Photograph by Sabrina Diemert
Toronto’s North by Northeast – or NXNE – is the younger cousin and orienteering opposite of the behemoth Austin music extravaganza South by Southwest. Over its 17 years, the festival has swollen to 7 days of concerts (ranging from cozy church acoustic sets to sprawling punk moshing at Yonge and Dundas Square), films (mostly music-centric documentaries, including this year’s highly touted Better Than Something: Jay Reatard) and interactive conferences (if you were a musician and could get advice from Brian Wilson, wouldn’t you?).
As with any event attempting to cram >600 bands into a few rock-filled days, it has its downsides. As per the SXSW model, the majority of sets are hosted by bars instead of outdoor stages; between dreaded line-ups, safety capacity, and city sprawl, show hopping presents some challenges. Some shows had limits on wristband admittance, require patiently camping out in cue or purchasing additional tickets for entry.
The festival concert becomes a new challenge for the hometown crowd. Unlike insouciant visitors – free of other responsibilities and able to party through the night and recover in the daytime – locals have to play the balancing act between maximum music absorption and minimal sleep/work disruption. Thus, we opted for a version of NXNE for the slightly risk-averse Toronto music fan: mostly music we knew, with a couple of wildcards. As a change of pace, this festival is presented through two points-of-view (sometimes coalescing, sometimes contradicting): Kevin Kania and Sabrina Diemert. We tried to keep our snark to a minimum.
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All Photographs by Jan Kucic-Riker
Primavera Sound is an overwhelming and vastly stimulating music pilgrimage made each year to Barcelona, Spain. Over two hundred bands across eleven stages and timetables that schedule sets well past five in the morning make the musical mecca a monstrous undertaking. Fortunately, 140,000 music lovers joined me over the course of the three main days and two satellite events to dance, sing, and even swim at the Parc del Fòrum and Poble Espanyol. The eclectic line-up saw everything from unabashed hip-hop to captivating folk ballads and electronic DJ sets. Though the scheduling and sheer volume of music can make it difficult, somehow we found time to sleep amid the madness.
Getting any rest was a predicament owing to the tension of anti-government protests consuming Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya over the course of the week. Demonstrators voiced their concerns over the political and economic situation in Spain emphasizing the growing problem of unemployment amongst youth in the country. Primavera Sound also overlapped with the UEFA Cup Champions League final between FC Barcelona and Manchester United. As a result, the Saturday night schedule saw a two-hour gap in music as fans flooded the Llevant stage to watch the match on enormous screens. Whether or not you were a football fan, Barcelona’s victory was instantly apparent as celebrations ripped through the streets and onto La Rambla well past the closing sets at Primavera that night.
Outside its musical aspects, Primavera held an array of meanings. The festival had its transformative qualities, for instance, the colour and amount of wristbands one donned was the founding rule of social hierarchies over the duration of the week. Wrist apparel, stickers, and swipe cards, clung, stuck, and hung off fans as they hustled across the festival grounds. The photo areas provided amusement by way of disgruntled Spanish photographers who complained of poor lighting throughout various sets. Ultimately, the true meaning dawned as I watched a communal dance break out during ‘Summertime Clothes’ by Animal Collective as they closed out the festival at 2AM on the San Miguel Stage. It is my hope that the following images, sounds, and commentary will help convey the innumerable untellable sentiments of Primavera Sound 2011 with you.
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Photograph by Nick Helderman
As a fan of one-person music projects and guitars layered with lyrics of love, Montreal-based Miracle Fortress dovetailed perfectly into my music collection. The summer of 2007 was bathed in the melodies of Five Roses, a beautifully dense album which made it on our list of top 20 Canadian albums from the aughts. When Van Pelt returned to Toronto in March for Canadian Music Week, the difference was striking. Accompanied by a drummer and effect lighting, he provided a danceable live preview of Was I the Wave?, his second full-length, released on April 26 by Secret City Records. I recently spoke with Graham over a static-ridden Skype connection about his new album and old influences.
Miracle Fortress – Raw Spectacle
Miracle Fortress – Maybe Lately
Sabrina: It’s exciting that you have some new material coming out; we haven’t heard from Miracle Fortress in a couple of years. In the hiatus, you have been doing a lot of touring and recording with Think About Life. What’s the future looking like for that band?
Graham Van Pelt: We’ve been working on a new record; we’re in the recording phase now, just getting some songs mixed. The group has been writing pretty steadily for a couple of years since Family.
Sabrina: I read that you deliberately avoided any influence of music from after 1980 while recording Five Roses. Immediately upon listening to Was I the Wave? it seems like you have turned full circle on that quest.
Graham: Wouldn’t a full circle mean that I’m still the same?
Sabrina: This is true. I guess I should say a semi-circle. Do you feel like it was an active decision to change your approach?
Graham: It definitely was not an active choice to focus on any particular era. I started adding different elements and sounds into the music, especially drums and drum patterns. It ended up leading things into new territories. But there wasn’t any real premeditation about where I wanted to arrive. It’s always a goal of mine to explore something else every time I work on a piece of music. I just keep myself occupied by finding new challenges and combinations. A lot of it is just experimenting: setting up a bunch of gear up and not really knowing what you’re going to do. Let the experiment progress, and in the end if there’s a germ for a song then you’re pretty lucky. I take it from there.
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Photograph by Steven Walter
South by Southwest is kind of like the Twitter of music festivals. It’s peppy, popular, easy to mock, highly corporate and desperate to hide that fact with little stabs at techy subversiveness. The scene on the ground is as though social networking itself was suddenly given life by a trickster god, as musicians of every flavour and every level of grunginess mingle with industry suits and club kids on spring break. Iffy metaphors aside, the festival deserves its widespread reputation as a hipster-heavy network-a-thon that saturates Austin from downtown to the sticks with more man-hours of music than could possibly be experienced in a standard human year. It’s fun.
I arrive in Austin before the official beginning of the music festival, while the interactive tech and film expos are still in full swing, and before you can say “Wes Anderson” I’m comfortably installed on a patio, chatting with a group of Portlanders about different brands of free-range chicken. I’m off to a comfortable head start on all my stereotypes.
The main drag on Sixth Street is already fairly happening, though it’ll get exponentially more clogged as the week goes on. I spy a familiar face through the open window of the Bat Bar: it’s icon of awkwardness Michael Cera, playing bass with his supergroup-of-a-sort Mister Heavenly. The band is rounded by members of the Unicorns, Man Man, and Modest Mouse, but it’s pretty clear who the gaggle of college girls are crowding around to see, cell phones straining upwards for photos like a curious herd of electric giraffes.
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All Photographs by Vanessa Heins
When last we spoke to the Rural Alberta Advantage, Canada’s premier suppliers of hard-driving indie folk and small-town nostalgia, they were a friendly, fresh-faced band with the glow of recently signing with Saddle Creek for their debut album. Recently at South by Southwest, they were a friendly, fresh-faced band with the glow of recently dropping their outstanding sophomore album. They look good in glow. Ca Va Cool’s Josh Penslar joined forces with Mathew Katz of Colorado’s KDNK Radio in an alley behind Home Slice Pizza in Austin, Texas to talk with the trio about their SXSW experiences, being Canadian in the States, the proper relation between Texas and Alberta, and what covers the band is secretly prepared to play if you ask nicely.
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Stamp
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Eye of the Tiger
Ca Va Cool: How’s the festival been so far? Exhausting at all?
Amy Cole: I dunno, we’ve been good. Yesterday we played our shows and we went back to the house we’re staying in and went to bed at an extremely reasonable hour. I think it was 11 PM. [Laughs] We’re really boring. But it was good for us, because now we’re energized for the rest of the fest. We had a long drive the previous day, so now I think we’re ready to really experience things.
CVC: Where were you guys coming from?
Amy: Atlanta.
CVC: That’s a big one. So I hear you’ve played South By before. How does this year compare?
Paul Banwatt: I mean, we’re veterans, you know? We’ve been around the block. For example, we call it ‘South By’. We don’t feel like we have to…
Amy: I just say South.
Paul: Sometimes we’re just like S-X.
Amy: You know what I mean.
Paul: Every year is fun here. Our first year was definitely special cause we came down and got signed. So every year after that is a bit of a disappointment because we can never top that experience. But it’s still really fun and everyone keeps coming out to our shows. We’re playing like six shows, so the fact that there’s people there at every single one, that’s crazy.
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