Peter's Negativland contacts in Toronto, Darren and Nadene of Deep Wireless, invited Wet Gate to perform at their SOUNDplay Festival this October. The trip was made possible largely by adding stops in Montreal and Kingston, where 2 other festivals were able to book us and defray costs. Shipping 3 guys and their projectors and sampling equipment can get expensive. Steve sourced out a big, cheap suitcase at Ross to house the Eiki slotload, a choice I joined him on. Peter opted for a hard plastic toolbox, which seemed to work out, but I found its plastic handle too brittle and breakable. Anyway, we made ourselves portable; projectors on the fly.
We Know Each Other So Well
2 weeks before, I travelled up to SF from LA to rehearse. We spent 2 nights working on new material and conceiving an outline for a Canada show. We watched the documents of our Rotterdam and Exploratorium shows and pulled basic ideas from those. This is basic Wet Gate process, feeding on recent past. I like the fact that tins of film loops from the last show(s) contain much of what will be used on the next one; anyway, the most interesting and current material rises to the surface. I had found a number of films on themes of ice and fire and brought some loops to our meeting. Steve deftly cut some additional loops from these films and Peter pulled a few nuggets from his archive.
24-hour Bagel Town
Customs is a drawn-out affair entering Canada, with a gymnasium sized atrium roped off into about 30 rows of zagging line which took 45 minutes before reaching the Customs desk. Steve and Peter had arrived about an hour before me, and found the bar. Tired Montreal Pop volunteers took us into town and our host accommodations. I lucked out and was housed with Dave Douglas, a genius professor of film at Concordia University, who spent a lot of time showing us around as well as educating us on Canadian film history. One of Douglas's focuses is Cuban film and he visits the Cuban Film Festival when he can, sometimes bringing Canadian films with him. Douglas got some grant money to publish on dvd a series of early Canadian independent films, most notably works by Larry Kent who might be seen as Canada's Cassavettes. He lives close to the 24-hour bagel epicenter of Montreal, and so several times we grabbed late bagels and watched Larry Kent films.
Our show was part of the Film Pop Festival, an offshoot of the Pop Montreal music festival showcasing upcoming bands as well as presenting older artists like Roky Erickson, Gary Lucas and Ramblin' Jack Eliot. We played on Sunday, October 8 at the Portuguese Association, along with a series of short music-films made in association with the National Film Board of Canada. Canadian cities are fortresses of internationalism, with cultural centers for many immigrant communities dotting their maps. These centers are available for rental by groups to put up music shows and festivals, which gives the events an interesting hybrid homegrown feel. Although some of the NFB audience left before we played, we had a good show which was well-received even though it seemed many didn't understand that our sound comes entirely from the filmsound until someone asked a question (we had a lengthy Q+A) afterwards. We were referred to as the Wet Gate Collective in Montreal for some reason; I think they like collectives, Montreal being a rebellious town.
[See an article -"Looper Troopers"- in the Montreal Mirror which interviewed Peter and Steve at http://www.montrealmirror.com/2006/100506/film1.html]
Lakeside Park
A day off in beautiful autumn weather allowed me to walk up Mont Royal to the lake park there, a bit like nirvana. Bought a Sun Ra + Walt Dickerson LP. While Peter and Steve tended towards poutine stations, restaurants serving french fries covered in gravy and lard or cheese, we all concluded that Montreal beer was tremendous.
Friends of Steve's, Matt and Sonia, invited us to their home for Thanksgiving dinner, Sonia offering us a fantastic vegetarian lasagna and more incredible hospitality.
[A brief history of Canadian thanksgiving: "The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an English explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. He did not succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now called Newfoundland, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. This is considered the first Canadian Thanksgiving. Other settlers arrived and continued these ceremonies. He was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him - Frobisher Bay. At the same time, French settlers, having crossed the ocean and arrived in Canada with explorer Samuel de Champlain, also held huge feasts of thanks. They even formed 'The Order of Good Cheer' and gladly shared their food with their Indian neighbours. After the Seven Year's War ended in 1763, the citizens of Halifax held a special day of Thanksgiving. During the American Revolution, Americans who remained loyal to England moved to Canada where they brought the customs and practices of the American Thanksgiving to Canada. There are many similarities between the two Thanksgivings such as the cornucopia and the pumpkin pie. Eventually in 1879, Parliament declared November 6th a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday. Over the years many dates were used for Thanksgiving, the most popular was the 3rd Monday in October. After World War I, both Armistice Day and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which November 11th occurred. Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day. Finally, on January 31st, 1957, Parliament proclaimed... "A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed ... to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October." from twilightbridge.com] We enjoyed a game of film trivia I concocted using David Thomson's Dictionary of Film, reading excerpts from the entries and guessing who was being described. Kept us busy for an hour! Matt's dog also afforded us the opportunity to later discuss the subject of pitbulls as pets, with Peter and Steve I think somewhat cavalierly defending ownership of these dogs while I argued that there should be some rules about owning dogs which have been bred and trained to fight in close city quarters.
Tuesday, we took an evening train to Toronto, which was a bit confusing because they try to limit baggage to 2 pieces on this train and we each carried 4; but it worked out fine, after a telephone rep for the train told Peter, "go for it, live boldly", and we found an escalator to the train platform and I pretty much demanded access to that. The train attendants were generally quite kind. The ride was long and dull; I amused myself by drawing cartoon coinface images of Peter and Steve. The weather turned as we left Montreal, bringing an early winter to the Great Lakes region and 2 feet of snow to Buffalo, NY.
Projector Museum
I remember that Montrealers told us that bike safety was better in Toronto than Montreal, though in Toronto people told us stories of cyclists being dragged under the back wheels of turning buses. Avid bicyclist Jim (Bailey I believe, member of URG, the Urban Refuse Group) met us at the train station and guided us to Nadene's minivan and we were off to the Grange Hotel, a funky 6-floor brick dormitory between Queen and Dundas, a good central location. We found the Java House restaurant and installed ourselves there, for constant breakfast and other meals during out stay. Wednesday, we did a morning radio show on CKLN with Ron Gaskin, who as "Rough Idea" hosts concerts around town. Peter and Steve toyed with a projector and sampler, mixed by Ron into a living interview with us, classic freeform radio. After breakfast, we visited Art Metropole, a media center/bookstore opened by notorious art group General Idea back in the 80's (they fetishized poodles and published a magazine called FILE that was fairly big in the art world back then). Then went to the CBC Center in the business district and ogled their collection of old film and radio machines, the displays on kids TV shows and the sound effects world, a wonderful little museum that i hope is never hidden away. Steve spent 25$ to go up in the CN Tower and we later met up at the Goethe Institute to see Michael Snow (CAT synth) play with Alan Licht (guitar) and Aki Onda (cassettes and samplers), a Rough Idea event. While it was not an ingenius setting of noise improvisation, there were moments towards the end where soft tones from Licht's guitar played mutually with Snow and Onda's somewhat lighter approach. The arced array of amps behind the musicians didn't help sound dispersal in the room, a small round cinema auditorium. Thursday we loaded our equipment into the Latvian House on College St., where the SOUNDplay festival would host 3 concerts using Darren Copeland's multi-speaker diffusion array. Later that night I took off and visited the Orbit Room (Alex Lifeson's bar on College) for an hour or so, catching a set by Chris Caddell's Hendrix-style trio.
Friday the 13th
Friday was concert day. We had a good sound check and a bit of bickering over how our projections would fit on the screen. The days of travelling together were adding up. I tried to leave it to Steve and Peter to discuss everything ad nauseum; there wasn't room or time for all 3 of us to talk. David Ogborn presented some beautiful music to the prelude segment of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, using computer music and 3 soloists on voice, violin and trombone. Wonderful use of the surround system and chorused samplings from the live instruments, particularly voice. Our show was a bit of a calamity; very quickly our sound began over-modulating and breaking up and it was not clear where it was coming from. Evidently, our lines on the system mixer had not been adjusted for proper levels, even as I had tried to get a good headroom for peaks at sound check. But none of us thought to trim the gains back to line level, and so when we pushed our levels in performance the sound broke apart. This wasn't the only sound problem of the festival; Saturday night was plagued by similar over-modulation noise and surround sound related computer glitches and crashes. After Peter wrongly deduced that the sound problem was in my line (understandable because I was the last one he heard breaking up), I ripped apart my sound gear to remove a previously faulty effects unit, thinking it might be acting up again. I was hobbled for the remainder of the show, but I guess we did OK. There was great informal discussion afterwards, and I met with Jonathan Pollard, who had invited me in 1990 to show the Filmers Almanac in Pleasure Dome's first season (Pleasure Dome IS a collective which has been showing experimental film across Toronto for over 15 years), and John Porter, Canada's greatest super8 filmmaker, said HI and gave me a copy of his Visiting Filmmaker Map of Toronto (see super8porter.com).
Saturday was night 2 of SOUNDplay, beginning with Michael Snow's trio, with his son Aleck and John Kamevaar. (I'm assuming anyone reading this would be a little familiar with Snow's work, he is the most well-known living Canadian artist, painter and musician, and filmmaker known for classic avant-garde films Wavelength, Back and Forth, La Region Centrale etc.) Snow's remarks for this performance: "We are going to sound flicker". (Sunday's soundPLAY would be a screening of "flicker" films and a panel discussion.) While the trios music was interesting at times, splayed out on the surround speakers, it was largely a wall of noise-chatter and was interrupted by computer crash-like glitches. Aleck Snow snuck in drum machine samples. Michael's CAT synth issued staccato sine wave pulses and we don't know what John Kamevaar did while sitting at his laptop.
Perhaps the most interesting person at SOUNDplay was Louis Dufort, a Montreal electro-acoustic composer who tries his hand at all sorts of giant projects, including operas and harbour symphonies (a form popularized by Newfoundland's biennial Sound Symposium and visionary Canadian composer R. Murray Schaefer, author of "Tuning The World"). Dufort had presented some video samples of his work at Gallery 1313 a few nights before. He now presented 2 beautiful audio pieces, Grain du Sable for the tsunami victims of 2004 and Hi_res, both of which were dense explorations of the possibilities of new music coming from the computer (MAX/MSP base). Unfortunately, Dufort's presentation was again interrupted by surround computer problems. He also showed a single-channel version of a multi-channel video+sound work called Flesh, in which he plays with porno image and sound loops and which I found less interesting.
Saturday closed with a performance by trio PHH!K, whose uncertain stance between worldbeat-jazz and academic new music was uncomfortable; it was a taste of the 1980's, with lyrics lifted from Marshall McLuhan and "Que Sera Sera" twisted infinitely ala Ursula Dudziak or Annette Peacock, with gurgling Kurzweil and MIDI saxophone rounding out the anachronism. One highlight of SOUNDplay was seeing Bill Daniel, the gypsy-tex filmmaker who did a long residency at ATA in SF, also in Toronto showing his Bozo Texino film at cine-cycle the same night we played. I have finally seen Bozo Texino, thanks to Bill's willingness to trade dvd for drinks, and it's a beautiful film about tramp life on the rails, with gorgeous hi-con B+W footage taken from wide-swung boxcar doors all across North America, great interviews with spokesmen of this dying outsider breed of wild person, and great train sounds. Anyone interested in trains should see this film (go to Bill's website: http://www.billdaniel.net/, it's very cool). Saturday we visited cine-cycle, where Martin Heath and Janet Attard (cine-cycle t-shirt stencil artist) showed us around. An old 19th century horse stable, cine-cycle is a wonderful alternative film space, hidden in the alley behind the fancy 401 Artists studios building.
The Big Apple and the Garage
Nadene lifted us to the airport Sunday where we conscripted our own minivan for the trip to Kingston, a third and final show in Canada, this one in a municipal parking garage. The weather remained above freezing. We did make a stop on the highway at The Big Apple, a famous tourist trap offering mediocre apple pie, coffee, a putt putt course, a gifte shoppe, and a giant red apple about 30 feet high, that you can sometimes walk into, but we couldn't. The Tone Deaf festival had kindly gotten us each a room at the Kingston Days Inn, ahh. Then we made our way to the parking garage, met host Matt Rogalsky and set up, wind-proofing the place a bit using local detritus (nice work, Steve). We ran to get food and returned to watch Wendy Luella Perkins lead a group circle in voice, percussion and garbage (plastic bags, tin cans). Peter and Steve couldn't stand it, but I rather liked the open aspect of the piece, inviting everyone to sing with each other or to themself (to keep warm). A circle of paper bag lanterns pushed the seasonal ritual aspect; it was pleasantly feminine, somewhat mysterious and uncomfortable, but good in a lysergic kind of way. You were left looking at yourself in response to a piece which is really no more than the people collectively assembled there.
Following this, Wet Gate did one of its best shows in a long time, at least in my opinion. (Steve felt differently.) Perhaps it was how shitty I felt our Toronto show had been, that I had been crushed by the problems there (wanting to give Toronto a great show) and the 10 days trapped traveling on top of each other, now was the release. I do think it was a very good show and it was ironic that such a simple set up, again in freezing weather and on a cold concrete floor for hours, could make for the best show of our 3 Canada dates. Matt gave us wood TV dinner trays for our electronics, classic! I had fun ripping apart sounds inside that parking garage. The goodness of that show salvaged what was a pretty difficult small tour for me; I mean, performance-wise Montreal was even, Toronto a bit negative, and Kingston quite good; that balances out a bit above even. Throw in the personalities of 3 "grown men" acting like school boys across Canada and you have destination Mars, an asteroid belt. Once the third show was done, we could relax a bit and gaze at the October Ontario foliage en route to the airport home. Pearson airport (YYZ) is a maze of circling overpasses; we eventually got the rental to where it was going, wheeled our projector bags through Customs, enjoyed a final Canadian airport meal and ale and said goodbye. I flew to my new town, Los Angeles.
Post Intelligencer
Wet Gate has been a wonderful off-and-on project for me, a way to bring together many of my interests and keep a performative aspect to film going in my life. It's a good occasional band. I would love to see us use Wet Gate more as an umbrella for greater collaborations, under which we can work as individual artists and mix with other artists in unique combinations, which might bring excitement back to working with each other. I think filmgroup silt has grown considerably in recent years as "solo" artists, using the strength of their siltiness to go off in new directions individually, and then return to group work out of the strength gained from the separate studies. Certainly the members of Wet Gate lead independent creative lives; I'd like to see our independence grow in relation to one another. Otherwise the group concept can be stifling. I could hardly get a word in edgewise with my 2 coffee fueled companions on this trip.
There was a rumor of going to St. John's for the Sound Symposium 2008; Peter said Gayle Young of Musicworks had mentioned that possibility. I'm all for it. I've always wanted to "do" the Sound Symposium. I love Eastern Canada, having visited Cape Breton 2 summers when I lived in Maine. But I would want to see Wet Gate as the vehicle that gets us there and then be free to do my own work, which requires attention and nurturing. (The Wet Gate group is almost instant and easy, we grew out of a stump fully grown.) I would imagine going there, presenting a Wet Gate performance, and then being free to do other work, perhaps compose a radiophonic piece on my own and collaborate with another visiting artist.
The idea that Wet Gate is viable as a serious source of financial income is laughable to me; it entails much more input than return financially. This Canada trip almost broke even, and that's good for Wet Gate. This is not a cash cow we're milking, even if it can be productive until doomsday. Of course, we each must measure our sense of what we put in and what we take out, which is the reality of all relationships. Unfortunately, under present kill-bill capitalism, funding matters in what art you are "free" to pursue, or how intensely you pursue it.
