weewerk," Lola 15, Spring 2003, pp. 10-11 - view Lola PDF
"It is now tougher for Canadian artist-run co-ops and indie record labels to make it since they are on the same playing fields with Sony BMG Canada and Universal Music Canada who also have artists applying for funding from FACTOR, VideoFACT and other Canadian Funding agencies. (weewerk) is one such indie label that has been able to keep up with the Canadian majors as well as maintain their artistic integrity."
- MuchMusic Blog (link...)
"News," Wavelength zine (Toronto), January 2003 - view PDF
NOW Magazine Online Edition, VOL. 22 NO. 20
"Between the two of 'em, CMW/Teenage USA honcho Phil Klygo and his partner in crime, curator-artist Germaine Koh, have given an awe-inspiring number of blood transfusions to the independent rock and visual arts communities in this city. But just in case you doubted their commitment before, the dynamic duo are doing something unprecedented to prove their mettle.
With their new multifaceted weewerk initiative, Koh and Klygo are opening up their home to music and art fans across the city. Koh says it's no biggie; after the two were more or less homeless and shacked up in her studio for a year, they didn't know what to do with all the sprawling space of their new place.
"Weewerk is a side project for the ideas that spill over from our activities, and it also has to fit into our already busy lives. Before we had this space, Phil and I had been talking about starting a record label through which we could release arty music and experimental sound stuff. Our first release will be the Great Lake Swimmers' lovely self-titled debut album, which should be out within the month.
"Then, when we were considering moving into this great apartment above Rotate This, we realized the space would be conducive to other kinds of activities, and that's when the idea of the combined gallery, music venue and salon was born. We want it to be a place for exchange, where people will encounter interesting stuff in different disciplines, and a means for us to help make things happen within our communities."
It's things like this that make you realize what a vital undercurrent of exciting activity flows below the mainstream. Check out the launch of weewerks at Phil 'n' Germaine's pad (620A Queen West, above Rotate This) Friday (January 17). Starting at 8:30 pm, Satan McNuggit screens DIY films till 10 pm, when the Grasshopper Sound Clash play a special acoustic set. Future events include the Tops 'n' Bottoms zine launch January 24, programmed by Karen Azoulay and Joel Gibb, with art by Will Munro and Paul Butler and music by vzzt.
As Koh notes, weewerk is decidedly low-budget, so don't look for big ads in the glossies. Check out their Web site at http://www.weewerk.com/ for further info. And remember -- it's their house, for crying out loud, so be polite. And note that there's only room for about 50 people.
Copyright 2003 NOW Communications Inc.
story link: www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2003-01-16/music_tonotes.php
The Globe and Mail - Tuesday, January 28, 2003 Print Edition, Page R3
Arty house party
The new salon is an intimate blend of informal exhibits, live performance and mixed socializing
By R.M. VAUGHAN
TORONTO -- Use the word "salon" to describe an art event, and your potential audience is immediately transported to the tangled, mind-numbing pages of a Henry James novel, where the men wear spats, smoke cheroots and discreetly damn the government while the ladies collect on the opposite side of the room to gossip, exchange forbidden French novels and smooth their petticoats -- a world of tea, finger cakes and polite boredom.
The more hopeful listener might think himself in for an evening of rousing philosophical discussion, the kind sponsored by Madame de Pompadour near the dying days of the French monarchy, or perhaps a night of sharp barbs and emasculation, the specialty of Gertrude Stein in her Paris years. One might even hope for a Warholian afternoon of soft music, light drag, and very hard drugs.
But those days are long gone, and, until very recently, so was the social impulse that guided the salon tradition -- the desire to gather together disparate artists and thinkers, serve them snacks and booze and sit back to watch the fur fly. We don't socialize in such organized ways any more, because communication technology makes us instantly accessible to each other at all times. Besides, artists have enough chances to see each other at the regular rounds of openings and receptions.
Speaking from personal experience, I know that attending an average of 25 art openings a month disinclines one to walk into a living room full of equally oversocialized artists and talk about contemporary art. That is, unless there's a floor show.
Since the mid-nineties, various artists have attempted, in fits and starts, to revive the salon tradition by repositioning it as a multi-media drop-in, not a formal symposium. Five years ago in Toronto, artists Jaxon McDade and Jinhan Ko opened up their tiny Niagara Street home for a monthly series of slide projections, performances and dancing. Dubbed the Money House, the series attracted hundreds of artists who were glad to try out new works without the pressure of mounting a formal show. Around the same time, legendary actress Clare Coulter began performing monologues in living rooms and kitchens, and poet/painter bill bissett cleared out his apartment every other Sunday for art shows and poetry readings.
When Ko and McDade split up, the Money House group transformed, with the addition of artist Jennifer Papararo, into the Instant Coffee collective, an ongoing project that occasionally sponsors informal in-house exhibits and runs a wildly successful Internet list service and arts magazine. But the genie was out of the bottle, and artists in the city quickly realized that showing works in private homes can be a lot less trouble than begging (and paying) dealers for space or negotiating the byzantine, committee-driven world of publicly funded galleries. For instance, artist James Carl exhibits works from his balcony in Toronto's Kensington Market, and designer/artist Barr Gilmore has turned the street level stairwell of his Queen West home into a tall, narrow glass vitrine that showcases everything from video to performance (by very thin artists).
Toronto artist Germaine Koh is picking up where Money House left off by opening her tiny apartment for a twice-a-month series of screenings, performances, exhibits and live music. Fittingly dubbed weewerk, given the small operating space, the series attracts a mixed crowd of people who would have little or no chance of encountering each other in their regular circles. Young musicians squat on the floor beside high-powered gallery directors, trying to figure out who brought their dad to the show. Fragile artists lurk by the bar, waiting to see if any of the furniture designers laugh at their latest earnest video. Theatre artists try to pick up rave kids, and everyone wonders who, exactly, is that rich-looking guy in the corner, the one with the confused model on his arm.
Given the size of Koh's apartment, people have no choice but to socialize. At a recent screening, I sat on a ledge and inadvertently kept kicking a young dancer in the head. She could only smile, as she was involuntarily elbowing a 50-year-old photographer's stomach. Koh does her best to make her living room a neutral space -- the furniture is shoved into the back of the apartment and the art is taken off the walls -- but one is always aware that one is inside somebody's home; an awareness that breeds a refreshing decorum and consideration. But is this a salon proper, or the artsy equivalent of a vacation slides party? Koh wants it both ways.
"Weewerk was definitely conceived, at least in part, from the tradition of the salon. But we like to personalize the event, let everyone know who we are and what we're doing, so it's not totally a focused discussion event."
On the night I attended, Koh walked around her apartment introducing herself to total strangers who'd just walked in off the cold street, pointing out the bar and a generous row of coat hooks. I half expected to be offered a pair of slippers.
In the coming months, Koh is teaming up with the Luft Gallery's monthly curators and artists forum called Art in the Dark, and then with uber-art rag Artforum magazine. Clearly, Koh is trying to mix passive viewing events, such as screening and performances, with activities that require more attentive participation.
"As far as salons as specifically focused discussion events go, we've hosted one small group so far, and it worked. Next, I'm having a forum about collaborating at the same time as I'm showing collaborative art in a Valentine's Day Reunion show."
To succeed, Koh admits, the new salon movement has to mix spectacle with conversation, dance with debate.
Not to be outdone, Montreal's trendy Plateau is about to experience a salon revival in the form of 7eSPACE, an artists' outlet run from a two-bedroom apartment shared by artists G. Hall and Carl Ruttan. Since last fall, Hall and Ruttan have been bombarding artist list serves and publications, begging artists to fill their apartment with projects.
Their message is blunt, "We seek to upset the rather stagnant cultural atmosphere of Montreal by staging performance and performative events, exhibitions and other such flim-flam in a social setting not known to have previously existed in this city."
In Winnipeg, Plug In Gallery director Paul Butler hosts collage parties in his home -- inviting artists to make collaborative works on the spot using scissors, paper and glue. Similar parties have popped up in Vancouver and Toronto. And in Saint John, veteran folk musician Debbie Adshade hosts and participates in a rotating series of folk mini-concerts held in living rooms and kitchens.
But not everyone's smitten with the homey approach. David Liss, director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, a large, publicly funded gallery in suburban Toronto, wonders whether the salon revival is an attempt to make art more accessible and friendly, or merely part of an endless cycle in the arts.
"None of this is new," he reminds me. "It's just the sort of thing young artists do naturally. I did it in the eighties. Making your home your art space usually comes from necessity and pragmatism, not ideology. For me, it's not all that seductive to get a peek into someone's home. I don't really care; I'm not a voyeur. But I understand the connections to the whole do-it-yourself movement."
Liss admits to going to "art house parties" for fun, and, jokingly, to a bit of jealousy.
"The great benefit of these events is their small size. I mean, if you have 25 people at your art house party, the place looks packed. If I had 25 people at one of the MOCCA's openings, I'd be the laughing-stock of the town."
Copyright 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Globe and Mail - Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003, page R4
Music in tune with the new city
By CARL WILSON
What point were you happiest to hear made in new Toronto mayor David Miller's campaign? Mine was that the fixation on taxes and garbage in local politics is based on the same misconception as the image of Toronto as an also-ran New York -- that a city is something to consume.
The resulting story is that government is a janitorial service to hire on the cheap, while the rest of urban life is an arcade of goods and experiences in a quaint array of colours. It's easy to fall into talking that way: Nearly everything takes money, and money has a way of making itself the point.
This week's vote expressed how sick we are of that story. At heart, a city is just somewhere people gather, doing stuff. The myth that "Toronto" means "meeting place" may not be accurate (the Huron word translates closer to "where trees stand in water," which reads depressingly like "stick-in-the-mud") but it's the kind of error that sticks around because we like it. We finally have a leader who understands that, but it remains up to us to act it out.
Two people who do are Phil Klygo, the Mohawk-adorned head of Teenage USA records and Canadian Music Week, and artist-curator Germaine Koh. For the past year, the young couple has been holding events in their apartment on Queen Street West under the punning title, Weewerk. In these monthly salons, bands perform, artists show, and there's playfully vital conversation on themes such as uncertainty, art and morality, humour (I judged a "bad-joke contest" one very silly night this summer) or guerrilla gardening.
It runs on the same resolve you find in all kinds of Toronto events now -- house concerts, amateur variety shows, the mayoral race itself -- that we stop standing on the sidelines staring into the display case, and plunge in to be part of the action. It has spun off a Weewerk record label, which first released the local-landmark-littered songs of Tony Dekker as Great Lake Swimmers, and is now putting out the second CD by one of Ontario's most enchanting bands, Guelph's Barmitzvah Brothers.
Tonight at the Rivoli, Weewerk leaves home to celebrate that new disc, Mr. Bones' Walk-In Closet, as well as the anniversary of the series. Dekker will be on hand, and so will promising local new-no-wave unit Controller.Controller.The Guelphites will prove the spirit is not confined to the big city.
All in their late teens -- though one's female and none is Jewish -- the Barmitzvah Brothers formed half by accident in high school, and preserve that thrown-together, what-the-heck feel. Singer Jenny Mitchell's lyrics are deceptively transparent, either manifestos on mundane subjects -- camping, security passes, reading -- or daily diaries of routines and aperus. Her characters fight, then tentatively make up; they are often lazy or sleepy, but seldom bored. Yet a post-Simpsons sardonic sense hides between the lines.
The songs are also full of local detail:The Commute is a harsh rebuke to musicians who leave Guelph for Toronto (with allusions to lyrics by ex-Guelph band Royal City), and Show Promoter Dan is an open letter to a notorious Toronto booking agent ("You're already lying before you speak") that ends with a sympathetic twist ("Somewhere inside I think you're okay/ But people can't tell from first sight").
A bit insider-ish, but why not? And the barbs help pull the group out of the cute-kid corral to which patronizing elders might consign them. If they sometimes slide through too easily on youthful charm, the music ensures you don't begrudge it.
Using a trunk-load of junk-shop castoffs, vintage keyboards and fiddles and drums, Mitchell and her companions (Geordie Gordon and "Little John" Jemeson Merritt, son of well-known songwriter-producer Scott Merritt) achieve an improbably full handmade sound in which behind-the-beat rhythms slip through the ears like trick-or-treaters skidding, down a greased wooden slide, into the basement of a haunted mansion.
Montreal's Les Georges Leningrad work in a similar intensively amateur realm of homespun imagination. Made up of two married couples and, they say, a "horny ghost" named Georges who was conjured up one night around the Ouija board, their show is a decadent cabaret of masks, rag dolls, mutant puppets, gruesome makeup and semi-nudity. Les Georges' chunky, Euro-trash "petroleum rock" sets the stage for the feminist electro-pop of Le Tigre at the Phoenix in Toronto on Monday.
Another place to find city-dwellers doing it for themselves is in the ever-shifting landscape of improvised-music loft shows. Like Weewerk, the New Work Studio at 319 Spadina Ave. is a live-in space. This Monday and next, it hosts the last two instalments of bassist Rob Clutton and guitarist Tim Posgate's annual Festival of Autumnal Happiness.
This week, it's the outlandishly beautiful music of composer Martin Arnold and an improv set by Clutton, Doug Tielli and Brodie West; on Nov. 24, Plunderphonics inventor and CCMC member John Oswald playing solo sax and Clutton and Posgate in duet.
Meanwhile, tomorrow in the rough-and-ready ArrayMusic studio (60 Atlantic Ave., Suite 218) pianist Marilyn Lerner plays with Ken Aldcroft and Joe Sorbara, the Ryan Driver Quartet will perform and drummer Sorbara will lead his Pickle Juice Orchestra in a round of John Zorn's Cobra, a maddeningly clever instant-composition exercise that Sorbara has begun to organize regularly, like a weekend pickup baseball game.
With its new mayor and all these enterprising happenings, Toronto is on its way out of shopping-centre syndrome. All it needs now is a thousand more.
cwilson@globeandmail.ca
2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
eye - 09.16.04
Wee are family
WEEWERK SECOND ANNIVERSARY
Featuring Elliott Brood, Great Lake Swimmers, The Two-Minute Miracles, The Barmitzvah Brothers, Pine Music. Part of the Kensington Rocks Festival. Sneaky Dee's, 431 College. $8.
BY LIISA LADOUCEUR
There are two ways to tell that Toronto's weewerk is doing well: the wee indie collective celebrates its second anniversary this Friday, featuring three of its highly buzzed-about acts: The Barmitzvah Brothers, Great Lake Swimmers and Elliot Brood. But founders/companions Phil Klygo and Germaine Koh will have to miss it: they'll be in Liverpool.
Two years after they started up an "art and music salon" in their apartment above Rotate This, Klygo and Koh are taking the idea to Europe. Koh, an accomplished visual artist and curator, has scored a showing at Liverpool's Biennial gallery, and will then begin a one-year residency at Berlin's Knstlerhaus Bethanien, a perfect spot to try the apartment/gallery concept again.
"I have a studio for a year at someone else's expense and basically, we figure all we need is space and to be on the ground and we can pull off some events," says Koh. "What it might be, I don't know yet. Everything we've done so far hasn't had a lot of advance planning."
"It's all unexpected," Klygo says. "We started out with this idea to put on a few events in this big apartment we were moving into. We set it up so it could be a gallery space at a moment's notice. At 4:30pm on Friday our lives are closed down and moved into the back room for a showing. We didn't advertise or market, it was all word of mouth, and the first record wasn't put out with the intention of starting a record label. It was just one project among others, in the same way as putting on an exhibition or an event would be."
That record was Great Lake Swimmers' self-titled debut, released in 2003 to much press acclaim and establishing weewerk as a home for alt-alt-folk music and artful CD packaging. Despite increasing media attention and Canadian distribution through Outside Music, the pair kept weewerk small, focusing on forging partnerships with local acts and helping them get records made instead of trying to score them big deals or work traditional industry networks (which Klygo does at his day jobs for Canadian Music Week and the Teenage USA label). This has paid off in modest sales and global outreach, like this year's European tour for Great Lake Swimmers.
Now, with weewerk operating out of a temporary studio space until the big move, the pair feel more like nomads than scenesters. Koh claims Vancouver is where they'll probably end up being based in Canada, and that she'd like to try art in Mexico City, but that Berlin offers "a lot of room for underground activity." Klygo sees the residency as an opportunity not only to find new acts, but to bring his Canadian weewerk family to Germany.
"The exciting thing about Berlin, aside from it being a foreign country, is the studio space to have events in," says Klygo. "In addition to going out and meeting people, we can invite people to our house. We want to bring Canadian and American artists over to stay with us. We saw what happened with Peaches going there and literally within a month she was living large. You never know what will happen out of that gamble. But we've always had this idea that weewerk is organic, it can move. It's whatever the participants want it to be. The Berlin trip is an opportunity to continue the story of weewerk. That's more important to me than having an office space people can come to."
www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_09.16.04/music/weewerk.html
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