WL485 Sunday October 18 Old World Vulture + Mandeverest + Sook-Yin Lee + Ostrich Tuning: Ostrich Tuning and Old World Vulture are two of the finest bands I've never seen, an incredibly appropriate and astute suggestion from that mysterious Lonely Vagabond character - basically an ethereal ghost who only haunts the very best of indie music shows has access to the internet. Everybody should be excited about seeing Sook-Yin Lee make her first visit to safe harbour Wavelength, she is so good at plucking elitist expectations that it will be a good litmus test to see if our audience still has a grasp of the open-mindedness that defines the series. Lee is an art subvertor along the lines of Maylee and Pegwee Power but with musical instruments instead of aerobics equipment.

This Wavelength is especially special for me because it will be the CD release of a band featuring one of my favorite people. It's the one and only time in the decade I've known and looked up to her when I can really be a help for her, and help her release a CD at Wavelength.

You might not have met her as Mandeverest, they're a brand new band if you don't count three years of dogged determination and practice and hard work required to become a brand new band, especially when you have high pedigree from a former chapter of your life to live up to, like Mandy Mintz does. She was the splendid pastiche guitarist and singer who added all those primary colours to Jim Bravo's dayglo pop songs. Hers was one of the first bands we asked to play during our first year of Wavelength and they capped off our first anniversary, Wavelength #50, while I hauled myself around on a makeshift crutch made of a broom handle while dragging a freshly broken ankle along with me, presented me with a guant medialian of a bust of Marvin the Martain from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. I know, Wavelength stories don't always make sense in the re-telling. I used to marvel at the lyrical interlockings of Jim's songs and how Mandy's harmonies and fuzzed out guitar countermelodies would blast a song into a new dimension.

Mandy has suddenly and starkly reinvented herself, she has somehow un-flanged her voice and completely changed her approach to making music, now all of a sudden she finds herself in a band of foils waiting for cues out of her twists of phrase and musical phrasing - she's cooked up a recipe of brashly charged garagerock songs that turn in on themselves to suggest psychedelic overtones without playing them outright, the bridges open up and the songs flow through and keep flowing, like traffic on a commuter highway streaming across a drawbridge, demarcated by slightly skewed structures, emerging almost entirely unaffected from the the thrill and magic that happens when a first song explodes into sound.  

A cd release is never an easy experience. By the time an artist has made it through the filters of conception to execution to finished disc the songs have been shaken from the creation meme and float unguided into the "out there" with naught but some album art and mistyped lyric notes to frame the songs, alone in that space between the headphone and the eardrum, the new song is left to its own like a hatched tortise on a beach surveying the endless Pacific, the latent potential still filling each wave on the beach with the possibility of connecting with the future mysterious listener, to find its own place as a song in its own right and finding meaning outside of the original tune by merging with a stranger's conscious interplay with the tune, a song freed like a bubble of volcano that came bubbling out of the psychological cellar door of the muse, there's a mix of apprehensive letting go, like watching a child leave home for university, a bittersweet mix of "if only" and "if only I didn't" being released along with the finished bunch of songs, finalmixed into sailing bright eternity.  It's up to the rest of us, you and me, to seek out the songs and to define our own relationship with what the tunes say to the the rest of our sensibilities. To be left alone eyes closed in silence with an empty mind in anticipation of a beautiful new song, it's one of the finest flavours of being alive.

I often resign myself to the thought that I am doomed to write songs for people a thousand years into the future, sending out song after song into the yawning abyss of apathetic middles of cold Canadian roads that relentlessly drive on, crushing the delicate shoots under the feet of the profit-driven agendas of the status quo. So much goes missing in our history, so many deserving songs get crushed under the Nickelback breakfast television of the medium's message, nameless soldiers of sound, coiling in row upon row of beautiful music, lost to unmarked time in forgotten cd racks. When it's time for the slaves of the medium to conduct their annual ceremonies to reanimate a dozen or so of the corpses to be offered up to the gods of the genericification process, and to duly mail out medium's polaris prizes and socan cheques, I recognize none of the songs. It's as though there's no muscle in the mind of the medium to acknowledge the most primal element of good music, always hopscotching to the next brightest flavoured bonbon. The most beautiful moment of them all is the five minutes or so before the door opens and you're huddled around a table to the scent of sweat and anticipation helping Owen Pallett fold the sleeves of He Poos Clouds while people wait in line on the other side of the door, that moment of expectation when there's nothing more that can be done, before that one last live performance before the moments of the songs are fossilized forever to make way for the next songs, that's the sweetest spot of them all. 

Also worth mentioning here, to add to the karmic elements of cd releasing as a quality of mind not as a verb, that Old World Vulture have just completed a beautiful new cd of their own, and in a few weeks this same experience that Mandy's about to go through will be happening to them. It's like watching a Tim Wakefield knuckleball slowly sailing down the pipe towards home plate, wondering what the future holds when the physics of the bat reaches the potential of the knuckleball. All the best, Mandeverest!

WL485 Sunday October 18

Old World Vulture (St. Catharines, instrumental, sweeping shadow gently raking a crusty desert floor) http://www.myspace.com/oldworldvulturemusic (Midnight)Mandeverest (CD release for original Wavelengther psych/pop grunk rock angel) http://www.myspace.com/mandeverest (11pm)Sook-Yin Lee (legendary avant-everythingist!) http://www.myspace.com/sookyinlee (10pm)Ostrich Tuning (the continued exploration of the vitalistic/animistic properties of the key of D) http://www.myspace.com/ostrichtuning (930pm)

DJ RAWK PIGG