So, this is it the dawn of another new era, another fresh Sunday night in a seamlessly endless string of Sundays stretching back to 2000, then back beyond that through the Harmony Picnic, Sedated Sundays, Theta State records, and before that into the days before I was old enough to go out on Sunday nights. I lived in Winnipeg then, it was bleary and cold. I was angry and miserable. I know. It’s all just rock and roll, but somehow to me it marks a new vista, another new beginning in a seemingly endless string of new beginnings.

Wavelength is relocating to a new temple of indie rock, to an understated community crevice on tree lined streets, with clean sightlines and a bigger cap than Dee’s. A place is just a coordinate on a map, a location built of bricks that remain inert as stones until vitalized by our living desires and expectations. Pity the wonderful new proprietors of this establishment, feverishly trying to play down expectations while the rest of the community builds them up.

This sort of expectation is rare and magnificent, I last sensed it in teh commun the week before the first Nuit Blanche, an unnerving combination of big ideas and unrealized plans, a shapeless chunk of granite looming on the horizon waiting to be carved by a thousand visionary pairs of hands. Twenty years from now who knows what this transformation will mean. Will we look back at this new venue fondly as the start of a new era of the community? Will we look back on it as a last gasp of independent culture before it was finally utterly and totally in the grasp of the moneyed powers that be, etherized, sprawling on a pin, unable to spit out all the book ends of its days and ways. So how shall we presume? And how shall we begin?

Pardon the prufrock pilfering there, I ran out of hyperbole for the Garrison, speechless and adjectiveless from the moment I first laid eyes on it and have been resorting to half remembered snatches of poems ever since. It was a massive grotto of a hole on that the stretch of Dundas, I’d walked and pedaled past it a million times without even sensing its presence, but after standing on the spot where the stage was envisioned and barking a few words towards the north wall I felt as though I remembered the place from a long time ago, and when Ryan, Kevin, Jonny, and I finally left the building to survey the rainbow from a summer thundershower I thought of (I think it was) Browning “look upon my works, and despair,” realized how small we all are in this big commoditized world, and how lucky we are to be doing our own small thing screaming at the wall, waiting for it to fall.

Wavelength is to me a little clump of clay in a river that bit by bit has been shaped by the silt flowing past it, and has transformed into a strangely beautiful sandbar refuge in the sea of unsouled commercial ambition. It continues because the people involved with the series are genuinely excited about good music, not made by machines, unplugged from the grid and since it’s on a Sunday night, far removed from the critics and punters who inhabit the brighter more profitable reaches of the weekend. So to all of you who have built this sandy reef upon which so many of us have washed ashore at some point or other I salute you and thank you for persevering as you fumble through this cruel world in search of your own true voice. WL has put on lots of shows away from Sneaky Dee’s and Ted’s Wrecking Yard, and they’ve all felt like shows, but those two places – and the sense we get from this new place, the Garrison – feel like home.

We’re going to be all grown up once we reach WL500 and who knows what the future has in store for us when we take our idea from the incubator for the last time and send it out to the big world that exists beyond Sunday evenings. Let’s spend the last days before we leave the nest getting hammered to awesome music at the Garrison! Be in this moment right now, or else you’ll regret that you’ve spent your time waiting for the future when it was already happening. Of course I will miss Sneaky Dee's which has been so good to Wavelength over the years, and I will definitely miss the awesomeness of the club's low-end. I will not miss having the head of the sacrificial goat painting to the Dee's stage ceiling hovering over my head in every Wavelength photograph, but I will miss the vegan food, the years of great memories I can bring with me, but you'll never find a better tofu wrap at 4am.

Full respect to Sneaky Dee's, but there's no sense dwelling in the past. See you Sunday night, at the Garrison. Love, Doc Pickles