Forgery League

I can’t post the latest Song-a-day pieces, because (1) the sound quality on one of them is terrible, not to mention the playing, (2) the second one’s not done, and (3) they’re part of secret Hallowe’en show plans. Not that it’s that big a secret, I suppose. Regardless, I’m quite proud of them both.

We don’t have time to pull it off for this year, but the secret plan is this: for Hallowe’en - or perhaps some other show, just for the heck of it - we come on dressed as a completely different band, and play our own material in a different style. Of course, knowing the two of us, New Wave seems the most logical and fun choice. I’ve spent the past half hour trying to sing like Neil Tennant.

I mentioned the premise to a friend, who had a related idea: musical improv. Not just improvised music, not just an improvised musical, but improvised drama featuring the players in a band. The audience could throw out suggestions for what style they should perform and the soap opera dynamics that are going on between all the musicians. It’d take a good deal of skill and chutzpah, and no small amount of preparations. But it could be really cool.

On another related tangent, I’ve been tossing around ideas for a while about doing a story-with-songs - not quite a musical, but a narrated story with songs performed by a band, or more than one band (they could change during the story breaks). My chief inspiration was Harry Nilsson’s The Point, which is fun, but it’s by someone else, and it’s not really his best work.

As I type all this, Tarquin is on my lap, pawing at it in a way that’s frankly rude. He’s been really pushy lately about wanting to own my lap and/or chair, and if not, to climb up on my desk. I may have to employ him in my music making (inspired also by this YouTube video, which was passed along to me by Ms Urnash; warning, contains adorable kitten).

I guess you’d call that ailurotoric composition?

Dream: I was working on a long-running TV show - for some reason I ended up minding two black horses that kept wandering in and out of the house set. Later, in the same building, I came upon a folk triio from Quebec who were busking and preparing for a stage performance. Several of their pieces consisted in large part of animal noises, especially frogs, produced with their fiddles and the leader’s double bass. I chatted with the leader about her playing and why her bow had a truss structure instead of a traditional light wooden shaft. The truss was heavier but gave her more oomph when playing, and was unusually bouncy if she used it the right way, which produced impressive frog-trills. (Compare earlier dreams about bass playing.)

New word, coined by Sean: bungus. First used to describe a book on marketing. A cross between “bogus”, “bung” and “fungus” - I like its connotation of something false and loathsome.

Moving immanent… We’ve given our notice at our current house. Time to start the purge of Stuff so there’s less to move on the day. We did manage to gather about three boxes’ worth of books last night to give away, and I’ve got a stack of CDs that need selling.

I’m much, much less particular about my CDs these days - before our last move a couple of years back, I had them all alphabetized, but that fell by the wayside once I got everything I listen to onto the computer. I like having the “hard copies” of some rare or important stuff, but mostly it just gathers dust on the shelf. Heck, aside from concerts and buskers, I haven’t bought an actual CD in ages.

Speaking of music… Really, I haven’t listened to much new music lately. For the past month, I’ve been absolutely obsessed with the music of the New Pornographers and their songwriter-in-chief AC Newman. Some of their stuff I’m not so big on (I confess Dan Bejar’s stuff has never clicked with me) but probably two dozen of my Favorite Songs Ever are theirs.

But today, thanks to shuffle mode, I have a new favorite song, and - heh! whaddya know, it’s from BC as well: Nomeansno’s “Hello / Goodbye”. The little riff over just those chords, plus the lovely soaring round of “you will not follow me”... yes, yes, yes.

Ooh! And, via the ever-awesome Spacing Wire, here’s the video for the Spoons’ 1984 hit Romantic Traffic. Ah, the Can-con memories! The old red subway cars! The crimped and fluffy hair!

Hadn’t seen this yet: the gender-bendy video for “Sing Me Spanish Techno” by the New Pornographers. Yet another reason to love them (cooler still ‘cause I’d just worked out the chords to the song the other day and have been playing it ever since). I like the little moment where Carl wakes up. :D

There’s a higher-quality QT version at director Michael Palmieri’s site, along with a lot of other cool stuff - check out his stop-motion work!

Tune in to TVOntario this evening to catch Flickershow on Studio 2! We’re first on the bill with an acoustic rendition of “Erratic Satellite Aphrodite”, and from what we saw, the rest of the show should be great as well.

STUDIO 2 ONTARIO SONG CONTEST
Thursday 23 June - 8 pm on TVO (repeats: 11pm, 2:30pm Friday)

And as if that weren’t enough…

“INVINCIBLE” VIDEO LAUNCH PARTY
Friday 24 June - 9pm - The Renaissance Café
1938 Danforth Ave, west of Woodbine [map]
with Archery and Jessica Graham

CANADA DAY SHOW
Thursday 30 June - 9pm - The Pour House
182 Dupont Ave, east of Spadina [map]
with Some Of The Parts

The shoot for “Invincible” was amazing. We spent Saturday afternoon shooting the opening and closing sequence on B&W 16mm: singer Julian falling asleep in our “rehearsal space” (actually our director Remi’s bachelor apartment, the furniture having been relocated to the deck and the roof). Geez, it’s a lot of work doing this stuff, and we were only doing about half a minute of ‘story’ at most… I have a new respect for TV and movie actors and crews now.

In the evening, we crammed a few dozen people into the same room for the main event. We performed the song in front of an audience as a dream sequence, shot on Super-8, using 6 different cameras of varying makes, on several different types of film stock for a sort of ‘patchwork’ look. Even the movie cameras were part of the scene.

Three of our camera operators were women wearing little pink tops, hotpants and knee socks - Remi promised “space helmets” early on, but they were nowhere in sight, sadly. I did have a moment of “dear god, have we sold out already?” over the Female Eye Candy Thing, but Remi’s justification was that the whole thing is Julian’s dream. Really, this video is just a big character assassination on poor J. :>

One of our guests (I shan’t say who yet) was a strapping fellow in a dress and boa, with whom I ended up dancing. The sight of him, complete with chest hair and glitter, prompted one of our scantily-clad camerawomen to blurt out “Ohthankgod. I don’t feel so dumb now.” Alas, our friend David Hein couldn’t be there… he was planning to be there in a superhero costume, appropriately enough.

Next, we have to record the final version of the song. We’ll have a screening party in June, most likely, and then we’ll put it up on the web site. And then, who knows? I’ll have to start looking up places to send a DVD…

Flickershow news: a friend of ours has it in mind to do a tiny-budget video of “Invincible”, and we’re aiming to shoot it on April 9th. We won’t have time to record the final version of the song before that, but we’ve put together a demo to use for shooting.

Been doing a lot of covers lately, trying out things I can sing and play bass on at the same time. In the midst of all that, I’ve been doing some work on original tunes - as always, I have about half a dozen of them going in parallel, none of them finished. But it’s a nice feeling to be making progress. Maybe this weekend I’ll devote a day to wrangling them into shape and making a CD for the rest of the band…

Latest web site: SpinHost. I’d been puttering around trying to come up with a logo, when the spin -> wind turbine idea finally wandered up and thumped me on the head. So the logo and site take their cues from streamlined Air Age stuff. There are some further refinements to come - the photograph of the turbine isn’t final, for one thing. I’m gonna replace it as soon as I can get down to the Ex to take a picture of the one there.

Konono No. 1 - electrified Congolese trance dance, with instruments (and microphones!) built from salvaged parts. The fuzzed-out sounds might fool you for a second into thinking it’s some bedroom electronica noodler, but the rhythms and vocals are from some place far, far funkier than that. Here’s a video clip.

Sunday we did a video shoot for some folks making a documentary for and about the Riverdale Art Walk, a neighbourhood art festival across the river. Our beat was the stretch of Queen between Carlaw and Leslie, where we were to drop into the shops, galleries and restaurants that were the art venues.

I went along expecting just to be responsible for audio and holding the microphone boom, but it turned out we were it for our team - meaning that I was gonna have to do the interviewing. Ack!

The good news was that, although my most recent interviewing experiences were a) awful and b) about five years ago, I did well. Artists are wonderful to talk to about their work - at least, the down-to-earth, largely self-taught ones we met along the way. One of our favorites was Annette Hansen, a Danish-born (and Danish-trained) ceramic artist who’s become fascinated with concrete and other construction materials - we had fun discussing the demolition of the Gardiner Expressway just south of Riverdale. Her sculptures are generally very spare and restrained in a rather Japanese or Euro-modern sort of way, with slabs of textured concrete accented with ceramic, metal and other materials (she’s big on rebar).

Also met Randal Lee, whose work we’d seen not only at the Free Times Cafe (where J and I have played on numerous occasions) but at our friend Karen’s hair salon. He’s having an opening there Thursday, and we’ll have to put in an appearance now. :D Also showing at the same gallery was Bernice Landry, who as it happens writes screenplays. She and Sean are meeting tonight to talk shop.

The bad news was that after the interview with Annette we discovered that our tripod was missing - our best guess is that we left it outside while loading into the crammed little shop, and that someone walked off with it. With head, it’s about $700 - and we had a shoot the following night, so Sean had to go buy another with more of that Money We Don’t Have. Yes, we are insured, but it’s production insurance, meant for, say, death or conflagration - so our deductable is even higher than that. So much for the supposed down payment on that supposed house we’ve been talking about. :D

We remain determined not to get worked up about money. It’s been tough at times, though.