MAJICAL CLOUDZ

August 15th – Saskatoon – Amigos Cantina

                  The drive to Winnipeg from Saskatoon on the Yellowhead Highway is one of the most boring drives I’ve ever been onf. The most interesting aspect of it is the discovery of how utterly deserted some parts of Canada can get. The sign for the Yellowhead Highway is literal – it is a yellow silhouette of a head. Various towns (highlight name: Colonsay) come up every once in a while. We drove into one after seeing a ‘fuel’ symbol below the sign announcing the town, but the pump had since closed down. It all felt like an abandoned movie set. I’m sure it can be beautiful living there, but from the view of the highway it does not look good (very few places look habitable via the highways that run through them).

                  The venue in Saskatoon was inside a Mexican restaurant. On paper this sounds really unpleasant, and when it was first described to me a few years ago I thought it sounded like a less than ideal place to play. However, the stage and speaker system were great, and when the room was cleared of tables in the evening it turned into a nice venue. I would not have guessed this to be the case but it was a great place to play in terms of the actual space and system.

                  My friend Ryan opened the show with his new project Ones. His old band Feral Children was a great Canadian band that was very inspiring to me when I started getting more seriously involved in playing music and touring. Along with Cecil Frena’s project Gobble Gobble, they were a band that represented to me the notion that touring Canada on a DIY level was possible and something to strive for. His set was great, a two-piece of electronics and a guitar.

Moon King performed afterward. They were amazing as always. I’ve been feeling grateful to have them on this tour with us. Their music is an effective counterpoint to what we do. This still doesn’t make sense to me, but someone at the Detroit show told Daniel that, “its like one band is the pill and one band is the high”. The only way that begins to make sense to me is in reverse chronological order (i.e. our band does not feel like a “high” to me), but irrespective of ill-fitting metaphors I do think there is a good chemistry. Also, it seems as if they have been touring even more heavily than we have in the past year, and it’s nice to be able to share time with people who understand and can relate to the life of being on the road.

When we went on, the crowd was distracted and lots of people were lined up to get drinks or were talking at the back of the room. There were only ~5 people standing at the front of the stage. We played a couple of songs and it felt very awkward. Before the third song I told everyone that if they wanted to they could come up on the stage or sit on the side of the stage, or stay on the floor or do whatever they wanted. A lot of people come onstage and then we played our next song. I had to turn as I sung in order to make contact with people all around the room.

For the song after that, we turned off all the lights on the stage so it was very dark. When people came up onstage it still felt as if there was a ‘stage area’ and an ‘audience area’ because one was dark and the other was lit up. Once we turned off all the lights on the stage it all became a vague ‘general area’ where some people were on the floor, some were on the stage, etc. After a couple of songs in the dark, people started coming up with their own lighting strategies. Someone had a strobe light on her phone and she turned it on for a while, and other people used the flashlight apps on their phones to light us as we were playing. This was a very interesting and positive use of smartphones during a performance.

When we played “I Do Sing For You” I sung while interacting with a guy who was onstage behind me to my left. He knew all the words to all the songs we were playing, and there was something about his energy that was so legitimately positive and cool. We both sang the words to the song while essentially mimicking each other’s movements and looking at each other. I lost focus on myself as ‘playing a show’ and for a minute was just kind of in a trance.

The performance wasn’t as focused as in other situations, but that was largely due to the bizarre setting for the show. We had never played in the dark before, or had people onstage so early in our set before. The audience seemed somewhat disoriented by what was going on, but in what I thought was a positive way. It didn’t feel like a ‘show’ so much as a house party or some other kind of informal event. It’s not something that we will necessarily repeat – disrupting the conventions of venue space performances generally results in a really fun time, but disruption loses its excitement and value when you’re doing the same thing every night and it becomes expected of your project. I believe that the energy that came out of the show last night was derived from the fact that the situation was ‘unknown’ for Matt and I as well as for the people that came to the show. If we had been doing that every night and continued to do so until the end of the tour, by the time we got to Toronto people would be preemptively turning off the lights and climbing onstage, and we would probably be dreaming of excessive light shows, pyrotechnics, and ample distance between ourselves and the audience (in reality, probably not), i.e. disrupting the venue space would become expected and boring.