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I spent the past weekend at Sappyfest, a little music festival in Sackville, New Brunswick. This is a place 10 hours east of Montreal - not at the end of the world, like Dawson City, but far enough away that boy do you have to want to be there. And boy did I want to be there. Sappyfest is the sincerest festival in the world. It is about small, not big. It is about building magical moments, instead of gesturing toward the impossible. If Coachella and Osheaga create bacchanalian amusement parks, songs sounding from every corner; and Pop Montreal is a city turned treasure map, a hundred Xs strewn through Montreal's clubs; then Sappyfest is just a town. It hosts musicians, newcomers, old friends. It asks everyone to simply build something together: a weekend apart from every other weekend.

The slogan of the 2009 festival was, A FIRE STORM FROM THE 5TH DIMENSION. And in 2010, SWAMP MAGIC.

Go with friends. Have fun. Hear songs you have never heard before.

Like last year, Sappyfest invited me to Sackville to write something called Sappy Times. At the end of every day, from 2-5am, I would go back to my room and rub my eyes and try to set down my thoughts. And in the morning, Paul & the volunteers would print these scrawls, spread them through town. A newspaper about yesterday. A sappy collective diary.

For those of you who were not there, or who missed an issue or two, here they are, for posterity:

Erratum: The Saturday issue describes a performance by the Chinstraps, joining Purple Knight at a ramshackle roller-derby in the Sackville Civic Centre. This was not Chinstraps: it was Adam Mowery.

The festival highlights include: Shotgun Jimmie, Spider-Man wrestling a luchador (as documented in Saturday); CFL Sessions, Etaoin Shrdlu, PS I Love You, Horses, Jim Guthrie, Snailhouse, the Silt (as documented in Sunday); Cousins, Michelle McAdorey, BJ Snowden, Shapes & Sizes, Sloan's surprise performance of Twice Removed in full (as documented in Monday).

Thank you to Paul Henderson, Jon Claytor, Steve Lambke, Shotgun Jimmie, and everyone who made this happen.

(Sappy Times photo by Chris Campbell, a total stranger.)

Wolf Parade - "Cloud Shadow On The Mountain". Jack Gala had been hitting home-runs for so long that when on July 28th, a Wednesday, he stepped to the plate and struck out - he was as happy as a pig in shit. His teammates sagged, the coach drooped, fans across the stadium were rending their clothes. But Jack Gala was tossing his cap, high-fiving his rivals, leaping and whooping and lifting his face to the sky. He skipped the press conference. He ran out the arena's back door, jumped on his motorbike, threaded the boulevards til he was home. "Jackie, let's get married," he said to his girlfriend. He called his mother: "Ma, it's me." He walked up and down the block, paying for all the neighbours' kids' college educations. Jack Gala was reinvented. Jack Gala was free. [buy Expo 86]

Lucien Midnight - "Major Tom". It's taken me a couple years to track down this cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity". We heard it in a rental car, across the radio. Google was not very helpful. These many months later I am gratified to uncover the song and still find it very good. I am wary of covers. They must justify their existence. You will find none of Seu Jorge's anemic Bowie retakes on this blog. You will not hear the inane acoustic versions of "Paper Planes" or "Since U Been Gone". These can be fun in the moment, round the campfire; but they are blown bubbles, potato-chips, knock-knock jokes. Covers are interpretations, and some interpreters are better than others. Some mark the material, some mimic it. Some rekindle the songs in their own way. Lucien Midnight does not just recreate Bowie's "Oddity" with acoustic guitar, evening air, crickets. His Major Tom is a different character. There is more anger, submerged; more love for his "blonde" back home. He is not just stranded out in space - he says he is fucké, ben' buzzé, stoned. Some of this is in the lyrics, loosely & brilliantly translated. But mostly it's in the everything. An old song, telling a different tale. Just slightly different. It's lovely. If only it didn't end so abruptly. [MySpace]

(Photo source)

Weezer - "Say It Ain't So (demo)".
The-Dream - "Umbrella (demo)".

Can you hear it? Is it already there? Can you recognize an unfinished masterpiece? Or does a thing only become itself when it is complete?

There are many reasons to wonder these things, whether or not we are music critics. Is the drawing you've made any good? Can it yet become a treasure? Or is all of its potential contained in that first line?

Is he your true love? He who isn't, yet? Will this ever feel like home? Are we all heroes?

By omission, The-Dream's demo of "Umbrella" is evidence of Rihanna's gift, the oft-dismissed gift of the pop-singer: the ability to sing pop. The song is not just the song; there is a swagger and flare to the way she sings it, and its brilliance is in large part due to the swagger, to the flare. And Weezer sound like boys in a garage - no, not a garage, in a cheap rented studio. They enjoy the playing, luxuriate into the solos; but they do not know, no way, that one day an entire generation will know these lyrics. Something is bubb-li-i-i-i-ing behind my back. The things that make this song marvelous, they underplay; the things that are boring, they overdo. And yet they stumbled into this stupid, ridiculous, beautiful thing. There is a kind of Tao in this.

[photo by Ryan Schude]

Get Em Mamis - "Cold Summer" [website] To write perfectly about the Dawson City Music Festival, I would need the Harbourcoats' "Rivers of Gold", a song that has not yet been released. So instead, this; a song that has perhaps never been heard in the Yukon. But I can imagine it booming from a helicopter, pounding from a steamboat, banging hard as the DCMF board of directors swagger down Front Street. DCMF is a gentle festival, big-hearted, but there is a Baltimore backbone in their faraway choices, their determination to organize rackets in a town without traffic lights. Let "Cold Summer" help them to skip off the boardwalk, to kick up dust. Steal bikes and return them.

Dawson City is an extraordinary place, banked by hills, and a river, the Yukon or Klondike, a waterway that literally runs with gold. It is dusty. Things lean. The low buildings have been preserved, petrified in the cool dry seasons, until they feel like pieces in a diorama. But people live here - old people, young people, families, prospectors, artists, hippies, labourers, loping prowlers. They meet in the evening, at Bombay Peggy's or Klondike Kate's or the Midnight Sun Hotel. They eat fish & chips at Sourdough Joe's or, more often, at home; it is a village of dinner parties, of slow food, of waiting for the ice to break. It's a place where people visit, and stay.

We should all visit.

The Riches Big Band - "Madame Zehae Ala (Just As I Am)". With Vish, Dallas from Constantines, and a couple others, I took a helicopter ride to the Tombstone Mountains. After the tufted greenery outside Dawson, the Tombstones rise up like bad dreams. They are sharp, craggy. They made me think of rusting knives. But they're also so beautiful, and we wove between them like gods, like Coyote or Krishna, over sheer slopes and perfect cold pools. I imagined that this was the sort of place that immortals would live. They would wander, at peace, in the summer's long days. In the winter, they'd build fires, crouching in the gravel, listening to LPs on their magical record-players. They'd play "Madame Zehae Ala", impossibly far from the Ghanaian studio where it was recorded, but recognizing every sentiment in those guitars, those voices, the co-mingling of loves. [via Juan and Only / buy / "Madame Zehae Ala" is clearly the song on which Highlife's "F Kenya Rip" (previously) was based.]

For more on this year's Dawson City Music Festival, see the DCMF Listener.

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Said the Gramophone will have its first ever dj set tomorrow night, as part of the launch party for M60, the Montreal 60 Second Film Festival. Dan and I will be there from 8pm til late, giving much occasion for hang-outs and dancing. The launch party is free, and besides the DJing, there will also be exciting tales by Fruit Hunters' Adam Gollner and The Secret of Oak Island's D'Arcy O'Connor, a compass-building workshop, screen-test booth, and a surprise 9pm headliner that hisses, snaps and rhymes with "wizards". Most importantly, you can register to make a film for M60 - a festival I co-founded in 2007. There are no fees, no judges, no prizes, just a great gang of Montrealers making one-minute movies. Hope to see you there!

At 5am last night, I staggered home from the Dawson City Music Festival's afterparty. It was at a log cabin. There was a canoe full of beer and a replica hollow log in honour of headliner Fred Penner. It never got truly dark.

It was a wonderful weekend here, in one of Canada's northernmost settlements, steps from the Klondike River, where the Constantines' furore rang out over Jack London's former home. I will try to gather my thoughts for you later this week, but in the meantime you can read The DCMF Listener, the zine I was brought here to write. As for Sappyfest last year (and again this year, later this month), I wrote about my experiences every day, wrote 'em down and in print, and these thoughts were distributed around the festival site. It was a privilege.

The weekend's highlights included Elfin Saddle, Tune-Yards, Constantines, A Young Linthead, Diyet, Burning Hell, Pat LePoidevin, and Fred Penner singing "You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Party". Because there was no Monday issue of the Listener, there is no description of last night's performance by Matana Roberts. This was brave and moving.

All this, quickly; I have to run and catch a helicopter over the Tombstone Mountains.

Emily Reo - "Witch Mtn". At the top of a mountain, the air gets thin. L perches on a rock, eating a granny smith apple. She breathes in shallow inhalations. Across the gap, there is mist and sharp spires. From her pack, she takes a transistor radio. It is the size of a dental floss container. She unravels the earphones and slips these on. The sun will soon begin to sink. L hears mist and sharp spires. She swivels the tuner with her thumb. The voices are thin. The melodies are like spring-water. L is not sure she will remember A's face. [MySpace/buy]

Murzik - "In Nothing". Even Leonard Cohen needs songs to listen to. He is sitting in his living-room, in his robe, staring at his 5-CD changer. He has eaten a bowl of cereal and later he will shower. Right now he just wants to hear a song. He wants a song like a song he would sing, but lustier, in a way, and a little plainer. He craves a kindred spirit, not mimicking words. He does not want to mope. He wants to be lifted into his day, up and into the streets, full of beautiful women. [MySpace/buy]

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My story from the summer 2010 issue of Brick, "The Lizard, the Catacombs and the Clock: The Story of Paris's Most Secret Underground Society", is now online in full. (Albeit without the pretty photographs.) I invested much of last summer, and my Banff Centre residency, on this non-fiction article. The title tells the tale, I think: it is the first major investigation into UX, known also as the Untergunther and La Mexicaine de la Perforation. It is quite long. It is a true story. I get lost. (Please share it far and wide.)

Later this afternoon, I fly west and north, to the gold-rush town of Dawson City, for a music festival. More on that when there is more to tell.

(image above by Rona Chang)

Valley Maker - "The First". A song of beginnings, the first track in Austin Crane's album about Genesis. But Valley Maker's story ex nihilo does not evoke cosmic dust, electron fizz, even the slow crawl of algae into orchards. Instead his call & answer speaks to apartments half-lit, faces half-lit, entrances and exits of a different kind. It is desolate, wanting; the singer is not content with the fact that things are; he wants to know why.

[Valley Maker's debut album is hot, exquisite; it's an enormous leap forward from Crane's prior work; you can buy it now for $10 or whatever price you name]

Kath Bloom - "Is This Called Living?". I had the privilege to see Kath Bloom play a few weeks ago. She played new songs, like this one. And although it's been 32 years since the release of her first album, it's difficult to imagine that Kath's voice was ever better than it is now. She sings with a beautiful tone, great warmth, but more than that - there's a remarkable bareness to her music. "Bareness" is a clumsy word, but it feels righter than the alternatives: transparency, honesty, rawness, sincerity. Her heart is laid bare. She disguises nothing. She shows us how much certain phrases are true, how thirsty she is, how lost and craving. Sometimes, how happy. Because of the albums I love, it can't help but evoke Julie Doiron. But Julie sings as though she knows others are listening, as if she must make herself clear. Kath sings as if she doesn't give a fuck; as if she just has to.

All this to say, buy her newish album (released by Mark Kozelek), and if you can see her & her band on tour - Shambala Festival! Madrid! Penryn! London! Newcastle! Manchester! End of the Road! - please do.

(midnight baseball photo source)