Open Ears: Day 5
Valody call themselves “the vagabond of our imagination, a wanderer with extraordinary stories, and a chanting soul.” They played at The Wax on Sunday, early afternoon (which definitely still felt like morning), and can I just say that it was one of the best concerts of the weekend? I want to be in a street band so badly. The show was a premiere of an extended work called The Book of Disquiet. The instrumentation: Portuguese street band, a mix of Klezmer and folk and other things, a true Quebecois pastiche knit together with a text as romantically spectral and abstract as you can imagine.
There was a rock / country band that started playing halfway through the show in the pub downstairs ( at 1 PM on a Sunday? what is this?) but Valody kept going, and at one moment in their set they all grabbed whistles and their clarinet mouthpieces and made as much noise as they could; it was a truly triumphant moment, and I couldn’t stop smiling.
I got a lot of neat pictures; the lighting and ambience at The Wax midday is awesome:
I then ventured over to the Walper Terrace Hotel Gallery to see Veronika Krausas’ Player Piano Project which was pretty neat. See: video above. I know an appalling amount about many of the installations and artists because I wrote large portion of the festival program, but until I got to this installation and someone was asking questions of someone who did not know the answers did this learnin’ come pouring out of me. I love player pianos, though, because it’s a very obvious reading of something that you wouldn’t regularly think of as music. I think you can hear me talking in the video, but I say something like, “Imagine if you took great pointillistic art and turned it into Player Piano rolls?” Probably someone has already done this, but wouldn’t it be cool?
I also bombed up to Centre In The Square to see Althea Thauberger’s piece, but it wasn’t working! Weird! Here is a picture of the frozen demo screen to PROVE I WAS THERE: 
Anyway, after that disappointing experience, I walked through the ridiculously freezing wind and rain to get to the church where Da Capo Chamber Choir were singing the Open Ears’ closing concert. I used to be a huge choir fan (like I used to be a huge jazz fan, and played the saxophone, oh-those-crazy-youthful-phases), but it just doesn’t do too much for me anymore. I’m a tone colour freak, and choral music so often seems limited in that way. Da Capo is great in that they perform almost exclusively contemporary choral music, and in this concert there were occasional additions of other tone colours (piano, brass percussive pots, overtone singing heck yes), so that was something.
Also, the WORLD PREMIERE of Gerard Yun’s The Silence
And just like that, Open Ears is over for another two years. It was a great festival, though, I loved almost every show, piece, installation and had some pretty radical ideology shifts. I hope I’m around next time, and hey, you should come out, we can be friends!
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