Event Announcement: “In partnership with Kingston Punk Productions, Modern Fuel Presents a Vapours concert featuring The Famines (Edmonton) and local band False Face on Thursday July 30th at 8pm. Vapours is a semi-regular concert series hosted by Modern Fuel whose aim is to provide alternative space for exploratory musical performances and to promote emerging experimental musicians both locally and nationally.”

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False Face is a rambunctious group of musical troublemakers in Kingston, namely Stephen Guy, Paul Saulnier, and Mark Streeter. They bring the combined energy of years spent in garage rock bands, these guys are ready to explode.

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The Famines are an indie rock band hailing from Edmonton with two members, Raymond E. Biesinger on guitar and vocals, and Garrett Heath Kruger on the drums. The band uses a modern and minimalistic approach that draws comparisons to mid 70s punk and fuzzy garage rock. 

Event Announcement: “For ‘Sadderday Night,’ clock din Sound System returns after a two-year hiatus to accompany the sonic sculpture of Anders Oinonen and Mike Murphy in an exhibition of the same name at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. This exploration of the ‘din of disappointment’ takes the form of an immersive environment in the main gallery at Modern Fuel on June 20th, 2009.”

Read the full event program here.

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clock din is the ongoing collaboration of artists from Canada, Europe and Japan, curated by Gord High. clock din has been exploring ‘components of sound’ for over ten years. First as an interactive sound website, then as a performing sound system, clock din fuses ‘dada and dubplates’ to create and to let users create their own soundscapes.

The clock din website (http://clockdin.com) went online in 1998, allowing over a million users to generate their own mixes with its library of sounds. Early adopters of clock din included the CBC’s 120seconds, Zed TV, and Brave New Waves, as well as print media including SHIFT, NOW, and Exclaim! magazines.

clock din has performed as an audio ‘sound system’ at a number of art and performance spaces including Ed Video in Guelph, the Gladstone Art Bar, the 2BOND in St. Catharines, and the infamous Electric Eclectics Festival in Meaford, Ontario. Generally, clock din Sound System includes a rotating roster of artists who have contributed sounds to the interactive site, joined by Gord High. clock din always performs ‘free form’, and makes use of its own signature sounds in a live setting.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with CFRC and Tone Deaf 9, presents yet another installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring Marinko (St. Catharines, ON) followed by a dance party featuring cheap drinks and Kingston’s own DJ Sealegs on Friday October 29, 2010.

This concert is the second in a series of experimental music events organized and promoted by Modern Fuel, CFRC, and Tone Deaf 9 from October 28 to Nov. 7, 2010. The evening will begin with an experimental turntable set from Marinko at 9pm, and evolve into an all-out dance party at 10pm, as Marinko is joined by CFRC’s own Sealegs. Expect the two DJs to pull out all the stops and dig deep in the crates for an unparalleled tag-team musical adventure. Marinko will also be mixing live visuals at the event. Doors will open at 8pm with performances starting at 9.

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Marinko, based in St. Catharines, Ontario, is a DJ and visual artist, a member of the experimental turntablist trio Vinyl Interventions and the founder of the Ghetto $y$tem mobile sound system and music label.

Event Announcement: Vapours Concert with Holzkopf and Freida Abtan members. Modern Fuel, with CFRC and Tone Deaf 9, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring Holzkopf (Vancouver, BC) and Freida Abtan (Providence, RI) on Thursday, October 28th, at 8pm. Local artists Blake Macfarlane and Nicholas Fellion (Kingston, ON) will also present a short opening set

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Holzkopf is the alias of Vancouver-based musician and DJ Jake Hardy. Since 2001, Holzkopf has been developing a style of hypnotic and frenetic dance music made from a mishmash of homemade tape collages, blown out drum machine beats and grabbed found sounds. The sound is reminiscent of proto-industrial, disco, hip-hop, global psychedelia, gospel and breakcore synthesized into a complete unique whole. This is futurist and anarchist music made on cheap gear, recorded live to tape or dusty old hard drives. A Holzkopf performance is always a spontaneous, raw and one of a kind experience.

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Freida Abtan is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist and composer. Her work falls somewhere in between musique concrète and more modern noise and experimental audio: both genres are influential to her sound. Abtan works with samples of musical and non-musical objects that she records herself and then manipulates, often beyond recognition, through layers of digital signal processing. She uses structures reminiscent of popular music and more abstract compositional variants to sequence these sounds into melodic songs before incorporating her own treated voice. Her first album, “subtle movements,” is available on United Dairies / Jnana Records.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC and the Canada Council for the Arts, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring Alcrete (Kingston, ON), Dreamcatcher (Montreal, QC) and Disguises (Toronto, ON) on Saturday, November 5th, at 8pm. 

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Alcrete performs brooding dark jams about rusty assembly lines and broken dreams. This is not your grandfather’s “Darkness On The Edge Of Town.”

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Dreamcatcher have been pounding analog drum synth music through their pile of amps, composing unusual songs and disorganized dance music, for seven years. Leads come courtesy of the rumble pack, an analog synth made of thriftstore junk. A variety of tape/vinyl textures provide gently moving backgrounds for maximum carsick effect. Their songs are about the mind, the heart, the body, the society, the snakes and ladders of fickle fortune, the double helix of creation and destruction, equal parts hugs and doom. Think rhythms of deep-breathing and undersea physics, textures of sonic fractals and electron pressure, with lyrics about oracle versus highwayman morality.

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Disguises are scum and splooge surfers of Toronto’s noise/avant D.I.Y. underground. A volcanic blast of rushing blood & damaged ear drums, Disguises seamlessly blurs the lines between avant/psych creep, free-jazz improvisation, mechanized industrial groove, and total punk attack.
Total “rock action” abuse, strings shredded, fried speakers and hours upon hours of VHS tape eaten for samples (Carpenter, Dr. Who, David Koresh, and classic Godzilla movies…they’re all in there) create a gonzo movie buffs auditory wet dream come to life. The end result is 21st Century punk rock crafted by a band too difficult to pigeonhole in to one specific genre, a band burning the heat of now.

 Event Announcement: Sponsored by and in association with the Kingston Multicultural Arts Festival, Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN (Toronto, On / Montreal, QC) and Pop Talk (Kingston, ON / Montreal, QC) on Friday, September 16, at 8pm.

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Pop Talk is a noise rock performance piece. Pop Talk is an off-kilter mumble-core sketch comedy duo. Pop Talk is committed to independent music and DIY culture. Heavily influenced by community radio they weave together talking bits with ‘musical’ bits. They have performed live and released 2 cassettes, the most recent a split with local socio-critical noise rocker Alcrete. Pop Talk is composed of Neven Lochead and James Goddard as well as other collaborators.

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YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN are an Asian Diasporic psychedelic noh-wave opera group fusing noise, metal, pop and folk music into a multidisciplinary hyper-orientalist cesspool of ‘eastern’ culture in giant monochrome paper sets. Blending Noh, Peking Opera, Buddhist Ritual Punk, Taiko Shows, Tokusatsu, Performance Art, Rock Opera & their own mangaesque cardboard ‘NEVERFLAT’ style of 2.5D set design, their bizarre form of music//altheater have awked and shawed audiences in Montreal for several years.

Founded in early 2008 by performance artists alaskaB and Ruby Kato Attwood, from the ashes of ‘Yellow Peril’, YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN functions as a mutating and constantly evolving art cult that brings together individuals of Diasporic and Indigenous identity to perform/create as a collective. Working in multiple mediums including Installation, Theater, Music and Design, YT//ST negotiate cultural clashes between dominant cultures and those whose traditions are oppressed, erased or being eclipsed. YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN continues to operate now between Montreal & Toronto.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC 101.9 FM and the 2012 National Campus and Community Radio Conference, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring AJ Cornell (Montreal, QC), Gambletron (Montreal, QC), and Holzkopf (Vancouver, BC) on Thursday, June 14th, at 8pm.

This concert is one of an array of stimulating workshops, provocative speakers and mind-blowing music performances organized for the 2012 NCRC conference (visit the CFRC website for more information).

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Andrea Jane Cornell is manipulator of gleaned sounds who likens the sonorities of the every day to an assemblage of musical instruments randomly orchestrated by its inhabitants. She engages in the practice of listening as a creative act. Cornell has a background in campus and community radio and electroacoustic composition and a holds a master’s degree in Media Studies from Concordia University.

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Gambletron is a DIY Montreal-based experimental electronic improvisational noise artist. A circuit bender and musician, she is the innovator of “Noise Karaoke.” Her solo project is a mish mash of glitch toys and cheap little synth stuff. Her music is entertaining, electronic improv, that sounds like saturated, super glitch-fuzz, kind of dance-NOISE. In her head she is referencing pop music. Gambletron works extensively with constellation records on projects such as Matana Roberts, Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista, Hrsta, and Clues. She is also in a Greenlandic pop band.

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Holzkopf is the alias of Vancouver-based musician and DJ Jake Hardy. Since 2001, Holzkopf has been developing a style of hypnotic and frenetic dance music made from a mishmash of homemade tape collages, blown out drum machine beats and grabbed found sounds. The sound is reminiscent of proto-industrial, disco, hip-hop, global psychedelia, gospel and breakcore synthesized into a complete unique whole. A Holzkopf performance is always a spontaneous, raw and one of a kind experience.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC and the Canada Council for the Arts, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert of experimental sounds performed through an 8-speaker diffusion system that will feature works by Hector Centeno (Toronto, ON), Andrea Jane Cornell (Montreal, QC) and Matt Rogalsky (Kingston, ON) on Saturday, February 25th, at 8pm.

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Hector Centeno is a music composer, sound artist and digital media designer originally from Mexico and currently living in Toronto Canada. For his performance at Modern Fuel, Centeno will be improvising an acoustic journey through an imaginative landscape. To recreate the sense of space, sounds will be diffused through a multichannel system surrounding the audience. His improvisational procedure is inspired by Zen Buddhist art. Sound textures will gradually change and give place to new ones in an abstract soundscape journey that seeks to mirror the way the constant change and flow of reality is perceived through deep listening of our acoustic environment.

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Andrea Jane Cornell is manipulator of gleaned sounds who likens the sonorities of the every day to an assemblage of musical instruments randomly orchestrated by its inhabitants. She engages in the practice of listening as a creative act. Cornell has a background in campus and community radio and electroacoustic composition and a holds a master’s degree in Media Studies from Concordia University.

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Matt Rogalsky works in the areas of live electroacoustic music and sound installation. In addition to playing electric guitar with The Gertrudes, and recording and producing releases for Kingston bands like Madam Raz, Sleuth Bears and PS I Love You, Rogalsky’s recent activity includes solo electronic music performances in Canada, Cuba, the USA, Scotland and England, and group installation/performance work with Composers Inside Electronics in Mexico and New York.