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Globe and Mail not so Reactionary !
CARL WILSON THE GLOBE AND MAIL Friday, March 3, 2026 Wavelength, the Sunday-night free concert series at Ted's Wrecking Yard (594 College St.), is now entering the second month of its perverse quest to punch holes in the barriers between Toronto's various indie scenes -- and this weekend's edition is a sterling example. This Sunday, Wavelength presents a bill that includes female garage-rock trio The Hassle, long-standing art-punk quartet Parts Unknown, and electronics devotee DJ Solvent. The latter, better known simply as Solvent, is Toronto's Jason Amm, who runs the Suction label with compadre Lowfish (Gregory de Rocher). Their self-described "robot" music is this area's most distinguished contribution to the international outlands of esoteric techno, the fields where the likes of Autechre, Mouse on Mars and Aphex Twin play. (Ambient music, you could say, or as fans wearyingly call it, Intelligent Dance Music.) Solvent's 1999 album Solvently One Listens manages nearly to redeem the legacy of eighties electro-pop. Amm will own up to a continuing attachment to Depeche Mode and the Human League, Yaz and Heaven 17, for which even the most misty-eyed former John-Hughes-movie fanatics have trouble summoning up nostalgia. Disposing of that period's affected vocals, Amm discovers how the pointy-headed synthesizer hooks of that period can be reshuffled and messed with to create music that is at once coolly abstract and surprisingly melodic. As outre-music bible The Wire described it, the results include "body-popping rhythms, toytown electronics, Chinese puzzle-drum programming on the edge of overload, contemplative synths [and] shredded beats." Parts Unknown, by contrast, still labour with those antiquated tools, electric guitars. While the band has held together for over six years, the songs themselves have a charming way of falling apart between verse and chorus. On their latest indie release, Airshow, the songwriting has that rare combination of smarts and sincerity. Derek Westerholm's vocals have just the right pinched incoherence to recall the Fall's Mark E. Smith, and the music consists of pitched hand-to-hand combat, a noise jones battling the gravitational attraction of the pop song. It's territory mined by dozens of bands before -- from early Talking Heads to the Wedding Present to the Pixies to Prolapse -- but it's the most antiformulaic of formulas, and at their best, Parts Unknown make every moment of it an adventure. As for The Hassle? I've yet to hear them, but at this point, the Wavelength crew has me on faith. (Next week, they host free improvisation by Wrist Error, Eric Chenaux, John Oswald and Michael Snow; the week after that, it's the spritely rock of It's Patrick; and March 26, the avant-prog of Holding Pattern and Currently In These United States.) My only wish is that they get even wilder in their juxtapositions: Why not Solvent, Oswald and Snow, a hip-hop outfit and cheery pop-punk on the same night? A boy can dream. questions?...e-mail us at |
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