Hi, my name is Ryan McLaren and this is my interview with Steve Kado, aka The Blankket. Steve and I talked for a while in the foyer of the Royal Bank next to Sneaky Dee's a few Sundays ago, and we continued the conversation in email. We talked about the Blankket and the relationship between the audience and the performer and Toronto and what's going on in the local music scene. It's a really long interview, but Steve is a really interesting guy.

I started doing Blankket shows when things started going badly with the Barcelona Pavilion following our European tour. Maggie and me fought all the way through the tour and things were very negative. Me and Maggie are fine now, things are good, but we didn't talk for two years following the band breaking up.

And so, in the fall of 2003 the Barcelona Pavilion was back from tour, we had fewer shows than we had at the beginning of the tour - there was a time where we were playing twice a week in Toronto - we had very few shows and I still wanted to play shows and I was contemplating what life would be like if everything bad happened. I was feeling very, like, what if everything bad happened? And the idea would be that I would be playing a Barcelona Pavilion show with no one else. Like, if everyone said "fuck you, asshole"? and not show up and there would be no technical things at all. I show up with this bass guitar and all the infrastructure - all the other band members, the audience, everyone - no one showed up. Like, "it's the end, Steve Kado, it's the end. What do you do? Now throw yourself on your sword and die."

And that's what led me to the Springsteen covers, because there's a primal comfort to Bruce Springsteen to me, it's one of the few things I listened to as a child, in the car. I come from not only an unmusical family, but a family that never listened to music, this was one of the two kinds of music we had.

So if everything bad happened, curl up in the fetal position and revert to the age of four and then play your unplugged bass guitar.

So where did the FM radio's come into play?

So then, I stopped doing shows in mid-2004. I didn't really feel like I was getting what I wanted out of playing these shows. One plays shows to relate to an audience, one wants to provide something to the audience that, like, they can relate to. One doesn't just want to be up there for the sake of being up there kind of thing. That's how I feel. And I didn't feel like I was giving them very much.

At this time, Steve started dropping out of the bands he was in. Jon Rae and the River, Germans, Lenin i Shumov, and even a reformed Barcelona Pavilion. This is when he started playing with FM radios, recording his backing tracks and broadcasting them to an FM frequency so the only people that could hear it would be the ones that brought FM radios to his shows. Steve says he thinks a lot about people enjoying freedom and saw this experiment as a way to bypass the cultural filters that come with playing a standard show, giving him a more direct relationship to the audience and create a better opportunity for interaction.

And it never really worked out because here's the thing, I was like, "if people are interested in seeing me then they should come with a radio. If they're not interested in seeing me, they shouldn't come at all, and we'll be able to generate as much sound as we need through the use of other peoples radios." But it didn't really work.

Well, what if I don't have a radio?

Well, it's cover. I mean, I don't care. It's not my problem, do you want to see my band or not? If I'm telling you it's necessary, if you're putting on a show with a set cover price, and you've got expenses and say the band needs X amount of money and it cost you this much money to rent the venue and a person is like "I don't have any money." You're like, "I'm sorry, the necessary requirement to see this concert is X dollars." It's not even because I'm a jerk, you know what I mean? Like, "here's a spreadsheet, fuck off. I'm not paying $300 to rent Cinecycle and paying these guys no money and letting you in for free. I'm sorry. Contribute something to this event you want to attend so that events that you want to attend may continue." And this is my thing, if it's not money, people don't seem to understand. Like, "contribute money to the event," and people are like "okay." "Contribute money to someone else, acquire an object, and bring it." People are like, "I'm confused, I don't have one." And that's kind of not the point.

People are really hung up on this idea of the musician being some sort of whore they want to pay directly. They want to buy this relationship. They don't want to have some other sort of relationship with you where they give this money to someone else in exchange for having this experience with you. So I'm a bit hurt.

I don't feel like I was anything other than straightforward with people when I'm like "do this for this reason. To make this concert happen you have to do this thing." And people are like, "sorry." Well, it's not going to happen then. Not to be a hard ass, but the idea was this. But at the same time, obviously I feel the idea is important and other people don't really, and it's not like I should expect other people to necessarily read my mind or feel what I feel is important. I just wish such a degree of compromise wasn't necessary, ultimately. When I play Wavelength, I don't think I'm going to use the radios at all, or hardly at all. I'm probably going to plug directly into the board, or run my stuff through an amp of some kind. I will probably sing into the microphone. And this will be my first club show in several years. So I'm thinking a lot about what strategy to use to try to have the relationship I want to have with the audience and making the audience interested in having this relationship back with me. I want them to feel interested and I want to feel interest, but how am I going to do that knowing that these things will be this way, knowing how things are.

Some audiences are far more concerned with purchasing a requisite experience that meets these certain criteria and other audiences; if you get a bunch of people to watch you play in a pile of garbage in Chinatown, they're really flexible. Those people that showed up are very willing to make whatever extension to you. If you were to be opening for The Tragically Hip or Metric or some shit, the audience would have definite expectations and I imagine they'd be very resistant to you tampering with that. If that ticket cost them 40 bucks, you're being a jerk in a way because you can see what they expect of you. If you're getting involved in that kind of thing without being able to provide what people are expecting you are kind of ripping them off. At the same time I question whether they have good needs.

Even in that mythical land of 2003 what I've been trying to do might not have worked. Maybe it's asking too much, or too soon or whatever... maybe it's just too complex, asking people to find and bring a specific item when money is something that is omnipresent. We aren't always fully aware of how deeply we rely on capital to mediate our experience of the world for us, and perhaps I'm not in a position to ask people to forget this stuff. Maybe I should have been more explicit.

The social environment at large has been poisoned to the extent that the social purview of something like that is so limited, and that discussion about and for these things is so restricted that basically only the choir is preached to ever. Who is to blame? In the main, it is Capital.

The reduction of a zone of convergence to an atomized collection of cliques represents a failure on the part of the organizers of said convergence to keep and hold positive energy. I love Toronto, and weirdly, I love it with and without people in it. I actually feel an intense and visceral love for things here (and I do mean things). This is my home and this is where I'm from. I will never be different.

Toronto the city, has largely changed for the worse. You can bittorrent all five seasons of Kids in the Hall. These were shot between 1989 and 1995. In between sketches you can see Super 8 bumpers that show you what Toronto used to look like during the pre-amalgamation, pre-Mel Lastman recession in the early 90s. No chain retail, no Parkdale coke-disco scene, no fake-distillery-district late-30-something "culture", just this weird unstable and totally insecure city that was doing dumb shit like building SkyDome and trying to 'make it' with other big cities in the world.

I was mortified by how alive and awesome parts of the location shooting looked. It made me feel terrible, and simultaneously proud that my town had produced this comedy thing.

I'm not saying things were even better then, but seriously, we've lost so much over the years. Shutting ourselves off and letting Metric and other shitwads steal the rest of it from us while building Drake hotels and condos on it is the last thing we should be applauding. Increasingly, we're moving from being unique to being "unique".

A large part of Wavelength and Blocks and the "community", to me, is finding like minds so we can work together on what it is we're trying to accomplish. I've got some pretty specific ideas of what I want to see happen and I'm steadily working towards it (although, as usual, I wish it was going faster), but if these mutually existing cells never get a proper opportunity to connect, we're doing ourselves a huge disservice.

That's what was so special before and that is what's missing: this cellular form you're complaining of was not always the state of things. There was a more fluid world before. It honestly was so: there was real disagreement. If one thing doesn't really occur in a more atomized culture it's genuine disagreement. The problem now is that some wimpy fear of conflict has confined groups who might disagree with other groups to tiny worlds where they get to live by themselves with themselves. Disagreement is healthy, and I feel that lots of people need to change their lives and stop doing things that are, whether they want to admit it or not, wrong, to stave of a catastrophe that grows more immanent as the seconds pass. One need only look to parts of Manhattan to realize what dismal shit lies before us. The situation now is one where there are separate atomized worlds that look on their own works with ultimate self-satisfaction and are easily able to eliminate criticism from without. This is rabidly unhealthy.

Music, and claiming agency as a person in general (one of music's most useful effects in my opinion), is only really useful if there are goals that lie in the larger social terrain. You should want to do something with the stage you get on, not just turn it all into a short burst of easy money or a six page internet thread. I am not trying to be harsh with people whose work I like and whose general goals I'm sympathetic to, but surely it's time for someone to at least appraise the progress made and make a well meant and clear rendering of where and how these tendencies are leading us.