Recording: Baby Cages

Artist: Baby Cages

Songs: Flowers + Polly

Recorded at Owl's Club, June 29, 2018.

Baby Cages - Flowers

Baby Cages - Polly

A brightly-coloured celebration in support of the new bitter melon (an ambitious project that also exists as a video album) saw the band, a half-dozen wide, in neon fruity finery. Focused on the new release, Halloway Jones and co. offered up a concise set, showing off the new songs' diverse moods — ranging from the tautly-drawn Cate Le Bon-ish spareness to the lush and tender balladry heard in this pair. The release of a project is always a marker of beginnings and endings, so it was a treat to hear the fuller arrangements here, including Katie Jensen's vibraphone, before the band transforms into new shapes.

Recording: Tatsuya Nakatani

Artist: Tatsuya Nakatani / Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra

Songs: [two excerpts] / [excerpt, in two parts]

Recorded at The Music Gallery @ 918 Bathurst, May 26, 2018.

Tatsuya Nakatani - [excerpt 1]

Tatsuya Nakatani - [excerpt 2]

Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra - [excerpt, part 1]

Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra - [excerpt, part 2]

The past couple years have seen a series of visits from master percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, each of which has seen him welcomed by an increasing crowd of astonished admirers. It was therefore fitting for the Music Gallery to provide the resources to take things up to the next level and host a manifestation of Nakatani's Gong Orchestra. Providing the beautiful percussive hardware, Nakatani relies on local programmers to create an ensemble, which then spends the day together learning his vocabulary before performing for the public. The instructions specify that the musicians can be at different levels of experience (and, in fact, do not even need a background in percussion) so it's no surprise that the MG was able to use its many connections into many different scenes to come up with a diverse ensemble. Members included: Brenda Joy Lem, Katie Jensen, Debashis Sinha, Charlotte Cornfield, Rupert Ojiji Harvey, Kristyn Gelfand, HanHan, Alex Punzalan, W. A. Davison, Tréson Alman, Jenn Kitagawa, Bryan W. Bray, Laura C. Bates and Raphael Roter.

Before starting the concert with a captivating solo set, Nakatani reminded the crowd that this isn't so much a musical undertaking as a "vibration project" so that should be kept in mind in listening to these artifacts here — it's nowhere near as wonderful as feeling the vibrations live and in person, where the listener gets to lean in closer to hear the tiniest bowed overtones before being bowled over by mallet-clanging thunderstorms. That feeling of vibration-over-sound was even more intense with the ensemble playing together, while Nakatani conducted the group to create intense phasing and other effects across the length of the churchlike hall.

Recording: Diane Roblin & Katie Jensen

Artist: Diane Roblin & Katie Jensen

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at The Steady Café (Track Could Bend #27), June 6, 2017.

Diane Roblin & Katie Jensen - [excerpt]

This one had been in the works for a while. The irrepressible Diane Roblin had asked me quite a ways back to play TCB and I agreed, but told her I was keeping an eye out for the right person to pair her with. When I saw Katie Jensen playing keyboards last spring at the Music Gallery's Drone Therapy event, the figurative lightbulb switched on. It took a while to get everything to come together, but this turned out to be a satisfying musical blind date. The pair don't have the same sort of background or musical practice, but I had an inkling there'd be a connection there personality-wise — a sort of optimistic tenaciousness. Musically, there was a meeting place in a sort of wobbly dreamworld soundtrack, with Roblin's more structured approach mixing nicely with Jensen's pedal-aided shimmers and textures. Cheers to both performers for taking a little excursion outside their usual comfort zones.

[The next instalment of Diane Roblin's monthly at The Tranzac (on Sunday, July 9th) sees her improvising with MFS faves Glen Hall and Brandon Valdivia. Track Could Bend is back at The Steady on Tuesday (July 4th), with Montréal's Sound of the Mountain as well as Ami Spears' solo project Blue Light and Body of Waste (Adam from Retired).]

Recording: Drone Therapy Collective

Artist: Drone Therapy Collective

Songs: Drone Therapy Prelude + Coda [edits]

Recorded at The Music Gallery's courtyard (National Drone Day: Drone Therapy), May 28, 2016.

Drone Therapy Collective - Drone Therapy Prelude [edit]

Drone Therapy Collective - Drone Therapy Coda [edit]

An interesting variation on the standard-issue concert. For the third annual Drone Day, the Music Gallery took inspiration from Kristel Jax's drone therapy concept to host an afternoon dedicated not only to sonic drift but also a community discussion around mental health issues. That meant that the ratio of talking to music might have varied from the audience's expectations, but on the whole the event's inclusivity did a nice job of subverting the "brone" template.

This was a safe space for open discussion while the mics were on, so that would have been inappropriate to record, but here's a taste of the music as the event started and finished. The musical participants included: Jess Forrest, Allison Cameron, Oriana Barbato, Kat Estacio, Brett Despotovich, Jonathan Culp, Sage Kim, Abigail Trotsky, Chris Trotter, Brian Random, Johan Seaton, Sid Tangerine, David Jones, Katie Jensen, Scott M2, Jamie Todd, Tony Marasco, and Stefan Vladusic (although not all of them were playing in these two sections).