Two summers ago, there was a cacophony in the streets of Toronto — or at least, in the grasslands, parking lots and cozy clubs situated around a tiny cranny of the city just west of U of T. The ruckus erupted into a chorus of bellows, runts and plinking thumb piano, spiralling waves of distorted feedback and tooth-grating rhythms echoing off the graffiti’d alleyways in a bacchanalian orgy.

This was no ordinary teenage riot, though. The chaos was controlled, a carefully programmed outdoor/indoor celebration of underappreciated noise, folk and avant-garde artists from T.O. and beyond. Compelled to break down the imaginary barriers separating pockets of artists from different genres, local scene stalwarts and sometime bandmembers Matt Dunn and Wolfgang Nessel dreamed up the multi-day, multi-night Bummer in the Summer festival. They recruited everyone from the hooligans in Oneida to gentler souls like Laura Barrett and Ken Reaume to descend, guerrilla-like, on the space inside and surrounding the Tranzac as part of their slightly hippie-ish scheme.

Noise was made, beers were drunk and mild cases of whiplash were acquired as a result of ferocious headbanging. The latter phenomenon is captured particularly well in one memorable scene in Kevin Hainey’s epic Bummer in the Summer film, which premieres Aug. 23 at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex, 9pm. $10). If you weren’t around to witness the fest in the flesh, Hainey’s dreamy, raucous snapshot is the next best thing, a non-narrative documentary that splices live performances with loads of eardrum-shattering sounds and impressionistic imagery. (It closes with a glimpse of flickering tea lights.)

“I wanted to stay away from people talking about music, which can be boring,” Hainey explains. “The goal was to be exciting and to mimic what the festival was doing — that is, to mash all this stuff together in one big orgasm of sound.”

Editing more than 30 hours of footage, Hainey says, was “not a nightmare, but certainly a challenge.” As amorphous as noise and experimental music can be, trying to match up performances by acts as disparate as longhair folkies MV + EE with the thunderous Gravitons took him over two years. And because his top priority was sound quality, favoured acts like Rozasia and Polmo Polpo got axed due to shitty sonic fidelity. “Determination was the only thing that made it come together,” Hainey sighs. “It was kind of like laying out or sequencing an album, or making a mixtape.”

Like Bummer in the Summer itself, one of Hainey’s goals was to open up more ears to artists and styles of music that — with the exception of, say, the occasional Sandro Perri mass love-in — rarely get enough attention outside their rarefied communities.

Hainey (a former EYE WEEKLY contributor) is hesitant to use the word “exposure” when discussing what effect his Bummer in the Summer project will have on the participating artists. You get the sense that he’s still slightly protective about showing this document of a particular subculture to folks who might not get it. That attitude comes through in the film: because there’s little dialogue and the bands aren’t explicitly identified, even a music fan who’s relatively well-acquainted with the Toronto underground can have a hard time keeping up with the rapidly shifting barrage of sound and images.

“[The film] is totally just to show people the Toronto music ghetto and what was going on a couple years ago,” he says. “There’s an exciting underground scene [here] that’s just as riveting as what’s going on in the States or Finland. Just because you’re dealing with bands who might not be great at marketing themselves, fewer people know about them.”

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