New Harbours Music Series 1.3 -- Slither + Fossils

New Harbours Music Series 1.3
Slither + Fossils
June 13, 9:00 PM
Christ’s Church Cathedral
262 James street North
Free Admission


The noisier and more experimental end of jazz has always been a troubling beast to many listeners. Throughout the history of the genre, musicians have been simultaneously playing within traditional structures and emphatically breaking past them in search of new musical horizons. Free jazz attained a popular zenith in the late sixties with reed players such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and the genre was able to proliferate commercially despite the demands which it placed on listeners. Over the next two decades however, jazz was concretized in the public imagination as a genre of rigid formalism associated with easy-listening radio stations. Experimental jazz quickly relegated itself to the Japanese, European, and North American underground, where it remained a fertile though somewhat marginalised scene.

Michigan duo Slither are among the newer generation of musicians who work within the amorphously-conceived genre of free jazz (which is at this point more appropriately termed “free improvisation”). Clarinetist Heath Moerland and saxophonist Chris Pottinger have been performing torrid live shows for the past few years. Described as “Today’s jazz for today’s playboys” by Thurston Moore, Slither perform a combination of reeds and electronics that serves well to reinvigorate free improvisation fans and other aesthetes of the nearly-impossible. The cacophony which they create certainly falls within the noise camp, and a great deal of spectral beauty can be discerned as the horn instruments wash themselves of the sonic detritus. Indeed, the last time Slither performed in Hamilton, an amplified dish rack proved itself a worthy addition to the performance.



Local noise practitioners Fossils will also be performing at New Harbours. A trio centred upon the weekly improvisation sessions at band member David Payne’s downtown apartment, Fossils have been internationally championed as being among Canada’s elite experimental acts. Tape manipulation, no-input mixer feedback, prepared guitars, and an arsenal of electronics conjure a dissonant and distopic aesthetic of tortured landscapes and strained human relations. Much as the DJ scene of the 1990s revived interest in the vinyl culture of the previous generation of music listeners, the tape culture represented by Fossils signals to children of the 80s and 90s that their long-forgotten cassettes can still find a use despite the wear of neglect, magnetic drift, and oxidation.

Slither and Fossils play the final concert in the spring 2008 New Harbours Music Series at Christ’s Church Cathedral this Friday at 9 PM.