Jenny Charlesworth

AUSTRA

Whenever a touring musician rolls into a new town, there are certain must-Google spots: the closest Guitar Center, the cleanest laundromat, the cheapest auto body shop. Or, in the case of Toronto electro-goth contingent Austra, the nearest Whole Foods.

For a band that maps out their travel itinerary based on organic grocery pit stops, it seems bizarre to meet ringleader Katie Stelmanis in a Toronto bar that hawks prehistoric pickled eggs and platters of sandwich meat. But Stelmanis, with her dyed blonde hair and metallic necklaces piled one upon another, is perfectly at home with such contradictions.

Onstage, the bold 26-year-old, with her octave-shattering voice, is the centerpiece of the show. “I’ve been performing since I was 10 or 11 in lots of different ways, like recitals or full-on operas, so the stage has always felt very comfortable to me,” she says, leaning back on one of the retro vinyl chairs that decorate the tiny watering hole dubbed “The Commie” (its actual name is the Communist’s Daughter, after the Neutral Milk Hotel song). Offstage, though, Stelmanis shields herself from both record and ticket sales, still lacking confidence in the hype that has propelled the trio into the pages of Vanity Fair and earned their latest album, Feel It Break, a coveted spot on Domino Records’ UK roster.

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Ground control to Amon Tobin

_PHOTOGRAPH BY EDWARD CARREON

For the better part of two decades, electronic music maven Amon Tobin has dazzled audiences with mind-expanding cuts that marry vinyl samples with his uncanny sonic sensibility. Despite his  impressive résumé, the Brazilian-born visionary balked at touring his new album ISAM. Tobin insisted this latest disc—which he calls a “sound sculpture” of field recordings—didn’t have the right vibe to ignite the dance floor, so the stage show needed to evolve beyond his DJ-centric performances. When ISAM: Live touches down in Toronto on Sunday night, fans will experience an audio-visual adventure that has already drawn praise from Cirque du Soleil. Tobin gives us the inside scoop on his bold new show.

1. “I can’t make the music from ISAM work in a DJ environment because it’s not about making people come to the front of the dance floor, so I had to think differently about how to present it,” says Tobin. “We came up with an idea about integrating it into a much larger thing; making [something other than] myself the visual focus.”

2. “I’m not DJing, so it’s more like a cinema experience, a live presentation of the record with visuals. Similarly to when I do DJ sets, I’ve really meticulously worked out the pacing and dynamic curve to the live show,” says Tobin, who utilizes audio-reactive graphics and real-time projection mapping created by Vello Virkhaus of V Squared Labs—which animates stationary objects with 3-D video—to bring ISAM to life.

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Death Cab for Cutie taxis to the bright side

When Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard got hitched to Zooey Deschanel in 2009, his bandmates saddled up for a lifetime of dodging questions about the She & Him bombshell. And now thanks to a certain studio where the Seattle band recorded parts of its latest album, Codes and Keys, the doe-eyed It Girl isn’t the only one popping up in interviews.

“As a kid growing up hearing ‘Summer of ’69’ on the radio, who would ever think I’d be recording in a place Bryan Adams built?” bassist Nick Harmer tells the Straight, on the line from a Los Angeles hotel room. “You couldn’t grow up listening to Top 40 radio and not become fond of him. So to record in his Warehouse Studio was completely awesome.”

Local Death Cab fanatics will be crushed to learn that the introspective indie rockers spent nearly two weeks at Adams’s nondescript Gastown studio last year. Yes, while you were dodging suburban hooligans during the city’s annual Celebration of Light festivities, you might have been just a thrown punch away from the band—though Harmer is far less ruthless when describing the sea of downtown drunkards.

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Bellwoods social scene

BY: JENNY CHARLESWORTH  

As St. Lawrence Market opens, merchants are setting up sandwich-board signs and sorting through day-old croissants. Coffee in hand, Ohbijou ringleader Casey Mecija navigates the maze of grocery stalls to a secluded picnic table. After the previous night’s excitement—the hood of Ohbijou’s van flew up and cracked the windshield while the band was en route to a video shoot for the lead single off their Metal Meets album—the Brantford native seems relieved to have found a tucked-away corner. “The van belonged to April Aliermo from Hooded Fang,” says Mecija, who’s a little flummoxed by Ohbijou’s bad luck when it comes to borrowing vehicles from their counterparts in the Bellwoods/Queen West music scene. “Once, when we were driving the Forest City Lovers’ tour van, the brakes stopped working, too.”

Despite the unreliability of their vehicles, those two bands have a close relationship with the members of Ohbijou. All three groups are part of the indie-pop community that sprouted up in Toronto in 2006, around the time Broken Social Scene and its many offshoots began spending more time abroad. Mecija and her bandmates are considered by many to be the poster kids for the post-BSS scene, thanks to their role coordinating the two Friends in Bellwoods benefit albums, which documented the action and featured some early recordings by now-famous local names like Austra mastermind Katie Stelmanis, Rural Alberta Advantage and a pre–Diamond Rings John O’Regan.

“We’re very much lumped into that orchestral pop thing,” Mecija says of the chamber-pop sound most associated with the scene. “We still have that sound in so many ways but we definitely wanted to show some growth on [Metal Meets].” To do that, the six-piece enlisted the help of Besnard Lakes’ frontman/producer Jace Lasek. “We wanted to play around with toys—not just always have a glockenspiel—so we got effects pedals and tried to create a different environment for the songs.”

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