Purveyors of: Beating hearts and sweaty brows
 
Ontario Power Generation will really kick your ass when you see them.  They're playing a special Wavelength Halloween show complete with sweat, heat, towels, furries and bad girls! Get ready for some fast, hard, fancy prog/math rock that will leave your ears ringing.  Bassist Al Mousseau (aka BIG Al) texted quite intimately with Lisa Aldridge about the band's inspirations, fetishes, and misadventures.

You seem pretty confident about your live performances.  Where does all that gusto come from?

Competition. Like many who stumble into athletics late in life, Jon and I are chippy bastards. We fight constantly, and it's always a competition to see who screws up first. It's the only way we can motivate ourselves to practice outside of rehearsals. Also, we're all very poor, which makes us hungry. Which makes us angry. Which makes us destroy when we play.

I heard you wooed dangerman Keifer Sutherland with your explosive rock.  Is this true?  How did this happen?

He saw us at the Drake. He wouldn't stop buying us drinks! He kept talking about getting us a guest spot on 24 as French-Canadian terrorists or something. But he "lost our number" and the one he gave us was for some massage parlour in Beverley Hills or something. Hollywood. Go figure.

What do you miss about Vancouver? 

Jon misses Vancouver the most, because he's never been. Mike and I miss the rain and the friendly junkies. Crackheads in Toronto just aren't the same.

My Mom is a huge Eddie Van Halen fan.  Can you rock as hard as like, "Hot for Teacher"?

Is that a cover request? Sometimes Mike warms up with it, for his left hand only. He is trying to learn it with his feet. It is also my favourite song to dance to in a strip club. True fact!

How do you handle all those crazy time signatures?  Is there any serious tapping or multiplying involved?

Jon majored in calculus in university. Mike and I just pretend to know what's going on, and hope nobody can tell when we don't.

Do you have a favourite YES tune or album?  The only one I know is "Roundabout," but it is great.

YES has a special place, very close to our hearts. The first song we learned to play together was "Heart of the Sunrise" from the Fragile album. We all have our different favourite YES albums - Mike likes Close to the Edge, I like 90125 (narrowly beating out Fragile), and Jon likes OK Computer.

What about earplugs?  Are those just for nerds?

We never play with earplugs. We use wireless in-ear monitors. They actually make the music louder in our ears, which I especially need considering that my left ear is pretty useless nowadays. (Except in bed!)

You mentioned being poor and hungry. Do you guys have day jobs?  What do you do? 

Despite our taste in expensive toys, we live pretty modestly. Jon fells trees in northern Ontario in between Cantonese pop gigs, Mike is a semi-pro hockey player, and I'm currently mulling a return to the service industry. After all that we all find time to teach and do session work.

What will you be wearing on Halloween?

Mike is going to be Hawk from Legion of Doom, Jon is going as the Iron Sheik, and I am going as Hobbes from Calvin and Hobbes. I was going to do a wrestler (Sergeant Slaughter or Nikolai Volkov), but I always dress as some sort of furry for Halloween.

I heard through the grapevine that you have one of those new iPhones.  What do you think of it?  Is life simple now?
 
 I do. Life has never been better. Its fragile shinyness ennobles my otherwise threadbare existence.  My boyfriend and I like to text each other on them over expensive brunches.

By Lisa Aldridge