Monday Roundup #81

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Community notes:

• The Music Gallery dropped a "save the dates" notification for this year's X Avant Festival, coming up on October 12 to 16th. No lineup announcements yet, but you should indeed head over to your calendar and, uh, save the dates! (and, similarly, Venus Fest announced their Festival — lineup included — for October 14-16, so you should take note of that as well!)

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Concert announcements:

Ayal Senior and Friends (feat. Kurt Newman / Nick Flanagan / bUDi) / The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge) 2022-08-14 (Sunday – 2:30 p.m.!). $PWYC [FB event]

Dark Matter presents (feat. Naomi McCarroll-Butler / Wenderly Park [Heraclitus Akimbo/Fuzzy Nibesh]) / The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge) 2022-08-23 (Tuesday) [FB event]

Venus Fest (feat. Austra / PIQSIQ / R. Flex) / 72 Perth Ave. 2022-10-16 (Sunday). $18 advance / $22 door (+ fees and taxes), 19+. [FB event]

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Shows this week:

Lina Allemano's Titanium Riot (BLOOP) / The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge) 2022-08-02 (Tuesday). $PWYC.

Alpha Strategy (So Tired / Dermabrasion / Shallow Waves) / The Baby G 2022-08-03 (Wednesday). $16.93 advance, 19+. [FB event]

Jeremy Dutcher & Friends: A Fundraiser for Kehkimin / The Tranzac (Main Hall) 2022-08-03 (Wednesday). $PWYC. [more info]

Luka Kuplowsky & The Ryōkan Band / The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge) 2022-08-03 (Wednesday – early!) [FB event]

Lina Allemano Four / The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge) 2022-08-03 (Wednesday). $PWYC.

Matmos (Memory Pearl / Jeff Carey) / The Baby G 2022-08-04 (Thursday). $22.35 advance, 19+. [more info]

Batuki Music Society presents: Habari Africa Festival (feat. Gloria Nankunda & Emanzi Dance Troupe / Ethio Azmari / Okavango / Dobet Gnahoré) / Harbourfront Centre 2022-08-05 (Friday). $free, family-friendly, most events outdoors. [more info]

Tania Gill Presents (feat. Tania Gill Quartet [Tania Gill/Lina Allemano/Rob Clutton/Nico Dann]) / The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge) 2022-08-05 (Friday – early!)

Batuki Music Society presents: Habari Africa Festival (feat. IZimba Arts / Adam Solomon / La Kora des Griots / Dicko Fils / Songs of My Mother [feat. Lorraine Klaasen/Djely Tapa/Mis Blandine/Ruth Mathiang]) / Harbourfront Centre 2022-08-06 (Saturday). $free, family-friendly, most events outdoors. [more info]

Birthday Bash! (feat. Greydini / Man Made Hill / Bbomit / Sourpussy / Banananananana) / The Tranzac (Main Hall) 2022-08-06 (Saturday). $12. [FB event]

Jelly Ear / ["medieval music, improvisations and other selections", feat. Cory Harper-Latkovich/Karen Ng/Sebastian Shinwell] / 2022-08-06 (Saturday) [FB event]

Batuki Music Society presents: Habari Africa Festival (feat. Mambo Chivero / Sadaka / Butterfly Band) / Harbourfront Centre 2022-08-07 (Sunday). $free, family-friendly, most events outdoors. [more info]

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Bandcamp corner:

• Technically speaking, this album came out ten years and a couple months ago, but I just noticed that I picked up a copy of the tape (packaged, natch, in a paper bag) at a gig ten years (and a couple weeks) back, so it seems like a reasonable excuse to look back a decade (!) to this classic slice of ZA. (And, P.S., on the topic, Carl Didur's new album drops this week!)

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It happened this week...

• ...on August 6, 2015 at Ratio.

Mermaids - The Humpback Whale

• ...on August 7, 2015 at Pia Bouman School for Ballet and Creative Movement (SummerWorks Music Series).

JOOJ - Ghost of Love

[Do remember that you can click on the tags below to go back and find the original posts (and often, more stuff) from these artists.]

Recording: Sook-Yin Lee

Artist: Sook-Yin Lee

Song: Narcolept, Falling

Recorded at 918 Bathurst (Women From Space Festival 2022 – Night 4), May 1, 2022.

Sook-Yin Lee - Narcolept, Falling

For the past three years, the Women From Space Festival has been an excellent encapsulation of its moment. Coming on the cusp of the First Big Lockdown, the 2020 Festival is remembered by many as the last event of the beforetimes, while last year's "hologram edition" was an elegant solution to the flatness of livestreams. And now, this year's Festival had to bear all the relief and angst of "returning to live" at this uncertain mid-point of the pandemic. Presented with joy and community spirit over four nights, the Festival was a chance to run into seldom-seen familiar faces and to hear a dizzying variety of sounds.

Closing out the festival, Sook-Yin Lee brought some of the songs from her final collaboration with Adam Litovitz, poems and wordbursts invoking the tonalties of stern folksongs and synthpunk rhythms, moving from dirge to dancefloor in the same uncertain path one moves from grief to something that is... not-grief.

Recording: JOOJ

Artist: JOOJ

Song: Crystalline

Recorded at The Great Hall's Black Box (Long Winter 4.5 – Night 2), March 18, 2016.

JOOJ - Crystalline

You can't fault Long Winter for being ambitious and for wanting to close out the season by cramming in as much music and art into the Great Hall as possible, but their plan to close the year out with a two-night stand didn't entirely pay off. Giving patrons the choice of two nights (and holding them at the end of Spring Break) seemed to especially cut into the younger crowd and both nights (especially Friday) lacked that "about to burst" feeling that makes LW unique. But even if the crowd was at less than maximum strength, there was no certainly no lack of music spread throughout the building.

In its recorded version, the monologue at this song's end is delivered by Soon-Yin Lee in a hushed whisper; on stage it comes out more like a fever monologue, pumped along by the heartbeat rhythm. Its minor/epic internal drama (vividly set on Vancouver's Lion's Gate Bridge) always leaves a bit of a tightness in my chest until its blood-pumping-in-your ears escape/resolution. Lee and Adam Litovitz played to a darkened basement, giving everyone in the audience their own safe space to sway or otherwise react to the music before ending by declaring winter's end.

Recording: JOOJ

Artist: JOOJ

Song: Jessica

Recorded at Smiling Buddha (Silent Shout Festival – Night 2), December 5, 2015.

JOOJ - Jessica

Although they'd stepped away from presenting live music, Silent Shout returned for a two-night celebration to mark their fifth anniversary. Taking over the Smiling Buddha for two nights gave the site's designer Roxanne Ignatius a chance to re-imagine the space, with a deconstructed disco ball twirling above clouds and webby fabric tendrils. Plus, downstairs there was a gallery of her consistently-excellent show posters, going right back to the series' beginning when it had to spell out its mandate of "EVIL DISCO / GLOOMY ELECTRO / DEATHLY SYNTHPOP". And though there was a retrospective element to the whole affair, the music was decisively forward-looking, including a couple bands making their debuts. The second night even upped the ante by adding lasers!

JOOJ might not have been a strictly populist choice to headline the festival's second night, but the selection served as a reminder that Silent Shout's vision of electronic music includes art drone experimentation as well as dancefloor action. Adam Litovitz and Sook-Yin Lee's musical project trades in uncomfortable surges and pulsing heartbeat rhythms, presented with a slightly-operatic stage presence. One got the sense that this might have been a little disorienting for some of the audience, but on the whole, it fit right into Silent Shout's soundworld.

Recording: JOOJ

Artist: JOOJ

Song: Ghost of Love

Recorded at Pia Bouman School for Ballet and Creative Movement (SummerWorks Music Series), August 7, 2015.

JOOJ - Ghost of Love

The SummerWorks Music series, evolving since its inception in 2008, feels to have really and truly settled into its identity both as another way for SummerWorks to celebrate its growing foregrounding of interdisciplinary art and as a unique feature of the city's live music scene. After a couple years of just stuffing some bands down in the basement to provide an après-play gathering space, 2010's Hidden Cameras spectacular (featuring a "dramatic retelling" their Origin: Orphan album) pointed the way forward — but it wasn't really until 2012 that the festival started to ramp up the practice of pairing musicians with artists from other disciplines to create unique, one-off events.

It was finally in 2013 that the "mature" music series fully emerged, with stand-out events from Maylee Todd, Snowblink, and The Bicycles. Since then, collaboration has moved to the centre. Last year saw the series' first visit to the Pia Bouman School at the edge of Parkdale, which became their home this year, giving the Series its own space (and a cool pop-up venue). Adam Bradley and the returning Andrew Pulsifer have played to the series' strengths with their musical curation, and all of the works this year felt like good additions to a series whose legacy includes the future memories of these one-of-a-kind shows.

Entitled What Happens to JOOJ in 24 Hours: According to Bojana & Alex, the series opener's stated methodology was "a concept that formally unbounds the notion of performance through a practice of duration" — artspeak for locking the performers in the theatre overnight, forcing them to stay awake and see what happens. Faced with a crowd and having to give a performance after twenty-three hours of tasks set by directors Bojana Stancic and Alex Wolfson, the most interesting effects upon Sook-Yin Lee and Adam Litovitz weren't so much musical (they pulled off their performances of the tunes from the debut album in fine style) as in their body language and reactions to what was going on around them. Not surprisingly, Lee bounced between punchy-tired and second-wind-manic as she spoke between songs, or prowled into the crowd with her wireless mic during them. After a few songs the fourth wall was broken altogether as Lee invited the crowd down from their seats to wander through the theatre as they pleased — people circulated and looked at the project's self-documentation that was taped on the walls while some of the band's friends settled into into their stage-side sleeping bags and nibbled on their snacks.

Preview: SummerWorks 2015

SummerWorks Performance Festival

August 7-17, 2014

The SummerWorks Festival is increasingly becoming a music destination because there's nothing else like it. Continuing its focus on constructing cross-disciplinary one-off events (rather than just plain ol' gigs), there's a chance here for local musicians to work with artists from other media to create the sort of immersive experience that is hard to assemble on the usual DIY shoestring.

Each of the seven shows in the Music Series would be worth going to just on musical merit alone; but with the special enhancements on offer, they're not to be missed. The thing that makes these compelling is that the tantalizingly vague descriptions are signposts beckoning the audience to one-time only events. Here's what's going down in the Music Series, with a few live recordings from my own archives as a hint of what you might hear:

• What Happens to JOOJ in 24 Hours: According to Bojana & Alex: Sook-Yin Lee and Adam Litovitz are undertaking a site-specific and time-specific challenge, sequestering themselves in the theatre for an entire day with the show acting as culmination. How directors Bojana Stancic and Alex Wolfson will interpret that day to the audience is a mystery, but do expect some of JOOJ's Suicide-meets-Dietrich cabaret tunes. [Friday August 7th, 10 p.m. @ S--------- Studio Theatre]
  Listen! Jooj - Crushed
• To Cast a Stone: this sees solo electronic musician Jill Krasnicki (a.k.a. Animalia) attempting "to create a sacred and otherworldly space to weave her songs through a spell casting ritual." Once again, that description is evocatively vague, but given that the show is being presented over five timeslots throughout the evening instead of one big show, you should expect the ritual to be a close-up and intimate experience. [Saturday August 8th, 6:00 PM/7:30 PM/9:00 PM/10:30 PM/midnight @ S--------- Studio Theatre]
• What Fate Awaits Them?: I didn't make Most People's EP release a couple months back, but its mix of music and large-scale puppetry was described as a knockout. Add alien robot emissaries/entertainment units MATROX and this sounds like fantastic fun. [Sunday, August 9th, 10:00 PM @ S--------- Studio Theatre]
  Listen! Most People - Release
  Listen! MATROX - Thank You
• Melancholiac: The Music of Scott Walker: Adam Paolozza and Greg Oh combine to try and give shape to an artist whose singular career arc is rather difficult to conceptualize, never mind encapsulate. From teen idol to menacing avant-crooner, this is being billed as "part concert, part spectacle, part existential variety show", mixing "unique sonic and visual interpretations of Walker's music" and including some special guests. [Tuesday August 11th, 6:30 PM/9:30 PM @ S--------- Studio Theatre]
• all you can hold: musicians like longstanding electro-experimentalists lal operate on the sort of terrain that gets swept under the rug a bit in the music scene's continual fetishization of the new. But they've been audaciously pushing boundaries and recombining various pop strains for long enough to deserve a helluva lot of respect. This show sees them performing a full set of new music embellished by "dance, costumes, digital painting and projections", representing their vision of a musical queer/straight alliance and mix of cultures. [Wednesday, August 12th, 10:00 PM @ S--------- Studio Theatre]
• Heat Shuts Off Overnight: As Germaphobes, Paul Erlichman and Neil Rankin have been honing the sophisticated pop sounds they were previously pursuing as members of the now-defunct Gay. This show sees them bring a whole batch of new songs to a show that uses shadow puppets, stop motion, and projections for an exploration of quotidian banality and the digital consciousness. Expect a performance by ANAMAI somewhere in there as well. [Thursday, August 13th, 9:00 PM @ S--------- Studio Theatre]
  Listen! Germaphobes - Everybody Else
  Listen! ANAMAI - Lucia
• 2016 Spring Collection: The unexplainable grinning manifestation that is (are?) Still Boys has been something of a whispered secret for the past while, being shared like a ritual that gladdens the hearts of even the most jaded music fan. Now, with Sasha Van Bon Bon and Jesi the Elder on board, there will be even more to be digested. Possibly even the audience. Don't try to explain, don't try to understand. Just see this. [Friday, August 14th, 10:00 PM @ S--------- Studio Theatre]
  Listen! Still Boys - [popsong]

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Meanwhile, outside the Music Series, there's a lot more for music fans to investigate. Counting Sheep, the festival's "production-in-residence" deploys Balkan party-rockers Lemon Bucket Orkestra into the Maidan for an investigation of Ukraine's social revolution. Also, local music sensation (and visual artist) Lido Pimienta moves to the stage in Ayelen, a magical-realist tale of resistance to the exploitation of international mining companies.

There's also lots going on in the festival's wide-ranging Live Art stream. A lot of it's out of my field, but I can recommend the Listening Choir's Listening Songs, put together by Adam Kinner and the always-intriguing Christopher Willes. The practice of these dérivé-based jaunts is to "propose listening as an endangered practice worth reconsidering". Best of all, this little experiment is free (as long as you book a ticket in advance).

I also don't know a lot about the dance world, but the festival has ramped up their offerings on that side of things this year. The good news is that the Dance Series is curated by Amelia Ehrhardt (who chatted with me about dance before her SummerWorks offering last year), whose DIY spirit and enthusiasm for joyful experimentation parallels what I look for in exploring unfamiliar music. In that regard, the curious could have a go at any of the offerings in the Dance Series, but I would especially point people to Aimée Dawn Robinson's Ramble, which blends improvised and choreographed dance to music and live-mixed video. Currently based in Whitehorse, Robinson was a frequent collaborator with the city's creative musicians in her time in Toronto, and this one comes hotly-tipped from friends who know about these things.

The fine print: single-performance tickets are $15, and there are various pass options available. You can find all the ticket information here. Remember (especially for those music events!) that the festival runs on theatre time, so do not be fashionably late!

Recording: Jooj

Artist: Jooj

Song: Crushed^*

Recorded at Geary Lane ("Wavelength 627"), November 8, 2014.

Jooj - Crushed

This new-ish project sees Sook-Yin Lee and Adam Litovitz working together to explore the liminal space between intimacy and theatricality, a realm for experimental torch songs that exist somewhere between a Suicide gig and a Weimar cabaret. Expect more shows (and an album!) in the new year.

^* Thanks to Sook-Yin for passing the title to this one along.