So Bell Orchestre might just be the best live show ever. Richard Reed Parry plays string bass, Sarah Neufeld plays violin, Stefan Schneider plays kit with lots of toys, Kaveh Nabatian plays trumpet, melodica, and messes with electronics, Mike Feuerstack plays lap steel guitar, and Pietro Amato does electronics too, and plays french horn. Beautifully. I swear I didn’t hear him cack once.
So it’s basically a chamber orchestra, but a really bitchin’ awesome one, and the music they play is like…Mahler meets Stravinsky meets George Crumb meets Arcade Fire meets meets meets. I don’t even know.
Colin Stetson opened for them, playing sax. Playing alto sax and bass sax. He circular breathed for what must have been ten minutes straight.  Holy crap. I don’t usually like sax, but what he did was incredible–the alto sounded more like one of those perpetual motion synth pieces, but with sooooo much more colour and dynamic contrast; the bass sounded like slap bass. And growling and singing and yelling into his horn. Like. Guys. It was awesome.

Colin played with Bell Orchestre too, bass clarinet and bass sax and cornet and french horn, and it added a little something extra. One of the best parts of these live shows is getting to feel your chest cavity vibrate with really loud bass frequencies, but it is really something awesome when your chest is vibrating with really loud bass saxophone frequencies. And, of course, I love the french horn (and Pietro is the sexiest bearded man), and they are all really, really good at their instruments, and the music is so…chamber orchestra, but there is nothing calm or collected about this chamber music. Bell Orchestre to regular chamber orchestras is like…Picasso to Monet. Bright colours and vivid shapes and arrangements and combinations it takes a genius to turn into something beautiful, but it does work, and it is far more eye-opening and stunning and…well, bold, than Monet.

(Don’t get me wrong–I love chamber music, and I love Monet, I think he was genius. But do you know what I mean? Monet made beautiful, subtle paintings, washed-out colours, that sort of thing. Picasso and Monet are two kinds of beautiful, even though they work in the same medium.)
I love that a club full of indie kids can get into what is really a chamber orchestra with a drummer. I love that I took notes during the concert–ideas, you know, for my own compositions, that their music is complicated and innovative enough for that. I love the big sounds and the rich, raw colours and the fact that a bunch of seriously skilled musicians can turn their talents to a whole other side of chamber music.

So starting today it is Open Ears! I am going to be living it this week, volunteering, going to almost every show (I have a pass!) and writing about them on this here blog, and perhaps on the Cord website, as well. Like one of those festival-journal-blog-review kind of things, but more awesome because *I* am more awesome. You should ALL come out to this week, friends. I know some of the shows are pricey, but there are free ones too! And reduced rates for students! And MURRAY SCHAFER.

P.S. Bell Orchestre people, you should get an oboe player. It would make for the perfect ensemble, for serious.

Open Ears has begun! I think I got an earlier start than everyone else, as I spent all morning on Friday putting up posters for the festival, and all afternoon setting up for a performance of Satie’s “Vexations” (which happened Saturday).  I got to hang out with some fairly excellent people while doing it, though! Jason White was the project manager for Vexations–a former Peter student, like many of the others participating. I also met Windsor Viney, a musician and scholar active in the community, who also happens to be a (robed) Tibetan monk.

The festival *officially* kicked off yesterday with a performance of “In C” by us, the beautiful WLU Contemporary Music Ensemble. It sounded pretty good! We opened for the KWS, who decided to mix things up by having Edwin go out onstage before the concertmaster, and the concertmaster before most of the orchestra. It was cute. The concert was…intriguing. They played Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” and Bridges’ “The Sea” and Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” (that latter of which was my favourite of the three), but to be honest, none of those pieces compared to R. Murray Schafer’s violin concerto, “The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveller” which was sooooo beautiful and complex. It was a weird concert. I mean, none of those pieces are big crowd-drawers. A fresh change, though, I’d say.

SO THEN I went home and slept for a scant few hours before getting up at 5 AM to see the start of “Vexations” which SOMEONE told me started at 5:30, but did not actually start until 6. My housemate (and bassoon friend), Nate, obligingly accompanied me. We got roped into doing some work–carrying things and setting things up and folding programs–but it was all right. We got free coffee, and after a couple of hours, we (me ‘n Nate) took off to Benny’s for breakfast (mmm, chocolate chip pancakes).
Though much of the point of “Vexations” is to explore boredom, the venue was decorated with dozens of umbrellas (Satie died in a tiny apartment with 100 umbrellas), a T’ai-chi group came and did T’ai-chi every hour, a group of people did Thunderclaps (100 syllable made-up words),

there were performances from John Cage’s “Songbooks”, a trio of singers did a vocal version of “Vexations,” cleverly entitled “Voxations,” a projector was set up displaying images about Satie, and out in the lobby there was a set of speakers playing some of Satie’s weird performance instructions (“Be careful, the monkey is watching”).

There were also a couple of sound installation pieces set up there–really neat ones, too. One was a big black box with a subwoofer inside and a dish of water set on top; it also had two dials you could turn to adjust the vibration, and make the water ripple in different patterns. The other piece was called “N-tet,” and it was a set of plastic pipes with some sort of radio frequency and proximity sensor, so that if you were close to one end of a pipe, a pitch would sound. We had a lot of fun making chords and melodies on it (even though it struggled a little). The two installations were made by students from the University of Waterloo; apparently they have an “Art and Technology” class, which art students and engineering students can both take. In this class, teams are formed of some art students and some engineering students, and they make an installation piece. I find this to be Very Awesome.

The Vexations pianists had a laptop set up to display the number of times they had left (and they had to hit the spacebar after every repetition).  I was at the church for the start of the performance and the end, where Peter started playing it with Jason, but on a second, verrrrry out-of-tune piano, which sounded *awesome*.

I was ushering for the Flying Bulgars concert that evening, and they were great! The lead singer and trumpet player were super friendly and funny. I love it when bands don’t take themselves too seriously. The music was great, too: Yiddish folksongs, screaming clarinet, a string bass that had a timbral quality like a bari sax, really strong vocals, and fantastic trumpet.  I mean, some of these guys had Mad Skillz.

SO FAR SO GOOD.

Stay tuned: the next blog will be on Tuesday night, after TransSpectra.

Friends, you may have noticed there was no comic yesterday.  I am sincerely apologetic! But there is a good reason for it, that being: I am moving.  Indeed, I am moving from both my homes: the oboe studio and my apartment. All of my reed equipment is packed into my car, my scanner is in a box somewhere, and my pens are scattered hither and yon.  I did draw comics for this week–three of them, in fact, in purple ink–but they are nowhere to be found either, and as my scanner is buried in detritus, you can see my dilemma.

I am still journal-blogging this week (although I didn’t make it to TranSpectra last night, hence there not being a post), and there will be a lovely article tonight when I get home from David Lang/Elevated and ETC! Be excited.

In conclusion, I have determined that in future I shall give up collecting books and begin collecting feathers. My back is killing me.

I spent most of the day at the Registry Theatre today, chillin’ with Jeff Donkersgoed, the technical director of Open Ears, and setting up chairs and spiking mics, holding ladders, and feelings a *tiny* bit like a sore thumb. I was supposed to be pretending to be Jeff when he had to run off to do things; in this case it meant talking to the piano tuner (to whom I gave *two* right answers!) and yelling at the musicians when they had to get onstage (not mean yelling, more like, “HEY GUYS! Five minutes!” type yelling).

David Lang showed up shortly after the musicians, and I was all like, “whoooa, David Lang.” He gave a bit of a talk before the concert, which was interesting.  The performance consisted of 4 pieces of music which Lang composed and sent to 4 film makers, asking them to create a film to go with the music–backwards from the usual, of course, but it made for some very interesting work.

The first was a piece called “Wed” which was backed by this film:

It made me a little sad, and then very nervous. I don’t think the dog cut himself, though.

The second piece was for piano, electric guitar, bass, violin, and percussion. It had this sort of insistent syncopation kind of feel. The film had something to do with icebergs and the ocean, and the footage was (or looked) old, with scratches and blotches and snow that flickered across the screen constantly, and made shapes that looked a bit like fractals, and a bit like static sounds.

The third piece was called “Heroin,” for solo voice and ‘cello. The ‘cello had these arpeggiated lines, and the soloist (I feel like her name was Nadine) sang with a delicate, wistful timbre. The film was sleeping people, fingers twitching, mouths open, in all different places and attitudes, who eventually wake up. It was my favourite, I think.

The fourth piece (after intermission) was 45 minutes of long tones for chamber orchestra. I’m not kidding! I mean, really beautiful chords, obviously, but without the film it would’ve been reeeeally depressing music, and with the film (which was black and white old footage) it seemed to reflect more on memory than on despair. But I very much enjoyed it, too.

So I helped pack up all the chairs and mics and stands and cables from the Registry Theatre.
We then went to E.T.C. at The Wax, which is a totally awesome venue except that it smells strongly like Frito-Lay (where I worked last summer): grease and fryers and rotten potatoes. I’m not sure why this was the case. But the art was neat, there was a fantastic chandelier, and a *balcony*.
I did not enjoy this concert as much as Elevated. It was modern jazz, and jazz to begin with is not really My Bag. And there was screamy sax, which is also not My Bag. I hate to be mean, but he sounded exactly like every other noise-jazz saxophone player ever, and I am disinclined to like the saxophone anyway. Also, he and I have the same hair, and it is weird to see what my hair would look like were it grey and on a middle-aged man.
The bass player was awesome, though. He had a really neat looking bass, and was feeding it through his MacBook. There were some crazy awesome electronicz and effectz, so he must’ve been ProToolsin’ it up. He was my favourite.

Next post: following Francisco López tomorrow night, hopefully, although maybe the night after that.  Tomorrow is moving day, after all!

TRANSMISSION OVER.