Wandering minstrels find a perfect Room
Piano Lesson
Inspired show can be as diverse as raging electro to campfire folk to free jazz to sweaty rock 'n' roll
Most music festival organizers would have a hairy fit if their attendance was decimated in the space of a year. But for Ryan Carley, who hosted 400 people on his parents' farm last year, he was perfectly happy when 40 people showed up earlier this month.
"We made enough money to pay for things, and there was enough people that it felt like a party," he says. "Another 50 would have been nice, but it worked out."
Last year Carley's party was called Track and Field; this year it's taken on a new format and a new name, Living Room. Instead of a single event, it's now a roaming festival that has already made stops in Brantford, and the Carley family farm outside Rockwood.
The festival continues on Saturday in Waterloo and next weekend in Guelph at a number of indoor and outdoor venues, including backyards, basements, the Waterloo Park Grist Mill, the E-bar and the Guelph Youth Music Centre. The events are all-ages. Other than Bob Wiseman, an elder DIY statesman of sorts, most of the lineup will be unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't listen to campus/community radio or frequent local message boards.
But if -- like many -- you didn't get your Hillside Festival ticket on time this year, here's a chance to see plenty of local acts that didn't make it on that bill. And don't be surprised if some of these acts will be headlining Hillside four years from now: people like vaudevillian madman Friendly Rich and his Lollipop People, Montreal's electro-pop Telefauna, Toronto's noise rockers No Dynamics, classically-trained thumb piano songstress Laura Barrett, or one of Carley's own bands, the gentle folk pop Ohbijou.
The 2005 festival was one of the most inspiring events this writer has ever witnessed, a wildly diverse bill that went from raging electro to campfire folk to raucous free jazz to sweaty rock 'n' roll. The best moments were at some site-specific shows--like Jenny Mitchell of the Barmitzvah Brothers playing a solo Omnichord show in tree branches, or an impromptu Singing Saw Shadow Show covertly setting up in a neighbouring field. It's no wonder that for the next year, everyone who attended was bugging Carley and his friends in the Social Arts Club to find out how they were going to follow it up.
"Our first thought was to make it bigger," he says. "We were in talks with one Toronto promoter to do something on Toronto Island. It would have been awesome if we could have picked the bands and set the scene to shape the feel of things, but I don't think that would have been possible.
"The other idea was to make it smaller, but we would have had to neglect certain bands. Every year we meet more people that we want to play at this celebratory event. Doing something really small wasn't the ideal situation either. By having Living Room as a roaming festival, we could have multiple locations and get every band we wanted to play. We made it both bigger and smaller at the same time."
It was also important to get the local scenes in each city acquainted with each other. "The aim was that people would travel and roam along with the locations," says Carley. "We tried to make sure there were some Guelph things going on in Waterloo and some Brantford things happening in Guelph, etc. I don't know where this will go next year. It might be another central location, but I'd miss inviting all these towns to participate in it."
Web: www.socialartsclub.org /livingroom/popups/waterloo.html Feature: Ohbijou, Bob Wiseman,
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