Tim Hecker
Once a year, disparate streams of avant-garde sound meet at the Music Gallery’s X Avant New Festival Festival, which brings all of that Toronto institution’s programming—contemporary classical, free jazz, global traditions, experimental pop—together simultaneously. The event was created six years ago and curated ever since by Music Gallery artistic director Jonathan Bunce, a.k.a. Wavelength co-founder Jonny Dovercourt. X Avant VI happens to be his last project in that gig, but he’s not leaving on a muted note.
Technically, the festival has already started: if you’ve ever wanted to see 20 guitars crunching in unison, well, you missed your chance yesterday. Most of the big shows are still to come, though. At 6 pm tonight, Sonic Youth mainstay Lee Ranaldo and artist Leah Singer (his wife) will pay tribute to Brion Gysin’s hallucinatory dream machine with a collaborative piece for literally “swinging” guitar. A few hours later, German glitch specialist Oval and the locals of Global Cities Ensemble open for sound artist Tim Hecker. The Montrealer has played X Avant twice before, but never like this: using a complex feedback system of distortion pedals and bass amplifiers, he’ll draw out a warped soundscape from the pipe organ in St. George the Martyr Church.
This year’s festival concludes with the Nihilist Spasm Band, who were travelling down here to make an unclassifiable racket back when you did that kind of thing in Yorkville. (Formed in 1965, their “newest” member joined in 1996.) Proud purveyors of noise music before the genre had a name, they refuse artistic compromise no less firmly than X Avant itself. Even their instruments are self-made, according to gleefully unconventional designs.
