WHIMM with ICE CREAM, QUE LASTIMA and INVISIBLE OUT at the Baby G (1608 Dundas West), November 17, 9 pm. $10.
Whimm’s Mounir Chami has a weird job. “I walk around the city all day, taking photos of condos,” he explains. “It’s banal but sometimes it kind of shows itself to me. I’ve been here so long and lived in so many different places. I end up in parts of town that I haven’t been to in quite some time, seeing people I haven’t seen in years, so I’m being forced to go back into this past self.”
Inquiry and reflection come naturally to Chami, a Palestinian-Canadian who sometimes feels like he dwells in two solitudes that can be hard to reconcile. The band’s a natural extension of his life: an ongoing project of reflection and reconciliation, of getting as close to meaning as possible in the fragmented chaos of post-truth times.
He likes to talk in terms of revelation. Certain songs “show themselves” after a prolonged period of experimentation he keeps a journal of thoughts and images that will eventually “reveal things” to him. His approach to songwriting almost seems analogous to his day job as a photographer: it’s all about putting a frame around things, about finding some momentary order within noisy chaos.
“I don’t really know where my politics lie anymore,” says Chami, his voice slow and careful, as though he’s working through a range of epistemological quandaries in real time.
“My personal manifesto, I don’t know what it is. Because it just seems like we’re constantly – like, all of us – being thrown for a loop with what’s right and what’s wrong.
“We know about so many things that are going wrong right now, but there are so many variables, so many contexts. All the cultures that spill in together, the spaces we’re all living in together. These things get so jumbled up and are confusing to me.”
Throughout their new record, A Stare Ajar (out October 27 on Pleasence and streaming below), there’s a powerful sense that Whimm are earnestly searching for new insight into themselves. These songs are not contrived thought experiments that play devil’s advocate. They’re like lights being thrown down a dark passage, attempts to discern how deep the three of them can go together, how far they can see.
“I want to get to a point where I can just sit down and just write everything that’s happened in the past few years – how things have changed, how we should be interacting with the world, and then I want to distill it all down so I can be a bit more clear about it in my mind.
“Then I can focus on making something.”
His quiet voice is momentarily drowned out by a bulldozer smashing up the sidewalk. We’re sitting in Little Italy, near an intersection that’s been under construction for three years. Jackhammers and concrete saws have become a naturalized feature in the neighbourhood’s soundscape, the droning and thudding so relentless that it’s almost transcendent.
Whimm’s music has something of this energy in it: a churning, transformative clamour of dissonance and repetition. They’ve been one of the most intense live bands in the city for years, but have released very little recorded material. For a band that chooses its words carefully, A Stare Ajar is a lot all at once.
“Honestly it was more of an onslaught before Dean got in,” says Chami, referring to producer/musician Dean Tzenos of Odonis Odonis, who mixed the record with the band. “When we were mixing, we would drop guitars and specific elements in songs just for fun, and sometimes it made it so much better. We wanted the record to be as open as possible.”
For Chami, things are working right between him and bandmates Jonathan Pappo (drums) and Andrew Matthews (bass) when everything’s a negotiation – among each other, with their audience and with their own music. He’s quick to point out instances where the three have disagreed with one another, and is even quick to disavow his own opinion. “I feel way more confused with myself musically now than I was when we were making this record,” he says. “Everything I was thinking about and writing about then, I am second guessing now.”
I ask if he can say more about what he was thinking.
“No, I think I should say less about it.”
Fair enough. Whimm’s music speaks for itself in many ways, while seeming to already contain all that can be said about it.
“Ambiguity is the only place where you can be absolutely sure about what you’re writing and saying.”
Watch Whimm play an exclusive live performance of Fifth Column below:
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