The cover of the debut, Feb. 2000 edition of Wavelength

As with most weekend outings that happened nine years and several gin-and-tonics ago, my memories of the first Wavelength are hazy. This much is certain: it was Sunday, February 13, 2000, the venue was the long-defunct Ted’s Wrecking Yard on College and the night’s bill consisted of Neck and the Mean Red Spiders, two psychedelic Toronto indie-pop bands who had gigged consistently the previous few years but only had modest fan bases to show for it.

On paper, Wavelength’s inaugural lineup didn’t appear any different than ones you’d see at the El Mocambo, Club Shanghai or Lion Club in the late-’90s, but the presentation was something else: Wavelength organizers Jonathan Bunce (a.k.a. Jonny Dovercourt) and Derek Westerholm were holding court at the top of the Wrecking Yard staircase, but instead of charging a cover they were handing out free Wavelength zines. Cash-collecting duties fell to fellow organizer/resident emcee Duncan MacDonell (a.k.a. Doc Pickles), who introduced the audience to “Henri,” the piggy bank that collected the night’s pay-what-you-can proceeds, while providing the sort of relentlessly cheerful energy that Fergie Olver used to bring to Blue Jays broadcasts. And there was just something different about going to a rock show on a Sunday night: it’s like attending a wake for the weekend that was. With our minds caught between Saturday-night revelry and Monday-morning responsibility, the Sunday audience is attuned to a different mode of spectatorship, one that encouraged more engaged listening.


Derek Westerholm avec Henri.


But more than anything that night, I remember Mean Red Spiders guitarist Greg Chambers’ final words from the stage: “Support local music — it really is the best stuff out there,” effectively summarizing Wavelength’s mission statement. And if there were only a hundred people or so at Ted’s to heed those words, the subsequent weeks and years would prove that the Wavelength crew were not in the minority for believing them.

Wavelength’s early history is well-documented and celebrated, as the series pooled artists from marginalized indie-rock, hardcore, improv jazz and electronic communities and cultivated a consistent, open-minded audience receptive to its willfully eclectic mandate. And out of this supportive, inclusive atmosphere emerged some of Toronto’s most renowned indie artists — Broken Social Scene, the Constantines, The Hidden Cameras, Final Fantasy — all of whom appeared at Wavelength back when they existed more as ideas, years before international acclaim and touring formalized their processes.

Like the careers of its most famous alumni, Wavelength has undergone significant changes of its own over the years: upon the closure of Ted’s in 2001, the venue moved to Lee’s Palace before settling into its current home of Sneaky Dee’s in 2002; the series’ monthly zine was discontinued in favour of a website operation; and, after various personnel changes over the years, organizational duties are now shared among Bunce, MacDonell and more recent recruits Ryan McLaren and Kevin Parnell, as well as a team of volunteers and occasional guest promoters. But while the lineup for this weekend’s Wavelength 450 ninth-anniversary festival (see sidebar at bottom) shows that the series’ core ethos has been mostly unaffected by these factors, the current musical culture in Toronto is arguably less receptive to it.


Master of ceremonies Duncan "Doc Pickles" MacDonell


Wavelength is, of course, not the only local institution celebrating a birthday this weekend: it shares an anniversary with the Drake Hotel, the boutique-hotel venue that, upon its February 2004 opening, effectively shifted the locus of downtown nightlife away from traditional Annex, College Street and Queen West strips westward to the Parkdale border. Ironically, Wavelength’s MacDonell actually served as booker for the Drake’s Underground concert venue in its first months of operation, hoping to complement the hotel’s bohemian marketing rhetoric with suitably adventurous programming, but the relationship was short-lived. By introducing glamour and affluence to the once-derelict Queen/Beaconsfield area, The Drake sowed the seeds for the fashionista-frequented electro dance-party scene that dominates nearby venues like The Social and Wrongbar. 

In a way, Wavelength’s current situation mirrors that faced by its founders back in 1999, when they were flying the withering flag for Toronto indie-rock at a time when the masses were more interested in going to raves. However, the audience for homegrown music that Wavelength built up in the first half of this decade hasn’t so much disappeared as pluralized and splintered.

Scan your local listings and you’ll see a slew of similar indie-rock series: Keith Hamilton’s Pitter Patter Nights at The Boat; Lauren Schreiber’s No Shame parties; Dan Wolovick’s Two Way Monologues showcases at Rancho Relaxo — all of which speak to the ongoing health of Toronto’s independent music community and the abundance of new bands it produces.

As Toronto indie-rock has ascended out of basements and garages into iPod commercials and Desperate Housewives cameos, Wavelength’s programming has become more determinedly unconventional, reaching out to the local Ethiopian and Eritrean jazz communities and staging one-off, cross-cultural events like last March’s successful Kalimba Summit. But on a week-in, week-out basis, the audience has not been as eager to go along for the ride. According to Bunce, there have been recent Wavelengths where attendance has not amounted to much more than the organizers, bands and bar staff.

Wavelength was originally formed as a response to the dire circumstances faced by Toronto indie artists in the late 1990s. But with the emergence of equally adverse circumstances, the series’ organizers have to take equally proactive action — which means that, pretty soon, underground-music seekers in Toronto are going to have to find something else to do on Sunday nights.


The freshly bearded Jonathan Bunce


It’s fitting that Jonathan Bunce and I are talking about Wavelength’s future over dinner at La Hacienda.  Like Wavelength, the venerable Queen West Mexican-food haunt is trying to hold its ground (in their case, amid a downtown core that’s gone take-out-burrito crazy). In response to this brutal winter, Bunce has grown his first-ever beard. The professorial look provides a visual cue for Bunce’s changing role with Wavelength, as he now spends as much time studying the intricacies of arts-council grant applications as scouring MySpace pages searching for new bands, getting the paperwork in order for Wavelength’s next phase.

“Wavelength 500 [in February 2010] is going to mark the end of the Sunday series,” Bunce says. “But,” he stresses, “it’s not the end of Wavelength. We’re considering it a change-up: we just want to break with the format. The format’s worked really well, but it can be a grind. That’s honestly a big factor: every Sunday, trying to outdo ourselves with the lineup. We feel that what we’re doing with the weekly series is less special, less unique — we feel like we’re competing in terms of audiences and getting bands to play the series with things that we have helped spawn. Which is great, that means it’s kind of a ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of what we wanted to do with the series and develop a healthy music scene. But it makes our job, week-to-week, a lot more challenging.”

Bunce envisions less frequent, but more ambitious Wavelength events happening throughout the year, including collaborations with the Images film festival, Ryan McLaren’s annual all-ages ALL CAPS! festival in August and a continued multi-night/multi-venue anniversary festival each February. To ensure a consistency in vision and execution, Bunce is looking to strengthen Wavelength’s relationship with the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, whose grant funding is traditionally directed to high-art pursuits like classical-music troupes. Unlike indie-artist-centric programs like FACTOR, which distribute monies on a per-project/tour basis, arts-council funding provides ongoing support for organizational infrastructure.

“There aren’t many other people in the indie-music world who are pursuing arts-council-supported presentations,” says Bunce, who first familiarized himself with arts-council minutae through his day job as Artistic Director at experimental/contemporary-classical venue The Music Gallery. “It allows us to bring in bigger names from out of town, to put shows in alternative spaces we couldn’t otherwise afford and have more administrative stability.

“We want to put the Wavelength brand out there in the sense of it being attached to different locations, different nights of the week, different themes. We’ve always tried to reach out to regular people, and, ironically, Wavelength is on a Sunday, which is not the working man’s favourite night of the week to go out. For us to do shows on Saturday is perhaps a better way to reach more people. I know Wavelength has been called a ‘hipster’ thing in the past, but that’s a misperception — we’ve always been about making this community accessible to regular people.”


Wavelength 350 seventh-anniversary zine, February 2007


Whenever a local cultural institution announces its closure or discontinuation, the natural instinct is for people to rally around and try to save them; we’ve seen this in recent years with the shut-downs and subsequent community-driven rebirths of repertory cinemas like The Royal and The Revue. But what drives these venues into peril in the first place is that, in many cases, people like and romanticize the idea of these venues existing in their communities more so than actively attending or financially supporting them.

I’ve been just as guilty of this with Wavelength, an event I attended regularly in the early part of this decade, and which introduced me to many bands I’ve loved. But since 2006, my Sunday-night visits to Sneaky’s have been sporadic at best. Oh sure, I had good excuses: a promotion that required me to have my shit together on Monday morning; the post-Drake proliferation of new venues near my Beaconsfield abode that effectively delivered entertainment to my doorstep; and the onset of a serious relationship that made me realize how much of my going out was actually motivated by wanting to meet girls. But also, by 2006, many of the bands I strongly associated with Wavelength had either broken up or become international property.

Despite a less noticeable mass of regulars, Bunce is encouraged by the new influx of students he sees at Wavelength each September, lured in by the series’ long-standing reputation (not to mention the affordable cover and beer). But he also senses a disconnect with a new generation whose definition of indie-rock was shaped more by The O.C. and Juno soundtracks than the SST and Touch and Go catalogues.

“One of the things that concerns us is that there is a younger generation that expects every band to sound like Tokyo Police Club or Born Ruffians,” says Bunce. “Nothing against those bands, they’re great at what they do, but there’s a whole wave of groups who just want to sound like that.

“Wavelength is committed to messing with that. But there still isn’t tonnes of dialogue between the indie-rock crowd and the experimental/new-music crowd, and I feel like Wavelength is the only thing trying to make the conversation happen. And because we’re still taking risks with the booking every week, we’ve suffered in terms of attendance.”

But even if weekly turnouts are more erratic, the continued success of Wavelength’s four-night anniversary festivals provides an instructive model on how to balance populism and eclecticism, loading bills with proven local favourites and/or anticipated visitors, while bringing newbies and lapsed regulars alike up to speed on the past year of Wavelength discoveries. Bunce already has grand designs for next year’s festival, to shut down the weekly series in style.

“It’ll be 10 years, and 500 editions of Wavelength — it’s a nice round number, a big milestone,” he says. “It’ll be a chance for us to call in some favours from some people whose — ahem — first shows we booked to come back and lend their support.

“But there’s a danger in being too self-congratulatory,” he cautions. “It is, after all, just a series.” 

And one whose impending demise will spare Bunce the indignity of being “40 and still going to Sneaky Dee’s every Sunday.” Instead, Wavelength’s new life will reflect that of the 35-year-old Bunce’s: you may not see them kicking around the scene as often, but that’s only because there’s greater work to be done.

Email letters@eyeweekly.com

WAVELENGTH 450: BEST BETS

THURSDAY, FEB 12
Timber Timbre, Ghost Bees, Dorit Chrysler @ The Music Gallery (197 John), 7pm. The Diableros and Loitering Heroes after-show @ Cameron House (408 Queen W), 11pm. $10 or PWYC.
Choice frequency: Timber Timbre
Kicking off the festival with an air of reservation, Thursday’s Music Gallery showcase gives the organic lushness of Wavelength’s folksier leanings a chance to massage the audience’s eardrums. In particular, local singer-songwriter Timber Timbre (a.k.a. Taylor Kirk) assumes the headlining slot, which serves as the release party for his exquisite new album, Timber Timbre (Out of This Spark), which finds his haunting post-folk spirituals treated like Tom Waitsian waltzes and drenched in organ-led soulfulness. But Kirk retains the sombre croon that’s garnered him an overwhelmingly positive critical consensus.

FRIDAY, FEB 13
Steamboat, Slim Twig, Bonjay, Child Bite, The Magic @ Wrongbar (1279 Queen W), 9pm. $10 or PWYC.
Choice frequency: Slim Twig
Representing the eccentric sensibility of Wavelength’s programming, Friday’s showcase pits the upbeat danceability of Steamboat and Bonjay against the irreverent trash-funk of Detroit’s Child Bite and Toronto’s enigmatic sonic sculptor, Slim Twig. Since we last checked in with Slim, he’s been spreading the good word of rockabilly concrète across the nation during his first west coast tour, and is already slated to infiltrate America’s new administration with dates in New York City and a pair of SXSW performances.

SATURDAY FEB 14
$100, Brides, Hooded Fang, The Luyas, Element Choir @ Polish Combatants Hall (206 Beverley), 8pm. $10 or PWYC.
Choice frequency: Brides
The most unmissable show of the weekend, Saturday’s lineup reads like a rough guide to the future of Toronto indie-rock. The endearing twang of $100 plus the treehouse twee-pop of the easily excited Hooded Fang equals guaranteed good times. And then there’s the lurching nihilism of Brides, a band whose mix of ear-scraping guitar sounds and avant-garde saxophone bleats make it seem as though their former practice space in Guelph contained a time portal back into the early-’80s heyday of New York no wave.

SUNDAY FEB 15
Foxfire, Vowls, I Am Robot and Proud, Thank You, Mi Ami @ Sneaky Dee’s (431 College), 9pm. $10 or PWYC.
Choice frequencies: Thank You & Mi Ami
Wrapping up back at the Sneaky’s homestead, punctuality is recommended in order to catch American openers Thank You and Mi Ami. Constructing twisting instrumentals packed with virtuosity and improvisational drama, Baltimore’s Thank You released their sophomore disc on Thrill Jockey last June and garnered rave reviews from Pitchfork and the UK edition of Vice. And with all the unhinged energy of an electric eel–filled hot tub, San Fran’s Mi Ami provide an outlet for former Black Eyes members Daniel Martin-McCormick and Jacob Long to work out their sparse melodies and textural explorations. It’s less percussive than their usual sound, but it hits just as hard. CHRIS BILTON