GHQ and Charalambides
at the Tranzac
Friday June 8th, 2007
By Sal Hassanpour
The last time I found myself in the Tiki Room of The Toronto Australia New Zealand Club (way-way-WAY better-known as The Tranzac), I was behind a computer selling tickets. Now, I’m cramped sideways into a couch that’s a few months shy of being certified as “crack-den approved”. There had been a brief but very severe thunderstorm this night that blew the heads off of the city’s oldest trees onto streets and houses, so the humidity levels of this packed, tiny room are due to hit sauna levels soon.
Appropriate to the day’s events, the feeling in the room is like rainout day at sports camp, where everyone crams into the games room, crowding around shuffleboards and pool tables. What’s also helping the mellow vibe is that the bands I’m hear to see draw in those happy, gentle and beardy people we once called or still call hippies.
You see, there’s an unbelievably prolific, vibrant, and friendly cottage industry of psychedelic/drone/noise/experimental artists in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (not so much in Canada and the UK – at least not the “psych” and “drone” bits). One comes across these bands on the rare occasion when the odd few grab enough attention so that bigger indie-labels are then able to release their music in volumes of more than 500 copies. Seriously! Part of the appeal then, or rather what becomes the obsessive quality of following this underground scene, is to track down the massive amounts of hard-to-find CD-Rs, vinyl- or cassette-only releases. And with the constant collaborations, variations and live recordings, most of these bands are able to release stuff on a monthly basis, so much so that the dedicated micro-labels that release this music generally operate on subscription series to a dedicated yet global and inclusive crowd.
All this is to say that GHQ and Charalambides are some of the biggest acts in this musical world, the former being rising stars and the latter, one of the scene’s best-known veterans (twelve years strong, to give some perspective). This was my first time seeing either band, and I’ve been waiting years for this – and nearly missed it in all that NXNE noise. In the end, my patience was well-rewarded, although not in the way I would have anticipated.
The only thing GHQ’s guitarist Marcia Bassett said during the sound check was “too loud,” pointing at her monitor. I’ve never heard that one before. The collaborative aspect is crucial for the psych-drone set, so that even with her violinist Steve Gunn mere feet away Bassett wanted to make sure she’d hear him just as well as her own instrument (third member Pete Nolan couldn’t make it).
A persistent violin chord drones on, coloured by super-gentle electric guitar. Music from PUNK AID III drifts in occasionally, as do the voices of women hanging near the washroom, but luckily if there’s any kind of music that accommodates external influences, musical or otherwise, it is the music of GHQ. The violin untethers from its drone, gliding slowly up and down the scale, as Bassett’s guitar picks up speed. Gunn starts playing his violin in a more staccato (halting, abrupt) manner in response, banging some small chimes against his monitor. Bassett then switches FX pedals to a more electric sound. By the end of this first piece, both instruments have been looped and distorted and it ends in a wash of controlled feedback.
The next piece has Gunn switching to an acoustic, while Bassett’s indecipherable lyrics are spun out in a raga/spiritual style. The guitar starts doing that loud/soft post-rock dynamics and a couple of people in the crowd shake their heads in time with the intensity. Get over it, kids.
GHQ’s next song featured an amped balalaika: Hawt! Too bad it was causing screeching feedback and it had to be subbed for a plain old electric guitar. Gunn starts singing softly as the crowd gets drowsy in the humid box of a room. But then Bassett’s electric starts making a noise like a Formula One engine gear-shifting in a bottomless pit only to be patched through a tubular sound envelope.
By the fourth and final GHQ track, Bassett and Gunn are so successful at building drones that my notes speak of lost focus, the gelatinous nature of the brain and “music that defies attempts at close-listening, especially for a concert review”. But as before, the noise breaks through the fog towards the end, and all is good.
GHQ are true experts. One can only imagine what they’d sound like with the full quartet. They’re a no-brainer for a bigger space like the Music Gallery, since any band of their modest means and size committed to bringing upwards of five instruments to a show deserves better. On to the main act! Tom and Christina Carter (aka “Charalambides”) are legends to me and I’m totally – wait for it – psyched to see them!
Tom starts with a bluesy jam, featuring the rustiest wah-wah noise I’ve ever heard, closer to The Melvins-like grunge than anything else. Christina’s soulful, vibrating vocals are in full-effect right from the get-go. And just as the track is starting to drift away, Tom lays down some juicy riffs.
The second track sees Christina channelling all those 70s female folk artists that have been re-released in the past few years with lyrics like “I wish I could fly to forget.” Tom then plays a searing solo, like the sound of the scream of someone who has stuck their entire arm into the sun.
This is followed by another psych-blues jam, expect this one is more expansive and wind-swept. It’s spare, and willing to explore the space between notes, and perfect for a post-thunderstorm night.
Alternating between a two-note figure and some licks, Tom develops a shoegaze-y electric hum-crunch on the next track. Christina, at what feels like the ten-minute mark, utters sounds that I can only describe as high-pitched yawning. This is the most challenging piece of music tonight, in terms of uncomfortable noise. Tom vibrates the neck of his guitar faster than… well, you get the mental image. Highly amusing, I swear. It’s so fast I can hear the strings of his electric guitar over and beyond the sound coming out of the speakers.
On the final track, Christina Carter takes a FX pedal to her microphone and ends up modulating her voice so that it is pure demon sounds as Tom plays staccato, reverb-heavy chords. The dense, dark & evil stoner jam is cut short by the venue’s sound curfew.
In sum, two of the best instrumental psychedelic-slash-insert-other-adjectives-here bands in North America get the smallest room of the Tranzac on a stormy night dead in the middle of NXNE and still manage to deliver an excellent musical experience. The big surprise, the “not what I expected part,” was that the much-more-recent GHQ matched the seasoned Charalambides on every level.
And next time either band, or any of their hundreds of counterparts from around the world are in town, do check them out! (Look up Ben Chasny as an artist and record labels like Load, Not Not Fun, Jyrk, Three Lobed, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Time-Lag, Eclipse and Hospital Productions.) They need your support because they deserve it!
