The Fifth and Final ALL CAPS Music Festival ~ Toronto Island ~ Gibraltar Point Artscape ~ 11 August 2013

T.U.R.F. Lucks Out

Opening night of Toronto's first downtown Urban Roots Fest, (denying, denying, denying the forecast) featured steady sunlight, enthusiastic crowds and a misty rural mystique within sight of the CN Tower.

I'll be featuring these artists and many more too this afternoon from 5:00-7:00 on Radio Regent Toronto.

Montreal's The Barr Brothers (left) and Britain's Camera Obscura

 Joel Plaskett made it all real with dedicated showmanship and an intimate patter between songs that honed the audience's partying powers. Only light beer left at the end of his set.

                                                                                       More to come over the next two days

Thursdays are always the best at NXNE.....BRAIDS!

OMG ~ Eeeeek! Braids!!!
Okay...But wait....I'm getting ahead of myself.
Okay: The Comfort Zone, home of white light cocktails and stoner chic in T.O. Midriffs, silk jackets, crazy makeup, glowsticks, trippabble light-show, celestial convergences hourly. This time out it was new band Paula, sending up some echo funk inside a pixillated typhoon of projected colour, advanced string theory and chilly-cool tunesicles to draw the crowd into a dreamy poodle pasture under a low ceiling of sound. Music nobs arriving late were  unable to penetrate the thick clutch of fans ready for the first Braids Toronto show since Horseshoe 2012.

Efficient cable mongering and drum wrangling had Raphaelle, Austin and Taylor on their marks right on time. I was offered a table dance for my front row vantage point, but stood my ground for an eerie and astral set of post-jungle drums, malletted electro-marshmallow vibraphone and the wonder-eyed vocal aeronautics of Raphaelle Standell-Preston (founding co-vocalist Katie Lee was neither present nor referenced). All-new material featured the multiple brands that Braids have come to radiate - deconstructed lyrics, moebius keyboard oscillations, impermeable iceberg tempos and heart-stopping melodic leaps. Feedback was monstrously available in such a low room but occasionally blended right in and melted into the lava-lanche of loud pounding sound. The band seemed relaxed and tightly interwoven after a recent swing through the southern States and a SXSW showcase.
Patrons, fans and corpo-weenies alike were awe-inspired and, for a few days, nothing sounded really amazing to me.
Then I cracked open Sarah Jaffe's The Body Wins. But that's a story for another post.
Honestly, though. BRAIDS!
Sophomore album, Flourish // Perish,  is due for release in August

My Folk Alliance Dalliance

                                        Mandolin Orange Jam : "Steam-Powered Aereoplane" by John Hartford

  Reports are still arriving, and they will continue to do so throughout the convoluted consequences, but consensus places the 25^th Folk Alliance Conference / Festival / Flash Jam at the zenith of recent life-magnifying musical events.

                                                                                   Stella, Greta and Sunniva of Baskery

   Greta from Baskery, in one of her bemused between-song mockologues, boiled it all down: “You don’t want to get involved with it, and you really don’t like it, then you find out some things, and you start to like it and it becomes the Overlook Hotel and you never want to leave.” From behind her doghouse, her sister Stella commented, “That’s too much talking”.

                                                                                           The Hot Club Of Cowtown

  Talking created the landscape upon which the music gestured and posed and walked its walk. Much of it was peremptory. DJ Bob Weiser’s lanyard button was to the point: “I Don’t Remember Your Name Either”. But unlikely flashpoints of hot discussion broke through the schmooze: nostalgic reveries at the photo retrospective, political analysis in the equipment secure room, effects pedal gossip while standing on black spaghetti tangles backstage at the Churchill showcase. As the conversationalists listened and loosened, platitudes and attitudes dissolved and hilarity became a priority, with artists deconstructing MC introductions, and random hallway encounters turning into boffo hey-rubes.

                                                                          Star & Micey

“Serendipity” as CKCU’s loosey-goosey MC Chris White divined, was the operating system.  You were as likely to walk in upon the stark , dramatic blues of The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer, as the riotous dance party staged by the back-flipping, chair-climbing Star & Micey, the hallowed hush of The Stray Birds or  the satirically lyrical logic of Gurf Morlix, Dry Bones or JIM <Effin'> KWESKIN.

                                                     Chic Gamine in the Manitoba Room

For five days, the Delta Chelsea featured room upon room adorned with immaculate degrees of talent, character, costume, camaraderie, extravagance, affection, and community, revealed in chance tableaux. Bedrooms at midnight could contain a quartet serenading a single listener, or a jammed throng spilling out into the pulsating corridor. Saturday night’s three-storey stairwell jam evolved as naturally as a crystal.

And just as naturally, it all got in taxis, vaporized, disappeared; in the Sunday silence, flyer-strewn hallways were once again clear, and hundreds of folks were rekindling the fires through pictures and fresh cyber-cortex connections, sorting through 4-inch stacks of CD's, trying to play a new song on a well-worn guitar, and prepping for the next gig, all the while astounding themselves with impossible memories.