Extermination Music Night: A Review
Extermination Music Night is one of those events the city of Toronto should feel proud to have generated, and to host every coupe of months. The objective is, as one observer commented, “total art,” where one takes into account and manipulates the spaces associated with a musical experience.
Held since October, 2005, and exactly neither a concert nor art show, the places which the organizers turn into venues, therefore, have as much to do with the originality of the event as the bands that play there. Such abandoned arenas as empty warehouses, factories, have featured as sites of artistic exploration and exhibition, while on this last occasion, the stage was an old bridge by the Don River meets the DVP. At midnight or sometime thereabouts, the crowd gathered.
Saturday’s event was in many respects different than some of the others preceding it, though as is true to the nature of Extermination Night, none is like any of the others. There were no big name acts (like Owen Pallet) in the cards, but EMN favourites Feuermusik jazzed out a larger than usual crowd with its extraordinary combination of bucket-drums (as in actual buckets played like actual drums) combined with the saxophone. For those of us who have not yet heard Gus Weinkauf’s abilities to tease out complex electronic rhythms on plastic or Jeremy Strachan’s vertigo-inspiring free jazz renditions of what sound sometimes like Mulatu Astatke to a lay-listener like myself, the experience is scintillating.
Full of Grace by Feuermusik
By the time the third band, Romo Roto took the stage, everything made of paper or cardboard, anything at all identifying the night as an organized event was destroyed by the band and the whipped-up crowd. Painfully punk, and early garage rock to
boot, they seemed to borrow sometimes from the Sonics and the Kinks, though the singer’s voice is definitively his own. A most pit of dancers grew more animated with the progression of the set. As the distortion through the amp resonated muddy across the landscape of rusted metal which criss-crossed overhead, people hung high from them, smoking cigarettes, contemplating the evening. The breeze cooled us down after they left with rip-roaring finality.
Until the early early morning, the DJ Expensive Shit spun “UK Funky,” which included covers of Lee Scratch Perry over heavy, distorted synths. The diverse crowd stayed and danced and drank, finally petering out in slow, reluctant bunches. Though the atmosphere of the August 16 event featured a lower asbestos count than those held at the Brickworks, for example, the reclamation of public space and the spontaneous nature of Extermination Music Night remained its key threads. As one of the most intelligent events of the city, those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of its experience should try and make it out in the future.
For more information on Extermination Music Night check here.
Tags: concert
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