Nov. 11, 2009 - Issue #734: Hanky panky
Wyrd fest: Wyrd scenes inside E-town
Aaron Levin takes Weird Canada straight to the wyrd stage
"Before I forget, I always get these comments from people that what I'm reviewing isn't that 'weird,'" he says with the tired frankness that can only come from answering the same question ad infinitum. "Basically, 'Weird Canada' sounded a lot better than 'Eclectic Canada.'"
Weird Canada is Levin's blog/project devoted to the overlooked in Canada's music scene: the fucked-up noise, lo-fi pop and other assorted DIY/private projects—Levin likes to call them micro-niches—that form the basement shows and undiscovered gems of every city's music community. Started in June, he's already covered everything from Edmonton side projects to Montréal all-cassette labels, and has expanded from just a boy and his blog to a burgeoning institution, picking up contributors from Montréal, Ottawa and Lethbridge and organizing shows around Edmonton.
As with most successful online ventures Weird Canada is a labour of love that was born out of Levin's passion for record collecting, aided and expanded by his stint as musical director at CJSR.
"When you start [collecting records], you very quickly start amassing lots of them, and you're eventually forced into a position where if you want to explore, the only real avenues are the unknown and the independent. You can go to Goodwill and find the Police and Hall and Oates and all these great bands, but if you do that for five years, you want to find some fucked-up shit," he says of his initial forays into the outre and niche, which has also seen him start up a label, Cantor Records, that was initially devoted to rereleasing forgotten gems from music's back catalogue. Time at college radio, with its focus on what's happening now, gave him further avenues to explore. "It wasn't until I started working at CJSR that I really started listening to new stuff, just because I couldn't find an Our Mercury seven-inch at Goodwill. One thing I discovered is that there seemed to be these micro-genre, niche scenes in every city that were similar. You have your weird punk band, your lo-fi pop guys, and all their friends had bands, and they were all recording and releasing stuff, but they never seemed to care about promoting it."
Hence, Weird Canada, a kind of curated catalogue for just that kind of creation. But now, Levin is taking his biggest step beyond the web in the form of Wyrd Fest, a one-day, two-stage, 16-band extravaganza that will bring some of his recent finds and obsessions to Edmonton stages.
Though Levin has organized shows for much of the past summer—including a few memorable gigs at non-traditional venues like Steel Wheels Pizzeria and the Bonnie Doon Bowling Lanes—the sheer scope of this puts it in a different realm entirely. The bands are drawn from both home and abroad, and their genres are exactly as diverse as Levin's pedigree would indicate. Just the local contingent is represented by, among others, psych-garagers the Wicked Awesomes!, anthem-poppers Outdoor Miners, the sludge-garage of the Famines and the twitchy pop of Gobble Gobble. The out-of-town line-up is even more eclectic—ahem, weird—including Women side-project Friendo, Lethbridge garage rockers Moby Dicks and brainy punk Myelin Sheaths and Vancouver's no-wave Shearing Pinx and atmospheric poppers Peace.
Though Levin admits part of organizing Wyrd Fest is promoting the website and his own desires to see some of the music that he likes, he also hopes that the exposure to the kind of bands that don't always get prominent play in Edmonton might help kick-start a little more weirdness of our own, both in the form of new bands and some more people who might be willing to go out on a limb like him and put together their own weird shows.
"If people aren't exposed to the music, they're not pushed in directions that would encourage new ideas to come about—there's no notion that this is something they can do. When there's no stimulus, you have stagnation," he points out. "And I also want to show other people that you can do this without money. You can do this if you work at it, and you're not an idiot. Find a venue, make a Facebook page, send out your press releases, you can do it. And that will encourage more people to stop in Edmonton, because they can play a show and get $150 bucks and have 100 people see their show." V
Sat, Nov 14 (4 pm)
Wyrd Fest
Featuring Peace, Shearing Pinx, Gobble Gobble, the Famines, Myelin Sheaths and more
Cosmopolitan Music Society
(8426 Gateway Blvd), $15
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