Halifax’s annual festival of weirdos kicked off at Lost & Found Thursday with a poster art show from Cosmic Bubblegum (Nicholas MacMillan, also of Cosmetics) and performances by ECT and Troy Richter. With the growth of Obey over the last couple years one can only assume the city’s weird population is growing, or at least coming out of the woodwork. Friday night opened with what I’m going to take a leap and call the least accessible show of the festival, at the North Street Church. The organizers put together a pretty seamless night of experimental music and sound art, with artist and NSCAD professor Craig Leonard filling in the gaps between sets with samples from four decades worth of noise music in his vast record collection. D’arcy Gray, a percussion teacher at Dalhousie, started off with a minimalist play of sound ranging from percussion numbers to eating an apple and scrunching paper into the microphone.
Lukas Pearse, to the best of my biographical knowledge, has been involved with every sort of experimental music thing, as well as jazz and numerous other genres, in Halifax since forever. His set melded his upright bass with various recorded fuzz, drones and music boxes. I thought a bit about Montreal band set fire to flames, who record similar stuff in places like warehouses and disintegrating old barns, but I’m sure Pearse has been at it longer.
Vancouver’s Totally Ripped played a heavy, intense droning noise set, playing nonstop for a half hour or so. Amanda Dawn Christie’s film projections, which screened all night long, were an especially perfect fit here, providing a backdrop of overlays of trees, caskets, architecture and ghostly figures.
Omon Ra sound like a different band every time I see them, but maybe I just have a bad memory. Playing a melange of free jazz-psychedelic-post punk, accompanied by Gown, they turned the whole stage into an ear-splitting battlefield, with Gown sabotaging his guitar, an onstage fight and a guitar tug-of-war.
Noveller, from New York, has an impressive pedigree, having played with Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. She had two guitars laid flat that she played with her fingers or a bow; I thought of these lines from a Joseph Brodsky poem: “a piano woken by one finger/ like someone learning the alphabet all over.”
All in all, a fine start; the church was a great venue for this and the experimental music fans intently studying the program notes in their seats felt like more of a formal concert, which was a nice change from the usual bar shows. But where the church was all civil behaviour to uncivil music, the 19+ show at the Khyber later was all party. I thought I’d never wear earplugs at a show: that’s for old people, or at least my older friends; but apparently I’m getting to be one of those older friends now, because my head hurts and I’ll have to put off the rest of this post until tomorrow, and right now I’m really wishing I’d brought earplugs tonight.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.