MUSIC

Spasm Band still twitching

Saturday
October 29
8pm
$32

Y

ou might think that after 40 band. That was how we started, but
years of playing together, it was also the end of it, in a way:
the members of the Nihil- for whatever reason, no one had
ist Spasm Band would be any desire at all to study our musipretty good musicians—but you'd cal heroes and learn how to do what
be wrong, at least in terms of their they did. It never happened."
technical ability. And according to
That was in 1965. Since then,
founding member John Boyle, they Curnoe has been killed in a cycling
haven't had to work particularly accident, and more recently bassist
hard to avoid acHugh Mclntyre, the
quiring impresgroup's resident
sive chops.
curmudgeon and
polymath, passed
"I don't have to
Alexander Varty
away. But original
worry about that,
personally, because I'm mildly tone- members Boyle, John Clement, Bill
deaf," says the affable painter and Exley, Murray Favro, and Art Pratpioneering noise musician, reached ten continue on, playing a regular
by phone at his home in London, Monday-night gig in the London
Ontario. "I have real trouble hum- region—as they have since their
ming a tune with any kind of accu- inception—and indulging in the
racy. I can hear music well, though; occasional tour, like the one that
I can tell when people are hitting the will bring an expanded version of
right notes and stuff. But there's no the band next Friday (October 14)
danger of me falling into that—and to the Western Front. (Joining the
in my opinion, it isn't much of a surviving original members will
be percussionist Aya Ohnishi and
danger for the rest of us, either."
He laughs, and says that when it guitarist Tim Glasgow.)
comes to playing music, he's learned
After inspiring widespread indifnothing. "But we've sort of found ference and occasional acts of outthat what we do is so much more in- right hostility at home, it was on
teresting than trying to learn some- tour that Boyle and the rest of his
thing that others have done and then Nihilist colleagues began to realize
trying to do variations on it, which they were not alone in their noisy
is basically what everything else is." predilections. "We pretty much met
Ironically, the world's oldest universal contempt for the first 20
noise ensemble began as a one- years of our existence," admits the
time-only project, when several veteran kazooist and instrument
London residents—mostly visual builder. "But late in the 1980s we
artists, writers, and philosophers- played in Quebec for the first time,
assembled to create a score for a and had this wildly enthusiastic refilm by pioneering intermedia art- sponse from mostly young people.
ist Greg Curnoe. "Someone had This amazed us."
the idea of getting little kazoos—I
The band subsequently found
think mostly because they were red considerable acclaim in Japan, and
and black, which were the colours has won praise from influential
of nihilists and anarchists," Boyle rock avant-gardists Sonic Youth
explains. "But once we tootled on and Negativland—not surprising,
the kazoos then people's imagina- given the older performers' love
tions got going. We started modify- of unclassifiable sounds, mutant
ing the kazoos, and within a week instruments, and extreme volor so we discovered that we were a ume. According to Boyle, there's

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8

no such thing as a typical Nihilist
Spasm Band set; one of the side effects of its members' studied ignorance is that nothing is repeatable.
But the recordings that I've heard
skate the line between sheer anarchic madness and idiot-savant
primitivism, with steroidal-caveman drumming, buzz saw-like
shrieking, and clanking, atonal
guitars prominent in the mix. The
music isn't exactly formless, but
no other band in the world works
with forms like these.
"We still can't play music," Boyle
reiterates. "But we can play our kind
of music, and we know when we're
playing it well."
And, increasingly, so do others.
"People used to get very angry
when we played," the NSB spokesman recalls. "I guess they were expecting to hear some sort of conventional music, and they were
offended when they didn't. And they
were offended that we would have
the gall to get up in any public space
and perform. But there has been so
much performance art as well as
weird music over the past 40 years
that people don't get angry now. Nobody throws things anymore."
Boyle seems a little disappointed
that those days are gone, but contends that he and his fellow Nihilists are largely indifferent to public
acclaim. "We're kind of an insular
group," he says. "We play mainly
for ourselves. And we can have a
great night, and everybody knows
it, even if there are only two people
in the audience. Still, we're really
excited about coming 6ut west for
the first time as a band, and we
want to do our best. We hope people will check it out, and we hope
they'll find it interesting."
They will, I think. Interesting,
and perhaps a little abrasive, too.
After all, these Nihilists wouldn't
have it any other way. ^