Recording: Kee Avil

Artist: Kee Avil

Song: See, my shadow

Recorded at CineCycle (TONE Festival), June 10, 2022.

Kee Avil - See, my shadow

After an appetite-whetting preview last month, the TONE Festival kicked off in earnest with this night out, leading off a frenzy of activity that'll see the bulk of the festival's shows clustered over the next couple weeks.

It's quite satisfying to see the strides that Vicky Mettler's project has made since last playing this festival — not only in terms of gaining some wider recognition, but also in how she has shifted from building dense sound-worlds to more actively inhabiting them. Helping with the layers was percussionist Samuel Gougoux, deploying tiny close-mic'd gestrures that were amplified into widescreen textures.

Recording: Kee Avil

Artist: Kee Avil

Song: thinkstill

Recorded at Wenona Lodge (Somewhere There presents: Solos), December 3, 2018.

Kee Avil - thinkstill

This evening of four solo performances (two local, two visiting from Montréal) was engineered by Somewhere There's Peter Gough. At the end of one last tour in support of her experimental song project's excellent EP, Vicky Mettler was fully zoned in on the material. There'll probably be a new batch of songs the next time she's in town, but they'll probably build from the canny loop-sense and electroacoustic-jumble-as-pop-textures explored in this set.

[That "next time in town" will be coming up on Friday, March 1st, when Mettler will be serving as support for Marc Ribot at Burn Down the Capital's Jam Factory show.]

Recording: Kee Avil

Artist: Kee Avil

Song: Space 1.5

Recorded at The Baby G (TONE Festival and Mechanical Forest Sound present), June 3, 2018.

Kee Avil - Space 1.5

It was a real honour to have a chance to co-present a show leading off the second incarnation of the wonderful TONE Festival. Even if there can be unexpected shifts in a lineup from planning to execution, I was very excited with the night that came together. It was our good luck that Vicky Mettler was in town working on music for a dance piece and was able to step in at the last minute. The first songs from this new solo endeavour that have emerged on her EP establish this as a project to keep an eye on — and seeing the gorgeous execution of the mangled loops and shifted textures in a live setting is thoroughly impressive. This music sounded so much bigger in this space than the last time I'd seen this project, so while this recording can't fully express that immensity, I'm happy that it at least offers a very clear rendering of the stereophonic sound space that Mettler constructed on the fly.

Recording: Kee Avil

Artist: Kee Avil

Song: Sponge

Recorded at Belljar Café (Track Could Bend #36), March 6, 2018.

Kee Avil - Sponge

It's always a happy occasion when you see an artist dazzle with an advanced grasp of a different vocabulary than you associate with them. Known as a talented avant guitar shredder on the Montréal scene, this project sees Vicky Mettler shifting into song mode. Her vox and guitar still boomerang into deconstructive adventures, but the whole thing is assembled into a deliberate form — even, as we hear here, the pieces stretch themselves out from their presentations on her excellent recent EP.

[Track Could Bend returns on Tuesday (May 1st) in a special "studio" edition featuring Jen Wardle & John Mark Sherlock, David Sait and Hank Powell (a.k.a. Karen Ng + D. Alex Meeks).]