August 27, 2009: I noticed today that a review of Rusty Pile was published in the German online industrial-noise-style webzine kulturterrorismus. Sadly I don’t know German, but the review sounds positive from the Internet-generated-non-human translation below. John Whyte is speaking to a German-English-fluent-friend to have a translation done. (Today must be joining-words-together-day.) Fatigue is setting in.

Thanks to the kind folks at kulturterrorismus … and apologies for this translation.

“What must an art project such as VioSac (Violence and the Sacred performing ace VioSac) move after 16th years in the sinking in addition to produce new album with “Rusty Pile”? A question for what the answers keep a lookout follows how: “No Label! No motivation! etc. etc.,! why the return put on in own achievement “Rusty Pile” the more amazes, represents the one futuristic maximum performance.

Freaks, that the special seek appreciate how, should convince himself this gelungene such as futuristic return “Rusty Pile” of VioSac out of Noise, Industrial & field reception do not escape let, which through compactness, independence & Abgedrehtheit – my absolute recommendation!”

August 20th, 2009: You are planning to enjoy the apocalypse has been out for two months now. I’ve sent over 200 copies to friends, radio stations, reviewers. I’m pleased with the response to date, which has been faster and more enthusiastic than with Rusty Pile. It has received quite a bit of airplay, particular in Montreal and Australia, and on a scattering of Canadian and American stations. Three reviews have appeared:

• Monsieur Délire (a nice little review)
• disagreement.net (very thoughtful)
• The Sound Projector (not particularly enthusiastic)

I particularly enjoyed Disagreement.net’s charming characterization of us as “elderly”. I suppose it’s true in a sense.

I keep thinking about where to go next with this and am torn between pushing the music toward greater formal experimentation or producing something more gentle and beautiful. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. It feels like a conscious choice. I don’t really follow an intense inspiration. Much of the music stems from emotional states, but is tempered by deliberate extra-musical decisions about how it should sound. We’ll see …

A friend recently said that the couple of months after a CD is released are always hard because of the lag between the completion of your creative output and any reaction that might arise to it. It kind of goes out into a non-responsive vacuum. Given that, these two months have treated me well.

June 18th, 2009: Time is roaring by mercilessly hence I am very happy to release, today, the latest VioSac CD: You are planning to enjoy the Apocalypse. Pleased, as it has taken some time for this to be available (partly due to the effort put into Rusty Pile promotion, partly due to ever-more-finicky insistence on the perfection of little details), and also pleased as I feel this is a significant improvement over Rusty Pile both musically and in the quality of its holistic expression.

I will write in more detail about this release in the next few weeks, as well as try to document my, and others, changing feelings towards it.  YAPTETA is now out there, alone, hopefully not too cold and hungry.

Many thanks are due to all those wonderful people who helped me along the way with advice and commentary of all types.  Particular thanks is due to John Whyte, without whose strategic vision and expert design, this project would not exist.

May 11th, 2009: This weekend featured the fifth full moon of 2009. I enjoy the spring and fall moons because, from my latitude, they don’t have that crisp, overhead, out-of-reach feeling of a winter full moon, nor do they have that murky, obscured feeling of a summer full moon as it wanders vaguely between Scorpio and Sagittarius. Which is not to say that I object to any moon sighting, ever … for we have to seize life’s pleasures when they present themselves to us. But the spring and fall full moons have a perfect in-between feeling, high enough to announce themselves with pride, but low enough to still get stuck behind a tree or a cloud.

The fifth full moon

But this fifth full moon presses upon me with an urgency reminiscent of the feelings that accompanied breathing life into the Viosac corpse two years ago: what am I doing?, where am I going?, what do I have to show, to account for myself, to return as a gift in thanks for the honour of still being alive, for being allowed to live?, how do I come to terms with the frightening and terrible gears of aging which I resist and embrace in equal measure?, and, of course, the unanswerable why?

By restarting Viosac two years ago I moved from standing still, looking backwards to moving forward, looking backward. Now it’s time to move forward and look forward.

In the first week of June I expect to receive the 2nd new Viosac CD, You Are Planning to Enjoy the Apocalypse (YAPTETA), from the production house in Quebec. The CD master and artwork were shipped out last week. I find the artwork beautiful, rich, and mysterious. The inside panels are collages by Toronto/Hamilton artist Maureen Paxton made specifically for the CD. John Whyte has done a excellent job on the overall visual strategy and has chosen images which complement each other perfectly for the front and back covers. Combined with Maureen’s work and the CD image (a photo I took of some wood and a window though a bottle of scotch), the total effect, to quote John, is “a rich amber brooding”.

The music is more controlled, expressive, and disciplined than Rusty Pile. Although 7 of 8 tracks contain defined rhythms, even if merely a repeating pulse, I feel the overall effect of the album to be a more dedicated experimentation.

YAPTETA also involves more Viosac participants than Rusty Pile: Ted Wheeler performs on two tracks (as well as providing invaluable editorial advice on several others) and St. Deborah returns with a reading of the 38th Psalm. Scott Kerr, long-departed from Viosac, but still very active musically, makes a guest appearance via tapes recorded in 1987.

As with Rusty Pile I suspect that promotion will be my weak point. The approach has been to send out as many copies as possible to radio stations, distributors, reviewers, and, somewhat less so, labels. Radio station response has been pretty enthusiastic: Rusty Pile received airplay on at least 30 radio stations worldwide, including reaching number 6 on CKUT, McGill University Radio (!). On the other hand distributor and label response has been either negative or not at all. This should not be a surprise, however as Viosac is coming out of nowhere somewhat. Having been outside of things for so long, getting any response is a good sign, but I’ve always had high expectations of my work, so in some ways it is disappointing.

For now, the YAPTETA promotion will be similar. My hope is that after a number these self-released CDs, some offers from little labels may show up. It is fun doing it all myself/ourselves though …

Just two nights later and the moon is already waning. A thought of sadness passes, pondering a small flock of birds flying away, somewhere else. They say there might be some frost tonight. Small plants, just starting, will mostly pull through, I suspect.

March 14, 2009: A few weeks back I thought that the new Violence and the Sacred CD, ‘You are Planning to Enjoy the Apocalypse’, was complete, but after several listens, advice from Ted, several conversations, and a bit of introspection (because the answers are obvious, why introspect on obvious things where there are so many unobvious introspection topics?) I’ve decided I need to rework several pieces and reorder the tracks.

Yapteta Cover

Hopefully this will take 3 or 4 days, but getting those days might be a challenge with all the other non-musical requirements that seem to exist. Yesterday when driving home, I saw a large flock of Canada geese flying north, a common site this time of year. Beautiful, but it reminded me that they will be here, still flying north long after I am gone … I should find the continuation of the natural world to be encouraging, trying as best it can to ignore us pained humans. But it was my irrelevance to the geese that bothered me. Twenty years ago I revelled in our irrelevance and randomness; now it bothers me.

On the bright side, work on a video release is days away from completion. My colleague, Gordon Belray has done a wonderful job in preparing a DVD of a Violence and the Sacred concert at the Music Gallery in Toronto from March 1991. I’ll make about 20 copies to mail around and try to sell. The concert was a particularly abrasive outing and would likely only interest fanatics, if such exist, but the video of it looks very nice. More such concerts will follow.

VATS at the Music gallery