paganfest 2: 2009 (nearly six months late)

I wrote this concert review ages ago for exclaim!, but they never ended up using it. So here it is, months after the fact, whatever that's worth:

Paganfest 2: Korpiklaani / Primordial / Moonsorrow / Blackguard / Swashbuckle

Opera House, Toronto ON

April 28, 2009

Local excitement leading up to a concert doesn't always translate to a high-energy or well-attended event, but the second Paganfest tour had the Opera House swarming with metal fans who like a little folk with their metal. Headliners Korpiklaani are touring on the strength of last year's album with their second for Nuclear Blast soon to hit. Turns out one major record and a lesser known back catalogue was enough to inspire "dancing" and chanting, the band's spirited performance ending the night on an upbeat. Accordion, fiddle, and deer skull with antlers provided the backwoods atmosphere while Korpiklaani delivered a cheery brand of metal tinged with Finnish traditional sounds.

Also representing Finland, Moonsorrow's contribution was less jolly but still strongly rooted in folk traditions. The band wasn't at their best, following up a recent Toronto appearance with one less guitarist (and some related sound issues), but they put their shorter time slot to good use, reinventing themselves as a quartet for an already packed venue.

The Finns' sets bracketted the much more fierce and serious performance by Irish metallers Primordial, drawing on material from their latest albums for the band's first show in Canada. Invoking ties linking Toronto to Ireland through references to famine and death, Primordial were predictably grim (the mavericks of the tour in this respect) but amazingly together, living up to every expectation their recorded music has established. The crowd sounded utterly and passionately convinced, hopefully enough to lure the band back onto Ontario soil soon.

Primordial and Korpiklaani owned the night, but the festivities actually began much earlier with the amusingly pirate-themed Swashbuckle, followed by Canadian heathens Blackguard (formerly Profugus Mortis) supporting their Nuclear Blast debut - both overshadowed but Blackguard, especially, a good choice for the tour and one more draw for the early Tuesday night horde.

By Laura Wiebe Taylor

vegans in new york state

Gorge
by kill eat exploit the weak

The other vegan in this household is a car guy. This year, for the first time, I tagged along for his annual pilgrimage to Watkins Glen, NY, for the vintage car races. To my surprise, Watkins Glen is a bit of a hidden vegan treasure. Or perhaps not so hidden if I'd been paying more attention.

Pleasant surprise #1: The car guy does a little restaurant research before we leave and discovers that the local brew pub in Watkins Glen offers not just a vegan burger but also a veggie bbq rib sandwich and a few other vegetarian options.

Pleasant surprise #2: We drive into Watkins Glen on Friday afternoon and one of the first things I see is a sign at the local ice cream shop for "vegan softserve." I taste-test both flavours, banana and chocolate mint, but go with the latter.

Pleasant surprise #3: I walk down the main street and off to the left see this beautiful gorge with something like 800 steps from the entrance to the top. It's rainy and the race reenactment is about to start, so I don't get to really explore, but it's a delight to behold.

I discovered the reason for Watkins Glen's vegan-friendliness after I got home and chatted with another vegan I know. The Farm Sanctuary is there. And I missed a great opportunity to visit it! Ah well, between the farm, the gorge and the vegan food, I'm definitely tempted to go back relatively soon.

metal and physics

When prepping for my interview with Russian doom metal band Forest Stream I discovered that vocalist Somn is a physicist. I couldn't resist asking him about potential links between his music and his physics.

keew: You were working on your physics PhD while trying to write and record Tears of Mortal Solitude... Do you keep your academic and musical lives completely separate or do they overlap in some ways? Is there a relationship between your love of a certain kind of music and your interest in physics?

Sonm: Yes, call me Dr. Sonm please, I deserve that! Actually I should have started with these officials from the very first question! ROFL. I think that music and science are of the same origin, so to speak. Both are knowledge and emotional experience. In both cases you discover and make research. I made the cover art for the front page of my thesis showing the interference between music and science, which has resulted in some deep-blue light intensity distribution as a symbol of new discoveries and failures as well. Both are dares and falls, excitements and disappointments. Both are some artificial entities, yet our knowledge of them is a purely philosophical question.

My life while doing my Ph.D. was… It wasn’t easy, honestly, yet my memories of that time fill me with pleasant warmth and sometime bring tears to my eyes. Once, when I got back to Russia for my summer vacation, I had a dream: I wake up in my bed in Russia and discover that I am late for work in Holland! Damn, I got nervous, but was encouraging myself at the same time: “Come on! The flight to Amsterdam takes only 3.5 hours plus the time difference. So if I take the back stairs, nobody’s gonna notice I am late!”. A month later, in reality, I discovered that I’ve lost this “abroad” feeling once and for all. So, I wasn’t really trying to write music. And actually I never do. It comes to my mind in a form of some celestial choirs, which makes me shiver and causes fear of not hearing that again. That time it was the same; I was just playing it, trying to repeat. Therefore, I think I was not able to separate my academic and musical lives due to the fact that… evil dreams and evil waking were blended into a long tunnel of misery, with hope growing ever fainter behind (c), although overall it was okay and even entertaining from time to time. So it goes.

Forest Stream's latest record, The Crown of Winter (Candlelight), came out this past August. You can find the rest of the interview at hellbound.ca.

helix and the spca: helping the animals

Thanks to keew mom for this tip...

Next Saturday (September 12) hard rock / metal elders Helix are doing a hometown SPCA benefit and auction at Kitchener's Edelweiss Tavern.

Today's KW Record has the backstory on the benefit – involving a book on exotic animals and rockers and a supposed 'sanctuary' charged with keeping animals in poor conditions.

The same issue of the newspaper features a report that the region's SPCAs are bursting at the seams with cats and kittens. (oh, how I wish we had more education and affordable/free spay and neuter programs...) If you're in KW/Cambridge and in the mood for adopting a new cat (that you're going to keep for the rest of its life!) it sounds like now's a good time.

And since I haven't done it lately, now seems like a perfect opportunity to pump Burlington Humane (not an SPCA) and Niagara Action for Animals, which has a spay/neuter program.

monkeys and metallica

What do you get when you combine a cellist/composer, a psychology professor, and monkeys? Monkey music, and research into the relationship between certain types of music and the emotional responses they provoke.

Music to Monkeys' Ears? Try Metallica, or the Metro

Making Music for Monkey Minds

The research is geared toward understanding human responses to music and the possibility of manipulating emotions through music. But the researchers needed test subjects who didn't already have emotional associations with particular kinds of tunes. So they turned to monkeys.

Twist two is that monkeys apparently don't think much of human music, so our composer/cellist/researcher had to write music just for monkeys, derived from the tones and tempos of their calls to each other. According to one Scientific American report, this monkey music sounded like a subway car in need of a tune-up or speed metal on speed.

As it turns out, of all the human music the monkeys were exposed to, they seemed to prefer Tool's "The Grudge" and Metallica's "Of Wolf and Man". I wonder if anyone tried playing blast beats for the monkeys?

see new american mind

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=when-it-comes-to-monkey-music-try-m-2009-09-02

never mind modified vegetables: genetic engineering gone really wrong

An article in New Scientist reports that researchers are investigating ways to produce pain-free animals to reduce or eliminate animal suffering in factory farms. Reducing animal suffering I'm on board with, but there are some seriously screwed up aspects of this kind of research.

For one thing, the main proponent of this idea (who is featured in the article), a philosopher (and neuroethicist?) from Washington University, bases his proposal on some very skewed ground. He's quoted as follows:

"If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused . . . I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering."

1. Why can't we do away with factory farming? Giving up on the idea is a sure way to guarantee it will never happen.
2. Sure, let's make it easier for people to ignore their relationship with the food they consume. We need a better understanding of what we're eating, not a hand blocking that kind of knowledge and responsibility from our minds.

Besides, the problem isn't that animals in factory farms feel pain. The problem is that our attitudes toward animals and view of them as resources makes it acceptable, even desirable, to put them in factory farms in the first place. Eliminating or reducing the animals' perception of pain does nothing to improve their conditions or encourage a more highly developed understanding of our interdependent relationships with animals. It just makes us feel better about engaging in use and abuse. And as page two of the article points out, there are additional problems with industrial agriculture, such as the environmental damage such practices cause.

academia meets music: Rush and the suburban middle class

After writing a master's thesis on Voïvod, Fear Factory, and dystopian sf, the combination of academia and music has become almost inevitable to me. So while Greg Pratt reports (in exclaim!) on a scholarly book about Rush with a tone of surprise, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened sooner.

The book in question is Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown by Chris McDonald, an ethnomusicologist at Cape Breton University. The premise sounds plausible: that Rush's career and music embodies middle class anxieties and aspirations. Call me intrigued.

If you're a Rush fan with an appreciation for academic analysis, there are a few other pieces of scholarly writing on the band that I can recommend:

• Durrell S. Bowman: “‘Let Them All Make Their Own Music’: Individualism, Rush, and the Progressive / Hard Rock Alloy, 1976-77.” In Progressive Rock Reconsidered. Ed. Kevin Holm-Hudson. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. 183-218.

Bowman is also working on putting together a book on Rush and Philosophy.

• Deena Weinstein. Serious Rock: Bruce Springsteen / Rush / Pink Floyd. Montreal: CultureTexts, 1985.

Weinstein also discusses Rush briefly in her book-length sociological study of heavy metal culture: Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture, New York: Dacapo 2000.