Issue date: 1/21/10 Section: Film & Music

Experimental musician Slim Twig, aka Archaic Women Photo: Dave_pike / Flickr

Thee Gnostics make music in their sleep Photo: Theegnostics / Myspace

Though Toronto has a long been an incubator for some of Canada's most popular pop, rock, and hip hop, when it comes to weird, innovative experimental music, the city is oddly quiet compared to Montreal, Vancouver, and Edmonton. Connoisseurs of the loud and esoteric can rejoice then for cassette label Bennifer Editions, who provide colorful magnetic tape documentation of Toronto's most demented talents. The label moved into live performance last Saturday, with their first showcase, at Roncesvalles warehouse venue The House of Everlasting Joy. The diverse evening ranged from performance art noise freak-out to robe-clad psychedelic rock but maintained a constant high quality.

Starting off the proceedings was solo performer Man Made Hill, whose set began with him teasing rhythmic squawks from a synthesizer over a preprogrammed beat. For the second piece, things took a left turn. The music tightened up… and suddenly Man Made Hill broke into MC Hammer dance moves and party-starting chants. The incorporation of retro-pop elements into underground music can sometimes diminish its inventiveness, but the rough edges and sheer humor off Man Made Hill kept his music from grating. Furthermore, his final piece, in which he used a garbage can to resonate bass guitar feedback before placing both garbage can and amplifier on top of the bass for a cacophonic finale, resolutely proved his avant-garde credentials.

Following up was Archaic Women, another pseudonym of the self-proclaimed "concrete rockabilly" performer Slim Twig. Tellingly, the only holdover from a regular Slim Twig set was the song "Norma Jean", usually a destructive finale. Archaic Women replaces Slim's subtle hip hop influence with an electronic reimagining of crude psychedelic garage, clattering vintage drum machine providing a backdrop for a repetitive lurches of processed guitar and reverb-caked vocals. The end result retained early rock's danger and excitement but replaced cliché with noise spilling out of minimal song structures.

If Man Made Hill and Archaic Women made slight concessions to musicality, Brian Ruryk was having none of it. Setting up on the floor, bells attached to his shirt, Ruryk played an electric guitar with one hand, while occasionally smashing an amplified acoustic guitar with metal plates with the other. Controlling the sound with a mixing board, Ruryk's set was unique in that most noise performers usually unleash a wall of sound for the duration of their set, whereas his periodic guitar smashes and leaps into the audience to knock over metal equipment and throw boxes of CDRs and floppy disks, almost split up the music into songs. The physical element of the performance lent excitement and Ruryk was called back for a brief encore.

Headlining was Thee Gnostics, a psychedelic rock band from Hamilton who recently reunited after no less than 14 years of inactivity. Thee Gnostics certainly would have appeared otherworldly in 1990's Hamilton, taking to the stage in brown robes and stepping into the haze of a slowly thickening drone of violin, synthesizer, and a stringed instrument of indeterminate origin. Soon, the drums kicked in, and bass, guitar, and toy guitar joined the charge, and the lead singer/synthesizer player burst into a mystic hippie dance. As anachronistic as the band's garb and demeanor may have been, the propulsive music sounded great and didn't let up for more than an hour.

Though the night's performers may have only had their eclecticism in common, they all avoided self-conscious quirkiness and wackiness and reached towards genuine experimentation. It would be heartening if events like this began to occur more often in Toronto.

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