I have a new gig as a backup vocalist for Murray Lightburn’s Mass:Light.
As some of you may know, Murray produced the last WP album, History of Pain, as well as recording and mixing the most recent Lion Farm EP, and has performed as a member of the WP band at our last couple of shows. So we have gotten to know each other pretty well over the past few years.
All the same, I am also a big fan of his work, so it’s a thrill to be part of his show. It’s been described as an “electronic pop opera,” which is as accurate a description as I can imagine but still doesn’t quite capture the experience. It’s a lo-fi sci-fi multimedia musical, all held together with Murray’s usual mix of conceptual grandeur, heart-on-sleeve sincerity and amazing vocal powers.
I am singing backup. It’s the first time I’ve been strictly supporting someone else’s musical vision since being part of the Feist touring band back in the day. Then as now, it’s a great experience to simply learn my own parts and not worry about all the other details. But the parts themselves are a big challenge. The harmonies are complicated, and push the limits of my vocal range at both ends. But it’s a challenge that’s been great fun to take on.
The project had its debut a couple of weeks ago at Pop Montreal, and we are playing Toronto on October 12. Details here. If you’re in town, I recommend coming to check it out.
After that, the project is up in the air as far as I know (though there’s talk of a performance at the M for Montreal fest in November). But I’ve got a lot of other irons in the fire—including some brand-new WP tunes I’m pretty stoked about, that we plan to record this winter and bring to the world in 2014.
I was sad to find out a few days ago about the death of Zev Asher, who I had crossed paths with a number of times on the underground music and film circuits. He played noise music with Nimrod and Roughage, and had a parallel career as a documentary filmmaker.
I first met Zev through a friend of my wife’s. We were doing film projections for music shows at that time, and our mutual friend told us that he had a similar project, where he played music and screened films. So we ended up booking him at a show we organized with a bunch of like-minded people. I think he played last as Roughage. I just remember him yelling “Born free! Free to wave my dick in the wind!” while noise and images swirled around him.
Around this time he was making the documentary on the Nihilist Spasm Band. It was hugely inspirational and probably influential on my own docs in the respectful way it treated its subjects, never stooping to make fun of them as many might have. Great Canadian fogey Robert Fulford wrote an article in which, with typical hauteur, he mocked those who called the decades-strong, influential Spasm Band “legendary.” Zev responded by sending him his autograph, “from one legend to another.”
His next doc was Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat. The film, about some art-school kids who killed a cat as an art project and the fallout that ensued, caused controversy when it screened at the Toronto film festival in 2004. (A pretty good summary of the events can be found here). Watching the film was an experience that Zev himself described as “unpleasant.” The title’s obscure word refers to unsound reasoning, and what I remember most about it was how ruthless Zev was in the way he let all the subjects hang themselves with their own rope. His stance was apparently excessively subtle, since he was protested by animal-rights activists (none of whom had of course bothered to see the film).
We reconnected later in Montreal, where we had both moved. One day we made a plan to go for coffee. I arrived at the appointed time and left after half an hour when he hadn’t shown up. Later when we connected, he was genuinely confused, and made fun of me, for the fact that I arrived on time and only waited half an hour. This was my introduction to “Montreal time.”
Zev was an imposing figure. He towered over me (I’m 6’3”) and gave the impression of someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly. Like a lot of people on the noise scene, he had a strongly distinct way of looking at the world and clearly didn’t care about mass opinion. But in spite of this sometimes intimidating presence, he was always very kind and helpful to us and other people in the music and film communities.
After Casuistry, Zev made a few more films, artistic experiments on a much lower-profile tip. I hadn’t been in touch with him for a while when I heard that he had cancer. I’m told he was full of plans for future projects, and had been documenting his experience with the hospital system for a film to be completed when he got out.
He died following a stem cell transplant on August 7, 2013. He was 50.
Zev was a one-of-a-kind person and a genuine, fearless artist.
I’ve been busy the last couple of months preparing the release of Lion Farm’s new EP.
Nearly 10 years after the fact (UPDATE: actually only five years; clearly I have lost track of time), Spiral Stairs of Pavement discovered our cover of “Kennel District” and expressed his slackadaisical approval on Twitter. I was tickled.
That’d be our performance at Waterloo’s Starlight club in 2007 or 2008:
I recently found out that MySpace relaunched their latest version, but erased all the content on everyone’s pages except the music and profile picture. I found that pretty annoying. Like most people I stopped using MySpace a while ago, but I did have a bunch of blog posts up there from before this site was blog-enabled. There also used to be, some time ago, a database of all the past shows I’d done, which was helpful for the historical record. It would have been nice to at least have been notified (though, would I have opened an email from MySpace?). Oh well! I guess the bigger question is, is there any point whatsoever in updating the existing music or info on MySpace?
Through a friend I found this link to a rant about the state of the music business by a musician named James Brooks. I’m not familiar with his work, or to any of the people he refers to, but I thought it summed up the situation quite well.
Longtime friend and collaborator Steve Raegele has a track on a new Believer magazine comp with his avant-jazz solo project. Lots of cool stuff on there.
Finally, I recently demoed a bunch of new WP tunes. I’m pretty stoked about getting back on the horse, releasing some new music and doing a bunch of shows for 2014. Does that seem far off? It’ll be here before we know it!
I’ve recently reissued the WP’s earliest release, The Elements of Style, on the WP Bandcamp page.
When I got the tracks remastered (or, truthfully, actually mastered to begin with), I listened to them again for the first time in years. It was a funny experience. This may be hard to believe, but I never got why people thought the WP sound was so “weird” in the early days. Now I can see why very clearly! It also gives me a much clearer sense how much the sound has transformed over the years—again, that might seem obvious to someone else, but that kind of thing is harder to perceive from up close.
Dirty, messy, sloppy and out of tune as well as defiantly lo-fi, these tunes represent the WP in its rawest form. They take me back to the innocent days where it seemed like all I had to do was hang out and make music with my friends, such as Peaches and Taylor Savvy who are responsible for recording and mixing these tunes.
I could go on, but instead I’ll just point you over to the link and let you form your own thoughts. I’m also curious if there is any desire for this to be released in a physical form. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the role of physical vs. digital releases, and I’d be curious to see what WP fans think. So let me know… and in the meantime, hope you enjoy this blast from the WP past!
Every Tuesday this April from 3-5 pm, I’ll be guest hosting Montreal Sessions on CKUT, one of Montreal’s fine campus/community radio stations.
I used to do occasional spots on CKCU, the campus station in Ottawa, when I was much younger. I’ve only experienced radio as a guest ever since, but I love the format. Much like print media, physical release forms for music, and so on, it seems to be part of the digital-age conventional wisdom that radio is “dead.” However, like those other formats, it stubbornly continues to exist.
When I went for a training session to relearn my extremely rusty DJ skills, it was fun to be surrounded by young people (as well as a few seasoned veterans) who were passionate about music and the radio format.
Anyway, I’ll be spinning music, interviewing a few special guests and occasionally rambling and ranting about subjects of interest. Montrealers can tune into 90.3 FM, or you can listen from anywhere at ckut.ca. As always, any requests or suggestions are welcome. As for specifically WP-related news, stay tuned for an exciting announcement pretty soon.
On Saturday, March 2, the WP band is honoured to participate in a Nuit Blanche performance doubling as the closing party for New Troglodytes, an installation by our longtime friend and collaborator Philippe Blanchard.
Philippe’s artworks and videos can be seen on his website; his work is known to WP fans as the designer of some of our early album covers. As you can surmise by the above image, the show is bound to be trippy.
The free show takes place at Arprim, room 426 in the Belgo building (372 Ste-Catherine W). Also on the bill are Drainolith and Hobo Cubes. The WP is scheduled to perform at 11. Hope to see you there!
I’ve been a huge fan of WFMU, the longstanding free-form radio station based in New Jersey, for years.
I first discovered the station when we were researching a documentary on Gordon Thomas, the now 96-year-old singer/songwriter from NYC. Irwin Chusid, a longtime WFMU DJ and fellow GT enthusiast, agreed to be interviewed for our doc, and the station was kind enough to let us film there.
Whenever we were in NYC for the shoot, we’d always listen to the station. Being the technologically challenged person I am, I only realized later that it also broadcasts online, and I could listen to it at home as well.
It’s characterized by a genuinely free-form musical mix, as well as by DJs who really know and care about the music they’re playing. Some of them have been hosting their shows for decades and specialize in rare and obscure music through the ages, although the station also stays current with interesting things going on today across all genres. The Cherry Blossom Clinic with Terre T, Gaylord Fields, Transpacific Sound Paradise and Irwin’s show are some of my favourites. Aside from music, they also have a lot of amazing talk-radio personalities, from Tom Scharpling’s venerable comic extravaganza The Best Show on WFMU to Dave Emory’s weekly hour of conspiracy theorizing. They even play host to Canada’s own beloved Nardwuar.
In the recent Sandy storm, WFMU’s transmittors were knocked out (the station continued to broadcast online, with DJs spinning from their homes, until they were repaired) and their annual record fair, a major source of income, had to be cancelled.
The station has had its own funding drive going on, but I banded together with some sympathetic Montrealers to put on a show to raise a few bucks to pitch in.
It goes down Friday, January 4 – giving you plenty of time to recover from New Year’s Eve shenanigans – at L’Escogriffe (4467 St-Denis, corner Mont-Royal). Confirmed so far are The Pouteens (featuring Bloodshot Bill), Baked Goods, Giselle Numba One, the WP (with secret surprise guest member) and very special guests No Negative (a Montreal noise-punk supergroup featuring members of Holy Cobras, Black Feelings, Thee Nodes, and Total Crush).
If you’re in town, I hope you come out – it’ll be a good show for a good cause, at the unbeatable rockonomic price of $5.
In the summer of 1998, I had just graduated from film school. I was bumming around doing random jobs, and I’d just laid down some tracks of my newly formed solo project at a friend’s bedroom studio. That studio’s owner, my longtime friend and collaborator Dominic Salole (now better known as Mocky) announced that he was leaving Toronto to move to London (he would later ramble on to Amsterdam before settling in Berlin).
He and I had known each other as kids in Ottawa—I saw his first band play at basement parties and talent shows. Later, he and my brother were roommates in Toronto, and that’s how I came to meet Chilly Gonzales, Peaches et al. I have a million great stories about all those years, but I’m saving them for the coffee table book.
His move was the catalyst for an exodus to Europe among our group of friends—Gonzo left a year later, Peach and Taylor Savvy the following year, and Feist not long after. Now, after 10 years in Berlin, Mocky has made another dramatic shift, moving to Los Angeles with his wife, fashion designer Desirée Klein, and their two-year-old son.
During his time in Berlin he produced three solo albums including last year’s amazing Saskamodie and too many collaborations to count, but in the wider music world he’s probably best known as a producer—of Jamie Lidell’s Multiply and Jim and as part of the team behind the Feist albums The Reminder and Metals.
When Mocky was in Montreal recently, working in the studio with Bassekou Kouyate (Malian master of the ngoni, an ancestor to the banjo), we caught up and I thought I’d take the opportunity to find out more about his latest move and where it’s taking him. This interview is based on conversations in person with an email follow-up.
Mocky raises the roof at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango with Bassekou Kouyate.
WP: Where did you get the idea to move to LA?
Mocky: Jamie brought me out here in 2007 (and I hadn’t been there since the 90s—a much different time) and I saw so many similarities to Berlin in terms of decaying relics of former magnificence.
WP: Was it hard to leave Berlin? Do you miss it?
Mocky: Not really, I am Canadian after all not German. My Wikipedia page says I’m “Somalian-Canadian,” but that is inaccurate and not how I identify. I have a very mixed ethnic background including British, Italian, Somalian, Ethiopian and more, but I was born and raised in Canada and only identify myself as Canadian. However I lived in Berlin for 10 years—I miss my Berlin friends, I miss the parks and my two Canadian friends who still live there, Peaches and Taylor Savvy. But otherwise LA is so fresh and exciting that I don’t miss Berlin much yet.
WP: What’s the atmosphere like in LA?
Mocky: LA today is like Berlin in ’99. The American dream kind of collapsed in on itself, so there is new space there to create—much like Berlin in the 90s after the wall came down… a new space opening up after the “fall of the wall” of American cultural imperialism. There is TONS going on here, and I started skating again, so it’s the perfect climate. I hit sort of a bohemian glass ceiling in Berlin, and LA seemed like the right answer.
WP: I heard that the new Feist album was largely recorded live off the floor. Can you tell me about that decision?
Mocky: It was an incredible experience! We did it live off the floor because we didn’t want to leave anything to chance—we wanted to KNOW we had something as it was going down.
WP: I saw that you did a soundtrack [to Xiaolu Guo’s festival hit UFO In Her Eyes]. Is that your focus these days, or producing/other work/your own music/all of the above?
Mocky: All of the above—I’m starting a new project TBA.
Though he’s been working and hanging out with underground artists such as Juiceboxxx, The Hawnay Troof and Kevin Blechdom (whose album Gentlemania he’d produced in Berlin), Mocky’s most recent coup de coeur was someone seemingly at the opposite end of the music-business spectrum: superstar producer and songwriter Linda Perry, who he had the occasion to see perform at a club.
“She came out wearing clown makeup,” he recalls, “and said ‘I’ve been depressed for two weeks, so this is how I’m dealing with it.’ She had a record player and she was lifting the needle and putting it back down—real Andy Kaufman shit. Then she sat down at the piano and started singing, and it was just AMAZING. Great songs, a voice like Nina Simone, totally heavy shit.”
Since then, Mocky has actually had the chance to work in proximity to Perry—producing one of her protegés at her Studio B and, as he says hopefully, “soaking up her writing skills through osmosis.”
I am officially intrigued. I hope to report directly from Mocky’s new home at some point—in the meantime, I’ll be keeping an eye out on what he’s up to. He has always been one of the most inspiring artists I’ve known, so here’s hoping the move to this cultural hot spot will bring his various projects to more and more ears.
The WP’s fourth album is out today! You can buy it on iTunes or most digital platforms, or (best bang for your buck) on our Bandcamp page. Listen to it there and tell us what you think…
The album was recorded and mixed by our producer and friend Murray Lightburn. It features Stacey DeWolfe on drums, the guitar stylings of Steve Raegele, a guest keyboard spot from the great Nicole Lizée, and some co-writes from Warren Auld, Mocky and our friends in Les yeux fermés.
