaneous internal logic that held it all together. There's something truly powerful about improvised music where the performers are listening and reacting to each other with such easy closeness — and when it's unfolding right in front of you, it can really blow you away. The set felt like it flung past me in a rush, and all I could do was hang on, grinning. The best set I've seen all year.

A recording ain't the same, but listen to an excerpt from this set here.

IV

As someone who goes to a fair number of shows, I've oft thought about why I go to shows. People head to gigs for a whole lotta different reasons. I mean, everyone likes music, generically speaking, but a lot of the time, heading to a gig is mostly a chance to gather with old friends and occasionally encounter new ones. In fact, over the years I've come to admire people for whom that's a primary function, as they're the ones who seem more well-adjusted, less fixated on the music as a thing-in-itself. But what can you say for those wide-eyed ones over at the side who show up hoping for (but never necessarily expecting to get) that rare spark, that moment of true bliss — that moment where you're transported a little bit beyond yourself? Ah, that little taste of transcendence. (It's no wonder music enthusiasts are subject to a lot of easy junkie metaphors, always trying to recreate that perfect first high.)

The thing is, even when you go in with big expectations, most of the time the highest reasonable expectation is "really good", and not "mind-blowing". And the more stuff you've ever seen, the less likely you are to have your mind blown. This is probably why I kinda admire the people who basically let their tastes of their younger selves ossify, and stick with that stuff, going back to it again and again for a sort of contact high of remembering how life-altering it once was. I've never (yet) hit that point where my taste is fully composed, though, and that retrospective-glow thing just doesn't work for me, which is maybe why I dislike any sort of reunion shows.

Ironically, of course, I headed from The Tranzac to go see a reunion show, catching Tangiers' ten-years-ago-already reunion at The Garrison. It was good, but once again just back in that realm of merely good. Having tasted something far stronger right before, it didn't make as much of an impact on me, and though there were many late-night options open in front of me, I knew it was time to call it a night.

Having those experiences on back-to-back nights seems like unusual luck — having those moments of dare-I-say-it transcendence are really rare, like once or twice a year rare. They can't happen all that often because there's such a wide range of internal and external factors coming together — from one's own mood, to being in the right spot in the right room, to the musicians being especially on, to having listened to everything else so far in your life and being primed for this next thing to be a catalyst that creates some unexpected new connection. But it's that whole not-because-they-are-easy-but-because-they-are-hawd thing that gives those moments their exceptional value.

And maybe that's why I reacted so strongly, in a negative way, to that Magical Cloudz set. In the name of having captured that essence, it seems like it's selling a cheap reproduction of it. And yet, and yet... what is the standard by which I can call bullshit on this? How am I supposed to judge the quality of someone else's experience? A younger version of me would have been as likely to have been totally fucking impressed by that set as to have ranted forcefully about Welsh's jive-assed "my feelings are so real they hurt" shtick. Anyways: nowadays, I've got other, better things to worry about. Namely, to get out there, and soldier on every day, and hope that once or twice a year that that thing happens.

---

¹ Though when I had a chance to meet the housecat, I momentarily thought I was going to be done with people for the day, just like in that comic.

² It's probably frowed upon to "monetize" this sort of thing, but an enterprising sort could totally rent out that central spot as a therapeutic treatment.

³ Ribbing aside, one singer that Welsh brought to my mind after some thought was Fatima Mansions' Cathal Coughlan, and the comparison is illustrative, as Coughlan starts, on the surface, from a similarly emotive place as Walsh but then delves into a more interesting pathos by moving — knowingly — over the top. He could also tear into a contrasting rocker to offset the ballads — a move that Welsh doesn't seem to be interested in.

⁴ When I described the scene later to someone later, with a big parking lot full of people drinking free beer juxtaposed against five porta-potties, they cogently concluded, "that, right there, should be a VICE 'don't'".

Essay: You Forgot It In Yourself

You Forgot It Yourself

[Caveat: This is, no doubt, a variation on the theme of my Nevermind essay, but I suppose I remain intrigued by the disjunction between the neatness of these noteworthy anniversaries and the ambling randomness of our actual lived experience. Like most albums that are important to me, I don't listen to this that often. So, if nothing else, it's nice to have a reason to revisit it, and you probably should too, today.

Ten years ago today — October 15, 2002 — Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People was released. I did not know this at the time.

I

As it turned out, I did head downtown to buy a new release from a revered local group that day, but it was The Sadies' Stories Often Told. But in a sign of where my head was at in those days, I was more excited with an impulse (or, Impulse!) buy, a John Coltrane box set — that was a big deal to me.¹

Anyway, I know I first heard of BSS not long after the album came out, as YFIIP did garner good reviews in the local press. But it wasn't 'til I saw it I saw it popping up on year-end lists that I resolved to buy it. In fact, I purchased my copy on January 22, 2003 — which implies it was probably fresh in mind from seeing it in the Eye Weekly critics poll, where it placed a respectable 15th, not bad for a local indie album.

In fact, by that point, word-of-mouth was already building enough that the album was getting to be hard to find. After looking in a couple stores, I managed to snag the last copy from (the now-defunct) Edward's Record World at Yonge and Eglinton.² After that, the album was hard to come by until the original Paper Bag edition was supplanted by the Arts & Crafts re-release. And soon there would be a lot of demand as the famous Pitchfork Review came out just a few weeks later.³

But to be honest, on my first listens, I wasn't all that blown away by it. In my journals at the time — and oh my, yes, I had journals at the time: in the parts of our lives where the least amount is happening to us, we have the most time to think about things — I would usually include some commentary on whatever I was listening to, and in that regard, the absence of any mention of YFIIP is striking.⁴ I do remember the first time I listened to the album, out for my walk on a bitterly cold winter morning. "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl", a song for which I had no point of comparison, struck me as I was trudging past the sort of well-tended inner-suburban homes where such dramas were almost certainly taking place. I did dig "Cause = Time", which reminded me of Dinosaur Jr.: that was striking as — hard as it is to believe today — Dino Jr. was pretty-much unhip and not-particularly-all-that-much a part of the cultural conversation.

But otherwise, I filed the album away and didn't really think about it all that much for a couple months. It was only when, in the face of a mounting swell of acclaim, that my friend and co-worker J. asked to borrow the disc from me that I had another run at it... and suddenly it started to interest me.

II

Actually, another kind of music was occupying much more.

One morning, some months before any of this, I was walking from the bus stop to my office. I was listening to "Memphis, Egypt" — the first song on Mekons' Rock N' Roll, and one of the top twenty rock songs of all time. It's a cautionary tale, but like a lot of cautionary tales, it also makes a fairly salacious case for the very thing it's warning against. In fact, that thesis/antithesis is covered in the song's first two lines, where the invitation is followed headlong by the warning:

destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late

the battles we fought were long and hard, just not to be consumed... by rock n' roll!

I decided I was going to buy a guitar.

I was too old for this. I was hurtling towards thirty, starting far too late to ever really master it, and all the unschooled fumblings that would be endearing in a younger novice would not look so good on me. But still, the deed was done a few weeks later with the help of J., who played a bit himself.

I found a Squire Strat in cool metallic green, and we made grand plans to play together, to "jam out". In that idle, pass-the-work-day style, discussions ensued of preferable stage names and band names.⁵

We'd need songs, of course. J. was not only a generally competent player already, but he'd once been an English major, who would someday, maybe, finish off that novel he denied he was writing. It seemed logical that those were adequate qualifications for him to become the songwriter. And yet, nothing was forthcoming.

In a rare burst of assertive un-self-consciousness, I took matters into my own hands, more to prime the pump than anything else: I figured that once I made the point that it wasn't so tough that J. would take over. I combed through my notepads for bon mots and trenchant turns of phrase, grouping them together into lists. And on another morning that I was making that walk from the bus to the office, I started humming something, stopped in place, and wrote out my first-ever verse. The rest followed in a rush:

A few more tunes followed relatively quickly, but there were diminishing returns. I was working from the "write what you know" school but I quickly realized no-one wanted to hear that many laments about how I wanted to get laid — nor did I particularly want to ruin the particularly scant façade of worldly sophistication that I could muster at the best of times.

Still, as time went on, my fingers learned enough to propel me to the basest level of competence. Although the topic of "original material" was largely shelved, J. and I would get together and play songs back and forth every once in a while, and the way that could expose one's technical shortcomings couldn't quite overpower the delight of electrical alchemy.

Our copious theoretical discussion about having a band could have gone on forever. I can't quite say who dared whom, but in the end, I took the plunge, presenting J. with the text for a "musician wanted" ad. He made a couple adjustments, and we sent it off:

I vividly remember pulling my copy of NOW from the box on the following Thursday, and waiting 'til I got down to the subway platform to flip to the classified pages — at which point I nearly shouted in anger at whoever substituted "or" for "of".⁶ But, still, we nailed it otherwise.

Somewhat to my surprise, we got a handful of responses to the ad. A few of them were from guys who were clearly too competent for the likes of us, and between my efforts at lowering their expectations and dispatching my mini-manifesto⁷ we managed to chase most of them off.

III

As it turned out, there was one guy who seemed to be on the right wavelength, so J. & I arranged to meet him for a drink before heading into a show. Which would be, by chance, June 13, 2003 — the very same night that I saw Broken Social Scene live for the first time.

Their set included the songs from YFIIP blown up, magnified and re-assembled alongside a whole slew of newer songs that we'd have to wait for years to hear on album, ending with the sprawl of the band's self-proclaimed theme song, which sort of blurred and combined their best and worst traits — they seemed to have no clue and no interest in how to finish the damned thing.

But equally noteworthy was how the whole of the night was like a gateway to this surprisingly robust pre-existing world, where all the component parts of BSS had their own exciting things going on — the night opening with a series of mini-sets from Apostle of Hustle and Jason Collett and Leslie Feist, generally all of whom were rather more obscure at the time.

But seeing BSS was merely the third most astonishing thing to happen to me that day. The second most astonishing thing were Stars, who I didn't really know that well, but who totally knocked my socks off and outplayed the headliners. BSS "were also pretty good," my journal notes. "Given the gushing praise they've been getting, this could be one of those I-was-there gigs to brag about in the future."

But the show was just a show — the thing that really elated me and capped off my summary was, "we met our drummer!"

As it turned out, with life (as usual) trumping an elegant storyline, although we all seemed to get on well we never heard from the guy again. So nothing came of it, except for having taken the step.

Eventually, though, J. & I did connect with some other prospects to get out and play, renting a rehearsal space (in the far reaches of Etobicoke of all places) in Sunday-afternoon three-hour blocks. It was a bit like a succession of first dates, meeting up with strangers to check up on basic compatibility. And like first dates, only a couple seemed promising enough to bother with a second. And though it could be frustrating to try and fall into a shared headspace with strangers, it was rewarding, too, to be able to live out my Metal Box rockstar fantasies; to be actually jamming:

It was all good fun, though as time went on, I actually did less of that rather than more. Even when I was still playing a lot, I became more interested in playing by — and for — myself. I got an acoustic guitar and devoted myself to trying bang out as many songs from my holy trinity of Tom T. Hall, Lucinda Williams and Paul Westerberg as I could muster from my technical limits.

IV

But still, I didn't really appreciate at the time how these were the first fruits of a process that I was undertaking to deliberately complicate my life a little bit, by putting me in the way of other people.

In retrospect, it was really at that point that things started changing. I wouldn't have been able to recognize it at the time, but all of this was happening just as things were shifting for me in my own life. After a few Dark Years, I was slowly starting to transform into a more social version of myself. And if I never started a band, in time I turned into someone who'd go to a lot of shows rather than someone who went to a few — an indirect result of how that first BSS show had suddenly announced that there were all these local bands, this whole local musical ecosystem. This was something I vaguely knew about but wasn't involved with — but suddenly it became something to explore, something I could really dig into.

And the fact that all of this — the album, that first live experience — was celebratory but based in the murk of doubt and confusion also fit in with the spirit I was feeling with the looming road of angst over turning thirty stretching out before me.⁸ To re-listen to the album now, I can hear this, hear all of this — the layers of hope, insecurity and yearning; mawkish sentimentality mixed with braggadocio; our fears about other people constantly rubbing up against our hopes about other people.⁹

As such, the mess-music of YFIIP — overlapping, opaque but self-situated in a hazy interpersonal web — was an apt soundtrack for the times I'd been waiting for. Part of its art was the self-invocation of its milieu, and I was waiting for something like that, too. In slow steps over the next few years, I'd move myself a little bit closer to finding my own broken social scene.

---

¹ For the record, there is just so much beautiful stuff on this. Everyone should have this, or at least some of its component albums.

² I must have also done a troll through the used bins while I was there, as my other purchases that day were Death in Vegas' The Contino Sessions, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's How I Long to Feel that Summer in my Heart and New Wave by The Auteurs, who I was really into at the time.

³ One thing that the Pitchfork review gets very wrong is that Broken Social Scene is, in fact, an uncommonly excellent band name, capturing in one phrase a truism about the human condition — when you mix together a collection of persons, it's going to get complicated and awkward and be on the verge of falling apart all the time. The ars vitae is in how you navigate that.

⁴ By contrast, there's copious evidence on my near-obsession with the Nikki Sudden reissues that were coming out right around then.

⁵ There were great stacks of band names considered, with preferences changing every day; but by contrast, I quickly established that my punkrock stage name would be Heraclitus Akimbo.

⁶ I was less angry that they also misspelled "unacknowledged" — and by this point I'm not even sure if I simply submitted it like that myself.

⁷ Fortunately, whatever was in the screed detailing what we were trying to achieve is lost to the mists of time. I quoted myself to my journal as saying something like "we want to decommodify our relationship to rock'n'roll by taking part in the conversation", so I can only imagine how embarrassing it would've been once I really got going.

⁸ All of my insecurities about turning thirty were way, way worse than the actual fact of turning thirty. I offer this as an instructional comment to those younger folks who are on their way there as much as I am now using it as an instructive mantra for myself ten years later and hurtling toward that next dreaded milestone.

⁹ And, by the way, Justin Peroff's drums on the album, as recorded by David Newfeld, remain fucking fantastic.

Essay: Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)

[Caveat: This feels terribly undercooked to me — to be honest, if this isn't about Nevermind, I don't really know what this essay is about yet. But it relates to this specific moment, so it'd just feel stale if it wasn't pinned to the calendar on this date.]

[Addendum: Having thought on it further, maybe it's about this: the younger we are, the more we live in a perpetual now; the older we become, the more we live in a perpetual then. Those few moments where one could be fully subsumed in either of those are possibly the most sublime parts of life — it's being at an indeterminate midpoint that causes anxiety. This still doesn't feel worthy to serve that point, though.]

Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)

Alternate title: It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today — September 24, 1991 — Nirvana's Nevermind was released.

I

This is not really about that album. Although Nevermind would, eventually, go a long way toward changing the kind of music I listened to, when it came out it was nowhere on my radar.

Not because I wasn't paying attention to music. In fact, I was rather consumed by it — just not all this stuff with guys playing guitars. "Rock" music, almost as a whole, was quite foreign to me — distant, uninteresting. Why would anyone pay attention to that stuff when we were living in a Golden Age?

I finished highschool to the sounds of De La Soul is Dead and the Dream Warriors' And Now the Legacy Begins. And to the first Cypress Hill album¹ and Ice-T's O.G.² I started university with "Mama Said Knock You Out" in my walkman. The music was a big part of our lives — I remember how my friend T. deliberately scheduled a lab that first semester so he'd be able to get home in time for Rap City. That was how we rolled.³

September '91 is pretty vivid in my mind given I was starting university — a launching pad in a lot of ways into a bigger world. Looking back, I picture myself as a fresh-faced keener, assiduously going to classes and spending hours in the library⁴ broken up by bursts of exploring and getting lost in the three-dimensional maze that was the University of Winnipeg.⁵

Even without the internet, or even much media coverage otherwise, in the culturally-peripheral white hole of Winnipeg we were relatively on top of things. And if there was any album that I was excited for on September 24, 1991, it would quite certainly have been A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory.⁶ Later that week, a new season of SNL started, which I remember anxiously anticipating because Public Enemy was the musical guest.

It was on SNL that PE first dropped "Can't Truss It", which was a mighty single and left me droolingly eager for the album to come out.⁷ And when it did, I remember heading over to Musiplexx — the best music store in town at the time — with T. where we each got our copies on cassette, and headed back to the university to unwrap them. And I'd begin the process of obsessively consuming the album and grafting it onto my DNA. Listening to it over and over, yes, but also pouring over the liner notes and teasing out hidden meanings, dispatches from a world that was ours but that we by no means really understood. Absorbing every second of it, on the bus, or in Magicland, or even while in the library to study Latin vocabulary again.

That fall would also have a run of albums that kept me more than busy: Sons of the P by the Digital Underground (itself a gateway into all things Clintonesque, once I did the research to figure of what the "P" was), Ice Cube's Death Certificate, Black Sheep's A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, Del tha Funkee Homosapien's I Wish My Brother George Was Here, Big Daddy Kane's Prince of Darkness. Only that last one was a bit of a letdown, and there was more, more, more. We were in the middle of a Golden Age.

II

And yet, quite unexpectedly, there was a whole bunch of other stuff moving into my consciousness. It's probably inevitable — no matter how focused you are, it's rather difficult not to run into other kinds of music, especially when it's carried in on a tsunami.

It would have been around the time that I started university that on a whim, while at a mall bookstore, I bought a copy of the September '91 issue of Spin magazine⁸ — which I'm sure I'd never previously heard of — because the cover promised an interview with N.W.A. I dunno what else rubbed off on me⁹, but as a diligent nerd, I read it from cover to cover. And it sparked something, for from that point I'd buy every issue for the next six years or so.

There were further inroads on my consciousness: campus radio station CKUW was then mostly a couple rooms in the basement of Manitoba Hall where a clique of too-cool hipsters hung out. The station "broadcasted" to speakers that were located in the Centennial Hall Buffeteria and the Lockhart Hall Smoketeria¹⁰ — and, for some unfathomable reason, to the dank basement space where my locker ended up being. They played the weirdest shit — in that first year, the biggest thing in their rotation seemed to be the U2 EP by Negativland. There was also one deejay who had a vintage interview with John Lydon that he played over and over — in fact, I remember hearing that interview more than any actual music by PiL. At first, this was just some sort of strange assault on my senses, but eventually all of this would impact me deeply.

Given all that, in retrospect it's mildly strange that I didn't encounter Nevermind, which was spending that whole fall rising up from the underground and becoming a phenomenon. You'd think I woulda heard of the album by the time of that December issue of Spin where — now rather infamously — Nevermind was rated behind Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque in their year-end album list.¹¹ But so far as I can recall, the first I heard of it came when I asked my sister what I should get her xmas that year, and she said the album with the naked baby on the cover. And so I dutifully went down to Musiplexx and got that for her.

I know at some point in the next few months I basically ended up stealing the cassette back from her, but in a strong counterpoint to all those razor-sharp memories above I can't really say when. Or even recall precisely the order of event whereby it all became so ubiquitous — that video was suddenly omnipresent, and as if stone tablets with new commandments had dropped from the sky, suddenly there was this whole new pantheon of bands to learn about. Although it seems like a sudden explosion, I suppose it was a fairly-long accretion of information — and, remember, information moved a lot more slowly back then — that probably culminated the following summer with the release of the Singles soundtrack.

And meanwhile, my musical universe would expand outward at an incredible velocity, a whole new world unleashed on me mediated by what were very big, suddenly mainstream albums like Blood Sugar Sex Magik (also, interestingly, released on September 24, 1991 — though it didn't explode so quickly, either) and Ten and Badmotorfinger. But there was a tremendous momentary wobble, and for each band that was tamed by a major-label contract, and each legion of second-rate imitators and one-hit wonders that were pushed on the likes of me, there was also a light shined on amazing bands that I'd have never otherwise heard of. Not only "grunge"¹², but an entire new mini-canon that would be brought to the public consciousness. There's no way I could pretend to be cool enough to claim that I had any knowledge of, say, Meat Puppets or Beat Happening or Shonen Knife or The Raincoats before they were given Kurt Cobain's blessing.

And learning of all this stuff pointed backward, to a whole hidden history where the greatest-ever bands weren't the Beatles/Stones and lesser gods of classic rock radio, but a whole other chain that stretched backwards — Patti Smith, The New York Dolls, MC5, The Velvet Underground, each of those creating their own set of expanding concentric rings. And it pointed to the city around me, where suddenly I realized that there were local bands making music on their own terms, and it could be good even if if weren't given the blessing of some far-off magazine or music station. And the same thing coming from all across the country, found in intermittent dispatches from Brave New Waves or Exclaim.

All that would, in some manner, lead me down a wayward path where rock'n'roll has stayed pretty important to me. Though I never would have suspected it in September of 1991, the ripples of Nevermind would ultimately affect me more than the ripples of all the music I loved most dearly at that moment.¹³

III

I was thirteen on June 1, 1987 — the twentieth anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember the day well.¹⁴ It was a big media event — the "It Was Twenty Years Ago Today" headlines wrote themselves, after all.

And I knew the album well — had known it my entire life. It was one of a pile of platters that as a small child I had mixed freely in along with nursury rhymes and other "children's" albums. It had never seemed particularly out of place amongst those.

Even at thirteen, I had a decent grasp of "the sixties" as a clear cultural category. But at the time of that anniversary, it was unquestioned that that album, and that era were something wholly foreign, discontinuous from my own existence, separated by a massive gap of time and style and technology.

How strange to reflect on that now. It still feels shocking to think that 1967 was only seven years before my birth. Seven years? Seven years is nothing to me these days. That show I went to or that girl I had a crush on seven years ago, it's like something that happened last week.

And these albums that I bought twenty years ago, and music that I discovered (and classes that I went to and essays I wrote and hours I spent cloistered in the library memorizing declensions of Latin words) seem like something not so far from me. The flow of time from 1991 to 2011 is a smooth line, a continuous flow, those days just a vibration away.

It shocks me to think that someone born in 1998 and seeing stories about Nevermind would therefore be in the same situation as I was then. No, "shocks" isn't the right word at all ——— it crushes me inside somehow, makes me feel like a pre-emptive ghost, part of history.

So then what? If there's any comfort to be drawn from all of this looking back, it's not from the warm shelter of nostalgia. Not yet, dammit. Not yet.

Maybe it's the idea that the things that turn out to be important — the things that are going to change us, transform us, give us new skins and new hearts — are, indeed, all around, even if they're not the things one suspects are important.

---

¹ At the blooming of my first era of band t-shirt wearing, I had one that read THE PHUNKY CYPRESS HILL SHIT in block letters on the back. In a particularly tragic episode, someone stole it when it was drying on the laundry line. The older couple who lived next door took pity on me, and kept giving me shirts to make up for it, though none of them had swear words.

² Plus, I shall not lie, there was also a lot of stuff that would now be considered monumentally uncool, like 3rd Bass' Derelicts of Dialect.

³ If there'd have been any foreshadowing of a sea change that summer, it might've been the Anthrax Attack of the Killer B's comp, which I bought because for several months it was the only way to get my hands on their collaborative remake of Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise". And though it wasn't my usual fare, in a time where I listened to stuff like this it didn't seem like too much of a step. Plus, metal was always something in the cultural background — it wasn't strange, it just wasn't my thing.

Tangentially, this is probably worthy of its own study, but that collaboration would be a launching point on a vector that would extend to the Judgment Night soundtrack a couple years later, precursor to a decade of terrible rap-metal hybrids. Thank goodness that I had enough time to refine my musical palate before that happened — if I were a couple years younger there'd almost certainly be some more — or, I should say, different — regretful stuff in my musical biography.

⁴ Many of those hours in the library were spent memorizing Latin vocabulary — I had a whimsical (if not mildly eccentric) streak in picking my classes in those days. And sadly, pretty much all my conjugal visits that fall were with Latin verbs.

⁵ Or, less productively, going to Magicland. Located on Portage Avenue, just a couple blocks west of the university, Magicland was one of our main reasons for heading downtown during high school days. It was, like, the best arcade ever. Not because of the quality of the video games particularly, but because you paid by the hour to play the games, and never had to pump quarters in. Three bucks an hour was a pretty sweet deal, and we took advantage of it a certain amount, by which I mean a lot. An exclusively guy-ish sort of ritual, it was a good reason to skip class in high school, and perhaps more of a dangerous temptation once I was just minutes away from it for most of the day — time spent in Jupiter to get more stupider. For a while, there was some danger that I was going to major in Galaga.

⁶ This remains a pretty fine album, and should be loudly celebrated on this, the twentieth anniversary of its release. Very much a game-changer in its own way, it still stands up as a helluva good listen.

⁷ In the pantheon of that year's releases, Apocalypse '91 needs to be acknowledged for its fierce excellentness, the last of a trio of back-to-back-to-back masterpieces. It was also the last flare of undiluted greatness from what was, for a very long time, my favourite band ever, which makes it slightly bittersweet.

⁸ If you want a first-hand look back at the era, Google books has the whole run online.

⁹ At the time, the story therein on Fugazi, say, certainly didn't immediately impact me, even if in looking back it feels way more like something out of my world than N.W.A. was.

¹⁰ The latter was an informal name, but it serves to reinforce how much some things have changed — when I entered university, there was still a designated, unventilated indoor smoking area. In fact, older students were still grousing at the fact you couldn't smoke in classrooms anymore. And while it's crossing my mind, I'll pause to savour the wonderfully sixties nomenclature of the Centennial Hall Buffeteria — a name now re-branded into history, if my browsing of the university's website is correct. Oh, also — universities have websites now. That was totally not a thing when I was an undergrad.

¹¹ In fact, Nevermind was third on that list, though fewer people seem to recall that REM's Out of Time beat it, too. I suppose fewer people have an axe to grind with REM.

¹² Though I certainly took in a whole lotta that — enough that eventually, in more pedantic moments, I could argue things like, "the only real grunge band is TAD".

¹³ As the amount of attention I paid to "alternative" music blossomed, my ardour for hip-hop slowly waned. It wasn't helped of course, that that Golden Age couldn't sustain itself, and the quality of the music as a whole dropped off. As far as I was concerned back then, after, say, Enter the Wu-Tang the landscape was pretty barren, with materialistic gangsta rap in the ascendant. In retrospect, I have no doubt that I simply missed a lot of stuff because I wasn't playing such close attention — I never picked up Illmatic when it came out, for example. But to this day, I feel a disdain for most contemporary hip-hop music — the most-praised rappers of this age seem tepid and third-rate compared to the stuff I loved. So if you happen to be looking for it, there's one point where my nostalgia has turned to an ossified "back in my day..." sort of grumbling.

¹⁴ Specifically, I remember being in the kitchen of my friend C.'s house, sitting at the counter having lunch and watching a story about it on the news. His father — a stern, distant sort of man in my eyes — was there too, and I think that reinforced the distance of twenty years, if it could be a marker of a grown-up's youth. Again, it shocks me how different the past we were there for is from the past that came before us. They should actually have different names.