by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Based in what he fondly calls “Buttfuck, Saskatchewan,” Troy Gronsdahl (aka Soso) makes uniquely Canadian hip hop, glacial soundscapes lightly topped with rhymes about drinking, goose hunting and escaping from Saskatoon.

“We’re really isolated,” says Gronsdahl, “but it’s a good place to create ’cause we don’t have a lot of influences from the bigger centres, or pressure to make urban music ’cause it’s just not economically viable here. It’s really refreshing not to have all the irritating rappers competing for some bizarre, unachievable idea of success.”

His music isn’t “economically viable” either, but Gronsdahl, named Soso to keep himself “humble and modest,” stays afloat by running the Clothes Horse label (fellow Saskatoon rapper Epic is also on the roster) and the Phonographique record store (www.phonographique.ca), which specializes in the increasingly popular realm of independent hip hop.

Gronsdahl fell for American rap in the late ’80s, but when he got hold of turntables and a sampler in the mid-’90s, emulating the old masters was not an option. His nuanced sound and rural imagery is more akin to Halifax rap, or even Quebec post-rock, than commercial hip hop. And like a lot of Canadian music, Soso’s music is instilled with a certain wintry melancholy.

“I can’t divorce myself from geography, it definitely influences my work,” he says, “but I live a reasonably privileged life in Saskatoon. I don’t have to struggle to collect firewood, I don’t have diseases, I’m not confronted with natural disasters, I have a decent education. Sometimes, when you have these privileges, you start lamenting other problems because you have all this time to complain.”

That said, Soso is willing to suffer for his art, as in a music video he shot while wrapping up his Fine Arts degree. The central image in “Hungover for Three Days Straight (Don’t Matter)” is an extreme close-up of Gronsdahl’s face, and the camera gradually pulls back to show him pushing an empty wheelbarrow down a desolate, snowy road.

“It was about -25 with super-strong wind,” he recalls. “That’s my version of street credibility. I got frostbite shooting my rap video.”

With Maybe Smith and Bleubird at
Main Hall on Thursday, April 20, 9 p.m., $5

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