WAVELENGTH 500 – NIGHT ONE
Wednesday Feb. 10, 2010
@ The Music Gallery, 197 John St.
Bruce Peninsula
Evening Hymns
Pony Da Look
Deep Dark United
Canaille
Doors 9pm • $12 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.
Bruce Peninsula
Embarking on their musical adventure in 2006, Bruce Peninsula started out not as a band set on conquering Toronto and beyond, but as a couple of close friends sharing coffee and a love of old-time folk hymns. That sensibility remains the core component of Bruce Peninsula’s power and passion four years later, now with a membership swelling up to 15 performers, and sold-out
shows across Canada. Developing a distinct vocal-centric songcraft, Bruce Peninsula premiered as a heart-stirring beast warming rock clubs, churches, halls, and living rooms. From original friends Matt Cully and Misha Bower, their ever-evolving membership has grown to include
Neil Haverty, Steve McKay, Andrew Barker, Kari Peddle, Daniela Gesundheit, Tamara Lindeman, and many more. As members came and went, the band’s sound emerged containing touches of prog and math rock, jazzy licks, spiritual anthems, and an apocalyptic hope filtered through the lead guttural voices of Neil, Matt and Misha. As an audience member at any Bruce Peninsula show, you feel sincerely welcomed to a family feast and fireside seduction.
After a 2009 packed with 51 live shows, a self-released full-length record and an even bigger family of musicians to call on, Bruce Peninsula are set to bring their caravan to the rest of the world in this new decade.
Evening Hymns
Sometimes it can be difficult to talk about a band without talking about the community surrounding it. Toronto is known for its pockets, bands that play with each other, record with each other and tour with each other. Tranzac champion Stuart Duncan’s record label Out Of This Spark is home to a number of local bands with a like-minded aesthetic: Ohbijou, The Wooden Sky, Timber Timbre, Forest City Lovers. The Evening Hymns apple doesn’t fall far from that tree. Recently moving to Toronto from Peterborough, Ontario, Evening Hymns is the solo project of Jonas Bonnetta, who gains support both live and on album from a number of the OOTS community. His recently released second album, Spirit Guides, made a lot of “top” lists at the end of 2009, and contains the kind of music that seems best suited for a church in winter: delicate and warm with orchestral flourishes that support but never dominate. A few years ago there was a protracted discussion on 20hz.ca about
the difficulties of “beautiful music” finding an audience. Evening Hymns and the rest of the OOTS crew are proving those troubles are a thing of the past.
Pony Da Look
Dirty nails scratching at your back door. A one-eyed woman weaver from the flatlands of Saskatchewan. Sorcerers, forcefields and wishsticks; Hell, lies and fear — Pony da Look have always been more like Gothic fiction brought to life than just another band. Though critics have tried in vain to draw comparisons — to everyone from the B-52s to the Raincoats to Kraftwerk to ABBA — they are
one of the most singular Toronto groups of the decade. First coming to our attention when (if memory serves) WL co-founder Derek Westerholm came across a copy of their self-titled, self-released 2001 debut CD while hosting No Beat Radio on CIUT, Pony da Look took the first half of the decade by storm, winning over T.O. audiences with their archly dour, new wave-inspired drama-pop, and the possessed stage presence of frontwoman Amy Bowles. After the band took some time off for two members to start families, PDL returned in 2008 with their third album, Shattered Dimensions, released on Sloan’s resurrected indie label murderecords. Bowles and keyboardists Temple Bates and Catherine Stockhausen are now joined by Rob Gordon, formerly of From Fiction and Les Mouches, who replaces Rebecca Mendoza on the drum kit. In another dimension, Pony da Look are famous pop stars; in this one, this band started by two visuals artists, a dancer and a photographer/TV producer are happy to just exist — and we are thrilled that they have for almost a decade.
Deep Dark United
Deep Dark United’s live debut may or may not have been at Wavelength during our very first summer of Sunday night shows, back at our long-lost original home of Ted’s Wrecking Yard. Either way, it still remains one of the most jaw-dropping sets in Wavelength memory, and since then DDU have been members of our extended family — this festival show will mark their seventh WL appearance. Evolving out of singer/songwriter Alex Lukashevky’s ‘90s group Fell Gang, DDU are another one of those uniquely “uncategorizable” bands who are a genre unto themselves,
with Lukashevsky drawing upon folk, blues, pop, jazz, and anything else his ear fancies to create his stirring and memorable canon. Since the days of Ancient, their 2004 album for Blocks, DDU’s membership has included free-improv players Ryan Driver, Nick Fraser, Tania Gill and Brodie West, and accordingly their music has become more ephemeral — but if you’re lucky, you may still hear old anthems like “Ultimatum” or “Downhill is Downtown.” I guess this is the point where I should inevitably mention that Lukashevsky’s fans include Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew (who called Alex “one of the best songwriters Canada’s ever been blessed with”) and Owen Pallett, who released an entire Final Fantasy EP of Lukashevsky covers entitled Plays to Please.
Canaille
Jeremy Strachan got his new quintet Canaille off the ground within what seemed like hours of his Feuermusik partner Gus Weinkauf getting on the train for Montreal and grad school. Playing their first show in the summer of 2008, Canaille quickly became one of Toronto’s most exciting contemporary jazz groups. Inspired by the space-age swing of Sun Ra, reed-man and former Rocket-man (Rockets Red Glare, that is) Strachan assembled a heavy line-up of players: Muskox’s Mike Smith (bass), I Have Eaten the City’s Colin Fisher (tenor sax), Nick Buligan (trumpet) and Brandon
Valdivia, who has since been replaced on percussion by Vancouver escapee Dan Gaucher, also of Stop Time and Fond of Tigers. This line-up of Canaille— which means “riff-riff” en français — entered 6 Nassau Studios in Kensington Market to record the sessions with engineer Jeff McMurrich that led to the release of Potential Things on Standard Form Printing & Publishing this past fall — a record that Eye Weekly’s Dave Morris called “a welcome salvo in the fight against jazz’s stultification.” Amen to that.
