Suoni, Suoni, Suoni

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

The ninth edition of the Suoni per il Popolo festival kicked things off in grand fashion with TV on the Radio and Dirty Projectors at Metropolis on June 3, but the festival really starts gaining momentum this week and continues throughout the month of June. If you’ve been completely L7 for the past eight years, Suoni features the cutting edges of free jazz, noise, rock, metal, ambient, no wave and more, which has quickly earned it an international reputation for being one of the best festivals in the world. In fact, this year’s programming is so top-notch that I would advise those of you with the loot to just go ahead and get the $250 festival pass for the whole kit and caboodle. For those of you who are a bit more skint, here’s some must-see shows happening this week during the fest.

Saturday night should prove to be the post-metal event of the year when the ambient prog-metal of Isis fills le National, with the instrumental prowess of Pelican to boot, but make sure you show up early and catch the brutal crush of openers Tombs at 7:30 p.m. On Saturday afternoon, you can attend the first installment of the Tools of the Trade workshops, “Improvising on the 12-bar Blues Form with Dave Burrell,” at la Sala Rossa at 1 p.m. Bring your own instrument and get in on the family jams with a bona fide jazz piano legend. On Tuesday, you can check out former Fugazi bassist Joe Lally’s solo set with ex-Karate member Geoff Farina’s Glorytellers and cellist Helen Money at Divan Orange.

Although the Suoni fest will be taking up the stages of a number of local haunts, there’s still a ton of stuff happening outside of the fest, starting at 9:30 p.m. tonight, Thursday, June 4, at Green Room with post-punks the O Voids, Ultrathin and the Pink Noise, plus Time’s Up DJs Blamderson, Bwagg and yours truly doing sets afterwards. Down the street, on the same night and on the same tip, is punk/trash duo Tonitix (think of most of the In the Red roster) with Switzerland and Corona Ferox at Bar St-Laurent 2.

On Friday, Squalor will put some doom and gloom in the room at Barfly with heavy friends Tiny Empire, while Hollerado and Zeroes will play a block away at Divan Orange. Admission to the Hollerado show will get you a paint brush and, afterwards, you are invited to paint whatever you want on Hollerado’s van with buckets of supplied paint before they parade it across Canada on tour next week.

Saturday night marks the return of the Kinks Konvention and it will be held at—get this—the Rialto! If that wasn’t snazzy enough, check out this bill of local heavyweights tearing pages out of Ray Davies’ songbook: Priestess, Xavier Caféine, les Psycho Riders, the High Dials, Hollerado, Ladies of the Canyon, Amanda Mabro & Cozmos Quazar, Dead Messenger, Victory Chimes and Malcolm Bauld. Eeyowza!

On Monday, you can check out Ecstatic Peace’s Angels in America with local noiseniks Grand Trine at Green Room and on Wednesday, you can catch the heart-wrenching murmurs of AIDS Wolf, Minneapolis’s Gay Beast, Ottawa’s Nervous System and the spoken word of Miss Lady Swamp Pussy at Friendship Cove.

PUT THAT IN YER PIPE AND SMOKE IT… JONATHAN.CUMMINS@GMAIL.COM