Preview: INTERsection 2012

INTERsection: New Music Marathon and Musicircus in the Marketplace

Saturday, September 1, 2-10pm, Yonge-Dundas Square

"New Music" as a category doesn't lend itself to easy marketability. The name is a catch-all for a wide variety of sounds, and when you try to explain it, you'll usually hit some wall to make people's eyes glaze over. "Like classical music, but not written by dead people" turns off people who will begrudgingly listen to highbrow music if it's by a name-brand, canon-approved composer. Toss in an "avant-garde" and you'll lose even more folks who will assume this is tricky, eggheaded music that can only be appreciated by academic music theorists.

Challenging all of these assumptions, Toronto's own Contact Contemporary Music is leading a united front of local New Music purveyors for the wilfully populist INTERsection festival, where once again, the September long weekend brings a full day of diverse sounds to Yonge-Dundas Square.

Now in its third year (it was originally known as the New Music Marathon), INTERsection is free and runs from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday, September 1. It's a great chance to experiment with some new sounds on your own terms, whether you just want to drop by and get a quick taste or settle in and really let the vibe wash over you. Not everything is easy and "user friendly", musically speaking, but there's a lot of disjunctive weirdness in pop music today, so a lot of this isn't completely beyond the pale.

And in terms of social/musical alchemy, something kinda awesome happens when you put something unfamiliar at these busy crossroads — a few people are going to pause and take notice, and slowly a strange coalition of shoppers, mendicants and musos builds up. At a few points during the day, it's discordantly delightful to hear something truly off the hook in the ad-bath well of commercialism.

In that regard, noise fans will want to show up early to check out a set from Roman Pilates. Kevin Crump makes noise music the old fashioned way — by banging metallic things together, loudly and repeatedly. Add an undercurrent of harsh drones and you can expect to hear something gloriously abrasive taking over the Square for a brief moment.

Otherwise, the Main Stage performers will mostly veer towards something a bit more conventionally "musical". The day's biggest guests are undoubtedly NYC's Bang On a Can All-Stars, who have been bringing New Music (and marathon-length concerts) to the masses for over twenty years. Not only will the full collective ensemble be playing a headlining set, but there will be a series of solo sets from its members as well — I'm especially looking forward to hearing Mark Stewart's rendition of "Electric Counterpoint" by Steve Reich echoing across the square.

Contact (who dazzled last year with their rendition of Fripp + Eno's "Evening Star") look to have some more cool stuff up their sleeves: "Gamelan Grunge" sounds titled to hook me in and they'll also be tackling the proto-prog repetitions of Philip Glass' "Two Pages".

Minimalism always gets a good showing at these events, and my expectations are sky-high with Bang On a Can and Contact members joining together for a performance of the best-in-genre "In C", by Terry Riley. A dazzling piece, the score gives the performers 53 short fragments of music, and they progress through them at their own pace, taking care not to get too far ahead of behind the musicians around them. This creates miniature eddies with different parts playing off each other, a hypnotic frisson of sounds falling in and out of sync. Not to be missed.

Besides all that, I'm sure some of the best stuff will be the material and performers I don't know anything about. I'm not familiar with Edges, for example, but I'm looking forward to their performance of Ann Southam's "Networks"

And meanwhile, there will be lots more going on between sets on the main stage. In honour of John Cage's 100th birthday, TorQ Percussion is holding something billed as a Musicircus, promising "performers scattered throughout and moving through the audience" besides some Cage-inspired works on a second stage.

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If that's not enough, there's also more the following night, when Contact and Bang on a Can re-join forces for a gig at the Music Gallery billed as "Ambient²", presenting live arrangements of two of Brian Eno's most famous albums. Music for Airports gets more attention, and BoaC have recorded their arrangement to much acclaim, but I'm particularly stoked to bliss out while Contact tackles an extended arrangement of Discreet Music's title track in a promised "multi-media presentation".

This one isn't free, but promises to be worth a $25 ticket. (Or, given we're on the cusp of the new Music Gallery season, it'd be a perfect time to get a membership and save yourself five bucks.)

Recording: Roman Pilates

Artist: Roman Pilates

Song: excerpt from an improvisation

Recorded at The Boat, May 26, 2011.

Roman Pilates - excerpt from an improvisation

My notes for this set can be found here. This is a bit of a quieter interlude that doesn't really reflect the intensity of the whole set.

Gig: Richard Pinhas

Richard Pinhas (CCMC / Roman Pilates)

The Boat. Thursday, May 26, 2011.

A Burn Down The Capital show upstairs at The Boat brought the promise of some diverse forms of "noise" on a Thursday night. It was interesting to note that the average age of those on hand was about twenty years older than many of Tad's shows, which I attributed to the presence of CCMC on the bill. That also made me wonder how they'd react to the opening act, whose status as a noise band needs no scarequotes.

In fact Roman Pilates¹ began with a disclaimer² before his set started off with a skittering hiss, like butter in a frying pan, or maybe the amplified rustle of insects, building slowly in volume in the dark for five minutes. Crump would occasionally wander to the back of the room to check on the sound. There was a burst of radio noise, then a moment's silence, and then it all went haywire, audiovisually speaking.

Now, popping, spark-like noises gave way to a harsh grumble underneath — slowly transforming to a sound not unlike the hypnotoad,³ and then slowly becoming a noise that sounded almost exactly like a car racing game I had on the Vic 20 in 1983.

After a gentle, swooping synth-y interlude came the hands-on noise, with Crump employing large metal canisters used percussively with contact mics attached inside. And "percussively", in this case, ramped up from thumping them to Crump wearing them over his arms and thrashing about like a malfunctioning robot and, ultimately, dashing them to the floor.

Cables still trailing from them, Crump abandoned the cans ten feet from his table of gear, and the last segment consisted of banging more mic'ed items while switching around patch cables. Not all the noises were pleasant, natch, but there was an enjoyable element of "performance" here. And, somewhat to my surprise, the older crowd on hand seemed mostly into the abrasiveness.

It's hard to convey the kineticism of the action segments with sound, but you can listen to one of the quieter interludes here.

Free-improvising since 1974, CCMC is as much of an institution as its acronym-ish moniker might suggest.⁴ Original founders of The Music Gallery (as their own performance space, before evolving into the independent entity it is today), the group is a living, shifting organism. Now a core trio of Michael Snow, John Oswald & Paul Dutton, for this show they were supplemented by fourth member on syndrums and laptop.

There was a bit of a fine line between the band warming up and when they were performing. Everyone was tuning up and noodling along, and when Snow wandered up to stage with a beer and settled in, it gradually coalesced into "playing". At the outset, Dutton's throat-mumblings were matched by Snow's corresponding analog synth whirrings, syndrum rhythms tapping along. And then a different howl from Oswald's saxophone shifted things to a slightly different patch of ground.

The sheer freeness of CCMC's music is probably a lot to take for anyone encumbered by a conventional sense of harmony or melody. It can be ungainly, even to the point of sounding like "noise" in the musical sense, but it's not random or amorphous, bounded as it is by the realtime interaction of the performers listening to each other and responding. The neophyte might think they've found something to cling to on seeing a vocalist, but Dutton is less of a singer than a sound poet in the tradition of bpNichol — a phoneme-gun operator emitting voice bursts that tantalizingly don't quite cohere at the level of comprehendibility.

Here, Dutton's vocals hit a stretch of sounding like Donald Duck being strangled while sputtering out half-syllables of objections (with Oswald's sax in chipping in with similarly rapid bursts), and at other times more like a Captain Beefheart interpretation of "Spoonful" as performed by a cat horking up a hairball. The best bit came at the end of the first piece, when after a period of skittering electroacoustic noise sculpture, Dutton took the equivalent of a solo, the vocal noises slowing unclenching into comprehensible words, eventually settling into a self-referential monologue musing on trying to find the best bit of the song ("This is actually my favourite part coming up... wait, you'll hear...") and becoming increasingly befuddled at facing a sort of Zeno's paradox where the moment you're waiting for never quite arrives, especially as the sonic landscape all around is constantly shifting and suddenly you've passed it.

That piece lasted about twenty-five minutes, and was followed by another one half that length that tilted the ratio away from "pulsation" and toward "whirring". Perhaps most surprising is how much variability there is in the off-kilter soundworlds the band was exploring: even when it's four kinds of oscillation unwinding at once, sometimes it's quite fabulous and elevatingly goofy — and seconds later slightly off-putting meandering caterwauling. On the whole, though, it's quite entertaining, and provoked literal howls of approval from the crowd.

Listen to an excerpt from this set here.

CCMC clearly had the biggest crowd of the night — after they finished and the clock rolled toward midnight, it noticeably thinned out. Perhaps it was getting past the older crowd's bedtime, but the night's headliner was, in fact Richard Pinhas. Starting with his work with Heldon in the 70's, Pinhas is one of France's pre-eminent electronic rock pioneers. Here, he was joined by his son Duncan, who took up more real estate on the stage, with a table filled with electronics and a laptop. Père, seated beside him, only had a volume pedal — not even an amp, with his guitar going straight into fils' setup.

This pair also pretty much just launched right into it, like they were dipping mid-stream from some glorious Eno-esque drift. A sustained glide rose from Richard's guitar, and was slowly swallowed up by modulated looping courtesy of Duncan's laptop, who peered at his screen as if evaluating a particularly fiendish sudoku. There was a constantly shifting source of raw sonic material for sculpting, with Richard effortlessly tossing off ruffled bits of Fripp-ery that moved into trebly staccato bursts.

Slowly, the guitar built from atmospheric to something heavier, almost David Gilmour-esqe as a static-y oscillation underneath gave a vague rhythmic framework which slowly turned into regularized pre-programmed beatz. Although the two weren't closely watching each other, they were definitely responding to each others' musical cues, often in a chess game-like way, with one's strategy responded to with crafty counterfeints.

It was only toward the end that they leaned in and passed a few words back and forth, trying to line up their exit strategy. And soon the guitar faded into the echoing distance against vocoderish garblesounds and the whole thing melted into silence. The piece ran about twenty-two minutes, with some really satisfactory passages in there.

But that, somewhat surprisingly, would turn out to be it, and the pair started packing up. Rather short for a full set, but I guess they got across what they wanted to. An intriguing introduction to Pinhas' soundworld and a nicely-curated night.

You can listen to an except from this set (and a reinterpretation!) here. And if you want more, I passed my recording on to Pinhas, and he has made it available on his soundcloud.

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¹ The project is the bandonym of Kevin Crump, also of Disguises and some other local noise units, as well as head of Wintage Records.

² It's always an interesting sign when there's a disclaimer up front:

Kevin Crump: For your information... the light for the first five minutes will be out. After that you will be bombarded with some epileptic light projections...

Crowdmember: [interjecting] What is this, a Reg Hartt screening?

Kevin Crump: ...if you have any kind of medical condition... I give you advance warning now.

³ All glory to the hypnotoad.

⁴ Originally standing for "Canadian Creative Music Collective", the name has more generally become a backronym for whatever suits the musicians' whims.