Wavelength Presents: A Fundraiser for the Music Gallery + Special Addition to the Images Festival
UPDATED INFO! NEW VENUE! NOW ONE NIGHT ONLY!
ADVANCE TICKETS NOW TOTALLY SOLD OUT!
Tuesday April 8th, 2008
JENS LEKMAN
FINAL FANTASY
Both with visuals by STEPHANIE COMILANG
+ KATIE STELMANIS with guest ZEESY POWERS on the “Light Organ”
New venue: The Great Hall, 1087 Queen W.
Doors 8pm, concert 9pm
There MAY be a small number available at the door for $25
(All tickets previously purchased for April 7 & 8 at the Music Gallery WILL be honoured for April 8 at the Great Hall!!! Please bring your will-call info for the night you bought tickets for.)
Due to both overwhelming demand and scheduling changes, Jens Lekman’s two-night stand at the Music Gallery (which sold out in a just a few days) has been moved and consolidated into one night (April 8) at the Great Hall — a homecoming of sorts, since the building at 1087 Queen West was home to the Music Gallery during the 1980’s. This show will still be co-headlined by Final Fantasy, a.k.a. Owen Pallett, violin-looping sensation and Polaris Prize winner. Final Fantasy overhead projection artist Stephanie Comilang will create original visuals for Lekman both nights, as well as Final Fantasy’s set. Monday night’s original opener Katie Stelmanis, Blocks Recording Club’s latest vocal sensation, will be the third act on this bill, still performing with special guest, visual artist Zeesy Powers performing on the “Light Organ.”
Wavelength, Images Festival and the Music Gallery join forces to present two nights with Swedish indie-pop sensation Jens Lekman, taking a detour from a U.S. tour to spend some time in a city that is like a second home to him. Lekman has had a deep connection with this city’s independent arts scene since striking up a friendship with members of The Hidden Cameras during a European tour. In 2005, he performed a now-legendary show at the Music Gallery along with live visuals by artist Shary Boyle, as well as playing at the Wavelength series earlier that same year and bringing the audience out into the street with him for an encore.
*** NOTE TO EXISTING TICKET HOLDERS: All existing orders — for both April 7 and 8 — will be honoured at the new event. If you cannot attend, full refunds are available by contacting TicketWeb Canada Customer Service at 1-888-222-6608. Please have your order confirmation number ready. Deadline to request a refund is Friday April 4, 2008. If you’ve had printed tickets sent to you by mail your tickets will have to be returned before your refund can be processed.
Biographies
Stephanie Comilang is a romantic and realist who lives and works in Toronto. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design and has since been in collaboration with a number of artists. On her completion of school, she started touring Europe and North America extensively with Final Fantasy accompanying Owen Pallett and his violin with live shadows and drawings on the overhead projector. Together they have played both garages with mattresses as seating and big Scandinavian concert halls. She most recently directed a meta-trilogy of music videos for Final Fantasy, which can be seen on TV and your computer. Stephanie has also collaborated with experimental theatre company Mammalian Diving Reflex on Diplomatic Immunities researching and presenting in Lahore, Pakistan for the World Performing Arts Festival last November. She is working out logistics for their next collaboration entitled Parkdale vs. Queen West. She is currently mapping out a puppet show about growing up with an Elvis impersonator father entitled Children of the King.
Jens Lekman
Hailing from Gothenburg, Sweden, singer/songwriter Jens Lekman’s music can be described as guitar-based pop with heavy use of samples, strings and ukelele; his lyrics are often witty, romantic, and melancholic. His work is often compared to that of Stephin Merritt (Magnetic Fields), Jonathan Richman and Morrissey. Lekman recorded and released much of his material privately from 2000 to 2003 on CD-R. His self-released 7″ vinyl EP Maple Leaves caused a big stir in 2003. The songs “Maple Leaves” and “Black Cab” were heavily played on Swedish national radio. He soon signed a contract with the American label Secretly Canadian for releases outside of Sweden. Heavy touring and his debut album soon followed. His first album When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog was released in 2004. The album attracted attention among the alternative music press in both Europe and the US. The song “You Are The Light” was a successful radio hit, and a video received some rotation in the Nordic MTV and ZTV. In June 2005, a compilation CD of Jens’ first three EPs, with extra tracks, was released as Oh You’re So Silent Jens. His latest album, Night Falls Over Kortedala, was released in October 2007, and appeared on many lists for the best albums that year.
Final Fantasy
Owen Pallett has written music his entire life, including scoring a videogame at the age of 12, three short films by 16, and two operas by 21. Throughout his teens, Owen devoted most of his time to new classical composition and learning the violin. Once he moved to Toronto, he began playing with several local acts, including The Hidden Cameras, Picastro, and Jim Guthrie. At the encouragement of Blocks Recording Club founder Steve Kado, Owen started pursuing his own pop music interests with “panic folk” band Les Mouches. Owen’s violin-looping project made its debut in April 2004, and was hastily named Final Fantasy, in tribute to the melodramatic videogame series. Final Fantasy’s debut album Has A Good Home was released in April 2005. The sophomore album, He Poos Clouds, was released a year later, and written and arranged entirely for string quartet. Canadian journalists voted and awarded it the inaugural Polaris Prize for best Canadian full-length album. Despite the increasing scale of Final Fantasy’s recorded output, the live shows have remained solo outings, with Owen singing over frantically layered violin and piano. Stephanie Comilang accompanies Owen using an overhead projector to create live films and shadow show. They’ve played over a thousand shows across the globe, from garages to enormous concert halls. Final Fantasy was most recently invited to play at a gala in New York City honouring Laurie Anderson on her 60th birthday. Owen is currently working on a series of conjoined releases that contain narratives that are set in the fictional kingdom of Spectrum, in which he is the main deity.
Katis Stelmanis
The drama of Kate Bush and Toyah Wilcox mixed with the sturm and drang of Diamanda Galas and the pop bubbles of Lene Lovich shouldn’t make much sense, but in the world of Toronto’s Katie Stelmanis it comes together. Possessed of a classically trained voice that stuns at 10 paces, Stelmanis’ arsenal is simple — piano and MIDI noise percolations shape simple songs that subtly grow into powerful, cathartic moments. Yet for all her compositional savvy, Stelmanis’ manner is unpretentious and rooted in her experience as a member of the post-punk trio Galaxy and the indie-folk collective, Bruce Peninsula. Her CD Join Us may be an assured, loud and primal debut but Stelmanis winks with a closing cover of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” Without any irony, she strips the chestnut down to frame and gears and explosively, profoundly makes it her own.
Zeesy Powers is a visual and performance artist and long-time collaborator of Katie Stelmanis, working together on such projects as The Beast and beginningmiddleend for FADO’s emerging artists series. The light organ is her first foray into collaborative musical electronics. This fall will see the premier of their newest collaboration, The Ghost, a projection performance epic based on cartoons, the Bible and 8-bit video games. Zeesy maintains a website at zeesypowers.com, where she occasionally spills the beans.
