Minor Matter - 'Bed of Mercury'
Minor Matter
'Concept of a Knife', EP Release Show
3rd Ave. United Church, August 22, 213
...::...basementdusk...::...
My first encounter with Saskatoon's 3rd Ave United Church was marked by a sublimity inspired by labyrinthian halls, the echo of footsteps spilling through the ceiling over head, and the awe-inspired silence of a congregation wrapped in the warm and orchestral musings of Minor Matter.
This is, for all intents and purposes, a commentary on my personal experience of being a member in a community blessed with the good fortune of bathing in a musicality that, for myself at least, was transformative, inspiring, and incredibly endearing.
Music, as a truly an all encompassing art, stands to benefit from those elements that exist apart from the music itself: audience, venue, city, preconceptions of what to expect and of how one will walk away. This performance, in all of its empowering glory, was truly one of concomitant parts, the pieces of a whole standing alone, yet converging at the point where music becomes so much more than what the word itself entails. Dressed in the dim light of lamps and sheltered within the walls of a Church and congregation breathing a well-intentioned expectancy, Minor Matter emerged as the parishioners of an orchestral folk rooted in the connection between the interpretive and the communicative.
This group of musicians have combined to create with their music a fundamental earnest that is as palpable as it is ethereal. Their musicality is truly breathtaking, with members switching between percussive, brass, woodwind, and stringed elements, and then back again, all with a seamless ease indicative of their dedication to what it is that they are creating: an experience. In a live setting, this element of performative mastery is tantamount to the integrity of the music that is being performed; musicians functioning as masters of their craft, navigating their instrument in much the same way as a master whittler carves smooth and ordered objects out of jagged wood, recognizable as the end result of a life time of practice and manipulation.
And with this, Minor Matter exist as the whittlers of experience, drawing on their surroundings - audience and setting alike - to empower their music with the same sort of subtle beauty found in aged pews, or in the panes of coloured glass filtering the muted evening down onto the heads and into the laps of an audience that, for a very brief moment in their respective lives, felt the dawn and the dusk simultaneously. Minor Matter, for this congregate at least, created a moment stolen from the far too familiar banality and meandering characteristic of an uninspired day.
As a meaning-oriented species, we call on ourselves to draw inspiration and motivation from the externalities alongside and within which we exist. This performance was breathtakingly organic, as if the musicians and congregation themselves sprung forth from the foundation of the Church within which they coexisted, tangibilities bound together by the abstraction of experiencing something profoundly life-altering, a moment in which one feels the overwhelming surge and swell of emotion rising in their diaphragm, manifesting itself as the seconds-long silence between the end of a song and the appreciation shown by a cascading applause.
For myself, my experience at Minor Matter's EP release show was one that I will be lucky to experience again. I existed in that unfamiliar realm of a deep rooted appreciation for the those elements of life that tacitly inspire a recognition of what it means to be human, to feel, to be aware of our feeling, and to recognize this same sort of feeling in the faces of those next to us. In light of this, Minor Matter are manipulators of emotion, whittling our hard exteriors to expose the soft underbellies that we are far too reluctant to bare and to embrace.
After the show, the two blocks that I walked from the Church to my vehicle were serenely introspective. The rich, often visceral, vibrancy that so often escapes us came to me then, the trappings of emotive tonality captured forever in my ears and accompanied by the vision of a congregation spilling over with the same sort of awe and bewilderment that I myself experienced. The sounds of Minor Matter will resonate in the rafters of 3rd Ave United Church, finding home in the high ceilings and over the heads of congregations to come, that experience of enjoying and being utterly moved by music manifesting itself as the wood knots in banisters and as the echoes of footsteps traversing long hallways, meandering in the hope of one day finding familiar ears, echoes desperate for their source, forever present, the smoothing of jagged curves by experiencers of what it means to be human: to create, and to share in creation.
Minor Matter, you've whittled for me a soft underbelly.
Digital copies of Minor Matter's 'Concept of a Knife' can be purchased on their bandcamp page.
http://minormatter.bandcamp.com/
https://twitter.com/mnrmttr
https://www.facebook.com/MinorMatter?fref=ts
Photo Credit: Josh Robinson