July 30th, 2009: A characteristically humid and tired Thursday night in one small Ontario lake-city. (Laziness pervades. Nothing uncommon here, yeah? I’m going to see some friends, if I’m lucky maybe I’ll drink a drink, listen to something that will maybe be interesting if I’m lucky. Then I’ll drink another drink. Then I’ll go home.) An empty white space on the second floor of a downtown artist-run-centre. Suddenly, OUT OF NOWHERE: noise! All over the place! Sound is sent screeching through a vibrating set of amplifiers, ricocheting off the concrete floor, smashing into the drywall, and shattering the eardrums of a small group of devotees, aficionados, and habitués – paralyzed by this sonorial assault. Ahhhhh, but is it not that kind of paralysis that takes hold only because you’re maybe a little bit shocked, if you’re lucky? That kind of hypnosis that comes with being impaled on a good riff? It’s that kind of petrifying captivation that balances right on the ledge of really really good, ready at the slightest wrong move to tip over and plummet into embarrassing disaster. And if you’re lucky, your paralysis will be partly of your own making – I mean, maybe you’d been making yourself bored with the same old same old, but that means you can unbore yourself twice as fast and you don’t even have to be lucky to do that. So you find yourself standing there – mouth gaping, saliva practically dripping off your chin, eyes locked on Biesinger’s lithe frame, his feet dancing around the cord of his guitar in a rock & roll ballet that threatens to send him toppling over a mic-stand at the slightest trip. And then your eyes are flipping back and forth between Biesinger and Kruger – his drumsticks bouncing off the skins are making you blink in rhythm. And you’re thinking, “what garage did these two just emerge from?” Because it must be the same one that once housed earthshakers like The Sonics, Miserables, The Kinks and, more recently, The Vines, The White Stripes, and G&E Auto Brake and Tune-Up. And, after the two of them end up in some kind of a minimalist scrum in the centre of the floor, you close your mouth and swallow and slowly let your ears pop back into tune with the hum of after-gig white noise. And now you understand why E-town’s reputation for d.i.y. symphonic aesthetics has been spreading across the country. Anyways, the point is: Dear Famines; “I like some of the things you do”.

(as published by Modern Fuel A-R-C in Syphon, Issue 1)