Sweet screeching baby jesus, I've somehow gone a month without seeing a show. I knew that being back in Canada wasn't going to be a laugh a minute, but that's just not right. Once this broke-making holiday stuff is over and done with, I'm definitely going to have to find out where the interesting stuff happens in Toronto. (Suggestions would be welcome if anybody should happen to stumble across this posting.)

Vinyl is almost keeping me sane, though: news of a garage/surf rock record sale on a mostly-tedious music forum led to a 45 of The Vipers' "Never Alone",…

You know, I think the last time I had been to Lee's was for the Cannibal Ox show the day planes were dropping out of the sky all over North America. Things were considerably more upbeat on Thursday night.

Most of that wasn't on account of opening act Orn. They weren't dreadful or anything, but if you've ever seen any bands in the Sunn O)))/Earth/Om vein, you've already heard their dirgelike guitar buzz and their medicated drumming. Unfortunately, their gear doesn't give any of it quite enough oomph to rattle the dusty bits loose inside…

Seven years overseas had pretty much wiped the curse of the 905er from my mind, but Sunday night brought it all back: every bloody show in Toronto starts at 9:00 or 10:00, so woe be unto ye if you're from out of town and would like to catch a bus or train home and there are more than two bands on a bill. Sure, there's a westbound GO train at 12:45-ish if the venue isn't too far from Union or Exhibition Place; too bad my parents' new house is an hour's walk from Oakville station. Looks like I've got a…

So Peter Brötzmann has become the third musician in the last ten years to tell me not to record one of his shows, joining in the process such fine company as Soft (which isn't either of the bands currently listed as "Soft" on last.fm) and some crappy electronic act from Hamilton that once opened for Silk Saw. Having found gobs of Brötzmann on dimeadozen.org in the past, I was a little surprised by his response to my request, and seeing $13 Okka Disk CDs going for 2500 yen at the merch table, it felt a bit like…

Bit of an ear-buster of a night: things kept slipping back and forth between the kind of loud that brings the earplugs out and the kind of quiet that loses all of its detail to them, and after prising them out three or four times (or, more importantly, not getting them back in right away when things took another turn for the deafening), I sort of gave myself up to the morning-after pressure that says your hearing isn't happy with you. Sho ga nai.

Anyway, I was pokey on the train and didn't reach Ojikoen until around 8:00, but the…

Looks like I got to see a sequel to last year's New Picnic after all, and like a lot of sequels, this one was bigger and stupider than the original. The location, all of a couple of stops south of Namba, guaranteed a much larger crowd than you'd get by asking people to trek out to Himeji again at 9:00 on a Monday morning, so the crowds were sweatier and packed tighter and the sound systems were a couple of orders of magnitude bigger. Which made it a bad day to forget my earplugs: five minutes of Afrirampo, charming…

Tonight had a whiff of beginning-of-the-end to it, being one of only two shows I've got scribbled down on the calendar in the month or so before I move back to Toronto. That probably explains why, like a huge fanboy dork, I scuttled up to the stage after Acid Eater had finished and swiped their set list. I wish it explained the sweaty "dancing", too, but that's just sort of a given when I'm really into a show now.

So… Acid Eater. Their gear was already set up when I got to Bears, with a sexy Nord Electro plopped…

The trip out to Kyoto on Thursday was kind of interesting: one of the trains stopped rather abruptly in the middle of the line and we were all told to clamber off and wait for the next train, which probably really surprised the woman who was asleep across the aisle from me… nobody actually came through to clear us out, so the doors closed and the train took off while she was still aboard. I'd love to have seen the reactions of the staff at the railyard when they found her.

Anyway, I missed the bulk of psychedelic desert's…

I mostly went to Hokage last night to see pyschedelic desert, but the relentless precision of Hokage's scheduling saw Go & Co. finishing just as I was getting out of my usual Monday-night class. Why can't more places be as sloppy with their start times as Bears?

Chris Cobilis was setting up as I arrived, his Powerbook-guitar-and-mic rig catching me out a bit when he shifted abruptly from looped purrs and guitar squee to some heavily emoted back-porch country action… which was then overtaken by DSP demolition that got a little out of control, but it was certainly never…

Bless the summer concert glut. I hadn't been out in a while, but now that obon is underway, the city's slathered so thick with interesting shows that I'm actually having to cherry-pick 'em. Getting to them is an ugly, sweaty process, but once inside, the PAs rumble and the pain melts away.

Got inside Bears to find JP deep in communion with Internet-on-Japan legend Mason Jones. I immediately made the brilliant move of confusing Jones' wife with a guy — sorry, man — but he was as much a font of information as ever and wife-guy is apparently this close…