Sunday Playlist #48

Sunday Playlist #48: In memoriam Ron Gaskin

We lost one of the good 'uns this week with the passing of Ron Gaskin, a sender of sounds and a listener of note. Under his Rough Idea banner, RG was a huge part of this city's out-music history, specializing in bringing musicians to town who were too creative or adventurous for the more conservative institutional presenters. As a storyteller and conversational improviser, RG could make strangers feel like friends and as a presenter and host, his generosity of spirit and freewheeling associational logic encouraged audiences to enter into a dialogue with musicians earnestly and wholeheartedly. His presence will be missed by so many.

These selections from my archives are from shows where my memories of my encounters with RG are as vivid and precious as the actual music. (It's certainly not meant to be comprehensive in any way!) I also did a bit of a digging to find some moments from a couple of those famous intros — and we get to hear his voice as well, in character, playing the part of William S. Burroughs in the multimedia presentation of "Rub Out The Word".

The Swyves - Arc-Eye

• Recorded at Lee's Palace, May 18, 2011.

Matthew Shipp Trio - Psychic Counterpoint

• Recorded at Lula Lounge, March 10, 2013.

Peggy Lee - [excerpt 1]

• Recorded at Ratio, December 18, 2016.

Perch Hen Brock & Rain - RG intro

Perch Hen Brock & Rain - [first piece, first section]

• Recorded at Array Space (TONE Festival – Show #4), June 20, 2017.

Cactus Truck - RG intro

Cactus Truck - [excerpt]

• Recorded at The Tranzac's Southern Cross Lounge (TONE Festival 3.6: Peter Gough Presents), June 27, 2019.

Rub Out The Word - The Penny Arcade Peep Show

• Recorded at Dundas Video (Track Could Bend #9), December 1, 2015.

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Sunday Playlist is a semi-regular feature that brings back some of this blog's previously-posted original live recordings for an encore. You can always click the tags below to see what I originally wrote about the shows these songs came from.

Recording: Rub Out The Word

Artist: The Penny Arcade Peep Show [text by William S. Burroughs] + Cut Up Stew

Songs:

Recorded at Dundas Video (Track Could Bend #9), December 1, 2015.

Rub Out The Word - The Penny Arcade Peep Show

Rub Out The Word - Cut Up Stew

When it made its debut, Glen Hall's Rub Out Out the Word project – conceptualized as a centenary tribute to William S. Burroughs — was a large-scale affair, with an eight-piece band and live-mixed visuals. This electroacoustic version stripped things down, with Hall on laptop and sax joined by Matt Miller (laptop + MIDI keyb) and Ted Phillips (cataRT synthesis) — plus the presence of Burroughs represented by Ron Gaskin's narration, facing the musicians as if subject to some sort of bureaucratic tribunal.

This gave a lot of different ways to cut up and reintegrate the source material, from the spoken word heard here in "Penny Arcade", to a immersive sound-trip to a Moroccan marketplace to the cut-up stew that shows the band's musical talents. (On the latter piece, Phillips' cataRT is responding in realtime to the other musicians by drawing from a collection of microsamples that include some Burroughs mutters as well as a few fragments of "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" and some shortwave noises.)

[The next Track Could Bend will be at Dundas Video on Tuesday, January 5th — more info coming soon!]

Recording: Rub Out The Word Ensemble

Artist: Rub Out The Word Ensemble

Song: Nova Express^* [words: William S. Burroughs / composition/conceptualization: Glen Hall]

Recorded at The Music Gallery, November 7, 2014.

Rub Out The Word Ensemble - Nova Express

Opening the 416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival (the other events would take place at The Tranzac) was this ambitious music suite celebrating William Burroughs' centenary. The event was conceived by Burroughs scholar Glen Hall, who played and conducted as the piece's several parts worked off each other. Not only was there an eight-piece band (Bruce Cassidy, Jim Sexton, Chris Cawthray, Rakesh Tewari, Tom Richards, Heather Segger, John Gzowski, David Story), a pair of laptop soundscapists (Ted Phillips, Matt Miller) and live-processed visuals (John Creson, Adam Rosen) at the edge of things (behind a typewriter) sat Ron Gaskin in a rumpled fedora, reading/narrating parts of the proceedings with Burroughs' own words. There was a nice ebb and flow to it such that there was never too much going on at once, even as it built to a fever dream of warped reality.

^* I'm not sure of the formal structure of this piece, so I have named this extract after the Burroughs text that is read/invoked during it.