#eyeweeklysb

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Docs hot

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

Like Ondi Timoner’s Brian Jonestown Massacre bio Dig! and Keven McAlester’s Roky Erickson film You’re Gonna Miss Me, Feuerzeig’s film belongs to a burgeoning music-movie genre: the career-resurrecting, mentally-unstable-artist documentary. Never mind rave reviews — nothing gets the public to appreciate an underappreciated cult hero like a film that exposes the darkest corners of the subject’s fragile psyche.

 “I don’t know if it’s revitalized his career — it’s always been going on,” says Over the Top founder Eric Warner, who’s been trying too book Johnston for three years. “But I definitely feel it contributed to the show selling as quickly as it did. The film didn’t just cater to an outsider audience.”

And the film’s success certainly would account for Johnston’s improbable May 7 appearance on MTV Live. “With all the hype around the film,” Warner reasons, “maybe he’s just in a better state to do interviews and be open to these public forums.”

Adam Shore knows first-hand the drawing power of a good documentary; as an A&R rep for TVT Records, he signed The Brian Jonestown Masscare to an ill-fated major-label deal that saw them sell a mere 12,000 copies of 1998’s Strung Out in Heaven. Now, post-Dig!, the band can do two sold-out nights at New York’s 1,300-capacity Webster Hall.

“Thirty-thousand records come out each week, and every magazine or newspaper covers maybe three or four of those a week,” Shore explains from his current post in the Vice Records A&R department. “But every single film that’s distributed in your city gets a full review. And any one time that Dig! was being shown on the Sundance Channel  — even at four o’clock in the morning — it was getting 10 times more viewers than had ever bought a Brian Jonestown Massacre record.”

Not one to shy away from troubled artists, Shore has since taken a keen professional interest in Roky Erickson, whose return to the stage following a three-decade absence coincided with the 2005 release of You’re Gonna Miss Me.

“Obviously, it’d be a labour of love,” says Shore of the prospect of signing Erickson. “I don’t know if the market will bear any kind of mainstream success for a guy like him. But when I saw him in New York recently, he was strutting and smiling and it seemed less of a ‘let’s go check this out to see what it’s like’ thing and more like ‘they’re a really good rock band.’”

For Warner, that’s the ultimate benefit these documentaries can bring: “Not only can they revitalize the artist’s career, but them as a person, too.”

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Interview: British Sea Power

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

  The first time I saw you was here at SXSW five years ago, when your guitarist Noble almost took [Rough Trade Records owner] Geoff Travis’ head off with his guitar and starting throwing chairs into the audience. And at your first Toronto show at the Horseshoe Tavern later that year, you were riding on Noble’s shoulders and almost had your fingers taken off by the ceiling fan. Is the threat of imminent violence an important part of a rock show?

Ah, you’ve seen all the violent gigs. It’s declined somewhat. We’re getting a little bit older now… you start to think, “I need my fingers!” It’s more noise-based chaos rather than real danger.

  Your songs pay careful attention to historical events and details — is that a reaction to the fact cultural cycles are moving so fast, and so many bands are ripping off what came out last week?

You get so many generalized songs about very general things like, “I love you baby” or “I’m getting over you,” and I like detailed songs that relate to the world outside of music. I like listening to BBC Radio 4 a lot, I find it relaxing — in a history program or a science program, I just think the words and stories are more interesting. I’ll take a lot of notes, steal them all, and mix them in. If you can understand something from the years gone by, you can get a better picture of where you’re at nowadays. Everything is very “instant” nowadays — it’s good to get a bit of distance, time-wise.

  How did you make the connection with Efrum Menuck and Howard Bilerman in Montreal?

We were looking for somewhere we could go to get away from England, an interesting city; their studio came up as an option, and it was easily the top of the list. They seem like genuine, down-to-earth people — you can tell they’re musicians first. The studio’s like a big junkhouse — bicycles, big pipes hanging off the roof, freezing cold; they only had about two electric bulbs working. But we couldn’t mix it there to a degree that we were happy with, and that’s why we had to go back to England — we ended up in this Napoleonic fort in Cornwall on the coast owned by the army, and they let us have it cheap. It’s nice to know we can just go off on our own, in any kind of peculiar building and record however we like it: we’d stick mics out the window because all these helicopters started turning up completely unannounced in middle of the night, practicing their cannon drops. It was quite weird.

  Well, you have developed a reputation for performing in weird locales…

Yeah,  people suggest a lot of these places to us now in England because we’re known for it. Someone will turn up on the internet and say, “We own the highest-altitude pub in England — do you want to play it? We’ve got sheep and chickens in the bar.” And we’re like, “We like sheep and chickens — sounds good!” They’re all hit-and-miss, those things. That one turned out brilliant; the day before we played on a ferry in the river Mersey — that was a disaster. No one could see anything, you couldn’t put any speakers up properly… but I think it’s good to have a chance for gigs to go wrong.

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Interview: Thee Silver Mt. Zion Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

  Reading your past press, the discussion of your music is often theoretical — it’s not often described in terms of rock music, with a visceral, physical quality to it.

Even as going as far back as godspeed, there were a healthy bunch of us in that band who were southern Ontario-born and raised, so it’s all about rock music to me. It’s just that simple. When people ascribe these loftier goals and ideals to our music, or judge us based on some sort of intentional experimentalism on our part, it’s like, maybe you should broaden your ears a bit. For us it’s rock — capital R, capital K.

  Lyrically, you tend to write songs that are topical but don’t name names that might date the song — rather than just call out, say, George Bush, you prefer to identify people by vocations, like “the hangman” and “the banker.”

Using Bush as an example — George Bush is not the problem, the quality of our leadership is a problem, in Canada as well. The killing machines are different now, but the dynamic is the same. And then with the banker stuff: I left home when I was 17, I spent many years with pretty much nowhere to live, unable to get a bank account, having to cash cheques at Money Mart… I have a visceral and unreasonable amount of hatred toward the banking industry.

  Do you keep your money rolled up under a mattress?

I do a lot of that. I’ve got some grandfather values in me. I keep working toward the idea of having a safe in the basement. Not to be overly defensive, but our “politics” — with square quotes around it — are something that people use to frame us or characterize us as these didactic, preaching, lecture-some [people], but we write songs about bankers for real personal reasons, and at the same time, it’s an experience that most people in the world understand.

  For all the anarchist discourse surrounding your bands, your legacy is really one of community-minded capitalism. You’re entrepreneurs: you release your own records, you operate venues and studios — you’re basically showing people how to run a business based on fair principles.

Yeah, you don’t take anything for granted, you don’t strive so hard for the brass ring that you fall off the horse. It’s slow and steady, with modest goals, modest concerns. It’s so unromantic and unsexy, in an industry that so privileges the quick money and short career.

  But it seems like the idea of an indie-rock band licensing songs to commercials and films raises far fewer eyebrows than it did 20 years ago. And given the economic challenges of being an independent band — the price of gas being just the latest hurdle — is it becoming harder to resist the lure of an easy licensing cheque?

It becomes harder on the level that the offers get huger —there have been some things offered to us where it’s like, “Are you kidding me? That’s more than I earn in a year.” It’s like the devil appearing in a puff of smoke offering you a bag of gold. I couldn’t even begin to count how much we turn down every year, and it’s on these very basic terms: if we don’t like the thing, or if we have a problem with the way an entity does its business, we say no. That means we’ve said no except for one instance to everything having to do with television; we’ve said no to very many bad big Hollywood movies.

This is supposed to be the new model of “indie-rock” — again, with square quotes around it — that you’re supposed to earn your money through licensing deals because no one buys records anymore, and it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t get a lot of attention, but we still fill decent-sized rooms and we make an honest living by just doing what bands have done forever: trying keep it low-key, trying to keep control of our finances and not live extravagantly, in the name of being able to continue what it is we’re doing without having to say yes to stuff that we’re not comfortable with. If you’re a young band that has a lot of hype behind you and you’re on a label that has its finances in order, I can’t think of many reasons why you should be licensing songs to Grey’s Anatomy. 

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A new wave

For the past nine years, the Wavelength music series has broken down the musical and social barriers separating Toronto’s myriad underground music scenes and, in the process, helped elevate some of its alumni to international indie-celebrity status. But faced with adverse circumstances similar to those that catalyzed its inception, the weekly Sunday-night showcase will soon be a weekly no more.

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

As with most things that happened nine years and several gin-and-tonics ago, my memories of the first Wavelength are hazy. This much is certain: it was Sunday, February 13, 2000, the venue was (the long defunct) Ted’s Wrecking Yard on College and the night’s bill consisted of Neck and the Mean Red Spiders, two psychedelic Toronto indie-pop bands who had gigged consistently the previous few years but, with the city’s club culture dominated by DJ nights, only had modest fanbases to show for it.

But more than anything that night, I remember Mean Red Spiders guitarist Greg Chambers’ final words from the stage: “Support local music — it really is the best stuff out there,” effectively summarizing Wavelength’s mission statement. And if there were only a hundred people or so at Ted’s to heed those words, the subsequent weeks and years would prove that the Wavelength crew were not in the minority for believing them.

Wavelength’s early history is well-documented and celebrated, with the series pooling artists from marginalized indie-rock, hardcore, improv jazz and electronic communities and cultivating a consistent, open-minded audience receptive to its willfully eclectic mandate. And out of this supportive, inclusive atmosphere emerged some of Toronto’s most renowned indie artists — Broken Social Scene, the Constantines, The Hidden Cameras, Final Fantasy — all of whom appeared at Wavelength back when they existed more as ideas than bands, years before international acclaim and touring formalized their processes. (Despite the series’ intensely local focus, Wavelength has also welcomed kindred spirits from across Canada and beyond, including the first Toronto appearances by Destroyer and Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden’s Fridge.)

Like the careers of its most famous alumni, Wavelength has undergone significant changes over the years: upon the closure of Ted’s in 2001, the venue moved to Lee’s Palace before settling into its current home of Sneaky Dee’s in 2002. The series’ monthly zine was discontinued in favour of a website operation. And after various personnel changes over the years, organizational duties are now shared among Bunce, MacDonnell and more recent recruits Ryan McLaren and Kevin Parnell, with guest promoters enlisted occasionally. But while the line-up for this weekend’s Wavelength 450 ninth-anniversary festival (see sidebar) shows that the series core ethos has been mostly unaffected by these changes, the Toronto music culture in which it now operates is arguably less receptive to it.

   Wavelength is, of course, not the only local institution celebrating a birthday this weekend: it shares an anniversary with The Drake Hotel, the boutique-hotel venue that, upon its February 2004 opening, effectively shifted the locus of downtown nightlife away from traditional Annex and College Street strips onto West Queen West. Ironically, Wavelength’s MacDonnell actually served as booker for the Drake’s Underground concert venue in its first months of operation, hoping to answer the hotel’s bohemian marketing rhetoric with suitably adventurous programming, but MacDonnell’s idealism and the hotel’s business strategy didn’t jibe. By introducing glamour and affluence to the once-derelict Queen/Beaconsfield area, The Drake sowed the seeds for the fashionista-friendly electro dance-party scene that dominates nearby venues like The Social, Wrongbar and, further east, CiRCA. 

In a way, Wavelength’s current situation mirrors that faced by its founders back in 1999, as they flew the flag for local indie-rock at a time when the masses were more interested in going to raves. However, the audience Wavelength built up in the first half of this decade hasn’t so much disappeared as splintered.

Wavelength’s early success was a classic case of “if you build it they will come”; but today it’s more a case of “if you build it, they will come — and then other people will build their own.” Scan your local listings and you’ll see a slew of upstart indie-rock series: Keith Hamilton’s Pitter Patter Nights at The Boat; Lauren Schreiber’s No Shame parties; Dan Wolovick’s Two-Way Monologue showcases at Rancho Relaxo — all of which speak to the ongoing health of Toronto’s indie scene and the abundance of new bands it produces. But while these series may tilt toward more traditional, singer/songwriterly forms of indie-rock than Wavelength features, their existence also makes Wavelength’s job all the more demanding.

As Toronto indie-rock has ascended out of basements and garages into iPod commercials and Desperate Housewives cameos, Wavelength’s programming has become more determinedly unconventional, reaching out to local Ethiopian jazz communities and staging one-off, cross-cultural events like last March’s successful Kalimba Summit, which played on the current indie-rock vogue for African thumb-piano tones by uniting Wavelength regulars Laura Barrett and Matt “Prince Nifty” Smith with veteran players Kahil El’Zabar and Njacko Backo. But on a week-in, week-out basis, the audience has not been as eager to go along for the ride; according to Bunce, there have been recent Wavelengths where attendance has not amounted to much more than the organizers, bands and bar staff.

Wavelength was originally formed as a response to the dire circumstances faced by Toronto indie artists in the late 1990s. But in the wake of equally adverse circumstances today, the series’ organizers must take equally proactive action — which means that, pretty soon, underground-music seekers in Toronto are going to have to find something else to do on Sunday nights.

It’s fitting that Jonathan Bunce and I are talking about Wavelength’s future over dinner at La Hacienda — like Wavelength, the venerable Queen West Mexican-food haunt is trying to hold its ground (in their case, amid a downtown core that’s gone take-out burrito-crazy). In response to this brutal winter, Bunce has grown his first-ever beard, an appropriate manifestation of the poise, professionalism and perspective that comes with co-producing 450 editions of Wavelength since 2000. And the professorial look also provides a visual cue for Bunce’s changing role the Wavelength, in which he spends less time scouring MySpace pages searching for bands to book, and more time studying the intricacies of arts-council grant applications. Because this time next year, there will be no more Wavelength Sunday-night showcases to book.

“Wavelength 500 [in February 2010] is going to mark the end of the Sunday series,” Bunce says. “But,” he stresses, “it’s not the end of Wavelength. We’re considering it a change-up: we just want to break with the format. The format’s worked really well, but it can be a grind. That’s honestly a big factor: every Sunday, trying to outdo ourselves with the line-up. We feel that what we’re doing with the weekly series is less special, less unique — we feel like we’re competing in terms of audiences and getting bands to play the series with things that we have helped spawn. Which is great, that means it’s kind of a ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of what we wanted to do with the series and develop a healthy music scene. But it makes our job week-to week a lot more challenging.”

Wavelength’s impending transformation is symbolic of the downsizing trend overtaking the music industry at large, with artists responding to internet-bred music-consumption behaviour by deemphasizing the album format and focussing on the singles. Likewise, Bunce envisions less frequent, but more ambitious Wavelength events happening throughout the year, including collaborations with the Images Film Festival, Ryan McLaren’s annual all-ages ALL CAPS festival in August and a continued multi-night/multi-venue anniversary festival each February. To ensure a consistency in vision and execution, Bunce is looking to strengthen Wavelength’s relationship with the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, whose grant funding is traditionally directed to high-art pursuits like classical-music troupes. Unlike indie-artist-centric programs like FACTOR, which distribute monies on a per-project/tour basis, arts-council funding provides ongoing support for organizational infrastructure.

“There’s not many other people in the indie-music world who are pursuing arts-council-supported presentations,” says Bunce, who first familiarized himself with arts-council minutae through his day job as Artistic Director at experimental/contemporary-classical venue The Music Gallery. “It allows us to bring in bigger names from out of town, to put shows in alternative spaces we couldn’t otherwise afford and have more administrative stability.

“We want to put the Wavelength brand out there in the sense of it being attached to different locations, different nights of the week, different themes. We’ve always tried to reach out to regular people, and ironically, Wavelength is on a Sunday, which is not the working man’s favourite night of the week to go out. For us to do shows on Saturday is perhaps a better way to reach more people. I know Wavelength has been called a ‘hipster thing’ in the past, but that’s a misperception — we’ve always been about making this community accessible to all the regular people who, back in the ’90s, weren’t scouring EYE WEEKLY to read the Indie Eye column.”

   Whenever a local cultural institution announces its closure or discontinuation, the natural instinct is for people to rally around and try tosave them; we’ve seen this in recent years with the shut-downs and subsequent community-driven rebirths of repertory cinemas like The Royal and The Revue. But what drive these venues into peril in the first place is that, in many cases, people like and romanticize the idea of these venues existing in their communities more so than actively attending or financially supporting them.

I’ve been just as guilty in this regard with Wavelength, an event I attended regularly in the early part of this decade, and which introduced me to many bands with whom I’ve had lasting relationships. But since 2006, my Sunday-night visits to Sneaky’s have been sporadic at best. Oh sure, I had my excuses: increased professional obligations that required me to have my shit together on Monday morning; and the onset of a serious relationship that made me realize how much of my going out was actually motivated by wanting to meet prospective mates. But also, by 2006, many of the bands I strongly associated with Wavelength had either broken up or become international property, and the newer local music I was drawn to (Glissandro 70, Wyrd Visions) was more insular, less performance-driven in nature.

In these situations, you just hope the next generation of kids (overgrown and otherwise) will assume the mantle and keep the tradition alive. Despite a less noticeable mass of regulars, Bunce is encouraged by the new influx of students he sees at Wavelength each September, lured in by the series’ long-standing reputation and increased coverage in the campus media (not to mention the afforadable cover and beer). But he also senses a disconnect with a new generation whose definition of indie-rock was shaped more by The O.C. and Juno soundtrack than the SST and Touch and Go catalogues.

“One of the things that concerns us is that there is a younger generation that expects every band to sound like Tokyo Police Club or Born Ruffians,” says Bunce. “Nothing against those bands, they’re great at what they do, but there’s a whole wave of groups that just want to sound like that.

“We’re committed to messing with that. Kevin [Parnell] will do things like bring in a group to sing opera standards; we’ve brought in more of the new-music/experimental-jazz crowd. And the noise scene has really developed into its own thing. But there’s still not tonnes of dialogue between the indie-rock crowd and experimental/new-music crowd, and I feel like Wavelength is the only thing trying to make the conversation happen. And because we’re still taking risks with the booking every week, we’ve suffered in terms of attendance.”

But even if weekly turnouts are more erratic, the continued success of Wavelength’s four-night anniversary festivals provides an instructive model on how to balance populism and eclecticism, loading bills with proven local favourites and/or anticipated visitors, while bringing newbies and lapsed regulars alike up to speed on the past year of Wavelength discoveries. And to that end, Bunce already has grand designs for next year’s festival, to shut down the weekly series in style.

“It’ll be 10 years, and 500 weeks of Wavelength — it’s a nice round number, a big milestone,” he says. “It’ll be a chance for us to call in some favours from some people whose — ahem — first shows we booked and to come back and lend their support.

“But there’s a danger in being too self-congratulatory,” he cautions. “It is, after all, just a series.” 

And one whose impending demise will spare Bunce the indignity of being “40 and still going to Sneaky Dee’s every Sunday.” Instead, Wavelength’s new life will reflect that of the 35-year-old Bunce’s: you may not see them kicking around the scene as often, but that’s only because there’s greater work to be done.

  JONATHAN BUNCE’S TOP 4-T

In the spirit of the old Wavelength zine’s staff top-four lists, we asked series organizer Jonathan Bunce to list off the most encouraging Toronto music-scene developments he’s seen since Wavelength’s 2000 inception. 

1. Blocks Recording Club: “a musician-run artist co-op”

2. Somewhere There: “a musician-run artist loft in Parkdale for contemporary music, almost like the early days of the Music Gallery”

3. Extermination Music Nights: “[EMN participant] Matt McDonough was a former Wavelength helper and in many ways [EMN] has kind of stolen our ‘subversive’ thunder. A lot of people used to think of Wavelength was an underground thing; I think that crowd is now more drawn to the Extermination nights, because it’s really truly underground and renegade, and we recognize that we’re institutionalized in comparison. But it’s still part of the ecology.”

4. No Shame: “Lauren [Schreiber] will definitely give credit to Wavelength as an inspiration. In many ways it is a more accessible version of what we’ve been doing. It’s also on Thursdays and Fridays — nights of the week where it feels more like a party.”

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Ballad of a thin man

Slim Twig may deal in artifice — taking acting gigs by day, building records from samples by night — but his contempt for conventional indie-rock is very real.

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

It’s Friday the 13th at Wrongbar, and Slim Twig is all dressed up with nowhere to rock: jet-black pompadour in full flight, a tight black suit that’s practically painted onto his slender frame… and an electric guitar that’s on the fritz. As the technical delay starts to eat up precious minutes of his set time at the Wavelength 450 festival, Slim tosses the six-string aside and tells the crowd, “I’m pretty shit at guitar anyway.”

Though he’s been granted the coveted midnight headliner slot on this night, Slim Twig is really the odd man out. Compared to the other acts on the Wrongbar bill — excitable Cincinatti prog-punk crew Childbite, electro-dancehall duo Bonjay and good-time soul-rockers Steamboat — Slim projects a far more antagonistic presence, with as many patrons sent scurrying to the back bar as those drawn into his sinister spell.

And this polarizing quality suits him just fine. After all, rock ’n’ roll is losing its provocateurs — two months into 2009, we’ve already lost The Cramps’ Lux Interior and The Stooges’ Ron Asheton, with Chicago’s Touch and Go Records soon to follow — and Slim sometimes feels he’s the only one in town trying to hold onto the music’s transgressive spirit.

Sure, he’s met a few kindred souls in his brief career — caustic, confrontational avant-rock outfits like Brides, Huckleberry Friends, The Creeping Nobodies and Actual Water, to name a few. But unlike these comrades, Slim actually has designs on becoming a crossover artist enlisting widely distributed Toronto indie label Paperbag Records to assist him with his strategy of disseminating avant-garde ideas in pop-song packages. Equally dismayed by the cuddly, group-hug nature of popular Canadian indie-rock and the insular ethos of the art-noise underground, is it any wonder why Slim’s upcoming debut full-length for Paperbag is called Contempt?

  Slim Twig doesn’t do breakfast at the Drake or Aunties and Uncles or some other popular west-end destination. He’d much rather have a grilled cheese and milkshake at The Detroit Eatery, a subway car–sized greasy spoon on the Danforth where the walls are covered in Red Wings paraphernalia and where Slim is on a first-name basis with the coffee-slingers.

The east-side location is fitting, given Slim’s anomalous standing in Toronto’s  west end–centric indie scene. However, he admits his chosen neighbourhood is not so much a deliberate distancing tactic as it is a function of enjoying free rent from his landlords, who, shall we say, are old enough to be his parents. 

This revelation marks one of the few moments in our interview where I’m reminded that Slim is just 20 years old (the other is when he says he was only “like, six” when Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came out). It’s not an uncommonly young age for an aspiring musician, but where most artists of that vintage are still getting by on youthful vigor and leftover teen angst, it’s rare to meet a 20 year old with such an informed, defined perspective on what he wants to accomplish with his music.

Naturally, Slim’s an art-school kid — he attended North York’s Claude Watson School for the Arts, first developing the Slim Twig persona at age 17 as a singer/songwriter anti-dote to his concurrent blues-punk band Tropics. But he credits his advanced sense of aesthetic on a source closer to home.

“I didn’t really learn anything in high school about wanting to be an artist,” Slim says between bites of his sandwich. “It’s a tall order for a high school to inspire that, while keeping you in line and making you do work that you don’t really care for.

“I already had the equivalent of what people might think  art school provides because my parents are artists, so I’ve been fully immersed in the film world and going to art shows on a regular basis. And not unlike me, my parents were never part of any scene of any sort, and I’ve definitely felt that way.”

It’s usually pretty easy to spot the parents at a rock show — they’re the kindly, bemused-looking grey-haired folks standing near the back with their fingers in their ears. But when Slim’s parents were pointed out to me at the Wavelength 450 show, they could practically pass for Wrongbar regulars, with Slim’s equally skinny, side-burned dad standing near the front of the stage, documenting the performance on his cameraphone.

The parental influence on Slim was as much musical — complementing his childhood love of metal and top-40 hip-hop with early exposure to Roxy Music and Tom Waits — as ideological, showing him that there’s little glamour in the oft-romanticized bohomian-artist existence.

“I want to be a career artist,” Slim says. “And I want to reach a diverse audience. I do feel like an anomaly in Toronto — on the avant-garde side, there doesn’t seem to be any drive to break free [of the local scene]. I think, maybe, a lot of those people have already broken free of their suburban upbringing are now making their statement [by turning to the avant garde]. But my parents have been making films under the radar for 20 years — the goal was always to be seen and make enough money to work on your next project. Why wouldn’t that be the goal?”

  To date, Slim has been fortunate enough to bankroll one form of artistry with another: acting. It’s tempting to see Slim’s musical and filmic pursuits as products of the same persona-building process; in his most notable screen role to date — as Ellen Page’s punk-rock crush Billy Zero in Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments — he’s basically playing a glammed up, gonzo version of his musical self, and stills from the film initially served as Slim’s music press photo. (That said, unlike his onscreen incarnation, the real-life Slim is far too gentlemanly to ever kick a girl to the curb after a car-seat shag.)

But for Slim, the acting gigs are really just gigs — better paying than his former video store–clerk post, sure, but not necessarily more exciting.

“The thing with filmmaking is it’s so stilted,” he says. “There’s no flow to it, at least from the actor’s side of things — I’ll go eat a granola bar, go sit in my trailer and read, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s time to perform very, very briefly,’ and then stop. I have no illusions about the role of the actor; I think actors place too much importance on their role. As someone who’s a fan of auteurs in cinema, you’re not the auteur as the actor. With my music, I get to be the director, with each song being a scene.”

The restlessness Slim experiences on the movie set is answered by his formidably prolific musical output: two EPs (last year’s Derelict Dialect and Vernacular Violence) and the new full-length Contempt! in roughly a year. If Slim the musician fancies himself a director, his signature would be surrealist horror vignettes shot in single takes, producing songs “conceived in the moment of them down to tape.” And with each release, Slim has drifted further away from traditional song construction, further clouding the question of whether he’s a rock star in the making or a hermetic shut-in who lives in his own mind.

Where the askew blues of Derelict Dialect was built from a relatively conventional (if wobbly) organ/piano/drums base, and Vernacular Violence leaned on Suicide-styled analog-synth drones, Contempt! effectively does away with rock-based instrumentation altogether, piecing songs together with layer upon layer of mutated (and thus unrecognizable) samples.

Slim aptly describes the album as “Elvis locked in the [Wu-Tang Clan’s] 36 Chambers,” a handy catchphrase that not only speaks to the album’s dichotomous inspirations, but also to the individual songs’ discrete relationship to one another. Unlike many rock albums, Contempt! doesn’t cohere into a conceptual framework, or build towards any kind of cathartic climax; rather, each song exists in its own separate space — one where the walls slowly start closing in, heightening the claustrophobic tension until you’re gasping for air.

The opening track, “Young Hussies,” effectively establishes Contempt!’s art of deception: the rolling floor-tom beat and Slim’s convincing Nick Cave croon initially suggest a straightforward stomper, but the song’s central, circular melody is repeated to the point of queasiness, and practically buried alive by a torrent of smashed-glass effects, spooky multi-tracked voices and ear-piercing oscillations. In that sense, the songs’ brief two/three-minute lengths come as both a relief as well as an ominous harbinger that a similarly suffocating process will soon begin again.  

“I never compose anything,” Slim says, “and that kind of set up forces you to be really concise, as opposed to taking all this time to plan out bridges and choruses. Especially if the music is bordering on experimental, I like to hold people’s interest and move onto the next thing.”

Sampling, therefore, provides Slim with the purest distillation of his populist/antagonist dialectic, given that it’s a method originally devised by avant-garde artists, but later embraced by top 40 hitmakers.

“I was interested in the connection between those two worlds,” he says. “The whole process of sampling is actually an idea that runs deep in the cutting edge of art for the last 40 or 50 years, and that’s something that’s largely gone unnoticed in hip-hop: the same principle that The RZA has based his practice on is one that — to be obvious — Andy Warhol used: recontextualization and reappropriation.

“I was really excited by the idea of creating music with sounds that weren’t originally yours — as if they’re puzzle pieces that don’t fit, and then crush them into songs that fit your own ideas. A lot of hip-hop relies on hooks from past songs. But for me, I really like artists like The RZA and Madlib that have their own aesthetic fully formed using other people’s music. I can hear a Madlib beat and within the first 10 seconds know it’s him even though he’s an old horn sample. That concept blows my mind.”

   The most intriguing sample on Contempt! appears at the end of the third track, “Alley Spying.” For its first 90 seconds, the song sputters along inconsequentially in a torrent of deliberately jarring buzzer sounds. But like a movie whose best laughs are found in the outtake reel that rolls with the credits, in its dying moments, “Alley Spying” yields to a ripple of applause that grows louder before cutting out abruptly.

At first, the gesture seems like an in-joke, a knowing admission that such a beat-up, broken-down instrumental is hardly the stuff of opera-house ovations. But then the stream of applause reappears and cuts out and reappears in repeated cycles — forming both a rhythm track that echoes the preceding song’s slumberous gait, and an oblique commentary on the artificial, stagy nature of performer/audience interactions.

It’s something Slim Twig is aware of every time he plays a show, where the subtleties and intricacies of his recorded output are often compromised  in the interests of putting on a proper rock performance. When Slim jettisoned his guitar onstage at that Wrongbar show, it wasn’t just a snap reaction to a technical difficulty, but a symbolic step toward developing a new mode of live performance.

 “I really prefer not to play guitar,” he says. “I want to be able to perform the songs more, because they’re coming from characters — people doing bad things and getting away with it morally. It’s a thrill to sing from that perspective.

“But it’s difficult to translate textural music live without becoming a noise band, and I don’t really have an interest in that. I’ve heard Beck say that each song has its own laws, like it’s its own country. Live, there’s no time for each song to develop its own world — you want the set to be dynamic, rather than worry about the intricacies of the song’s laws.”

Ironically, the artists Slim is most often compared to vocally — be it Nick Cave, Jon Spencer or Elvis — are better known for their sweat-soaked, pit-stained, tossed-panties performances than the nuances of their recorded output. But Slim’s ultimate role model is a figure who exists far outside the deep-voiced, ladies-man pantheon.

“I think my biggest hero is Brian Eno,” he says. “He makes totally conceptual pop music, where every song relies on an idea. My songs rely on ideas rather than melody or chorus — each song is a little mini-art installation. If you look at Eno’s first four pop records, each song is an experiment, and I really think that’s lacking in music right now.”

At 20, Slim Twig knows he’s got a long way to go before amassing a discography as dense and diverse as Brian Eno’s. But for now, at least, he can lay claim to a growing body of work which evinces an adventurous, unfettered spirit similar to that of the young Eno.

That, and better hair, of course.

[stubermania]

The feminine mystique

Girls frontman Christopher Owens spent his adolescence fleeing religious cults and dealing drugs until pop music saved his soul.

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

When interviewing a new band touring their first album, inquiring journalists are forced to resort to such corkers as “How’d the band get together?” and “Who are your influences?” No such dilemma with San Francisco dream-pop outfit Girls, where you’re free to ask “How did you adjust to life after escaping that religious cult that coerced your mother into prostitution?” and “What kind of drugs did you sell to make ends meet after quitting your personal-assistant job for an eccentric Texan millionaire?” and “Is that guy in your new NSFW video for first single ‘Lust for Life’ really lip-synching the song using his boyfriend’s erect penis as a microphone?”

  So having just seen the XXX version of the “Lust for Life” video, I have to wonder: all your friends so eager to get naked at your behest?

I don’t know… the thing with that video is we went to everybody’s house and said, “You’ve got a three-minute reel of tape — do whatever you want to do.” I didn’t really ask anybody to do anything [specific]; I guess some of those people really wanted to become the next sex-tape star.

  Did you ever think twice about revealing your life story to the press?

No, it’s just me talking about who I am. When you’re talking about yourself it doesn’t seem weird. But then I’ve read back things and I’m like, “Oh, they’re making me look like a weirdo.”

  Tracks like “Lust for Life” and “Hellhole Ratrace” deal in the very universal theme of wanting a better life, but are you concerned that people will interpret your songs as commenting specifically on your past?

I know all about a lot of different famous musicians’ life, so when I listen to music, I only think about what it does for me. This is our first album and people want to talk about “this is who these people are.” By the time we’re on our third album, I hope people won’t still be talking about it. I’m just taking it one step at a time — I never even knew we were going to become a band. And if it gets too crazy, I’ll quit and go back to being a member of the serving class. And then in the wee small hours of the night, I’ll create a fake name and put out a brilliant album, but I’ll never tell anybody who I am — because you all screwed it up for me the last time!

  Given your chaotic upbringing, once you got out of the cult, did a normal 9-to-5 life seem desirable?

The first thing I did was get a job, within two days of leaving. Up until that time in my life, I had never even spent money — I had never walked into a store and bought a Coke. I remember my first week of working — it was Texas in 1996, and I was getting paid $5/hour putting groceries on the shelf  — and I got $125 and it was the best feeling. It was the first time where not only did I have money in my hand that was mine, but I could go buy Guns N Roses and Marilyn Manson albums — all the things I was told not to do. It represented freedom. I worked full-time for 11 years, and I’ve done every kind of job you could imagine, including being a hustler.

  What were you hustling?

Substances. I was out there like Biggie Smalls, man, just trying to stack cheese and make the bread. You know, I’ve read a lot of biographies and talked to a lot of musicians I think are cool, and I’ve always felt different from them. But I watched the Notorious B.I.G. movie the other day and I was crying — I really related to the idea of how his life sucked and he was hustling, but when he started to rap, he realized he could do something that was more fulfilling, and make a living doing it. If I had black skin, I’d look like Lil Wayne and people would understand what was going on. But because I appear to be a member of the white middle class, people are like, “What is this guy doing, I don’t get it!” If you knew me, you’d get it, I’ve been struggling my whole life.

  Are you afraid of getting snuffed out in your prime?

Just like Lil Wayne says: I’m more afraid of living than I am of dying … but I’ve always felt if you had a successful marriage, then you do find satisfaction in life. Though very few people have successful marriages. I have seen one, but the guy was in the closet and the wife knew, though he also loved her very much and she respected him. Right now, I’m very much in love with a girl that’s dating a friend of mine, so there’s no chance for a physical relationship.

  Well, most couples who have been together for a long time don’t have a physical relationship, either.

[Laughs] When all physical aspects are cut out of the equation, what’s left is just the concept of really loving somebody, and I think it’s amazing. It’s a huge reward I’ve been given — I’ve learned something important: you don’t have to be sleeping with somebody to really truly love them.

[stubermania]

Interview: Robert D. Siegel

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

  Most films about overzealous fans — whether it’s Play Misty for Me or Misery — chart an increasingly violent, cat-and-mouse dynamic between the star and the stalker. What’s interesting about Big Fan is that QB winds up being a peripheral character.

I wanted the movie to be true to life, and in real life, fans and stars almost never cross paths. It felt more real to me to have this one incident — QB punches Paul and puts him in the hospital — and QB’s never heard from again. Most fans typically never meet the star; the experience of being a fan of somebody is really remote, abstract one-way experience where you know them intimately but they don’t know who you are at all. I think it would’ve felt more Hollywood in a bad way if [Paul] took charge and kidnapped QB or took revenge. The fan is ultimately kind of helpless and isolated. On the other hand, I think for players, or singers, or Robert Pattinson, the experience of being a star is that you love your fans in theory but in practice, you’re just deeply uncomfortable with them. There’s a real appreciation for the fans as a concept, but the actual interaction between celebrities and their admirers, for the celebrity, is deeply unpleasant. 

  The film works well as a companion piece to The Wrestler — though one story is told from the athlete’s perspective and the other the spectator’s, both deal with people who refuse to adapt to the world around them.

Usually characters who are “pathetic” in movies are unhappy and want to change and Patton’s character doesn’t want to change at all; he just wants to be left alone with his team and eat his pizza — he has no real aspirations beyond that. Hollywood screenwriting requires that your character have a growth arc: your character has to get from point A to B, even if it’s just a tiny baby step to self improvement, and in both movies, those characters are fighting change tooth and nail. I do that because it’s more true to life: most people don’t really change or are capable of change and don’t really want to. I would have a hard time writing a movie where the character grows and it doesn’t feel cheesy or fake. I’m laying that out as my own personal challenge for whatever I do next — I can’t get away with a third movie where the character doesn’t grow.

Was it difficult to get the NFL’s permission to portray some of its players in an unflattering light?

Typically, you have to make up fake teams if it’s not a purely positive portrayal. But the less we talk about this, the better: I didn’t get permission. Though I did consult with a lawyer who vetted the whole script and watched the movie. You can actually get away with a lot more than you would think; it’s just that [the NFL] can still sue you. For most studios, it’s not worth that risk to them, but this film was independently financed and produced, so we had the luxury of deciding whether or not we wanted to take that risk. I wouldn’t have wanted to make this movie with fake teams, because that bothers me as a movie fan.

  Well now that you say that, the tailgate-party scenes did have a real guerilla/infiltration feel to them…

It was pretty guerrilla, and we were definitely on the lookout for cops. So far, so good — fingers crossed, [the NFL] haven’t bothered us yet. We’re not looking for trouble, but the whole movie was definitely a bit of a calculated gamble.

  You’ve expressed your admiration for early ’70s American cinema. Were the soundtrack selections — like John Cale’s “Big White Cloud” — a deliberate nod to that era?

I wanted songs that were affordable — John Cale is surprisingly affordable, though he was a replacement for a Richard Thompson I couldn’t get. You learn a lot about what our society values by song-license prices. You’d think John Cale — legendary founding member of the Velvet Underground — would cost more than Skid Row. On The Wrestler, I wanted A-list top-tier ’80s glam-metal — Poison, Motley Crue, Guns N Roses — and we just slid down the ladder. “OK, can we afford… Cinderella?” “No.” “How about Krokus? Trixter?” We got down to, like, Saxon. But I’m a huge music guy and I enjoyed the challenge of finding the right song. Though I feel like Wes Anderson’s a little bit on autopilot in that regard, it was thrilling to hear The Creation or Love in his movies. I love it when either a song you know is totally recontextualized by the movie, or when you hear some amazing song that makes you run home to look it up. So this was an opportunity for me to go through my “nuggets” collection and dig up something. And save money. 

[stubermania]

Season's dronings

Toronto psychedelic-rock survivalists The Hoa Hoa’s journey through the past in our Holiday Music Guide.

Originally published in Eye Weekly.

The enduring popularity of The Flaming Lips 25 years into their career has as much to do with their transformation into a balloon-blasted, bunny-suited travelling circus as their critically acclaimed albums. Throughout the 1990s, The Brian Jonestown Massacre were one of the most prolific underground rock bands in America, but they didn’t become a household (or at least dorm-room) name until an infamous documentary (2004’s Dig!) presented the band’s notoriously volatile leader, Anton Newcombe, to the public as a crackpot caricature. And as anyone who’s seen MGMT live can attest, hipster-baiting singles like “Electric Feel” are really just marketplace concessions that grant the band freedom to indulge in the 20-minute prog-rock jams that close out their sets.

Toronto psych-rock quartet The Hoa Hoa’s (pronounced “wah wahs”) aren’t yet popular enough to afford onstage confetti cannons, and they don’t punch each other nearly enough to warrant a documentary exposé. But their story could at least make for a decent cable-access reality TV-show premise chronicling DIY self-sufficiency and resourcefulness.

Three of their members — singers/guitarists Richard Gibson and Lee Brochu, and drummer Calvin Brown — live in the same house, Monkees-style, tucked behind the storefronts on Augusta in Kensington Market, a fortuitous location that puts them a stone’s throw from two things they really like: beer and gear (procured from Ronnie’s Local 069 and Paul’s Boutique, respectively). Their fourth member, bassist Famke Berkhout, is a tall blonde Dutch expat who also used to live in the house before “she smartened up and left,” Gibson jokes (though the fact that she and Brochu are exes would explain the real reason for her departure).

Over weeknight pints at Ronnie’s, The Hoa Hoa’s hardly exude the reckless abandon associated with the rock iconoclasts that they openly admire — like The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Fall, The Happy Mondays and The Stooges. For one, Brochu is a former hockey-scholarship recipient who now teaches Grade 9 English at Central Tech, while, as evinced by my pre-drinks visit to the band’s house, Brown is diligent about taking out the recycling. Never mind living up to some sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll fantasy; as the title of The Hoa Hoa’s stellar new second album attests, all they really care about is Pop/Drone/Pedals.

Fittingly for an album recorded entirely in the band’s living room-cum-studio, Pop/Drone/Pedals feels a lot like a night spent sitting around The Hoa Hoa’s turntable, dusting off records from all corners of psychedelic-rock history. The Hoa Hoa’s are old enough to have come of age in era when the rock canon was more clearly defined, but still young enough to appreciate the randomized nature of contemporary music consumption, in which the boundaries and codes that once separated various scenes and subgenres have dissolved.

“It doesn’t matter where you start when listening to music,” Brochu says. “All music is there to be enjoyed. I can’t see a 14-year-old kid getting into the stuff we’re into, but their taste eventually evolves. Maybe some kid starts off liking M.I.A. and then they’re into The Clash and then they’re into ’60s psychedelic garage bands.”

Adds Gibson: “Or some kid will be listening to Green Day, and then they’ll type ‘Green Day’ into Google and somehow a link to Iggy and the Stooges comes up, and they’ll be like, ‘Fuck Green Day! I want to find out more about Iggy and the Stooges!’”

Pop/Drone/Pedals works a similar connect-the-dots tack — the album is packed with overt references to ’60s-rock touchstones (the Nuggets nod “Grew Up on The Seeds”; Berkhout’s Nico-esque serenade “Waves”; the “Paint it Black” intro to “Flowers are Free”; a song called “Hey Joe” that isn’t that “Hey Joe”), but also charts the music’s mutation into late-’70s Brit post-punk (the 83-second rant “Intensity”) and early ’80s New Zealand indie-pop (The Chills-style swirl of “Vinyl Richie”).

The reliance on rhythmic repetition also points to the crossover between psychedelia and electronica. Brown mentions the “minimal and spooky grooves” of electro-rock pioneers The Silver Apples as a key influence, while Berkhout has rekindled her Euro-bred love of techno: “I feel like that influence is starting to come in more for me — I liked Sven Vath a lot, Richie Hawtin… even Tiesto! I used to go to Love Parade,” she laughs.

And, naturally, as with any exercise in record-collector rock, inside jokes abound: there’s a song called “Feels So Good” that strongly evokes the heroin blues of Spacemen 3 and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, two bands who, not coincidentally, also have songs called “Feels So Good.” And, as Brochu points out, the last song is called “Yaway,” because every psychedelic rock band “has to refer to Jesus at some point, right?”

“I like the idea of carrying on a tradition in rock ‘n’ roll,” Gibson says. “I’d rather do that than try to do something that’s brand new. To me, rock ‘n’ roll is the No. 1 most important thing in my life.”

To underscore that commitment, The Hoa Hoa’s (with the help of Gibson’s brother Robert) have formed their own label, Optical Sounds, to provide a local outpost for like-minded artists (like The Disraelis and Planet Creature), host parties and mobilize Anglophilic mods and rockers in the same way Davy Love’s Blow Up and Steve Poppyseed’s Sedated Sundays weeklies once did for a similar demographic 10 years ago. 

“The whole idea of the label is that bands can do whatever they want, and there’s zero contract,” Gibson says. “There’s not much money behind it. We just did it to draw some attention to not only our bands, but all of our friends’ bands, because nobody was helping us out.”

By Gibson’s own admission, The Hoa Hoa’s are “really poor,” and to date, their biggest windfalls have come in the form of isolated special moments — like the time they hosted visiting Spacemen 3 bassist Will Carruthers at their house, or their trip to South by Southwest last spring, where they got to perform “Grew Up on The Seeds” with the man whose band inspired the song, former Seeds growler Sky Saxon, mere months before Saxon died in June.

“It was magical,” Berkhout recounts. “Here’s a band you love so much, and to have something like that happen shortly before he passed away was a beautiful thing.”

The Hoa Hoa’s are planning a return to SXSW next spring, but aren’t in a position to do much more: “due to circumstances with money and all of our working commitments, we can’t do big tours,” Gibson says. “So we’ll just try to record a lot of new music.”

Which, for The Hoa Hoa’s, is a situation that actually presents them with the best of both worlds: the opportunity to take future trips without leaving their living room.