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This is an article about a couple of music festivals that took place in Vancouver this spring. I wrote it as a Global Ear feature for The Wire but it doesn't look like they're going to use it. Rob Young thinks I'm a light-weight. What do you think? Here it is for your sorry ass, anyway. Vancouver's personality is that of a very cultured civilisation perched on the world's edge; a city with a kaleidoscope of musical activity which is often overlooked by Canada's Toronto-centric media industry. Still, they manage to drag their asses out to the West Coast every May for a feeding frenzy known as the New Music West festival. This year, most of the city-wide three-dayer's best music sprang from Vancouver's abundantly healthy hip hop community. Hip Hop Mechanix's set at The Chameleon Urban Lounge provided a fine example of Van City's vivacious and multi-cultural rap scene. Their mixture of old school breaks and new school rhymes touched on all the best points of live hip hop whilst avoiding the usual cliches and posturing. Like the Beastie Boys for purists. Talking of whom, sometime Beastie turntablist Mix Master Mike played a stunning NMW set at the Plaza of Nations. It would be easy to dwell at length on the myriad tricks/techniques Mike employed but that would unfairly portray his set as gimmick-laden and masturbatory . In actual fact it was the alchemical effects (rather than the material processes) of his performance that were so amazing. He'd scratch a beat, effect or tune from a record before leaving it to play unadulterated, revealing the source material to be something quite other than what he had wrought from it. Although the horribly loud, booming PA threatened to swallow the intricacies of his set, Mike managed to move the crowd and leave them scratching their heads. His dexterity and imagination proved to be beyond compare, his simian glare a hilarious challenge to wannabes. This sort of thing is leading to a surge of interest in turntablism among Vancouver's indie kids. Kid Koala, who played at the Commodore Ballroom in late May alongside Ninja label-mates DJ Food, is a particular favourite. Although based in Montreal, Koala is originally from Vancouver and his humourous-but-radical style has a lot in common with local acts like Swollen Members. Who knows what could happen if the local avant rock and rap scenes got together. Perhaps one
clue comes in Kinnie Starr's mixture of rap, sampledelia and angular Deadman were also involved in NMW proceedings at an art space called The Church of Pointless Hysteria. This was where the real left-field action was. The fact that most of it was spoken word/performance art created a dichotomy between the mainstream indie rock on most of the festival bill and the stereotypical Art at the church. Said Art included an insane landscape painter in an orange boiler suit, a couple of poets and much banging on copper pots. The best part of the evening I attended came when Deadman's signature slide guitar reappeared as part of an otherwise dire multi-media performance. All this raised the question: where were great local art rock bands like Beans and Radio Berlin? It seems likely that most of them regarded an industry schmooze-fest like NMW as rather distasteful. Local country-rock eccentrics Jerk with a Bomb probably spoke for a lot of Vancouver's best bands when they commented: "It's pretty cheesy. It's just a big industry fest where a bunch of A&R people gather here and bands pay to register and get exposed. We don't really want to get signed by EMI." The Vancouver New Music festival at the end of the month was something different altogether: A real "serious" music festival upon which the vagaries of the rock world were not allowed to intrude. It began at the opulent Orpheum Theatre where three composers introduced and conducted their own pieces. The first half of the programme was dedicated to Canadians including the festival's architect Owen Underhill. His Lines of Memory amply demonstrated the power of contrasting musical opposites, as lush string sweeps intersected with jarring horn blurts to compelling effect. This was followed by Linda Bouchard's The Open Life which summoned forth an astonishing cloud-burst of cliff-edge tonality and extended playing. After this revelatory opening, the entrance of the VNM's star attraction, John Adams, was something of an anticlimax. Adams talked a good one but the long, ambitious first movement of his large-scale Naive and Sentimental Music was bombastic and meandering. The last two movements more successfully explored familiarly post-minimalist landscapes. The programme Adams conducted at the Arts Club Theatre the following night seemed designed to counteract any residual impression that he's a lightweight . Alongside deceptively simple-sounding pieces by Lou Harrison (Concerto in Slendro) and Arvo Part (Fratres), were two of his most challenging, abrasive pieces. While Gnarly Buttons proved competent, it was his Chamber Symphony that really hit home. A remarkably successful attempt to draw parallels between Schoenberg and cartoon music, this was proof positive that Adams isn't just the poor man's Steve Reich. Reich's Electric Counterpoint was the highlight of 21st Century Guitars, at the same venue the following night. Also notable was Tim Brady's newly amended Invention Eight... of Julie's Dance... which created a warm front of delay and distortion in the chilly, sparsely populated theatre. Strangely, this evening was the festival's sole concession to contemporary musical eclecticism. Even more puzzling, coming from a self-proclaimed new music festival, was the concentration on orchestral and chamber musics in favour of anything on the technological cutting edge. The nearest thing to electronic music we got was a series of events at Festival House where Trimpin, a performance artist, demonstrated his computerised mechanical system by which Conlon Nancarrow's player piano pieces can be played on any piano. These informal events demonstrated that the visual element (seeing the keyboard burst into a tsunami of bizarre harmonics) is surprisingly central to Nancarrow's complex, witty pieces. They also provided a welcome break in the rather homogenous festival programme. This homogeneity was epitomised by the competent but undistinguished pieces played, with undeniable flair, by local ensemble Standing Wave. The one stand-out of their concert at the Arts Club Theatre was another colourful piece by Linda Bouchard, who also stepped up to conduct a piece by Gerard Grisey. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this concert was that it constituted yet another outing for ubiquitous cellist Peggy Lee. Lee, whose multifarious projects include contributions to the subtly artful song-scapes of Veda Hille, saves her best work for her own ensemble. The Peggy Lee Band's self-titled LP on the excellent Spool label mixes multi-layered composition, moody atmospherics and jagged free improv with extraordinary aplomb. The band will be playing as part of the upcoming Jazz Festival in the late June alongside the likes of Ken Vandermark, Broken Record Chamber, Peter Brotzmann, John Butcher/Phil Durrant, DJ Spooky, John Oswald and Mark Isham. This should plug a few of the holes left by NMW and VNM, giving the music-loving people of Vancouver the sort of treats they are too often denied by a world that misjudges the city as a sleepy Pacific outpost. |
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guitar noise. Kinnie played two NMW sets. The first was at the festival
launch party backed by Millennium Project in a completely improvised
set of Herbie Hancock-style fusion and free-flowing raps. The second
was a packed Chameleon gig with her own band. At this show she was supported
by Deadman, a duo whose singular take on the blues mixes stuttering
funk, hypnotic slide guitar and understated