Well, this maybe made me cry because nothing has really seemed more significant recently: One of the greatest OUT Canadian bands of all time playing at the sexiest intersection in the country. Nobody showed up, except for the LEGEND Mark Maclean (1) and Brian Seeger (2) (documentarian). Whomever curated this stage was a GENIUS. Get Disguises to rip a set that sounds like someone shovelling glass trilliums overtop a TG rehearsal… at high-fucking-noon, at the epicentre of EVERYTHING. Before urban renewal, Yonge and Dundas was the only intersection in Canada that really felt like SOMEWHERE! That was before Lastman and his minions at city hall razed the pawnshops and porn-shops, the record stores and headshops, the dank jewellery markets, the diner joints and a whole slew of gorgeous heritage commercial architecture. I’m over it now and back to thinking it’s the coolest intersection in Canada. And if you are old enough to remember Yonge and Dundas before the Great Flattening than you are old enough to remember Disguises with Kevin Hainey (3) in the line-up on woowoowoowoooozy bass. Sometimes he would just stare at the bass and use his will to pitch its eternal wooing. Jon Shapiro (4) shreds bass here but he’s best remembered kneeling on a table playing mixer feedback, tapes and a giant horn. Randy Gagne, who looks like a cross between Prince and the Coffee Time at the corner of Dundas and Pape, better known to YOU as Man Made Hill, is the shuffle in Disguises, the motion flow. And what of the roguish mug up front in the sick cyan plaid? That’s Kevin Crumpp who runs Wintage Tapes and Records (5), crooning his little heart out, beating a rap, homeowner. The Disguises lp on Wintage (now OOP) is a chef d’oeuvre, recorded by Dale Morningstar at the legendary Gas Station Studio on Toronto Island (6) (which is historically significant (7)). People are so busy inquiring about the status of AIDS Wolf they forget to inquire about the status of Disguises, a more pressing question. And next year: Gastric Female Reflex featuring William Davidson at the Harborfront Center.

Addendum: If you’re not jamming WITH the King, then you’re jamming FOR the King, so might as well get with his majesty’s Lute-through-too-much-Line-6-style and call it a deep, mind-melded, madrigal, there Troubadour!

(1) (Mark Maclean) Of the Sick Lipstick, Black Cat 13, Thrashed Genes and Induced Labour, but who recently chose Life and gave up on the permanent death-fetish that is rock n roll, ostie.

(2) (Brian Seeger) Of the Planet Smashers, Pon D’Replay, Wasted Nymph

(3) (Kevin Hainey) Who runs Inyrdisk, the label that released the killer Clinton Machine Lp and tons of Toronto Underground Sound Force related cds, former Exclaim contributor, author.

(4) (John Shapiro) Of Induced Labour, Conspiracy of Familiar Objects, 13 Moons, Almost Blue Sunshine, producer of the John Milner 7” on Pleasance… also runs LsdOTB records, one of the few labels to actually release an Afternoon Penis joint, remembers record shopping on Yonge St. in those Palaeolithic times, secret side doors to the Lion at College and Adelaide, long nights at the Bagel and the first great gig of 2005 as if it had been fried and served just now, Chuck Schuldiner briefly joined Slaughter for a few months and was seen straggling around York Mills for some reason, how the Jerks and Suicide played the Horseshoe, Major Street days, long-night living room gig scenes and onwards.

(5) Wintage, the non-internet-presence label, has released countless amazing underground titles. Recent zones have included releases by Thurston Moore, field recordings of a Japanese couple fucking, Knurl, Nihilist Spasm Band and Six Heads, the former three on wax! The former three are all stone-cold Canadian classics.

(6) (Gas Station Studio on Toronto Island) Of Diner is Ruined, possibly even the Rheostatics. Recorded plenty of records in his day, including sides by Gord Downie, Julie Doiron, the Woodchoppers Union and the second GYBE! record ect ect. The Diner is Ruined blew my adolescent mind bee tee double you, when they opened for Helium and Sonic Youth at the Warehouse circa 1995.

(7) Reminds me of my submitted piece on Black Sabbath’s “Never Say Die” for Weird Canada’s Departures Revisited, the draft of which came back to me defaced, in Levin’s hand, by a giant MAPL system logo with only the “P” blackened.

Somewhere between a Canadiana Jandek, or a tone-deaf Neil Young, prairie-born Dave Smith drops a few of his strongest Going Down the Road-styled slices. Smith’s jams are often nothing more than tape buzz and harmonica-folk devolving into windy noise but with enough personality to shame Shotgun Jimmie into submission. Man of the land.

The bleeps, sweeps and creeps of Craig Storm’s MMC get a visual jolt from found footage aficionado Joshua Rogers on this hep DVD. In a tour de force of cable access follies, the songs of Le Progrès sync up with stormy night drives, puppy love on the monorail and aluminum foot soldiers goose-stepping to the beat. It’s an A/V collab on par with Ratté v. Femminielli.

Encased in a squeeze box of screen printed palms, Ocular Gymnastics’ debut transmission is as lavishly packaged as it is blissful. Pedal-jammed Casio meditations cast ripples across the mind-pond while the mountain of found-sound percussion clanks and rattles down the cortex. Only Moduli TV could provide suitable visual accompaniment for these C.H.U.D. ravers in a tropical time-warp à la Bamboo For Two.

Here it is: the Patron Saint of weird Canadian records. Alongside Corpusse’s Delusions and Bernard Bonnier’s Casse-Tête, Carlyle Williams’ Gotta Go For It! forms the Holy Trinity of ’80s Montreal private press beauty; each of them summing their parts and transcending with a one-man-one-wholly-formed vision possessed of unbridled id and utter disdain for the prevailing rules and praxis.

Forgotten in the usual fetishizing of the “filles du roi” cypher (1), beyond bloodlines French-royal and First Nation, is that Montreal’s women posses the ultimate sexy quality: good taste. And so it went that Leila Majeri (2) and Marie-Douce St. Jacques (3) played me Gotta Go For It! and on each separate occasion, my mind split open, the air charged, everything changed, and the damn crew hasn’t been the same since.

Released in 1988 and recorded at the Unidisc studios (4) in Montreal’s St. Henri neighbourhood, Gotta Go For It!’s qualities are many: blocky Chung King Studios drum programming, a careening non-chops guitar style that sounds like The Birthday Party minus the fireworks-display fay hairdos, and streams of vocal overdubs that make whomever Tim Buckley thought he was on Starsailor seem like a sane and well adjusted man. Some tracks have a synthetic tropical vibe that predicates the various fi’s (5) of the last half-decade like a boss, raising bloody hell in the listener’s mind, forcing one to reconsider every aesthetic category.

For all its sonic density and deistic power, Carlyle’s message, via truly inspiring vocal work, is positive: obsessive self-awareness and accompanying self-criticism can be reality forming, that the more you look INSIDE the more you will see. That, as he says on “No Reason”, “There is no reason for your next depression. And that’s the truth.” Which as an underlying vibe makes Gotta Go For It! unique amongst the great works of 20th century Canadian art.

Gotta Go For It!’s sleeve states: “The more you look – The more you see”, and like all amazing ass records, the more you listen, the more you hear.

(1) These women, who were poor and undereducated, often orphaned, and in their teens or early twenties, were sent over from France for the men of Canada. The rumour-that-won’t-die is that they were prostitutes.

(2) Screen printer extraordinaire, often using the nick Alphonze Raymond, and also the drummer in the amazing Yomul Yuk.

(3) Editor-in-chief of the awesome aMAZEzine, which lasted a few issues, came with a GYBE! 7” and generally covered a zone, Marie-Douce was also the Farfisa player and vocalist in Pas Chic Chic! I sat down with her to discuss this piece.

(4) Obviously, as the ’80s wore on and disco, particularly the French-Canadian kind, receded in popularity, Unidisc fell on hard times and started renting out their facilities cheap. They were based in the RCA building, who obviously were slowing down themselves.

(5) Lo, no, slow, glow, hi and high fidelities, be it Ariel Pink, Spencer Clark, James Ferraro and the rest, you can hear Carlyle in the faux madness. The incredible Afternoon Penis tape on Heavy Tapes is the most obvious student of Gotta Go For It!, however. Worth looking into for fans of Carlyle.

Toronto’s storied six-string weakling and Winnipeg’s notorious nightmare machinist junk it up on this flesh-crawling collab. The plainspoken title does little to prepare for the onslaught of shreddery lost in the tempest of tape loops and R2-D2 squeals. Bill Orcutt getting down with Bernard Bonnier is a start, but this is more like Mutant Concrète.

The infinitely astonishing half of the Brothers Tonstartss has unleashed a prophetic tome of popular drone. Andy Boay’s disharmonic orchestra eschews a wondrous pop dialectic; streams of incredible catch coalesce within tempered vibrations and dense bowed riffery while swathes of warm, ecclesiastical timbers mellow with hypnotic ease. Evil Masters brings us mere nanometers towards understanding the creative behemoth that is Andy Boay; yet the face doth melt and the hand grippeth ever more.

A power trio which sways from down-tempo doom to British Heavy Metal, and their drummer’s tape manipulations are the glue that holds it all together? If the tectonic shifts don’t diminish you with a blink, nervous hums will creep up through Crabskull’s eerie non-sequiturs and form pustules on any clean mind — infectious stoner metal in its newest mutation, perversion, persuasion, enticing all to bang head, bang head, bang head.

Down at the candlelit cabaret, Hey Mother Death are swaying onstage in spontaneous reverie. On their lavishly packaged debut cassette, this Granelli schooled duo hovers through an unclassifiable sound-cloud of spoken word, sleaze-guitar and haunted Hohner spectres. The aura of Isabella looms large. 50 copies. G.R.I.P.

Canada’s elder statesmen of ear-tickling anti-traditionalism have been a national treasure for nigh on five decades. Deriving their name and modus operandi from the found object street orchestras of New Orleans, the NSB has been tirelessly jamming (almost) every Monday since the late 1960s on a motley selection of modified noise makers. Nothing Is Forever proves definitely that they’ve dipped into the fountain of youth, as this four-song slab from Wintage finds the band sounding as mirthful as ever. The immortal foghorn of Bill Exley booms down from the pulpit, once again setting the stage for Art Pratten’s free-squealing “Pratt-A-Various” and the Sharrockified moves of guitarist Murray Favro. John Clement slides in on his fretless, three-string bass passed down by the late, great Hugh McIntyre, while John Boyle tosses in a kitchen drawer of percussion and well-timed cymbal splashes. Longtime adoptee Aya Onishi gets her time to shine on the instrumental title track, letting loose with a deluge of extraterrestrial squiggles on oversized kazoo. In the end, Exley sums it all up with a plainspoken credo: “Music is hard work. You must practice day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.”