Gig: Wavelength FIFTEEN - Night 2

Wavelength FIFTEEN – Night 2 (feat. Ginla / Last Ex / Del Bel / The Acorn / Lowell)

SPK Polish Combatants Hall, Saturday, February 14, 2015.

The Present is an uncertain place, lacking the hopeful glow of The Future and the retrospective adjustability of The Past. The middle of three nights of the Wavelength festival — thematically split into Past, Present and Future — was no less so, feeling a little inadequately stirred up. Which is to say, that although I liked most of the bands on the bill on their own merits, juxtaposed against each other the night's curation felt too safe, lacking any sudden left turns.

Maybe that notion of safeness was also lingering in my mind after the afternoon's artist talk with Art Bergmann, who complained about the suffusion of bland "beigeness" in the world at large. So, yeah, on the whole, this night was a little too beige.

There were good vibes in the room, mind, and it's always nice to be able to take in a show at the Polish Combatants Hall, where even a healthy crowd (as this gig had) meant you'd still have some elbow room, and the high walls behind the stage also make it an excellent canvas for General Chaos' visuals. I was glad to see that there were heaps of young first-timers out at this all-ages show, even if the big draw for them turned out to be a fairly uninterestingly generic pop singer.

Opening the night was Ginla, a duo on their studio recordings but playing as a trio live with guit, moog and drums. Offering some hazy popstuff, the tunes as of yet offer a bit more atmosphere than hooks. Attending to their gear, there's not much showmanship, making them a bit more suited to the bedroom studio than the stage — although having the live drums in the mix adds a spark. The sensibility was also a bit too straight-ahead to really stand out, so hopefully there's a weird leap forward yet ahead for the group, though there's already potential on display here.

Listen to a song from this set here.

Last Ex is also a core duo performing live as a trio. Simon Trottier and Olivier Fairfield, who play together as members of Timber Timbre, started the project to further the work they did on an unreleased film soundtrack. Both of those touchstones are present on their album and in the material they performed live, though Last Ex hews more towards cinematic abstraction than anything you'd head on a Timber Timber record. Live, they were joined by Mathieu Charbonneau, who also plays with them in TT — though his former work in epic-instrumentalists Torngat is also a fitting sonic touchstone here.

Their set started a bit roughly, with Trottier having some guitar problems. Fairfield would also have some issues with his drumside synth, but when things were smoothed over, this was a satisfying set. Their expansive sound is a natural fit for Constellation Records, but their music doesn't have the grand sweep of, say Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Do Make Say Think, preferring instead self-contained hazily evocative sonic miniatures. There's also enough forward thrust for it to be more than just background-y instrumental music, but this was arguably not the best situation to spotlight that, as the crowd largely treated this as something to chatter over.

Listen to a song from this set here.

Del Bel's mid-bill slot also doubled as the album release show for their self-titled sophomore effort. That probably made it additionally frustrating for the band that their set was plagued with sound issues and technical difficulties, including a recalcitrant synth that was vexing bassist Tyler Belluz to no end. Even after a pause to set that right, the mix was still wonky.

But things improved as the band persevered, and at least the last few songs sounded pretty great. The icing on cake came when horse-stealing death ballad "The Stallion" was chased with a "schmaltzy" closing cover of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" — that juxtaposition perhaps getting to the heart of what makes Del Bel so appealing. And if nothing else, going out on a high note mostly obviated the memories of the rough start.

Listen to a couple songs from this set here.

A post-album pause turned into a few years of hiatus for Ottawa's The Acorn, with frontman Rolf Klausener devoting his energy to co-founding the Arboretum Festival and dance-oriented side project Silken Laumann. The rhythmic pulse of the latter seems to have stuck with him, as several of the songs in a set filled with new material were based around simple drum-machine beats. Those rhythm tracks seemed to keep both the tunes and the parka-clad Klausener rooted in place at first, but as he warmed up he stripped off layers and heaved some Valentine's Day condoms into the crowd. Some of the new material sounded a little staid next to the couple familiar ones that were mixed into the set, but it's possible that the new material will find its pulse in time.

Listen to a song from this set here.

The night was capped off by Elizabeth Boland, who performs as Lowell. (She was backed on stage by an un-introduced Matt Fong on guitar.) I'd say that her electro-pop stylings more or less missed the mark, but would also note they were exceedingly popular with the enthusiastic young crowd that was there to see her. Boland wobbled a bit when technical problems took her beats and vocals out of the sound system, but after being unsure whether she should retreat from the stage while things were worked out, she eventually managed to own the moment with the help of a megaphone and some crowd interaction. So points there for fast thinking and keeping things interactive, but there wasn't much to recommend in her songs.

That closed the night out on a rather beige note, but at least there was still the Future to look forward to.

Currente calamo: Wavelength FOURTEEN Festival (Night 3)

FOURTEEN: The Wavelength 14th Anniversary Festival

While it's all fresh in my mind, a few notes from this year's WL Fest. Longer, more comprehensive reviews will follow down the road a piece in some far, theoretical future.

Wavelength's annual February festival was a window to the change and continuity from the evolving institution, whose adolescent years are seeing it shift from volunteer collective to professional non-profit organization. The months following last summer's final ALL CAPS! festival saw some long-time organizers stepping back from the group while co-founder Jonny Dovercourt (thanks to a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation) remains to steer the ship in a full-time capacity.

The extra resources mean that the festival was a smooth-running affair, though at a few points I missed the rough-around-the edges scrappy spirit of the series' DIY days. (Where have you gone, Doc Pickles? Wavelength nation turns its lonely eyes to you, ooh-woo-woo.) But this was still an essential weekend of presenting some of the city's best emerging talent to a larger audience.

Night 3 — Saturday, February 15, 2014

SPK Polish Combatants Hall — feat. Colin Stetson / US Girls / Biblical / Petra Glynt / Gambletron

The Venue & the vibe: After the vague discomfort I'd felt throughout the night before down in the club district, the concrete bunker at Beverley Street felt like a sweet homecoming. There's just something comforting about a place where you can tell old men gather together to drink. And though there was a full house, it never felt crowded, with little nooks and crannies that people could retreat to to hang out if they didn't want to be near the stage. Without a PA system of its own (though Wavelength set up an excellent one for the night), this is probably fated to remain an underused venue, which is just too damn bad — this was my favourite night of the festival.

The show:

I came in without having done any research on Montréal's Gambletron, so I pleased to get something a bit weirder than I was expecting. Taking over a semi-circle on the floor in front of the stage was a table full of electronic gear, plus radios, antennas extended to the sky. More radios littered the floor, and as the set started, Gamble walked around, turning them on and unleashing a humming drone as she chatted through a mic hooked to a portable radio slung over her shoulder. The set would consist of noise from motion-activated sensors (one concealed in a crocheted statue near the audience), something that sounded like a colecovision in its death throes, those radios on the table converted to homemade theremins, and occasional distorted beats. All of which was joined by Johnny Fever's video installation, with images (a shimmying woman; the full moon; twisting yarn) that hinted at themes without needing to connect the dots too explicitly. All told, it was experimental, arty and abrasive — maybe not entirely user-friendly to those uninitiated to this sort of stuff, but I'm glad that there's room for noise at Wavelength.

Listen to a song from this set here.

Alexandra MacKenzie, who performs as Petra Glynt also brought a strong visual element to her set, thanks to Steve Reaume's generative visuals. Beaming up on her from below, they not only created intricate features on her face and dress, but created striking giant silhouettes on the screen behind her. MacKenzie, meanwhile, sounded as good as I've ever heard her, presenting the tunes from her Of This Land tape with casual ease. There was even the début of an ace new song that augurs well for her forthcoming album.

Listen to a song from this set here.

House visualist General Chaos finally took centre stage behind Biblical, and his abstract swirling light painting projections fit right in with the quartet's hard rock psych choogles. It's fairly amusing to note that at Wavelength a band channelling classic rock is the outsiders — but even if the band (whose forthcoming Monsoon Season album seems destined for big things) is keeping different company lately (they've been playing with Death From Above 1979 and Monster Truck, for example), these guys are all Wavelength vets many times over.

Listen to a track from this set here.

I was expecting that it would be a ninety-degree musical turn from Biblical to U.S. Girls, but Meg Remy defied expectations by bringing a new incarnation of her live unit and a sound laced with unexpected heaviousity. (Simone TB's drums and Tim Westberg's driving bass were the main ingredients there.) Organized around the theme of "love songs", Remy performed an all-new set of covers, but pretty much none of it was obvious selections. (Wings' album track "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" was maybe the least obscure thing here.) The set might have lacked the "hits" from Remy's own catalogue, but the set certainly showed off the creative restlessness that's going to keep pushing her forward.

Listen to a song from this set here.

When Colin Stetson took the stage and picked up his bass saxophone, there were a few audible gasps in the crowd. That thing is so massive, it really does take one by surprise the first time around. The sheer physical fact of his live presentation, with its marathons of circular breathing driving the continuous wall of sound, generates a sense of spectacle that almost distracts from the actual music. But close your eyes and feel it pulse over you and it remains powerful stuff. Stetson occupies a place similar to the night's opener (and, it turns out him and Gamble have played together) in that he's perceived as far too weird for the pop crowd while experimental musicians look at his stuff like some sort of lowest common denominator party trick, too reliant on conventional melodic song structures to be truly interesting. But this stuff has the capability to expand people's perceptions of what music can be — and if one person out a hundred who is hearing Stetson becomes curious enough to explore music at the further fringes, then that's a net victory, and the exact sort of thing that Wavelength is all about.

Listen to a song from this set here.

Bonus! Check out some more photos from the festival over at the MFS Facebook page.

Gig: Faust

Faust / Not the Wind, Not the Flag

SPK Polish Combatants Hall. Sunday, October 4, 2009.

Sometimes when you're improvising your way through life, the contingencies you have to deal with aren't the contingencies you were planning on. Keep this in mind.

I was intrigued but nervous when the announcement for this show made the rounds. I mean, a chance to see a legendary and highly-influential band — legendary Krautrock unit Faust. Or, kinda, half of Faust. A rupture in the original collective has led to an unusual turn where there are now two co-existing units operating under the Faust name, each working out different elements of the original sound. This unit, consisting of original members Zappi Diermaier (pummelling drummer) and Jean-Hervé Peron ("art-errorist", provocateur, bassist) is now supplemented by James Johnston (ex-Bad Seeds) and Geraldine Swayne. But they still have the original cement mixer out on tour and a rep as a good live unit.

Headed up the stairs into the Polish Combatants Hall under an elaborate Bucky Fuller-esque geodesic entrance arch made of twigs — a holdover, I was guessing, from the previous night's Nuit Blanche installation. But it turned out that a fair amount of effort had been put into the presentation of the hall proper, with slightly spooky gouaches flanking the stage as well as being draped across the floor. There were also transparent balloons tumbling underfoot and in the centre of the room, a dangling sculpture of water-filled balloons.¹ In lieu of an elaborate lighting rig, there was several old lamps on the stage. And beyond that, the musical set-up was visually interesting. What with the cement mixer taking up a good chunk of real estate on the stage, there was gear spilling over onto the floor in a row in front, and beyond that, the openers' gear. That took up most of the space up to the paintings on the floor, with the early arrivals starting to accumulate behind that.

I was interested to see what the crowd was going to be like for this one. "There was a time, like, say, 10-15, 20 years ago, when our audience was of a certain age, and had a beard, and were mostly male, and would think a lot and would be heavily intellectual," said Peron in an interview, and, to be honest, that was about the kind of crowd I was expecting. As it turned out, this was pretty much exactly the case, a male-heavy crowd, skewing older, and laden with the sort of guys who you could probably engage in arguments about optimal speaker positioning and the merits of various record producers.² There were, as is usual for shows like this at SPK, chairs lining the sides of the walls, but soon guys were pulling the chairs out to the middle of the floor to get in closer.

Starting things off were Not the Wind, Not the Flag³, a local duo composed of Brandon Valdivia (drums, etc.) and Colin Fisher (guit, sax), both busy members of the local improvisational music scene.⁴ Fisher played guit with a semi-circle of pedals arrayed around him on the floor — including one that I believe was mixing in a keyboard loop. That was one ingredient of a slow build, five minutes or so of the the music gaining intensity. It took about a dozen minutes for the swell to build, before it faded and reprised in an echo of itself. The middle of the set was a quiet valley with eastern-sounding flutes, played by both musicians, until Valdivia kicked into a fast beat and Fisher replied with his guit, building up to a shred-y crescendo. With the pedals sustaining some noise, he switched over to sax to close out the set, playing some energetic runs. Lasting a half-hour, there was a nice flow here and the well-explored ideas moved at a pace that kept everything fresh. The audience was well into it. Nice work.

Check out an excerpt from this performance here.

In between sets, another indicator of the breakdown of the crowd: I went over to the bathroom, only to find a queue forming, while women had no wait to go in and out.⁵ Meanwhile, the crowd, now fairly well built up, was getting dammed up behind the invisible line behind the artworks on the floor, a situation resolved when Jean-Hervé Peron came out to invite everyone to move closer. The bricabrac was pushed aside and it ended up being a mix of people right up against the instruments, sitting on the floor, rows of people sitting on their chairs and those preferring to stand. Peron, while saying he was giving the smokers outside a chance to finish up, gave a little pep talk to the waiting crowd: "make sure we're not serious about nothing, and make sure we take the time to revert to infantility, spontaneity and all that kind," he said, before retreating back for another ten minutes.

Once Faust took the stage — and, um, the stage-front environs — they started with an instrumental that I think one could reasonably call krautrock-y, about six minutes of carefully contained rhythms with increasingly unhinged guitars and keyb sounds. Not revelatory, with a good groove and a nice table setter. Then Peron stepped into the crowd, passing around uninflated balloons, to be blown up and the air released in a collective squeaking symphony. As this happened, the band were joined by Brandon Valdivia and Colin Fisher, who joined in on an improvised jam that resolved itself into "Listen to the Fish".⁶ And then thundering drums announced "Fresh Air", another rocker, that was getting along for a couple minutes and settling into a groove when suddenly, most of onstage power cut out.

Given that this is a band filled with a love for improvisation and spontaneity, wanting to do more than just a "rock show", they rolled with the punch. Johnston switched to piano, Peron picked up an acoustic guitar and the band played a most-unexpected unplugged segment, leading off with "The Sad Skinhead", which roused appreciative recognition from the crowd. After another tune and a brief jaunt through "Miss Fortune" from 1971's self-titled album ("I lift my skirt when Voltaire speaks, his mouth full of garlic.") there was power back on stage, though apparently no monitors working.

Faust unplugged? Check out a sample here.

The band plugged back in and went back into their setlist, sounding a little ragged and unable to hear themselves — "we are having heavy problems with the sound", Peron commented, still sounding, at this point, more apologetic than unhappy. It's unfortunate that the band was thus crippled, as it was apparent that this was a powerful unit — one number that worked well featured Johnston's unflashy, harsh-edged guitar backing a lyrical spoken-word piece from Swayne. Then the band launched into the primal stomp of "It's A Rainy Day (Sunshine Girl)", which was cruising along — about seven minutes in and feeling like it could percolate for several more, when, suddenly, the power cut out again.

This, evidently, was the band's breaking point. Still apologising, Peron announced that the band was done. At almost exactly sixty minutes of fits and starts, it never quite felt like things were getting off the ground. A vague sense of frustration could be felt in the hall as people looked quizzically at each other and made their way out. A bit of a disappointment — at some level I wanted more, and better. Looked at another way, though, if you subscribe to that whole "the perfect is the enemy of the good" school of thought then this show was arguably a masterpiece. And, if nothing else, a unique night.

Listen to a sample of Faust rockin' out here.

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¹ These would later cause some apprehensive upward glances from the guy beside me, standing right below them during the show and feeling an occasional drip.

² To be clear, this isn't making fun — I feel pretty at home among this tribe. Perhaps another indication of what kind of music enthusiasts were attracted to a show like this was the fact that I noted, besides myself, at least two other tapers on the floor, plus possibly someone else set up at the sound board. And some people with a fancy video camera as well.

³ Googling the band's name brings up this Zen epigram:

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: 'The flag is moving.'

The other said: 'The wind is moving.'

The sixth patriach happened to be passing by. He told them: 'Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.'

This is probably as evocative of what this band was doing as any description I could come up with.

⁴ Fisher lists more than twenty current projects on his myspace page.

⁵ On the rare occasions that this happens, I'm amazed that no women stop to point and mock about the shoe being on the other foot.

⁶ Despite being seminal post-punk direction pointers, it's essential to remember that Faust were always essentially hippies. For all of their sonic influence, this commune-happy strand of their origins kinda gets swept under the rug.

Gig: Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex

Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Guests / Daniel Nebiat

SPK Polish Combatants Hall. Saturday, September 12, 2009.

After a fine day spent tromping around the AGO and wandering the cityscape with K., headed over to the concrete bunker on Beverley for a highly-anticipated show, to see Getatchew Mekuria, the Ethiopian saxophone titan — and on the celebration of the Ethiopian New Year, no less. By a funny coincidence, ran into some of K's friends right after my arrival, so a chance to compare gig stories and so on. Looking around, as the General Chaos light show swirled above the stage, it was building up to be the sort of mixed crowd I was expecting, with different types all drawn to different elements of the bill.

The first night's opener was local musician and Wavelength veteran Daniel Nebiat. Born and raised in Eritrea before coming to Toronto, Nebiat plays an amplified version of a krar, a traditional lyre-like instrument. The unusual looking contraption was best described by the artist himself, who noted that it wasn't unlike the back of a chair. To introduce the crowd to the krar, Nebiat opened with one song solo before his band (keyb, bass) joined him, where the sound went from folksy to funky. Played with a plectrum, Nebiat coaxed a variety of sounds from his krar, including some funky chicken scratches that fit in well with the upbeat, dance-y music. Not quite repetitive — let's say circular: if you weren't listening for the lyrics, you'd best be getting to dancing. With that ba-doomp, ba-doomp rhythm familiar in Ethiopian and Eritrean music, it was easy to start moving along in a sort of club-footed skanking motion — and rather hard to resist. Most of the songs came as extended grooves — with the band, he played a half-dozen songs over an hour, a couple reaching to ten and fifteen minutes. Soon enough, you could see Jonny Dovercourt and Lullabye Arkestra dancing up front with the members of the Eritrean community, the grizzled old punks in leather jackets and the music nerds moving only slightly more hesitantly, everyone sloshing around their bottles of strong Polish beer. In theory, this is how we all like to think Toronto is supposed to work, and it's always rather nice when it does. A really strong set, and when it was done, I stopped at the merch table to grab a copy of his disc.

Listen to a track from this set here.

I've been lucky enough to have seen The Ex before, last time they rolled through town, and that was a pretty great show. For this, I was daring to expect even more, given what I'd heard from their collaborations with Getatchew Mekuria. Hitting the stage, the band tore right into it, ripping it up with an upbeat number, the flurry of the horn section followed by Terrie and Andy launching into a two-guitar interlocking attack, stepping towards each other as if about to engage in a joust.¹ In a ninety-minute set, the band knew how to build up and release the tension, alternating the awesome explosions with intense quieter moments. After a two-song, barn-burning opener, the horns took over for a quieter, more subtly groovy number. A couple songs with Kat on vocals also were an effective switch-up.

But most of all, throughout, it was sax heaven. Mekuria, now in his seventies, plays with a rich, groovy tone filled with vital emotion. There is undoubtedly tonnes to be said about the technical side of his craft, his technique, and how he bridges Ethiopian and European styles, but while playing with such vitality it's hard not just to slip into the richness of it.² There were no few times where I just wanted the song to keep going, which isn't always (usually?) the way I feel in the midst of a ninety minute set. One to remember — one of the best gigs of the year.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ I was left somewhat confused with trying to figure out the fellow singing was, and wondering what had happened to G.W. Sok, only to find out after the fact that Sok has apparently left the band to focus on his other art projects. Filling his big shoes was Arnold de Boer, who pulled off the feat well enough, though perhaps without panache.

² I spotted Carl Wilson doing just that — eyes closed, head bowed and just listening, looking like he might shed a tear of joy as Mekuria played unaccompanied.

Gig: Bruce Peninsula / Alex Lukashevsky / Snowblink

Bruce Peninsula (Alex Lukashevsky / Snowblink)

Polish Combatants Hall. Sunday, February 22, 2009

Managed to have a nice nap before heading out for this, which I think improved my disposition a bunch. Sunday nights I generally prefer to finish off the chores, turn off the computer and so on, and go to bed nice and early and read for a while. Get a good night's sleep to set up the new week, etc. etc.

But alas, around the time I'd normally be climbing under the covers, there I was pulling my longjohns on to head out. Made me feel mildly grumpy as I was leaving, and made gig-attendance about the last thing I felt like doing, but by the time I got down to Beverly Street, I was in a pleasantly drowsy mood. Which I think made me receptive to what was going on. Sometimes amped-up razor sharpness is the best frame of mind for a gig, and sometimes languorous sleepiness works out well.

Because I was putting off leaving, only caught about half of opener Snowblink - the pleasantly folksy Daniela Gesundheit on guitar, supplemented by Dan Goldman providing extra instrumentation. The Hall was already rather full, so I just stood with the latecomers near the back and soaked in what I could. Her stuff was okay - not entirely unlike, perhaps, early Sarah McLaughlin at times. Finished with a nice piece using looped backing vocals.

During the between-set hubbub, I managed to move in a nab a seat and settle down to appreciate the hall and crowd around me. As with last week's Wavelength show, I felt relaxed in this room. This gig was set up in an all-seating configuration, and maybe that helped to bring out a pretty mixed crowd: the usual core of indie-show types, but supplemented by a lot of people who looked like they probably went to a lot more shows ten tears ago, and then the parental/elder crowd on top of that. The stage itself was nicely done up with ribbons and vines strung above the stage, which under the old curtains, turned it into a sort of garden gazebo set.

Alex Lukashevsky and his crew took the stage. I mostly knew him by his reputation as a twisted pop genius and work with various Blocks-y bands. He accompanied himself on guitar, mostly in a gentle fingerpicking manner and was backed up with two vocalists. The ornate vocal arrangements were the most distinctive element of the performance, at its most florid sounding like a rococo Swingle Singers arrangement of an xmas carol, but usually more reined in that that. Special note should be made of the female singer (whose name'd be worth looking up) who had tremendous range and a diversity of sounds from pretty harmonies to a theramin-like trill. It sounded like Lukashevsky had some interestingly idiosyncratic lyrics, but were it just him plus guit, I dunno if it'd've held my attention. The vox really made the set. Rather enjoyable.

Then the to-ing and fro-ing of getting ready for the main set while I reflected on Bruce Peninsula. I'd seen them live once previously (late '07, opening for The Acorn) and left the show not particularly convinced they were for me. Listening to their alb last week, I was still mostly on the same lines, rather able to appreciate that there is quality and originality in what they do, but not entirely moved by it. Meanwhile, various members (Peninsulans?) came on stage to tune up, call to the back of the room to wrangle other members and then pass out cupcakes. Cupcakes mean love, so that's one good way to win over an audience.

As they took the stage, I found out that the mild-mannered guy that was sitting beside me was a bit of a shrieker, letting out a few anticipatory whoops, and then once the band was on stage, shouting our "more Barker!" at regular intervals, apparently a paean to the bass player. But he kept himself quiet during the songs, so it's all good, I guess.

As the band played, I found myself enjoying it fairly well. Just the right combination, I guess, of that relaxed sleepiness, live spectacle, volume, and good sound. With eleven members on stage, there was a lot going on, but everything was clear in the mix, so props to whoever was doing the sound. I think the band's earthy throb in the live setting provided a bit more groove to frame the voices — whatever it was, I was suitably impressed and much more won over by them than I'd been previously.

The band were having a good time, humbled by the turnout and thanking everyone under the sun, and occasionally having to untangle instruments from the ribbons. They did tunes from the album, a good gospel shouter from last summer's 7", a new one, as well as a cracking cover of Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" as an encore.

So I left pretty satisfied. There are some local bands that I'm willing to go see over and over. I can't say I'd bump BP up to that category, but I would see 'em again, and I do wish 'em well.

Gig: Wavelength 450 (Saturday)

Gig: Wavelength 450 ($100 / Brides / Hooded Fang / The Luyas / Element Choir)

Polish Combatants Hall. Saturday, February 14, 2009.

With this getting a buncha press (incl an eye cover story) I had no idea how early the crowds were gonna show up, but I was having a quiet evening anyway and erred on the side of getting there responsibly early. So I managed to snag a chair and settle in with a dirt cheap drink in the rec hall-type surroundings of the Polish Combatants Hall. Not a bad place to see a gig, even if it sometimes has a bit of a musty basement smell. Sadly, they took down all the unit insignia banners on the upper reaches of the walls for some reason.

It turned out to be a robustly full house, with, I think, a healthy number of folks like me, who appreciate the idea of Wavelength, but can't make it out for shows on a Sunday night. But also some just making the scene, out for something that was "hot" and on eye's cover. Or so I'm guessing — maybe it was that subset of people who were up near the front but still remained committed to talking loudly with their friends. Frustrating.

Based on the blurbs, I wasn't sure that a large improv choir was going to be, well, good, but I was pleasantly surprised. Starting off like the soundtrack of the journey into the monolith at the end of 2001 crossed with a dadaist tone poem, Element Choir's performance branched into a wide-ranging exploration of the range of noises the human voice can make. The conductor ran the choir in a manner that made me think of performers with laptops and looping pedals — picking out one range of the group, giving a gestural signal, and letting them make that noise while turning to tweak the noise that another section was making, and building up various textures playing off each other. It was a rather warm sort of sensation. Felt human.

Stowed my bag and jacket on my seat and went up closer to the stage as each of the bands proper came on. The Luyas were okay. The vocalist was compelling, but the band's sonic approach didn't do much for me, eschewing the easy things (like melodies) for something a bit more adventurous, leaving a sort of spare, deconstructed song-sense.

Hooded Fang were sort of just the opposite, all poppy and happy and dance-friendly. Which disposed me much more towards them. Co-ed and seven members deep with a whole bunch of keybs and horns and tinkling glocks, a facile comparison might be to Los Campesinos!, but without their Cure-ish undertone. Perhaps hitting closer to the mark would be to think of it as something like widescreen A&C-style pop (Stars, or BSS, a little) covering The Bicycles. Regardless, they had good songs and a joyful attitude. I bought their EP at the merch table and would keep my eye out to see them again.^*

Brides were enjoyable enough, but any more than the short set they played would have been too much for me. Pick your identifier — post-punk/no wave, probably. Which is to say a rhythm section once-removed from hardcore roots, but tending occasionally to shift into technically tricky shifting time signatures, etc. I liked 'em best when they avoided that, and stuck to less chords. They had a skronky sax player who looked disconcertingly like Gary Busey in The Buddy Holly Story.

$100 was a band that won me over last year, and I ultimately ended up seeing them twice in the full band configuration, and twice more as an acoustic duo. I'd been excited by the fact that some of the best songs I'd heard them play were already moving beyond their fine Forest of Tears album. Perhaps it was the fact that I was starting to wear down, or just my heightened expectations that left me with the sense that this wasn't quite as good as I'd seen them do previously. (Or perhaps the fact that they were playing, I think, with a different rhythm section than I recall.) And by this point, I was surrounded, it seemed, by yappy people. So I wasn't totally feelin' it. But it was going okay enough. Though when they got to the stately, gorgeous waltz of "Nothing's Alright", Simone commanded the crowd to slow dance, and folks all around started to comply. When one of a group of yammering women to my left looked past me to grab a guy on my right to sway together, and her friends started talking even louder, I decided to move back for some peace of mind. But the spell was broken, and all at once I was feeling tired and antsy to go catch the subway, so I kept a moving back to my chair, threw on my jacket and split. I had a bit of wiggle time to catch the train, but I didn't want to miss it.

All in all, though, a satisfying night. One thing that came out in that eye story is that one year hence, with the tenth anniversary, Wavelength will cease as a Sunday night thing and transform into... something else. If that something else is shows like this, then I'd probably end up at more Wavelength overall.

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^* Weirdly, I managed to be sitting once again right next to a bunch of Band Parents, who were busily sizing up the competition and comparing their offspring to The Luyas. "Oh, they were much better than that first bunch," said one, "they sound like a real band."