Congratulations! You’ve picked up the first issue of Wavelength in two years. The last time we were in print was our fifth anniversary back in 2005, and we’ve been living in the weightless world of “online” since then. It’s been a strange self-imposed exile, and it’s good to be back.

It occurs to us that this might be your first time picking up the Wavelength zine. The freaky thing about indie music is that its generations are so short; two years can see a whole turnover of new fans. There are tons of current Wavelength regulars who weren’t even around when the zine was last in print. Here’s some self-congratulatory facts for the young’uns: Wavelength published 40 issues of its black-and-white photocopied zine from its launch in Feb. 2000 up to May 2003, then 15 issues of “Volume II,” the colour-covered, pro-printed monthly, from Dec. ‘03 to Feb. ’05.

Why did we stop? For one thing, “monthly” is a bitch. The workload was just too punishing for a crew of volunteers. Given the zine’s program-guide connection to the series, a non-monthly solution wasn’t exactly forthcoming and printing costs were getting steeper than we could afford. And there was the issue of personnel. One of us (okay, Jonny) had been hogging the limelight, and not letting anyone else get their hands on the booking or the editor-in-chiefing. He needed to go wander around and play in his band for a while. During Jonny’s “sabbatical,” Ryan McLaren stepped up as managing editor of the online zine, and photo editor Kevin Parnell expanded his duties. We needed to organize ourselves behind-the-scenes for a while, and figure out how to bring this baby back — for good.

To be honest, we’re not there yet. But rather than wait forever, we felt that lucky anniversary #7 was a good opportunity to test out a “special edition” of a relaunched print zine. Old-timers will notice that most of the “classic” features remain — Smokey Campbell’s Compare & Contrast (wherein Smokey finds the hidden connections between two seemingly disparate musical artists), Matt Collins’ Sexy comic, Jonny D’s op-ed The Way I See It, the band interviews and the Top 4-T list of your favourite things. We’ve expanded the Features section, with lengthier word counts and meatier, more journalistic coverage of issues relevant to the independent music community in Toronto (and beyond). We’ve also got a cool new layout and format, courtesy of designer Jason Pare, who was the art director for Shameless Magazine and the Music Gallery’s X Avant festival guide, and printer Alex Durlak with his new company Standard Form.

The zine remains a document of what’s going on in our community, Wavelength-wise and otherwise. Much has changed in the last two years; much has stayed the same. Happily, the Wavelength series carried on strong during the zine’s absence. Since so much of the WL flavour is determined by the bands we book, we tried to mix it up and take a community-oriented approach to booking, by having “guest programmers” select the bands in four-month blocks. While this was an interesting experiment, we feel that it created some confusion and inconsistency, so we’ve decided that the three of us — who in 2006 assumed equal roles as co-managing editors/directors — will rotate as programmers, in three-month cycles. We feel that this collaborative approach will keep things fresh, keep us from getting sick of it, and you from getting sick of us.

Other developments include this month’s long-overdue redesign of our website by Stuart Duncan of undertones.ca. The revamped wavelengthtoronto.com will be easier to navigate and will have an interactive newsblog feature, which we hope will generate some interesting and possibly civilized discussion. Our monthly flyer is now being designed and printed by Nicholas Kennedy of Trip Print Press, who has created our anniversary posters for the last three years. And Wavelength is in the process of incorporating as a non-profit, which will make it easier for us to get funding to keep doing what we’re doing, and do it better.

Last fall we received our first-ever grant from the Toronto Arts Council, for support to produce the series for six months, which will allow us to pay the bands better, among other things. The past couple of years have seen Wavelength better understand its place in the “cultural renaissance” of Toronto. Inspired by Coach House Books’ uTOpia series, at last year’s anniversary we staged our first-ever Wavelength Panel Discussion, where we discussed political and cultural issues of importance to the indie scene. This year’s panel — entitled Diversity: Our Strength? — looks beyond the walls of our community, to discuss how we can better engage with the rest of the city. 2006 also saw Wavelength branch out into more interdisciplinary events, such as our video/music collaboration with the Images Festival and a sound poetry performance by Christian Bök. We’re excited to take on new projects like these, and expand the scope of what Wavelength could be.

We’re also excited about this year’s anniversary line-up, which was democratically selected by the three of us. We hope you enjoy the weekend, and that you’ve booked Monday the 12th off work.