Bookshelf’s upstairs hosts music, readings
To kick off the 26th annual Eden Mills Writer’s Festival, the eBar hosted a slew of writers and musicians to launch (and set the tone for) the weekend’s events. Sandro Perri, Jeff Bird, and Scott Merritt performed intimate music with eclectic arrangements and timbres, after authors Carl Wilson and Sean Michaels read from their respective books, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste,and Us Conductors, Michaels’ debut novel.
The first presenter of the evening was Guelph-based multi-instrumentalist Jeff Bird, performing a brief and powerful piece on the theremin synthesizer. The instrument is an early synthesizer with two antennas that oscillate frequency and controls amplitude (volume), controlled by the hands’ proximity to the antennas. In an eerie piece, marked by jarring microtones and aggressively layered loops, Bird’s single theremin produced a Krzysztof Penderecki-esque short symphony by way of masterful tonal and textural control.
Shortly after, Montreal-based author Sean Michaels took the stage to read an excerpt from his newly released first novel Us Conductors, a fictionalized account of Russian inventor Lev Termen (Anglicized as Leon Theremin), and his time spent between jazz-age New York and the gulags of Soviet Siberia. Termen was the inventor of the instrument Bird had played just before Michaels’s reading. The segment he read from was an account of Termen’s first date with his future wife, Clara. Aside from his first novel, Michaels has been published in Pitchfork, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and runs an mp3 blog titled “Said the Gramophone,” one of the internet’s earliest and most influential music blogs.
In an interview, Michaels spoke of the inspiration for the novel and considering the artist or creator’s accountability for their art and lives. “[T]his book explores a lot about these scientists like him, who were trying to cede responsibility for what they do,” said Michaels. “It’s like ‘I make things! And what people make with them and do with them, that’s on them!’ […] I think that some artists feel the temptation to do the same thing […] And I don’t believe that. I think that, at a certain point, as artists, we have a responsibility to put out art that we will stand behind. If we’re experimenting with ideas […] it’s fine, but you still want to be able to stand behind that thing.”
Carl Wilson, a music and culture critic known for his work with the Globe and Mail and Haslitt among other publications, read the introduction to his book Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. The book is an extended edition of a shorter book titled Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, that was part of Bloomsbury Publishing’s 331/3 series, a line of books each focused on a particularly important album. In his book, Wilson criticizes popular tastes, his own aesthetics, and probes into the heart of what makes a “bad” album – such as Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love – so popular and important.
The first musical act of the night was Sandro Perri and his band. Performing gentle, sparse folk with a stripped-down arrangement of percussion and bass, Perri’s fragile voice filled the room with bare personality complimenting his sneakily complex guitar work.
Scott Merritt, renowned local producer and songwriter, performed afterwards with Jeff Bird on the acoustic bass, and Merritt on ukulele. Arranged entirely with these two instruments, the two musicians opened up surprising musical spaces with the jarringly different timbres/pitches of the instruments. Performing material from his first new album in twelve years, initially the ukulele acted as a jumping-off point for songwriting, but became integral to the new (for Merritt) sound.
“The first couple of songs were sketched out on a ukulele that we’d found under my mother in law’s bed after she’d passed away. The lyrics were just little ‘notes to self’ […] Ideas from old books, etc., that I wanted to hold on to somehow. […] The uke was good tool to keep the brain from bogging down along the way with too many options and distractions. […] Ideas really just seem to pop out of it somehow. I’m still surprised by it. So, yes, safe to say the process was quite different this time around. A long way from the way I went about things before. […] I should probably point out that I’m not really a ‘plunkety-plunk’ uke player. I try to think of it more as a little harp.”
After the night’s music came to a close, a karaoke sign-up sheet was passed around, and the celebration carried on until closing time. When not being drowned out by amateur singers, conversations about the evening’s art and that of the coming weekend filled the room in anticipation.