A familiar scene: a young dreamer alone in his parent’s basement makes music to escape loneliness and boredom. Now, the unusual thing about this scene is that this basement is filled with state-of-the-art (for 1984) home-recording equipment and synthesizers and is located in rural Alberta surrounded by endless potato fields, miles from anything remotely metropolitan. For the young Tona Walt Ohama, the major portals to the world-at-large from his isolated farm were through television, radio and records. A well-rounded diet of classical, rock, prog and most importantly New Wavers like Gary Numan & John Foxx gave Ohama the vocabulary he needed to beam beautiful analog messages from his farm to the greater world. I Fear What I Might Hear, Ohama’s first album proper, is a masterpiece of modern folk-form, perfectly capturing the Canadian cultural climate of the early eighties and its effect on a sensitive young mind. I Fear is at once as introspective and pastoral as Nick Drake, but rather than evoking acoustic images of Camus and moody English moors it speaks of McLuhan and a plugged-in landscape that is equal parts muddy toil and media spoil. The LP works effectively as a cohesive document partly because the existential themes of isolation, identity and cultural decay are explored as lyrical subject-matter throughout, but also because the songs are all stitched together using a concrete pastiche of sounds that ranges from idyllic & rustic (animals & water) to industrial & urban (engines & TV). Truly, this is a prescient letter of distress and dislocation revealing the disappearance of a dichotomy, where it doesn’t matter where you live, Google will find you. Don’t be afraid though, it’s a great comfort to know that Ohama’s clear and visionary voice is out there in the Great Wide Aether.

For further insight into the great mind of Ohama, check out my extensive dialogue with Tona via Polyphasic Recordings.

The only way to survive living in the yuppie void of Oakville, Ontario is by burying your head deep in the intoxicating sands of imagination. For Lou Champagne this meant filling his nose with the sting of solder, his eyes with a labyrinth of circuits, his mind with resistors and his ears with a virtual synthtopia of Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, Chrisma and their analog ilk. Lou’s ‘Champagne System’ is a self-invented device that allows him to control his synths with his guitar so that he can perform as a modern day (pre-MIDI) one-man-band. The beast born of his engineering explorations, No Visible Means, sounds at times like a gristleized Swell Maps, at others like despondent Transparent Illusion produced by Rago & Farina. Although Lou’s vision is viewed through singular Chrome & Cristal glasses there is something in these songs that is familiar to anyone who turned to art, music and dreaming to escape the boredom of growing up surrounded by numb suburban slump. Lou’s words are just as true now as they were in 1981, “I’m like a man in a fantasy, and maybe I should just get stoned”. Throw your glass in the fireplace and gulp Lou’s brew straight from the bottle; legit reissue available from Medical Records.

As I begin my journey east I have begun reflecting upon the westward strangers whose lysergic testaments have shaped my own vision. Paul Marcano, with his ode to a future bursting with space colonies and solar winds, is first in mind. Recorded in his secluded studio outside Victoria, BC, Islands in Space is a testament to the forward-thinking creative consciousness existing within the New Age cosmos. Ragged guitar, searing leads, layered vocals, and dense electronics synthesize Islands in Space into one of the great psychedelic canons of the north. As an experience that begs meditation and continuous listening, I challenge readers to take a dive into Paul’s universe. Islands in Space is a pre-cursor to Lightdreams’ tape-only release 10,001 Dreams.

Ken Lewis’ reverent cover of Cosmic Cars released in 1982, the same year as the original Cybotron 45, proves that people were almost immediately feeling Juan Atkins’ electric ripples just North of the assembly line. Released on Scorpio Records, home of countless dubious disco, boogie rap and dub records with peculiar provenance, Ken’s whip is more deluxe DeLorean than hot Spinner, his cruising spin more Grace Jones than The Normal. Although his version almost mechanically reproduces the original, it feels like a glossy photograph of a photocopy; the recording less raw and in-the-red, the drum machine less biting, the cold-creep synth noises replaced by a cold-sweat guitar riff. Still, Ken’s facsimile evokes a dystopian future, not the super-industrial cyber-sexuality of Cronenberg, but a world of simulacra coated in a vacuous veneer of replicated pleasures, like Ryu Murakami’s depictions of Tokyo. Still this record bumps and burns when played loud, so thumb a ride if you ever see this avant-coupe roll by.

Taking a wild lysergic dive from the purple pier of New Age (née Mood) Music into Mancuso’s pink Record Pool, Robert Leth and Phillip Ross’ Insertion in Middle “C” emerges glistening from the consumptive stream, pulls down your pants, looks you right in your 3rd eye and asks ‘What the hell did you expect from this record?!’. Housed in a fabulous faux Deutsche Grammofon sleeve, with images of the twee(d) Doctors sitting in front of a gigantic Moog Modular and several cranes hoisting a huge pink pipe on the flip, this LP certainly elevates, but not in the advertised manner, unless you really switch on for the grip. Even their label, Criminal Records, reveals these quacks as the self-conscious charlatans they are, peddling smut-sonics as cultural Spanish fly. What results from Banx’s bawdy laboratory experiments is a based bacchanal of smeared piano melodrama, motorik proto-disco, torpid poseur rock and woozy Schulze-pah. It’s a splendidly twisted tapestry of overdubbing that sounds like Brast Burn aping P&P and recording for Sky. Lift it if you can — guaranteed to arouse your needle.

*Special thanks to Gary Abugan for all the help in my stacks and for turning me on to this pill.

After studying with musique concrète demigod Pierre Henry, Bernard booked it to Quebec City and brewed his incredibly forward-scheming proto-dance collage. Casse-Tête, literally translating to “Head-Breaker”, is a puzzling exploration of break-beat montage. Bernard scaffolds the boundaries of rhythmic sensation and pounds through scraps of sinusoidal decay, beating societies remnant audio into a violent drum-laden melee of modern-dance predication. No less revolutionary than the acid-house visions of Charanjut Singh, Bernard’s genius resides in pushing these limits from the forgotten snippets of sound permeating our everyday ether. Originals are tough; thankfully reissues exist. Canon grip.

Visitors to Weird Canada being thwarted in our direction via CBC Radio 3′s Searchlight contest may very well be aware of celebrated instrumental (decidedly not using the word post)-rock group Do Make Say Think. However, it’s safe to say you’ve never seen or heard this. My bestfriendforlife Phil came across this cassette – a very early DMST demo tape – amid a giant collection of rap 12 inches in a Toronto Sally Anne. The cover art is home-made (decidedly not using the letters DIY), the liner-notes written in pen and 2 of the cassette’s 5 songs have yet to see the light of the Internet until now. Rerecorded versions of the other 3 tracks eventually found their way onto the first DMST album, with one of the more notable differences being a freaky synth-out at either the tail end of “The Fare to Get There” or the beginning of “Disco and Haze”. Grip.

In his infinite pursuit of happiness, Moe Berg tore Edmonton asunder with his madly obscure pop bonanza, The Modern Minds. Their lone, over-sized 7″ comes packaged in a sandwich bag and screams ultimate grippage with its chic 80s print and references to the Pointed Sticks and Rock ‘n’ Roll Bitches plastered on the back. Inside the 7″ is teeming with Berg’s teen angst, kiltered hooks, and bewildering guitar shreddery, making it an instant hit factory for anyone fortunate enough to stumble into a copy. Berg’s brilliance resides in cementing every lyric and riff deep within your pop consciousness while transfiguring his strangely warm and intimate personality into every frenetic strum. He remains a personal favorite and infinite source of ridiculous pop inspiration. While Weird Canada fetishes the physical object, the true majesty of The Modern Minds is best experienced through the Japanese reissue of in-studio tracks performed (presumably) at CKUA, or you can venture through these recently-surfaced live recordings featuring covers of The Modernettes and a song about Edmonton stabbings! BERGMONTON!

Two years ago Damage laid this collection on me and I somehow only got to it recently, reflecting on the need to stem the tide of things COMING INTO my zone. I’ve written about his Industrial band Phycus over at Thee-Outernet, and Early Electronic Works (1983-1988) collects releases made during those years under the name Data Strangler in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Damage claims he was trying to combine Judas Priest and Men Without Hats, a sort of Canadian teen alchemy, but the results on the early version of “Refrigerators” sounds more like Red Krayola to me. So much brilliance here: an amazing basement vibe (apparently tracks were bounced between boomboxes and you can pretty much hear the wood panelling), crude synth punk, MB style electronic miniatures, synth pop, Kemberic tremolo’d organ zones and so on. Damage’s songcraft is tight and he employs a varité approach to his lyrics which at times are hilarious (“Big Man On Campus”), creepy (“Refrigerators”), tragi-comedic (“Tar Pond Monster”) and cyberpunkish “(Malfunction 54”). Here are two mp3s, but I imagine this is getting the wax treatment sooner than later.

I’ll admit to never having actually found this record despite having searched for years. Pictured is a homemade CD bootleg someone made in the ’90s (1). Michael Snow’s best work hangs from the roof in Toronto’s Eaton Center (2) but this 2LP is so decidedly lo-fi and otherworldly that it belongs in the canon of Great Canadiana. Sadly, it will likely never be on any public school-system curriculum. Each of the four sides contain one long piece beginning with a solo whistling excursion, sounding at times like pygmies and at others like Dolphy. Snow just leaned over his reel-to-reel machine, puckered and blew a side of whistling, at times jaunty, at others, just straight OUT! Side 2 is repeated block chords slowly increasing in tonal violence, not unlike a piano version of the Shepard tone. Snow plays back side 2 on sides 3 and 4 at alternating speeds on the reel to reel machine, slowing it down so the low-end notes on his piano resonate glacially, coming off like a cruddy tape copy of Tim Hecker’s better moments. The whole package comes wrapped in typically clever and self-referential liner notes written by the man himself.
(1) I remember buying a Well-tuned Piano booted CD-R set for an exorbitant price in those halcyon days.
(2) Snow’s structural films are considered some of Canada’s great works of 20th century avant-garde, albeit slow moving ones. Also, Snow managed to sue Eaton’s for putting bows on his Flight Path installation. The thing resonates; hell, a V-formation just flew overhead now.