Indie music promoter Wavelength is bringing back its monthly new music series with a concert where the audience is banned from speaking.
Don’t Speak aims to attract ambient music lovers sick of enduring chatty, vibe-killing crowds at small gigs. The all-ages event takes place at Array Space (155 Walnut) on March 25 with performances by Seattle’s Benoît Pioulard, North Atlantic Drift, David Jones and DJ Languid Lilt, with visuals by General Chaos. (See listing)
The acts fall on the spectrum of ambient and drone music, a calming genre that provides “fertile ground for meditative self-reflection and just pleasantly spacing out,” Wavelength concert programmer Adam Bradley tells NOW.
“This concept wouldn’t work at all for pretty well any other genre,” he says. “Imagine asking people to not speak at a punk show? Not only would that be silly but it wouldn’t be fun. Here people can enter, wander and absorb the surroundings.”
And what if someone unseals their lips? Will they be escorted off the premises by the drone police?
“No one will be thrown out or given grief,” Bradley assures. “Our aim here is not to be weird authoritarians and get upset if people aren’t following the guidelines. We’ll have a small complement of volunteers carrying signs that read ‘Don’t Speak’, who will politely – and silently – remind folks of the show’s intent if too much noise is happening.”
Don’t Speak also marks the return of a dedicated new music night like the ones Wavelength ran weekly on Sundays from 2000 to 2010.
Although organizers continued producing one-off shows in the years since – they did five events last May alone – as well as Camp Wavelength on the Toronto Islands in August and the Wavelength Music Festival in February, fans have been asking for the year-round series to return.
“One thing we’d heard from people in the music community is that they missed that sense of regularity,” says Bradley, adding that the new monthly will be a “slight refinement” over the old weekly. “The idea is to make the monthly series more of ‘event’ and less like a regular show through the incorporation of more immersive visual arts, projections, installations, interventions and sometimes, as in the case of Don’t Speak, a conceptual element.”
Wavelength’s new monthly will fall on the third weekend of the month during every month that its festivals aren’t happening.
kevinr@nowtoronto.com | @kevinritchie
