Recording: Dead Neighbourhoods

Artist: Dead Neighbourhoods

Song: [last segment]

Recorded at Handlebar (Bedroom Sessions), March 20, 2016.

Dead Neighbourhoods - [last segment]

Handlebar's Bedroom Sessions series is a space offering "experimental/side projects from celebrated Toronto (and beyond) musicians". Another ambient spinoff from WEARENOTWHOWEARE, this pairing of Brendon Saarinen & Eric James Mayer played face-to-face on stage. Opening with sonic drift and found-sound bursts, the sonic haze segued into a single song, and then back out again into the hazy digression heard here.

[the next Bedroom Sessions night will be at Handlebar on Sunday, April 17th with a tasty lineup featuring Man Made Hill, Haolin Munk, Doom Tickler and Fulldeck Subhuman.]

Recording: Eric James Mayer

Artist: Eric James Mayer

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at Smiling Buddha (Casual Drones 14), January 14, 2016.

Eric James Mayer - [excerpt]

Having outgrown the small-scale confines of its former home at Milk Glass, the Casual Drones music series has landed at Smiling Buddha. Shifting to the larger venue has come with a definite sense of scaling up, with the shows taking place between two stages upstairs and down and the visuals (always a big element of the series) getting amped up even further. The main floor saw most of the stage removed to make way for a large lighting rig that resembled a sort of post-apocalyptic tanning bed and gave Romar L. Johnson a huge range of luminosity to paint with. So, to the good, there's a definite sense of ambition here — and the full house that was on hand showed there's an audience for this kind of experimentation. To the bad, however, this night did manage to live up to the series' derisive nickname of "Casual Bromes", with seven sets (and, by my count, ten musicians) but no women on stage. (And, for my money, I'm not sure why a night with that many acts needed to wait 'til almost ten to get started.)

Mayer, of local ambient pop unit WEARENOTWHOWEARE, lead off the show with this unhurried driftburst, the hiss of the fog machines punctuating the excursion.