Owen Pallet on Les Mouches reunion

ˆThis week, Wavelength Music celebrates its anniversary with a weekend festival. They do this every year. This year, however, being the 20th anniversary—along with current pillars (Haviah Mighty, Kaia Kater), some Montreal imports (Yves Jarvis, Little Scream, Lou Phelps) and plenty of largely unknown local talent that has always been their focus—they’ve pulled in some ringers from their earliest years. 

Electro duo LAL are performing their 2000 album Corners. Sandro Perri, a consistent presence in Wavelength circles from the beginning, put out two of his most acclaimed records in the last two years. Hidden Cameras, a band who arguably helped launched the so-called Torontopia scene of the early 2000s, makes an extremely rare local appearance; bandleader Joel Gibb decamped to Berlin years ago.

The most interesting Wavelength act of the weekend, however, might be Les Mouches. This band only lasted a year, 2003-04, before Owen Pallett became better known to the world as Final Fantasy and as a contributor to Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Drummer Rob Gordon also played with From Fiction, who recorded an album with Steve Albini and were signed to Last Gang. Guitarist Matt Smith went on to perform as Prince Nifty. Together, they were a combustible unit whose songs shifted between delicate beauty and jarring explosions, with lyrics filled with longing, sexual confusion and crude jokes. 

There was nothing remotely commercial about Les Mouches, even though they covered a Carpenters song on 2003’s Blood Orgy EP. It’s often uncomfortable listening. But it’s undeniably unique. And it left enough of an impression that the sole full-length, 2004’s You’re Worth More to Me Than 1,000 Christians, was reissued on vinyl in 2015. 

I talked to Owen Pallett this week about many things, for another project; this excerpt is just about Les Mouches, then and now.

What was the genesis of Les Mouches?

After I graduated [from University of Toronto's music program], I wanted to record some songs I had written. I was involved with Hidden Cameras, I was dating Gentleman Reg, and I was friends with a lot of Three Gut people, so I decided to record with Andy Magoffin in London [who made albums for all those people]. I wrote brass arrangements and recorded what I called The Polite Album. Nobody heard it. I think I burned five copies, but [Blocks Recording Club’s] Steve Kado somehow had one. He came into the Free Times Café where I was working, and said, ‘Dude, your album is awesome!’ He was so excited. I was playing some solo shows but it wasn’t doing anything for me. I wanted to start a band. I had seen Matt Smith play a set at the Free Times, doing improv, with a guy name Dane who has since passed away, and Owen Marchildon, who would later be in From Fiction with Rob Gordon. I had known Rob in second year. I don’t remember the early rehearsals that well. [Matt and Rob and I] had long discussions about how we wanted the music to be focused on epiphanies. There would be these moments where it would all make sense. We were all really into Xiu Xiu, especially me, and it was changing the way I wrote lyrics.

You had said you wanted Les Mouches to sound like U.S. Maple meets the Carpenters.

Exactly. That was basically it. We were trying to have that free, Storm and Stress aesthetic, but have it married to—not necessarily conventional songwriting, but really pretty songs. Our first show as a trio was April 21, 2003. It was in Guelph. Our second show was in Toronto with Lungbutter. We started playing a bunch. I didn’t have a concept of what our fan base was, but by the time 1,000 Christians came out we filled the Music Gallery until it was beyond packed. We asked everyone to wear white clothing—and they all did! Matt Smith said, ‘Thank you all for wearing white. Congratulations! You’re all racist!’ (laughs)

And Bell Orchestre opened?

Yes, and Wooly Leaves.

How did you know Bell Orchestre? Had you even met Arcade Fire by that point?

I had met Arcade Fire through Jim Guthrie. [Jim’s band opened for them at the El Mocambo in January 2003.] I remember Regine saying, ‘Bell Orchestre is my favourite band on the planet.’ I didn’t know Sarah [Neufeld] very well at all. Richie [Parry] I kind of knew. But I mostly was just friends with Win and Regine, and not close friends at that point.

Richie wasn’t even really part of the band yet. He wasn’t until spring 03.

It was Bell Orchestre’s first show in Toronto. Then we put out Blood Orgy around Xmas 2003. Those songs were done in the same session as the songs for 1,000 Christians; there was one other session where I did the songs with brass on them. There’s one Matt Smith song we left out because it just didn’t fit on either release, which is too bad because it’s an amazing song. Then we wanted to tour, but I didn’t know anything about touring or how it worked.

Did you tour much with the Cameras, or just around southern Ontario?

I toured Europe with the Cameras in 2003, after Smell of Our Own came out. I didn’t know how DIY touring worked. With the Cameras, we had a van, a tour manager, hotels, it was all set up. But I wanted to book shows for Les Mouches. I was also playing with Liz Hysen in Picastro and she was always talking about how she booked her own tours. Reg was always talking about how he booked his own tours. So we booked five dates. But we never played anywhere other than Guelph, Toronto and Montreal. We opened a few Montreal shows for Arcade Fire in the spring of 04, in the lead-up to Funeral’s release, at the Corona Theatre. But our last show was [in September 04] at a Pop Montreal showcase for Blocks, at Casa del Popolo. That was with Hank, maybe Barcelona Pavilion. The band had a second recording session for a pile of new songs we’d written. Not enough for an album, but I thought we could make things work with four songs that were in our set. We thought we could do more writing in the studio, but it went really bad.

Do you think the creative partnership had just run its course?

No, not at all. We just went into the studio with four or five songs, and afterwards we were just feeling an ennui. We did it at Tantramar Farm [outside Guelph], where they used to have Track and Field. While I was up there, I was wearing this fanny pack that had my birth certificate and my passport and everything. This was a week before we were supposed to go on tour. I lost the fanny pack, and I had no ID and no way of getting anywhere, so we scuttled the tour. I was pretty depressed about it. This was also the summer I had no money. I was also playing more Final Fantasy shows, which had started that spring. In August, or late July, that I played CineCycle and Stuart McLean [of the Vinyl Café] was there. He said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ I said, ‘I actually need a job. If you know of any, let me know.’ He hired me on the spot as a music programmer. I did a really fucking good job.

No job interview, nothing?

I think he just said, ‘What would you program on this show?’ I sent him some stuff, and he said I was hired. I was now working at the CBC and loving it, making money for the first time in my life. Not a ton of money, but certainly more than I’d ever made. From Fiction were doing their thing. Rob was mad at me for a reason I still don’t know. It was hard to book rehearsals and play shows. After that Pop Montreal show, Rob was so focused on From Fiction [who had recorded with Steve Albini and signed to Last Gang]. By the end of the year, Arcade Fire said they were going to do their heroic, life-changing US tour, and asked if Les Mouches were interested in opening. I said, ‘You know what? I want to bring my solo project instead—which you guys haven’t heard, but trust me.’ I showed up at the Great American Music Hall and hadn’t told them that I’d broken my ankle at an AIDS Wolf show. I show up with a cane and a walking cast, got up and played my set with my looping pedal on a stool, and I brought the house down. It was great. After that, Les Mouches really drifted apart. I didn’t really understand the resonance that band had. It was a surprise to me that [Deep Dark United's] Alex Lukashevsky liked it, [Rockets Red Glare's] Evan Clarke liked it, these people I thought were way cooler than I was, and fantastic musicians. I don’t think I got it at the time.

One of the best things about that band was the tension in the music.

Oddly enough, we never felt at odds with each other on a musical level. Rob and Matt always played exactly what was necessary. Robbie tried to explain it to me once. He told me his parents preferred the music he made with From Fiction, only because they could understand it.

Because it’s more linear?

It’s aggressive and complicated. But when they were confronted with Les Mouches music, they were like, ‘We don’t get this.’ After Blood Orgy came out, his dad used to make fun of him by quoting Les Mouches lyrics at the dinner table. He’s say, ‘Well, Robbie, you know, I never had a woman inside my dick.’

That’s an interesting parental dynamic.

I think they were like, ‘You’re in a gay band, Robbie!’ But it’s fine. I love his parents. My parents definitely didn’t get Les Mouches.

It’s not music for parents!

My stepfather had a very negative reaction to it. I think my mom told me that after hearing it he had to lie down or something. He went to my mom and said, ‘I think Owen may be seriously disturbed.’ My mom was like, ‘Oh, really!’ Then she listened to the record and said, ‘Nick, he’s joking! These are fucking jokes!’ Which was true. I was making fun of this shit.

What were you making fun of?

Depends, on song to song. ‘Daddy Needs a Daddy’ is making fun of tropes of gay male desire, while at the same time being very emotional. ‘I want to hold him in my arms and cradle him until his hair turns grey.’ That was pretty much how I felt about who I was falling in love with. ‘Carload of Whatever’ was satirizing bugchasers, which I didn’t know was a thing until I met one.

One of my favourite musical moments is the string arrangement on “Divorce the Ones You Love.”

Oh, really? I think it’s annoying. I don’t have a wide breadth of knowledge of classical music, compared to most classical music heads, but certain works really resonate with me. One of those is Charles Ives’s ‘The Unanswered Question.’ The backdrop of plaintive string chords, with these increasingly aberrant woodwind gestures, really had a profound effect on me. The beginning of ‘Divorce the Ones You Love’ is meant to recall that a bit, this very bucolic guitar thing with increasingly violent string gestures that try to interrupt this stillness.

How do you feel about playing this music now?

There are certain songs I’m not going to play, because I don’t think there’s much to commend them. A song like ‘Luci on Her Birthday’ I’m kind of amazed exists. That may be the fifth song I ever wrote. It’s on The Polite Album. It’s exquisitely sad now, when I listen to it. Other songs, I’m really into and really proud of. ‘Love Song to an Empty Room’ in particular I think is great. ‘Requiem to the Victims of Frankfurt’ I’m going to be playing at the Wavelength show—we haven’t played it since 2004—I’m really excited about. It’s so fun to sing this shit, like ‘My dream has a title: cunt marries asshole.’ It’s like—I don’t know. Maybe they’re just bad jokes, like Tim Kinsella in Joan of Arc. But I have a lot of affection for it.

For me, that music is very much situated in that time, which held great possibility. It was either you or Kado who once told me that it was a time of ideas: some projects were better ideas than they were bands, but they were great ideas so it worked. And of course there were also great ideas that were also great bands. There was an audacity to try things, musically or lyrically.

The environment was perfect. Rent in Toronto was so reasonable—

Okay, let's talk about that magical time in real terms. What were you paying?

At 19 Major, I was paying $350 for one room of five. I then moved into a larger room there and paid $400. Then $400 on Queen Street ... Later, [then-boyfriend] Patrick and I moved into a place at Dupont and Ossington, the building Will Munro lived in. Team Macho was based there. We were paying somewhere around $1,200. So rent was reasonable. We had also had the best form of social media back then, which was message boards. People were getting involved in local discourse. Twitter is too broad and international. Message boards were magical. I still post on message boards. It’s how my brain wants to interact with the outside world. I was there very early on in the Toronto message board thing: Anti Antenna.

That was before StillePost.

Anti Antenna was before Secret Arcade, which was before 20hz, which then became StillePost.

Anti Antenna was also a label, wasn’t it?

Yes. Post-rock stuff. The only people I knew posting there were [Feuermusik's] Jeremy Strachan and Shaw-Han Liem [I Am Robot and Proud]. And Jonny [Dovercourt], but I didn’t really know him then. StillePost became a hotbed of discussion. Everybody was on it. Just like Facebook would be today, but this was a much more interesting place because everything was compartmentalized.  It was not designed to be addictive, but meant to accessorize real-life social experiences. Facebook is designed to addict the consumer, to keep you at your computer. Message boards were not. On top of that, there was this new influx of attention. And people were still making money. If you put out a shitty CD and folded it together yourself, you could easily make $2,000 by selling 200 of them. It was a reliable source of instant gratification and income. Blocks made sense at the time. In 2004, we were having discussions about if we should put our stuff up on iTunes, and I was a vociferous ‘no’! I believed the packaging was part of it. I couldn’t foresee that 10 years down the line there would be no CD drives on laptops. I mean, I just recently took my CDs to a store, got money for the ones they wanted, and threw the rest out. Thousands of dollars worth! I kept the ones I play on, and my friends’ CDs, but I threw out my deluxe edition of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It had a really nice booklet! But I don’t have anywhere to store it anymore.

Les Mouches’ two CD releases on Blocks Recording Club are out of print, although 1,000 Christians received a 500-copy limited-edition vinyl reissue on Orchid Tapes in 2015. Bandcamp link here.

Full lineup and details for Wavelength's 20th anniversary weekend festival, Feb 13-16, can be found here. 

Del Bel, Last Ex

There’s no reason for Torontonians not to miss this weekend’s Wavelength 15 festival—unless, of course, you’re old enough to remember Wavelength back in 2000 and you are now discovering that it’s just as hard to get babysitting on Valentine’s Day as it would be on Christmas Eve. (Maybe that’s just me.) Tonight’s show at Sneaky Dee’s features the reunited Controller Controller and the legendary Art Bergmann, Laura Barrett, More or Les and even more (or less). Sunday’s show at the Garrison has Fresh Snow, New Fries and Mozart’s Sister. But Saturday at the Polish Combatants Hall is the kicker: Lowell, the Acorn, Ginla, and these two bands:

Del Bel – In My Solitude (Missed Connection)

If you spent the ’90s watching Twin Peaks and listening to Portishead, this is the band for you. Toronto-Guelph ensemble Del Bel are drenched in hot-buttered soul, Duane Eddy twang and torch song melodrama set to minor keys. Brass, woodwinds and vintage organs fill out the texture while the rhythm section sinks into deep grooves that sound like RZA beats slowed to a crawl, and singer Lisa Conway coos like a fairy-tale heroine lost in the deepest, darkest woods.

All these elements were in play on the band’s first album as well, but the production values here have stepped up considerably, especially the creepy guitar tones, drenched in reverb, and all the other tiny, tasty bits that add to the overall ambiance. Sole complaint: if you’ve heard one Del Bel song, you’ve heard them all. Not that there’s anything wrong with a mood album—especially a mood as carefully constructed as this one.

Download: “In My Solitude,” “Firebox,” “The Stallion”

Last Ex – s/t (Constellation)

Taylor Kirk, the man behind Timber Timbre, has an incredible band behind him that keeps getting better—that was more than evident on 2014’s Hot Dreams and the following tour (check their headlining performance at Massey Hall online, you won’t regret it). So what does that band do in their spare time, when they’re not being employed by Kirk to creep on creepin’ on, when they’re not encumbered by dread and dirt and downright weirdness? Why, they get creepier and drearier and dirtier and weirder, of course.

Last Ex could certainly be seen as merely an album of Timber Timbre instrumentals. But that also frees it up: without a reliance on Kirk’s personality to sell the music—and his occasionally hokey Halloween-y lyrics—the music is allowed to be evocative on its own terms. So elements of a David Lynchian view of ’50s music are still there, but this time it’s filtered through what sounds like a ’70s German experimental rock band stranded in the Arizona desert. Everything here sounds a bit off, a bit wobbly, in tone and texture and even in tape—it sounds like old, analog reel-to-reels were left out in the sun a bit too long. It’s not surprising to learn that this music originated as a score for a since-abandoned film.

Download: “Hotel Blues,” “It’s Not Chris,” “Nell’s Theme”

Wavelength 500

When a 10-year institution throws an anniversary party with reunions and reflections galore, it can easily be accused of nostalgia.

But at Wavelength 500—the five-day festival marking the end of the Toronto weekly music series that, it has been argued, changed the way the city’s music scene saw itself—there was no looking back, especially when the MC of the party was constantly—and I do mean constantly—hectoring the audience to be a part of the future, and demanding that they all go home and start bands.

Carl Wilson wrote in the Globe and Mail last Friday that Wavelength had become “a solution without a problem.” The problem in 2000 was a serious inertia in the Toronto music scene, a time when rock’n’roll was dead as a genre, the music industry was starting to collapse, and no one even seemed that interested in live music of any kind anymore. Cut to 2010, and one finds that Toronto is constantly opening new venues, not shuttering them, and there’s no shortage of live audiences for every possible genre. And furthermore, even our fringe artists—like the incredibly prolific doomcore guitarist Aidan Baker of Nadja—get international acclaim, long ago freed from the albatross of attempting to crack some pre-conceived notion of what Canadian culture was or should be.

And so the challenge of carefully curating three bands every Sunday night became a burden for the four men who were in charge of Wavelength in its final years, and they decided to retire that aspect of the project and focus on larger events. And what better way to kick off a retirement party, than with a five-night-five-venue-five-bands-a-night extravaganza?

I was lucky enough to be at every show, though I can’t claim to have seen every act that played. While I saw amazing sets by Bruce Peninsula, Diamond Rings, Professor Fingers, Holy Fuck, the Bicycles, the Constantines and more, it was the final night, the Sunday at the Garrison, that answered the eternal question: What Does It All Mean?

Having missed the first act, Boars, the evening then began with two bands that played the first Wavelength ever in February 2000: Neck and Mean Red Spiders. I’d never heard the former; I remember only that I was never impressed with the latter. Though both are obviously beloved by the Wavelength crew—and Jonny Dovercourt played bass in Neck—it became obvious to me that both bands were part of the problem of Toronto in the late ’90s, and what Wavelength’s children eventually sought out to destroy: music that was non-descript, no fun and missing soul. (To be fair, I also loathe the act each is compared to respectively: Mission of Burma and My Bloody Valentine.) Both bands were interminable. Both were merely “there,” not so terrible that I felt I had to leave the room. If they had made me angry, I would have respected them more.

(If such criticism sounds harsh and antithetical to the whole point of Wavelength, I’ll admit that it is. And in the interest of fairness, two other bands that drove me crazy were the rapturously received reunions of From Fiction and Rockets Red Glare, even though I have maximum respect for individual musicians in each of those bands.)

Ultimately, it was the contrast with what followed on the rest of this closing night that illuminated the changes that had happened in Toronto during Wavelength’s reign.

Barcelona Pavilion predated the short-lived tempest-in-a-teapot scene controversy known as the “Bad Bands Revolution” of 2006, though they surely inspired much of it. As they insisted on the short, sharp call for a “New Materiology,” “NEEDS MUST DICTATE FORM.” Singing and screaming about semiotics in German and English over primitive programming and two bass guitars, they dared to ask the one question that plagued Toronto, aka what hip-hop heads call the “screwface capital”: “How Are You People Going To Have Fun If None Of You People Ever Participate?”

Steve Kado and Maggie MacDonald were Hidden Cameras who were itching to unleash their supersized personalities outside the confines of the Cameras’ one-man operation, hence spawning Barcelona Pavilion. Kat Gligorijevic was a fan swept in the new spirit of Toronto at the turn of the decade. Ben Stimpson was recruited because Kado thought it would be funny to have his friend attach a laptop to a strap (like a strolling ballpark food vendor) and stand on stage and do nothing. Gligorijevic and Stimpson were stoic and nerdy cute; MacDonald and Kado were white hot and combustible, hilarious loudmouths and strong personalities who eventually had a (perhaps inevitably) bitter falling-out. All of them embraced immediacy and amateurism, although in Kado’s case it’s entirely deceptive: for all his railing against “men who practice,” he’s an intuitively gifted musician, and his melodic bass playing is a big reason why Barcelona Pavilion works in the first place.

Their whole ethos is equivalent to one of MC Doc Pickles’ many rants this past week: don’t think, DO. “How is your hangover? How are your bedsores?” taunts Kado on “Participate” (to which he coyly added, in a fit of self-consciousness about staging “dinosaur act” reunion shows, “How is your gray hair? How is your mortgage?”). You know that something like the Barcelona Pavilion can only be born of frustration, of dissecting a dominant situation and deciding that anything has to be better than the bill of goods we’re being sold.

And most importantly: the music of Barcelona Pavilion makes you feel alive, like life is waiting to be discovered, like wallowing in self-pity is self-inflicted cultural genocide, like what’s happening right now is the most important time in your life.

That latter point makes a reunion show a bit of an odd notion, and there were more than a few on-stage jabs at over-glorifying the mid-decade movement of Torontopia, which was most closely associated with Kado’s pontificating at the time. No matter. That time produced a sense of possibility that still exists today, even if some of its originators have moved on.

Barcelona Pavilion was followed by Kids on TV, who haven’t changed much at all in the past six years. Why would they? They’ve improved—as hopefully anyone would—but, like Barcelona Pavilion, how “good” or “bad” they are is entirely beside the point. There is pain, pleasure and politics mixed in with the party, and the spectacle is the thing.

The night was originally supposed to end there, but Owen Pallett was added to the bill at the last minute, along with one half of his current live line-up, a man known only as Thomas. Thomas and his band are hard to describe, and even harder to appreciate on first exposure—which this was, for many people there. Right up to its closing hours of its final Sunday, Wavelength was still introducing new talent.

Many performers have graduated from Wavelength to go on to great things, but Owen Pallett’s solo project—originally known as Final Fantasy—is perhaps the least likely. When he debuted it at Wavelength in 2004, Final Fantasy was one of about a half-dozen projects Pallett had on the go. And a solo violin looping project seemed the least likely of them to turn into a viable project—except that Pallett’s combination of his virtuosity and a balancing act between classical, pop and avant-garde moves made it a “winning formula.” That’s the kind of phrase that most Wavelengthers would recoil from, but there are precious few who begrudge Pallett his success. His homecoming here was beautiful and brief, a confident display of how what was once a daring and bold move has become everyday excellence—a perfect metaphor for Wavelength itself.

It didn’t end there. After what Doc Pickles called a “Saturday Night Live” moment, with all the organizers past and present on stage in a group hug, the Hidden Cameras took the stage. Ah yes, but which Hidden Cameras? Seemingly half of Toronto’s music scene has been in the band at one point or another, with bandleader Joel Gibb the lone consistent member. This one-song set, however, was a reunion of much of the original line-up, which included Steve Kado, Owen Pallett, Maggie MacDonald, Mathias Rozenberg, Magali Meagher, Gentleman Reg, and Dave Meslin, joined by Lex Vaughn, Thomas, and Kevin Drew.

The Hidden Cameras’ “I Believe in the Good of Life” is a Wavelengthian, Torontopian anthem if there ever was one—the “Rockin’ in the Free World,” if you will, of this generation’s time and place. It was preceded, as it would have been in 2002, by Dave Meslin making a brief plug for his latest civic engagement initiative. And it ended, as it would have in 2002, with dozens of people hauled on the stage to join the party— participatory democracy in action, if you will.

After the final chord and the final hugs, Doc Pickles was still on stage at 3 a.m. on this Sunday night, telling us that culture is not what Ben Mulroney and Jian Ghomeshi and Rogers Media tells us it is, that we are the culture, that we have to go home and make art, that life’s what you make it. The legacy that Wavelength helped create should never be taken for granted, never be lulled into complacency.

The only time you should rest on your laurels is if they’re lining your coffin.

Torontopia, part one: Jonny Dovercourt

We'll start this off with one of the most articulate advocates of Torontopia. I first met Jonny Dovercourt (ne Bunce) sometime back in high school in Scarborough. We had mutual friends of some kind, but both of us are hazy on the details now. I ran into him again sometime in university; I seem to remember him sleeping on my couch--again, the details are hazy. I also went to university with his sister, though the connection was so tenuous that none of us figured that out until much later.

Our current relationship began when both of us were working at Eye Weekly in 1999. He was a vocal proponent of a lot of local bands that I didn't really like--mostly math rock, which was never my thing at all. And I'll be the first to admit that I was rather conservative back then, on my way to becoming a Mojo-worshipping, No Depression sort of MOR CanCon apologist (which still happens--have you heard the Kevin Hearn record? Amazing).

At that time, Jonny was just about to launch a weekly music series called Wavelength (named after the Michael Snow film, in a nice nod to Toronto's avant-garde heritage). I bugged him about my band getting into Wavelength, but he never got back to me. Unlike many, I didn't take it personally. We were a four-piece power pop band (a great one, I still believe), but we obviously didn't fit in with what Wavelength was trying to do.

Wavelength went on to become a grand gestation for what became known as Torontopia, fostering the likes of Three Gut Records, Broken Social Scene, and the Blocks Recording Club, as well as making links to the city's improv, noise, electronic and avant-garde community.
But furthermore, Jonny is nothing if not a passionate Torontonian, and he's interested in much more than music (as his essay in the book uTOpia illustrates). Jonny wants the enthusiasm that goes into the city's thriving music scene to bleed into municipal action, re-imagining the city as a green, bicycle-friendly, neighbourhood-driven, Jane Jacobs kind of place. His sister has a PhD in this kind of stuff, so it runs in the family. And as one of the oldest of the Torontopians, he's also in an ideal position to place the last six years in context.

His latest day job is as co-programmer of Toronto's venerable avant-garde venue The Music Gallery.

Oh, and his latest band, Republic of Safety, totally kicks my ass.

A quick reminder: if you don't know what I'm talking about and haven't read this yet as a primer, then I recommend you do so before diving into this unedited conversation.

Enjoy!

---

Jonny Dovercourt

July 25, 2006

Future Bakery, Bloor and Brunswick, Toronto

[recorder is turned on mid-conversation about newfound sense of confidence in Toronto since 2000]

Jonny Dovercourt: The previous generation was maybe more intimidated by New York and the cultural and economic mass of the Eastern states. I remember telling people that my band was going to play Chicago, and they’d be like, ‘Woah, dude.’

Barclay: Meanwhile, going to Winnipeg wasn’t a problem.

JD: It was more cultural and economic intimidation, I think.

I think it’s largely cultural. I have a whole Mulroney/Trudeau theory which isn’t going to be very politically popular. Children of Trudeau grew up thinking that Canada was the be-all and end-all, which was necessary and great on many levels because we had to build Canadian institutions. But—even though I don’t think free trade is a great idea—people born in the '80s grew up seeing the world in a different way, and not feeling limited by Canadian borders. They have a sense of ownership in the world, not just Canada. In order to succeed in that world, you have to have that confidence. Whereas before, we thought in a bubble.

One thing I discovered that bolstered my confidence was through Wavelength, we found that there were lots of American bands who felt the same way we did.

How would you describe pre-Torontopia Toronto?

It was like a lot of the old model. Everything happened through the club scene, and that was it. If you talked about the music scene, it was only about who was playing in the clubs and building a following. Any music industry reality seemed divorced from that. The standard model we received was that your band gets a gig in a club and you have to play every month and get more people every time and then someone will sign you and you get a record deal and a video on MuchMusic. The whole model was just bullshit.

Were you ever a part of that model? Did you think that when you started playing in bands?

I don’t think so. When I started playing in bands, I was at least mentally thinking a lot more globally. I had dreams about my band being on 4AD Records or Merge Records or some cool label from the U.S. or U.K.

But there was nobody local on those labels—at least not at that point.

It all seemed a very distant horizon to aspire to. Then you’d read about more grassroots DIY labels like K and Dischord, and the dream of creating a more artist-driven music community around a record label was the dream. But nobody knew how to do it.

Which is weird, because it’s not rocket science. Did nobody know how to do it or nobody had the confidence?

I tried running my own label in 1996. I didn’t crash and burn, but I put out a few records and they ended up sitting in my bedroom, and I just thought, What am I doing wrong here? But a lot of it was probably my own lack of motivation. There was a lot of that surrounding the music scene: a lot of idealism, but not a lot of ability to follow through. At the same time, there was still a great community in the downtown club scene. Going to see a Skull Geek Record showcase at the El Mocambo, with Pecola and Smallmouth and Neck or whoever, Parts Unknown, that was the beginning of the social community that went on to form Wavelength. It was a really small community of people who supported each other and went to see each other play.

It was very small and very DIY and no one knew how to properly promote themselves or get much in the way of press or get records in stores—beyond the absolute basics of putting something on consignment in Rotate This. It was the indie tape days, and pressing a CD was a big investment. Everyone was really poor, we were all just coming out of university and there weren’t any rich kids on the scene. Later on, I realized that maybe all these cool American and British scenes had the capability to do that because there was one person involved who had the capital to finance something.

Or the financial comfort to live as a poor artist.

Everyone I knew was just struggling to make rent and working café jobs. A lot of genuine artist poverty.

How does that transform into optimism and hope? Because what you just described exists in every city. And this movement is really civically minded and about being excited about homegrown things, which people weren’t always here. It’s not particular to Toronto, but it’s endemic in Toronto, where you’re validated only by outside recognition.

Wavelength started with a small group of people I’m talking about, about 20 or 30 people, taking a good hard look at itself and turning around its engagement with the world. Up until then, we celebrated ourselves a lot, but in terms of our acceptance and recognition from the rest of the world, all we did was complain about the lack of it. ‘How come no one will write about our bands? How come no one will help us put out records? Why do only 30 people come to our shows?’ That led to this sentiment of, ‘Oh, because we’re in Toronto, Toronto sucks.’

We thought we shouldn’t blame Toronto; we should blame ourselves for giving up in advance. Maybe we’re not giving the rest of the city enough reason to care. Maybe we need to figure out how to generate more excitement around what we’re doing. That was the purpose of Wavelength: let’s celebrate our own music, let’s celebrate our rich history which goes undocumented, let’s celebrate the cool stuff that’s going on here under the radar. It was a recognition of what wasn’t being done, what wasn’t being covered. There wasn’t one nexus to the music scene, and we realized we had to create it.

That’s where the Sunday night series came out of. If you take all the best music from the Toronto underground and put it in one place, where people know they can find it and it’s always there, they’ll come back for more. It was thinking: if I’m an average music fan who is excited to new stuff but isn’t scouring the weeklies trying to find out who’s cool, how do you find out about this stuff?

What was the difference between Elvis Monday and Wavelength then? [ed note: Elvis Monday is a Toronto institution going back off and on for over 20 years, curated by William New, bounced from venue to venue, featuring free admission and largely up and coming bands; much of the mid-'80s to early '90s Toronto scene was fostered here, and it has been resurrected lately at the Drake Hotel.]

The difference is that Wavelength was curated. Those [Elvis Monday] nights were great, but the quality could be really up and down. You didn’t know what you were going to get. We wanted our night to be more like a mix CD, picking the best stuff. By saying certain things are great, you’re implicitly saying other things suck, and we took the risk of putting our taste out there.

I think what made it work was the mix of genre, and focus on the less conventional, whereas there are a lot more outlets for a four-piece rock band playing pop songs.

That was another important part. It’s not just an indie rock night or pop/rock night. We reached out to other genres and communities and tried to find the connections between these pockets of activity in the city that were isolated from each other.

What do you think it means when a certain term like Torontopia gets associated with this? For better and worse?

It gives things a brand identity, which is fine. I don’t want to be knee-jerk and say it’s a bad thing, because Wavelength did the same thing. It’s no different than starting a record label, and then people say, ‘This is a Constellation band; this is a 4AD band.’ It gives the public a convenient way to categorize things and gives it a sense of what we’re about.

But not a general sound.

No, exactly. This music movement was civically and ideologically driven. Obviously, every sort of label has its shortcomings because it can’t possibly encapsulate everything. There are things that are just as valid that might not fit within the framework of that. In order for those kind of labels to work, they have to be open-ended enough that they can encapsulate a lot of things that are different on the surface, so that you’re not rejecting someone on the basis of what kind of instruments they play or whatever sort of formal structures they’re working within.

This term came out of the Wavelength scene and the Toronto is Great compilation, but in the last six months or so—or maybe longer, I don’t know, but certainly since I moved back here—it’s been popping up in mainstream media as a shorthand for civic engagement. I can’t believe how much people here now talk about ways of improving the city in ways they never did before, and envisioning what it could be. I didn’t see that in Montreal, and I certainly didn’t see it in Toronto three or four years ago. How do you think the term made the leap from a musical discussion to a greater municipal discussion?

The way we talked about it, the people who are associated with the term, we didn’t talk about it in purely musical terms. We talked about how one lives in the city, your personal relationship to where you’re from as an artist and a citizen. It becomes more universal in that sense, and not something that only musicians can take a lesson from. All artists and people who care about living in the city in a meaningful and sustainable and responsible way can relate to it. The fact that people in more mainstream political and editorial circles are picking up on the term and understanding where we’re coming from is a good thing.

How transferable is the concept? Part of what interests me about writing this article now and not two years ago is that the term and the discussion are bleeding into different communities, either as an inspiration or as a parallel. I read an interesting article in Discorder recently…

Victopia?

Yeah. First of all, I couldn’t believe that anyone in Vancouver even paid attention to the Torontopia concept, just because of classic cross-Canadian antagonism. But I interviewed the guy who wrote the article, and he told me that he admittedly forced the term onto the scene out there in question, but that he was excited by what he was hearing and reading about in Toronto, and thought the term was transferable. How do you think this concept can apply to other cities?

It’s one of those things where the term is specific, but the notion is not. That’s where people can respond to it and come up with their own version and take on it. Every town is different and has its own things it wants to celebrate, its own problems it needs to overcome. Any other city dealing with similar issues can transfer it to their own reality, no problem. They have to do the creative work of using their own term or slogan. We had people in Montreal who wanted to start Wavelength there, and we told them no. It was very specific to what we were doing, and we encouraged them to use our model, but they had to come up with their own name and identity. We don’t want franchises.

That would be like someone saying, ‘Hey, can I start Dischord Canada?’

Yeah, exactly. And the answer would be, no! Independent thinking artists in other cities should be able to identify with the fact that a city like Toronto celebrating itself is a real ballsy move, because we have the whole country against us. We’re supposed to play nice and not give them any more reason to hate us.

Your band [Republic of Safety] has openly embraced the term.

It’s because we want to be true to our roots. We’re a band that was spawned by this wave of excitement. That’s how we all came together. I represented Wavelength and the slightly older guys-with-guitars indie scene of Toronto. Then I met the people from the Barcelona Pavilion, which was a younger, anti-conventional rock band, a yelling laptop band. We came from two different schools that were part of the same movement. We wanted to loudly proclaim the cultural movement that created us, the fertile ground where our collaboration started. I’m never excited by the idea of a band being a band alone, without any context. To be part of something larger always gives four people in a room a more exciting identity.

How do you find external reaction, outside Toronto, to such a Torontopian band? You employ the term liberally in your own press.

I don’t know, I haven’t heard much. What have you heard?

I’m hoping this article will generate debate, because it might be the first time they hear the term. I asked the Discorder guy when he first heard the word, and he said in February. And in February, Kat Collins and Carl Wilson were interviewing each other and discussing whether it was time to retire the term because it had outlived its usefulness. Which is why I wanted to write the article now.

I always anticipate that there’s going to be a backlash against this in the rest of the country. I remember trying to promote a show on the Montreal message board and being told, ‘Go home, Toronto!’ If anything, I hope it makes some people who have those anti-Toronto prejudices to rethink them. It is speaking to the stereotypical images of Toronto, which aren’t completely unfounded: it can be a grumpy town. I spend a weekend in Montreal and come back here and think, ‘My god, what’s up people’s asses here?’ The message we’re trying to send with Torontopia is that there are cool things happening here outside the rat race. There is an exciting, vibrant and friendly underground. That’s ultimately the message of the term.

Now that it’s arguably reached this critical mass of people, there is some griping that it can’t possibly be all things to all people: does it include this band? Does it include that scene? Suddenly there are higher expectations of what it could mean.

Yeah, and that’s unfair.

Why?

There are limits. It’s a term that wasn’t meant to describe the entire city. It is a very personal term, about things that I identify with as an artist living here. There are lots of people who live here that don’t share the same reality. I recognize that Jane and Finch might not be Torontopia. It becomes such a difficult conversation. The other communities that we co-exist with in this city might not share in this same view of it, but that doesn’t mean I’m excluding them. It was never meant to be anything exclusionary. It is about a personal relationship with the city, from the position of an individual artist who is also part of a community. Does that make sense?

How loose and fluid is it? I’ve felt it at very different events, whether it’s an all-ages matinee at the Tranzac or the Jamaica to Toronto concert at Harbourfront. I got choked up at that Jamaica show, just at the sight of such an incredibly diverse audience: thousands of people of all-ages and every imaginable cultural background, all celebrating this almost-forgotten chapter of Toronto music history.

Sure, you and I can experience that as a Torontopic moment, but it’s wrong-headed to try and impose that on other people. It has to be left open for people to respond to and interpret any way they want. To sit around and have debates about what is or is not Torontopia is really dumb and counter-productive. It’s based on a feeling, a personal relationship with the city.

I do get a sense of suspicion around the more commercially successful Toronto bands.

One of the unfortunate things about a movement is that it can become about ‘who’s with us and who’s against us.’ That’s when lines start getting drawn, when popular people you don’t like start jumping on board, and the original founders feel like they’re getting shoved out of the limelight. That can lead back to the same kind of resentment and falling back into the same divisions and rivalries that this open, inclusionary movement was supposed to counteract.

And there are always people on the other side who are not going to feel invited. ‘Oh, my band never got invited to play Wavelength.’

It’s tough. But I think I haven’t fully responded to the question of how other communities in the city respond.

I think they’re only beginning to now, that it’s dropped into mainstream discourse, like the big spread the Toronto Star had on Easter weekend about re-envisioning Toronto.

Did they use the term in there?

I’m pretty sure they did. It was basically an extension of the uTOpia book, about the hope and optimism of a new city.

One of the things I want to clear up, as far as me being a white, middle-class indie artist: I am a cultural tourist in certain parts of this city, but I don’t think I or other people should be afraid of that. There are a lot of places in this city where white people feel like they can’t go, and that’s one thing that I would like to see change.

Coming from Montreal, I did feel divisions there. Maybe it’s because the indie scene was so separate from the rest of the city: very white, very McGill/Concordia, very anglo, mixed with American students and Toronto expats. I didn’t encounter a lot of civic things where I felt like I was stepping outside of a homogenous community.

Or that people cared about the city they were living in? One of the things that is different here is a genuine hometown pride. Pretty much everyone involved in the music scene here is someone who grew up here or in the suburbs.

I don’t think that’s true.

Really? Who are the exceptions?

I’m sure it’s partially true, but Toronto is a place that people move to from all over Canada. In our interview the other day, Kado likened the city to a big bus terminal. From Winnipeg, from Ottawa, from Montreal, from the East. Usually people west of Winnipeg move to Vancouver. But sorry, I’ll let you finish your thought.

There are people like Steve who moved here from the 905 suburbs, and maybe Toronto could have just been a bus stop for him. But people like Steve Kado and myself made a decision to stay in our hometown and make a go of it. The people who have really made a difference here are people who wanted to give their hometown a chance.

[conversation is interrupted by Kat and Matt Collins walking by the patio en route to the Blocks office]

Sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought.

Do you want to talk about the new report on creative cities?

What’s that?

It’s a huge report that was released on Monday. It’s a big report by this 43-person task force assigned to study Toronto’s creative economy and what it needs to do. It’s obviously a post-Richard Florida creative city discourse, which had its ups and downs. But a lot of things they were recommending were really positive, in terms of the arts in Toronto and getting young people engaged. It was a very mainstream political document—Toronto City Summit Alliance, Toronto Star-level discourse about the city. But it included references to Broken Social Scene and the indie music scene. A lot of people in the grassroots scene here have done a great job of pushing the agenda of independent culture onto the table. I feel like that will be—for me, personally—among the most exciting work of the next five years of my life. Which is figuring out how to get what in many ways is this silly, goofball cultural scene some serious, governmental recognition and support.

Is there a danger in instiutionalizing it? I was talking to Kat about her Bad Bands Manifesto, and I get the impression that that came out of this codification of independent culture and what those goals of that should be.

If you have an idea of how to create things, it’s up to you as the artist to push that agenda. It means you have to work a little harder against the established models. If this whole notion is about creativity, then let’s make sure that the policy makers follow that to the logical conclusion, which is being able to assess what’s going on honestly and be able to create the room for things like Bad Bands Revolution so that it’s not just a standard model, that everything isn’t just Arts and Crafts. For us as independent musicians and artists, we have to do the work to make sure that happens. I get frustrated with the arts community when things fall back into complaining mode. If you have this vision of the way you want things to be, then figure out a way to make it happen and figure out a way to either get money for it or how to do it without money, if you think that taints things. I feel like I’ve outgrown the whole attitude of, ‘Institutionalising things is dangerous.’ Actually, I feel the reverse. Institutions need to be there to protect things. That’s what needs to be created in the independent music scene, a sense of advocacy and protection and creating opportunities to be as in the moment as they want to be.

That’s true of the Music Gallery or something like Artscape…

And both those organizations do become bureaucratized. I deal with that every day. There’s nothing wrong with being smart and learning a language and learning how to get what you want out of people. Maybe it’s because I’m more left brain than your average artist. To me, the process of learning how to work within the system to create autonomy for yourself is fascinating.

Where do you think Torontopia is now? Has the term outlived its usefulness? Will we still be using it in 10 years? Is it an albatross that will be buried by the cynical?

In some ways I do feel it represented a time and a place, a moment of a flowering of optimism. As this community does engage more with mainstream culture and serious bureaucracy, it is a term that may generate more snickers and chuckles than support, which is kind of what we need at this point. The big question is sustainability, and indie culture is dealing with the same issues as society in general, of mode of operations being unsustainable. Independent musicians, for better or worse, are going to have to engage with funding bodies and levels of governments and maybe even the private sector in order to get what they want.

What do they want?

Everyone wants the same thing, to be fulfilled as an artist, to write songs and not work crappy jobs. To be able to make a living off their music. That’s the frustrating thing about independent music, is that it’s often an extended adolescence between the ages of 18 and 31. Are you supposed to give up on it once you finally have to get a real job? The maturation of the indie community has forced this question to looked at more soberly. One of the most interesting things about Toronto is that if you compare it to the indie scene of other cities, it’s a lot older. There are a lot of people in their 30s still playing in bands and who still care about this. It’s our life.

How do you know that’s not true of other cities?

I didn’t take a census or anything, but I’ve been to New York and had people say, ‘You’re 32?!’ Everyone I met in bands was 22. I do get the sense that if you compare it to American cities, you have to sell out earlier there. Once you’re 26…

I don’t think that’s true of Chicago.

Yeah, but there’s the core of successful musicians who have made a career out of Thrill Jockey Records, and then there’s everyone else.

There’s the Bloodshot scene, the free jazz scene. I’ve always thought of Chicago as a model of a sustainable, artist-friendly culture.

But that’s because they’re all musos. There are a lot more amateur musicians here. The Bad Bands thing is really interesting, because most of these people can barely play but they’re totally committed to playing music.

To me it’s totally rooted in performance art. It’s very conceptual. It’s meant to be ephemeral, not necessarily a band that has a shelf life of more than two years or even two months, not necessarily a band that’s going to translate to a studio and make great records. I’m glad there are so many great records of the last five years, and I’m glad there are also wonderfully silly records in the last five years.

I am more old-fashioned, and this is where I diverge from the bad bands thing. I don’t really care about the stack of silly recordings that I don’t have time to sift through. I don’t have time to go to MySpace to hear your practice tape. I have a lot more “don’t bore us, get to the chorus.” Spend some time working on something and get back to me when it’s done. I do appreciate the necessity of that, and sometimes the inadvertent genius that comes out of that can be the most exciting, grin-inducing thing you’ll ever come across. But to uphold that approach as being important is kind of self-defeating.

(thoughtful pause). I’m still thinking of your earlier question about whether or not Torontopia has outlived its usefulness.

Okay, has it outlived its usefulness?

It probably has outlived its usefulness, because I kind of don’t care. I feel the time from which is arose a few years ago was an important enough time to want and preserve and document when the time is right. If it’s done now and we’re going into a new phase, that’s fine. But if it catches on in some other weird stream of popular consciousness, then that’s great as well.

What if it shows up on a David Miller poster campaign?

I wouldn’t feel like ‘Damn, where’s my cut?’ It would be cool.

The whole ‘outliving its usefullness’ question seems like such a self-sabotaging question to even bring up. It’s so typical to say, ‘Hey, this great thing happened—is it over?’

Yeah. As long as people self-identify with things, then they are useful. It’s like asking, ‘Is surf music dead?’ It is kind of a stupid question to ask. Alright, that’s it, I’m done.

[off-tape small talk leads us back on topic; Jonny requests the recorder be turned back on.]

Earlier this year I had this worry that all the chatter around Toronto’s cultural renaissance was just that—just chatter. I had this sense of, ‘Are we spending so much time celebrating ourselves that we’re not actually improving ourselves?’ That’s not what the whole Torontopia idea was supposed to be, which was a meaningful call to arms.

Does this assertion of it create this counterintuitive complacency?
That’s the danger. It is meant for people to respond to and get to work. Not to read about it and bask in it.