WAVELENGTH 500 – NIGHT TWO
Thursday Feb. 11, 2010
@ Steam Whistle Brewery, 255 Bremner Blvd.
Holy Fuck
The Russian Futurists
Diamond Rings
Fembots
Professor Fingers
Doors 9pm • $18 adv
+ Projections by General Chaos Visuals
Festival pass $50 !
Advance tickets and passes available at:
Soundscapes, 572 College St.
Rotate This, 801 Queen W.
Online at GalleryAC.com
From Feb. 10th to 14th, 2010, the Wavelength music series celebrates its 10th birthday and 500th show with Wavelength 500, a festival of independent music featuring 25 bands playing over 5 nights at 5 different venues. WL 500 will look back over a decade of Wavelength and Toronto music scene history, featuring some big names that started small at Wavelength, some dearly departed bands reuniting for this occasion, and some of the best new acts of 2009.
We will also be publishing a special 10th Anniversary Festival Program Guide to coincide with Wavelength 500. Copies will be available at Soundscapes and Rotate This as of Tuesday, Feb. 9.
Feb. 14th also marks the end of the weekly Sunday night incarnation of the Wavelength music series. This is not the end of Wavelength, though. We plan to relaunch the series in a new monthly format in the spring.
Holy Fuck
Back in the early days of our stay at Sneaky Dee’s, we made friends with a Wavelength regular named Brian Borcherdt — an enthusiastic singer/songwriter who also helped run a record label called Dependent Music that had started up in his hometown of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Brian had recorded a beautiful EP of his solo songs with über-producer Dave Newfeld, but he felt they were too personal to play live. Instead, he offered us two other projects — one, a Devo-ish rock band called Hot Carl, in which every member was named “Hot Carl” (and I dare you to Google “Hot Carl”), the other an experimental project that involved running sound loops through 35mm film synchronizers. I don’t think anyone at Holy Fuck’s debut performance in the winter of ’03 at WL would have suspected that this provocatively named yet nerdy instrumental band would go on to scale such great heights. Holy Fuck would go on to conquer Coachella, SXSW, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Lollapalooza, Glastonbury and countless other festival stages around the world. They were shortlisted for the Polaris Prize for their 2007 LP, and were even at the centre of a political scandal when the Conservatives cut a funding program because of their naughty name. But worldly successes aside, HF remain masters of live, laptop-free electronica, bringing experimentation and improvisation to the masses and rocking block parties of any size.
The Russian Futurists
The Russian Futurists have always been a unique beast in Toronto. They were originally a solo project for Cornwall, Ontario native Matt Hart. An odd distortion of twee electro pop with a distinct production aesthetic, the not-yet-a-band had a number of high-profile early supporters, including members of R.E.M. and Blur, as well as Patti Schmidt of the influential and now sadly defunct
CBC radio show Brave New Waves. It quickly caught on and the solo show turned into a full band with a hefty touring schedule. But despite his/their/its success and being around for a decade now there isn’t another project locally or elsewhere to which you could make a strong aesthetic connection. Although a recent international trend of fuzzed-out psych-pop like Panda Bear is a close approximation, TRF remain without equal.
Diamond Rings
Diamond Rings is the future. John O’Regan, the frontman for Guelph rock band The D’urbervilles, made some sweet acoustic guitar songs and played a few shows with his friends. Then he and videographer/man-about-town Colin Medley made a cute little video of O’Regan glammed out and greenscreened, dancing in front of the Toronto skyline with a newly revamped, lo-fi electro version of a song and posted it to YouTube. Soon enough Pitchfork mentioned they liked it and… BOOM! Now the guy is packing clubs and opening for Final Fantasy. This is how it works now, folks. Of course it helps that the music is well deserving of rocketing to notoriety, with some of the sweetest electro-pop you’ve ever heard, with lyrics like “If you ever wonder how we keep from going under it’s because we find another reason not to give in/ And even though we may not get to where we want to go I do believe that we both know it don’t matter in the end.” If you have a love of either community or irony, it’s impossible not to get behind that.
Fembots
Fembots is the brainchild of Dave Mackinnon and Brian Poirier, who were part of the alt-rock band Dig Circus in the early ‘90s and a shortlived project called Hummer with Ron Hawkins later that decade. In 2000 they debuted as a duo under the name Fembots, an alt-roots band that experimented with found objects, tape loops, reel-to-reels, power tools and whatever else they could find. When they released their first album, Mucho Cuidado that same year, they received rave reviews and were now anointed with the title “junk-folk,” reflective of the make-something-from-nothing vibe that permeated the local scene in the early part of the decade. Their two following albums, 2003’s Small Town Murder Scene and 2005’s The City, evolved as the scene did, becoming noticeably less junky, swapping out the rustic, rough-around-the-edges tinkering with strings and harmonies and using more straightforward instrumentation. Their last album, ‘08’s Calling Out, references their junk-shop past with home-made instruments forming a gritty, supportive percussive layer underneath their trademark haunting and heartbreaking roots-folk. It’s a commitment to noodling and not playing it safe that has come to define the band over the last ten years, and when you hear Mackinnon croon “Good days, I feel them coming on again,” you can’t help but wonder where they’ll go next.
Professor Fingers
With the term “DJ” bastardized by anyone with an iPod, actual DJ artists are a rare sight and sound, so it’s significant and highly accurate when Cheldon Paterson labels himself a “turntable musician.” He should be calling himself a “turntable artist,” since the music he makes as Professor Fingers is currently Toronto’s most inventive approach to spinning wax. Building on the Scatterpopia sound of his duo InsideAMind, Professor Fingers’ solo work harkens back to the ‘90s creative peak of Ninja Tune luminaries DJ Food, Amon Tobin and DJ Krush. With a sound
dark and brooding, or fantastical and wondrous, Professor Fingers creates fresh worlds in every track. Fingers also embraces live performance, putting on a show that includes
costumes and props, scripted theatrics and storytelling. Between himself and his music, Professor Fingers engages you to join in the fun and get up close where you can witness the turntablist’s technique but also the pure magic. His willingness to engage the audience has allowed him to cross Toronto’s live music communities and he can be seen just as comfortable on an underground hip-hop bill or between a noise punk band and a folk orchestra. With his self-produced debut EP Superorganism out now and a string of local shows and touring, it’ll be a hectic year for Professor Fingers as the rest of the music community catches up to his waxing wizardry.
