Event: Healing Power Picnic III (Part II)

Healing Power Picnic III – Part II (feat. Guy Dallas / Sex Worker / Psychic Reality / New Civilization)

South Humber Park. Saturday, May 28, 2011.

My rundown for the first half of this day-long event can be found here.

Helping with achieving quick turnovers (and maintaining precious generator power), nearly all of the day's acts were solo performers. That pattern continued with Guy Dallas, which is a nom du rock for Alex Janssen. Janssen can be seen around in a few other groups (formerly VOWLS, currently Cellphone) and didn't look entirely happy to be at the centre of attention. Armed with with laptop and MPD, Janssen's music was somewhat similar to Claudio's twisted disco from earlier in the afternoon, but the underpinning here was a bit more like "Atomic Dog" on crack.

The quick set was just four songs, running a couple minutes each, getting increasingly deconstructed as the set moved along — by the third, it sounded like something from a late 80's Celluloid comp on a slightly-mangled cassette. With a rather self-effacing vibe, Janssen almost looked like he'd rather not even be playing, but supportive friends in the crowd egged him on. During the last song, he actually just pressed play and wandered off, letting the track play out with less on-the-fly reconfiguring, which undermined the performative aspect a bit. But this was intriguing stuff.

Listen to a track from this set here.

The day's out-of-town guests came via connections with the Los Angeles-based Not Not Fun/100% Silk label, with Sex Worker (the solo project of Mi Ami's Daniel Martin-McCormick) first up. Seated on the ground, Martin-McCormick was surrounded with keybs, laptop, walkman and patchboard — tools to power his edgy, squelchy dance vibe. There were a lot of tweaks applied to his keening yowls — with enough stuff going on that Martin-McCormick was sometimes holding the mic in his mouth while his hands were busy twisting dials and manipulatin' sounds. Each of the four songs (that added up to almost a half-hour) took their time to build up and unfold.

And meanwhile, as he played, a fabulous transformation unfolded behind him. Arriving via psychbike, the colourfully-decked-out Halo Halo crew proceeded to brighten up the pavilion in a guerrilla art transformation. Graffiti was covered up, screen-printed posters were hung, and coloured streamers were soon everywhere, not only dangling from the structure up above (transforming it from a UFO to a giant jellyfish), but also looped around the poles and through the many bicycles lying on the grass, as if illustrating the many strands connecting the friends and acquaintances in attendance. It was like the sun was suddenly shining, and all at once it felt like a happening — by set's end, it felt like we were sitting in a different place entirely.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Psychic Reality is the solo project of Leyna Noel, another Not Not Fun-ster and keyboardist in the final incarnation of Pocahaunted. Noel also offered a set constructed of expansively long songs, using the same gear as Martin-McCormick, but wringing a spookier sound — call it Bad Vibe/New Age music.

With Noel's strong voice, there was no need for vocal manipulations here. She did get some weird, unintentional decay effects on her voice during the second (and more dancefloor-friendly) number, when I started to suspect that the generator was starting to wind down and not quite powering everything. And suddenly, it confirmed that with its high-pitched, alarm-type noise that was suddenly competing with the music.

"Can you play in that key?" someone asked as a hastily-convened huddle considered the options at song's end. It turned out that Noel only had one more song to go, so she played over it, which worked effectively enough in injecting an extra note of mechanized worry behind the music.

Listen to a track from this set here.

The day closed out with a reggae set by New Civilization¹, a true all-star band featuring Isla Craig backed by Colin Fisher (guit) and Scott Peterson (six-string bass), plus Brandon Valdivia and Eric Woolston switching back and forth between drums and percussion. With incense burning in front of the kickdrum (which was decorated with a picture of Christopher Walken) this was a conscious party, with Craig in facepaint all the musicians decked out in the Halo Halo-supplied colourful banners.

The band played all covers, but many of the selections went beyond the obvious, leading with Barrington Levy's "Wedding Ring" before Craig added some melodica for a lovely take on Yabby You's "Beyond the Hills". The band sounded great, though there were still some strange artifacts from the slowly-dying generator, with the bass amp barely getting by, reduced to blatting out distorted sonic farts before the set had progressed too far. The guitar amp was also quickly going downhill.

That couldn't squelch the joy in the deep cuts by Gregory Isaacs, Sizzla and Wayne Smith — plus a few more well-known sing-along anthems. After the break between sets, the generator lasted about three and a half songs before the low-battery warning started keening again, necessitating a series of adjustments to try and draw less and less power. The distortion fit fine with the rough-and-ready vibe, and the drop-outs weren't always intentional as the set went on, but it was still pretty awesome, and by the last couple songs things were down to mostly percussion and group sing-alongs which fit right into the afternoon's vibe. Ending with the band's eponymous song via Burning Spear, the cries of "New civilization, new civilization / All over this land, all over this land" acted as a sort of summing up of what the day was all about.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Summing up the day's chill communal vibe, there was an analogue "closing credits" sequence by Discolor Festooning (Vic Cheong & Anna Silverstein), whose hand-cranked paper roll gave everyone one last chance to cheer for all the people who had put the day together. These songs, these musicians, these artists, this community: they're all out there. There might not be banner ads and billboards telling you where to find this stuff, but if you sniff around for it, you can join up pretty easily.²

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¹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the band remains a loose, informal collective. You can see many of these musicians working together in some other contexts: the bulk of them play in Prince Enoki's Insect Orchestra, led by Peterson. Fisher and Valdivia are known together as Not the Wind, Not the Flag and have also been known to back Craig. And Eric Woolston's reggae bona fides are bolstered with his membership in local roots-rockin' crew Friendlyness & The Human Rights. (Addendum: Friendlyness & The Human Rights have just been announced as one of the bands playing at this year's Open Roof Festival, playing June 21 — on, natch, an Open Roof — after a screening of Marley.)

² if you want to find this sort of stuff, you should be keeping an eye on what's playing at spots like The Tranzac, Holy Oak Café and Double Double Land. Go check out a show or two put on by Burn Down the Capital. Keep an eye out for new stuff from places like Polyphasic Recordings. Follow recommendations from Mega Bonus. Dig some art by Mango Peeler. And grab yourself a copy of the still-defiantly offline newsletter Offerings.

Event: Healing Power Picnic III (Part I)

Healing Power Picnic III – Part I (feat. Allison Peacock & Alia O'Brien / ADR / Claudio / Hoover Party / Jennifer Castle)

South Humber Park. Saturday, May 28, 2011.

What are the boundaries between a public and private event? If a bunch of friends all show up in a park and start playing music, does that count as a concert? What if someone brought along a generator to amplify them?

This wasn't the first year that the Healing Power Picnic was on my radar, but it was the first one that I made it out for. By its very nature, it's not a heavily-promoted event, but it's the sort of thing you'd hear about if you go to a certain kind of show, or are plugged into a certain community on facebook. So, on the one hand it's an open event — defiantly so, in one sense, as anyone passing by on bike or foot was welcome to stop by and take it in. But if you chose, you could also cast it as a bit of a private club, or even a clique-y thing.

There's a fluid insider/outsider sort of boundary to events like this that I think the musicians and organizers are pretty aware of. Of course a musician generally wants to play to as big a crowd as possible, for ego-driven and financial reasons. But, especially when it's "weird" or experimental music, if you hype it up too much to the public at large you'll simply get uncultivated boors who denounce anything that reaches beyond the dull and obvious. How do you make it feel like something you don't need a secret handshake to get into while keeping a bit of mystery and secrecy around things? Because mystery and secrecy are kinda fun, too.

None of this was a burning issue at this show, but all of these issues were on my mind as I took the very pleasant walk down from Old Mill (surely the city's most beautiful subway station) to the Humber Valley trail and found the 70's vintage picnic structure that looked a bit like a UFO.

Cool, breezy and slightly damp out, I added some victuals to the overflowing share-and-share-alike picnic zone and nodded at some familiar faces while people trickled in, mostly on bikes that were soon casually laying around on the grass.

The "event" got started shortly before two o'clock, with Allison Peacock & Alia O'Brien (also billed as "Double A") providing a dance/music piece to start the day. Soon, O'Brien's synths were emitting a whum-whum-whum-whum undertone wowing against a trebly figure. The music shifted every couple minutes to something slightly different, winding up for awhile at something like old-fashioned ooky-spooky horror music before upgrading to a more cold-edged John Carpenter-type sound.

All of which was the backdrop for Peacock's choreography. Dressed in shiny copper-y lamé and a veil, she began with slow tai chi-like motions, then ramped up past "Walk Like an Egyptian" to sudden bursts of physicality — a coming-to-life that felt right at home in the ravine, trees swaying in the breeze, birds singing in the background.

Listen to an excerpt of the musical portion of this performance here.

That closeness to nature got even more intense with an "improvised dance" piece by ADR (as Aimée Dawn Robinson is often billed). Moving from the picnic structure to a bog just off the bike path, the audience was gathering on the shore as Robinson, fully clothed, wandered into the water. Hip deep, she doubled over, peering down as if trying to find something lost in the mud below — and then, as if finding it, collapsed into the water.

When she emerged, she began her dance, concentric circles radiating outward from her across the water's surface. Across the pond — Etobicoke! — the faint, suggestive whispers of cars; closer in, birds calling out; underfoot, red ants — causing some uneasy shifting amongst those who had too-casually sat down in the underbrush. And in the water, Robinson sinking... sinking, so that soon only her head was visible.

Consumed by the pond? Drowning? Melting into something larger and more amorphous? No answers were given as she finished, swimming off out of the audience's field of vision. Just behind where she had been sinking, a mallard landed on the water's surface. Explaining it all, or at least accounting for the possibility of magic, Jonathan Adjemian (who would be playing later on in the afternoon) exclaimed, "she turned into a duck!"

Back at the picnic structure, a turn toward modernity and technology with Claudio, whose name is suggestive of the serious/cheeseball italo-disco groove at its heart. Composed of Randy Gagne (Man Made Hill, Toddler Body) and Jacob Horwood (Gastric Female Reflex, Bennifer Editions), the pair make a sort of instrumental zworgy disco, bent and melted by Gagne's keyb and Horwood's electronics.

The latter were somewhat inadequately shielded from the outdoor light by an improvised cardboard screen, rendered slightly more bad-ass by the red-coloured torn cardboard cross taped on it. Despite a quavering underlying weirdness, this was slinky and groovy stuff. The tracks segued pretty cleanly from one thing to the next, with four groovers in a row before winding down after about twenty minutes into a slower haze, like a walkman with dying batteries.

Listen to a song from this set here.

I don't know if there's a conceptual difference between Hoover Party shows and those where Jonathan Adjemian is billed under his own name. This time out, he was without the keyboards I'd seen on some other occasions, and was simply seated cross-legged in front of his laptop, which he used to manipulate sounds, some of which were generated by a small blown instrument that he played into the laptop's microphone.

Perhaps befitting the plaintive droning drift of the music, the wind picked up during this, scattering a few paper cups around the area. After a few minutes of the music breezing along, Adjemian — looking ashram-ready in a flowing white garment — added some wordless vocals, leaning forward to howl into the mic for a quick interlude. After that, the noises were turned all the way up to "squiggly", for an effect somewhere between a kazoo and a shehnai, cut with glitchy realtime manipulations. And then it receded back into the drone it had risen from.¹

Listen to an excerpt from this set here.

"Move up," said Jennifer Castle as she finished getting ready to play. And seeing as she was playing without a microphone for her voice, I figured why not, and was among the front row of the people who ended up setting just a couple feet away from her. Her guitar was plugged into a speaker a few metres over, giving it a slightly disembodied feeling when she began to strum. "It's almost like my guitar wasn't being played by me," she commented, peering over almost as if she expected to see another guitarist on the other side of the concrete pad.

It almost doesn't get any better than this: being close up to a beautiful voice with a pleasing breeze drifting past as the sun burst through the clouds. As birds commented in the background, Castle played an ineffably gorgeous rendition of "Way of the Crow" — such a beautiful moment, enough to give a reminder that this is why you get out of bed and go outside.

Castle was in a good mood, joking with friends in the crowd that she could hear ruffling through the food while she decided what to play next. Of course, such small shufflings are only audible when the crowd is quiet and totally devoted to listening to a performance. Castle closed with the downer-ish "Misguided" ("I tried to hold on / and died trying") but the vibe of this glorious, affirming set was more accurately captured by an impromptu performance of Janis Joplin's "Get It While You Can".

When you're loving somebody, baby,

You're taking a gamble against some sorrow.

But who knows, baby,

'Cause we may not be here tomorrow.

Listen to a song from this set here.

You can read about the rest of the day's events here.

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¹ And in a serendipitous dispatch, I note that Adjemian — who notes that his shows are billed between himself and Hoover Party interchangeably — has just gotten a bunch of recordings posted on his new bandcamp page, so go check out his devotional grooves.