Pióro

I shouldn’t have been standing at the centre of the second row of the start line. I joked with the rider beside me, “I feel bad for the guys behind who’ll have to get around me.” In a cyclocross race, the sprint from the start line to the first corner is key. It’s easier to keep a position than to gain one, so everyone fights for that corner.

“Yeah, they’ll have to get around me, too,” said the other rider.

He was being modest. I wasn’t.

If the national cyclocross championships this past Saturday were a gunfight, I had shown up not with a pistol, or even a knife, but a rusty pair of nail clippers. Usually I race in a category called M3. The ‘M’ is for “masters,” those 35 years old and older. The ‘3’ means that the master only applies to age, not ability. It’s usually one of the largest categories in the local Sunday cyclocross races. But this was the nationals. Many of the guys I race against were smart enough to stay home. For this race, riders were just grouped by age. My category was 30 to 39. I was up against guys who are M1, two ranking higher, and elite, which means younger and faster. As for my position in the second row, a lottery put me there, and that little bit of fortune used up my luck quotient for the race.

After the start whistle, the riders with their gatling-gun legs did fire around me. I was about fourth from the end at the first corner. We tore along a paved path and then turned off into the woods. Like most of the others, I dismounted for the first tight, muddy turn. I got back on the bike, pedalled along. Then, for some reason of which I’m still not sure, I was doing a summersault along the side of the single track, and my bike bounced to other side. By the time I was pedalling again, everyone was out of sight.

If you are last in a race, like really last, you are an isolated particle. There’s no presence behind pushing you forward and there’s no wheel in front to draw you on. Because ’cross courses are so varied, there’s no “going for one’s personal best” for motivation, or to apply later as an ego balm. So at the back of the pack, you have this wonderful freedom to choose how you’ll lose. I’ve seen a rider mix his physical pain with his emotional dissatisfaction, which just seems sulky. Maybe there is someone at the finish line who will coo for him, “Oh, there there. You just didn’t have the legs I know you have.” I know of another rider who rides with such disdain when he’s losing. He looks back at barriers as if he overhead them say “I don’t get the deal with Daydream Nation” as he was browsing records. His performance is amusing, but he comes across like a prick. I decided to try to not look shitty and to give’er…or a least look like I was given’er.

My mind descended into its race haze. At certain points, the announcer’s words came into focus and seemed to be narrating my ride.

“Riding on the grass really saps the legs of energy, which makes going up those hills even tougher.”

Yes. Yes. Don’t remind me.

“And as a rider continues and gets more and more tired, his judgement also starts to go. The technical parts get more difficult.”

Yes. Thank you. Stop drawing people’s attention to that corner I just took too wide.

A photographer snapped a shot of me as I teetered and fell at the top of a hard climb.

“You just had to get that shot,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Ass.”

I did keep my wits on the barriers: dismounting, running over them and mounting smoothly. Same with the running through the swing-set sandpit. After the race, my friend had the most sincere backhanded compliment: “You did really well at the non-cycling parts.”

The only ray of hope came in the race’s second last lap. As I came down the the hill toward the start line, the second last rider didn’t seem so far away. Maybe I could catch him. I hit the gas on the paved section and went roaring into the forest. I stalked him through the woods around the twisting muddy corners. He had no idea I was gaining. Perfect. At the switchback coming out of the forest and back onto the paved path, he saw me and bolted. Maybe I could catch him in the technical section past the finish line. I had one more hellish lap to salvage something. But at the bend before the start of my last lap, a race official tweeted his whistle at me. Both my second-last nemesis and I were in danger of being lapped, which meant our races were over one lap before the others.

As my friend with the backhanded compliments would say, “Well, you did finish the race ahead of the winner.”

Of the roughly 176 cyclists who raced in last year’s inaugural Grand Prix Cycliste de Quebec and Montreal, 56 are returning this week for the 2011 editions. BMC seems to have the most returning riders with five. For the full, tentative 2011 start lists, visit Canadian Cyclist. Did I miss anyone?

• Ryder Hesjedal (Garmin-Transitions, now Garmin-Cervelo)
• Timothy Duggan (Garmin-Transitions, now Liquigas-Cannondale)
• Danny Pate (Garmin Transitions, now HTC-Highroad)
• Samuel Sanchez (Euskaltel-Euskadi)
• Miguel Minguez (Euskaltel-Euskadi)
• Alan Perez (Euskaltel-Euskadi)
• Robert Gesink (Rabobank)
• Tom Stamsnijder (Rabobank, now Leopard Trek)
• Dennis van Winden (Rabobank)
• Levi Leipheimer (Team Radioshack)
• Kristijan Koren (Liquigas-Domino, now Liquigas-Cannondale)
• Brian Vandborg (Liquigas-Domino, now Liquigas-Cannondale)
• Dries Devenyns (Quick Step)
• Jérôme Pineau (Quick Step)
• Francesco Reda (Quick Step)
• Jurgen van de Walle (Quick Step, now Omega Pharma-Lotto)
• Edvald Boasson Hagen (Sky)
• Michael Barry (was scheduled to race in 2010, but couldn’t because of a broken rib)
• Sandy Casar (FDJ)
• Thibault Pinot (FDJ)
• Michael Morkov (Saxo Bank, now Saxo Bank Sungard)
• André Steensen (Saxo Bank, now Saxo Bank Sungard)
• Damiano Cunego (Lampre-Farnese Vini, now Lampre-ISD, but the grapevine says he is ill and won’t be racing)
• Simone Ponzi (Lampre-Farnese Vini, now Lampre-ISD)
• Simon Spilak (Lampre-Farnese Vini, now Lampre-ISD)
• Diego Ulissi (Lampre-Farnese Vini, now Lampre-ISD)
• Gert Dockx (HTC-Columbia, now Omega Pharma-Lotto)
• Patrick Gretsch (HTC-Columbia, now HTC-Highroad)
• Craig Lewis (HTC-Columbia, now HTC-Highroad)
• Frantisek Rabon (HTC-Columbia, now HTC-Highroad)
• Jose Ivan Gutierrez (Caisse d’Epargne, now Movistar)
• Jose Joaquin Rojas (Caisse d’Epargne, now Movistar)
• Gerald Ciolek (Milram, now Quick Step)
• Niki Terpstra (Milram, now Quick Step)
• Fabian Wegmann (Milram, now Leopard Trek)
• Mirko Selvaggi (Astana, now Vacansoleil-DCM Pro)
• Yukiya Arashiro (Bbox Bouygues Telecom, now Europcar)
• Pierrick Fedrigo (Bbox Bouygues Telecom, now FDJ)
• Cyril Gautier (Bbox Bouygues Telecom, now Europcar)
• Sébastien Turgot (Bbox Bouygues Telecom, now Europcar)
• Alessandro Ballan (BMC)
• Brent Bookwalter (BMC)
• George Hincapie (BMC)
• Jeffrey Louder (BMC)
• Danilo Wyss (BMC)
• Mickaël Buffaz (Cofidis)
• Rémi Cusin (Cofidis)
• Leonardo Fabio Duque (Cofidis)
• Sébastien Minard (Confidis, now AG2R La Mondiale)
• Amaël Moinard (Confidis, now BMC)
• Dominique Rollin (Team Canada, now FDJ)
• Bruno Langlois (Team Canada [Quebec City race only], now Spidertech p/b C10 [Quebec City race only])
• François Parisien (Team Canada, now Spidertech p/b C10)
• Will Routley (Team Canada, now Spidertech p/b C10)
• David Veilleux (Team Canada, now Europcar)
• Ryan Anderson (Team Canada [Montreal race only], now Spidertech p/b C10)

I was heading east on Dundas this morning when I stopped for a red light at Shaw Street, east of Ossington. A scruffy guy pedalled up from behind, ambling in a high gear, and blew through the red. It changed to green and I was at the guy’s rear wheel after a few pedal strokes. He continued to amble, so I passed him and came to a stop by a minivan at the red at Montrose Avenue. Ambler went by but before he cleared the intersection, I had to call him out.

“Oh yeah, keep going. I don’t want to catch you again,” I said with what I’m sure was playful sarcasm.

“Fuck you, asshole!” he yelled over his shoulder.

A guy in the minivan called to me, across a woman in the passenger seat :

“He’s going to get hit someday.”

It was offered like a consolation. Sure, ambler was passing you and slowing you up, but he’d get what’s coming, don’t worry ruler-follower. The words were also a show of solidarity. We didn’t run red lights. We were good drivers. It’s like we were on the same team. But we’re not.

“Yeah, but that happens to cyclists who follow the rules, too,” I said.

We both started moving on the green.

I have my own Oscar bet going tonight. Even though I’ll miss the start of the ceremonies, I think I’ll still be home in time to catch Anne Hathaway’s penultimate wardrobe change. I’ll be at an ensemble concert that the Music Gallery put on by Array Music. It will feature five works from Array Music’s library.

First in the lineup is “(Damper) Coaster” composed by Martin Arnold. Next is “Soccer” by Scott Godin. I believe the full name of the piece is “Soccer: In Memoriam Hugh Kenner”. Although, I’m not sure what the links are between the world’s most popular sport and a Canadian literary critic. (See if you can hear them for yourself; you can find an excerpt halfway down this page.) You can hear the third work, Michael Oesterle’s “Assume Sometimes,” in its entirety on the composer’s site. The fourth piece has shared its title with the night’s event: “Four Seasons One Tree.” It’s by Rodney Sharman who writes the following on the work:

The piece is a meditation on magical, “seasonally complex” trees I have seen on North America’s West Coast, in Canada, California and Mexico. These extraordinary trees exhibit features of their entire life cycle at the same time, sometimes on a single branch, from smallest bud to fullest fruit, falling leaves and bare twig.
The music is a set of constantly changing variations, contrasted with four solos for each of the sustaining instruments of the ensemble: trumpet, violin, bass clarinet and double bass.

The final piece is “Stare at the River” by Linda Catlin Smith, which she has described as “gazing with the ear.”

The main focus, for me at least, of this concert is not the five musical pieces per se, but the conductor, Gregory Oh. The folks at Musicworks magazine have set me on a profile of Oh, who is also a pianist and member of the group Toca Loca. I’ve been theorizing as to where I should sit so that I have the best view of the conductor: not a common concert-goer’s goal. Any tips?

After the event, I’ll shoot of the Spadina Line to see if I can get home before Spielberg presents the best motion picture Oscar.

Yes, I have been known to drop projects and if you look at this past November’s posts, it does seem like I just dropped the article on the Canadian Music Centre’s LoK8Tr project. In fact, I was dropped. My contact with LoK8Tr sent me a message saying he was “shutting down communication [with me] effective immediately.” He also requested that I “cease writing about the LoK8Tr project in any form.” So, I did what any journalist would do: I wrote a story anyway. I wanted to call it “LoK8Tr Has a Cold.” You can read the tale of the breakup—more aptly entitled “dis-LoK8Ted”— in the current issue of Musicworks magazine. (On newsstands now!)

The LoK8Tr project has started. If you are keen on checking it out, as I am, you should become Facebook friends with Lo Katr and check out CMC’s page on the project. Also, don’t forget that LoK8Tr and the cool cats at Mannlicher Carcano will be performing an on-air collaboration this Saturday at 3pm on CFRU (93.3 FM if you live in Guelph, Ont.).

Quebec City and Montreal will be hosting International Cycling Union (UCI) road races this September, the first ProTour races ever to be held in North America. I not only want to attend these races, the Quebec City and Montreal Grands Prix Cyclistes, to watch dudes bike up hills faster than I can bike down them, but I hope to cover the races in some capacity. I’m still cooking up some plans for that, but as part of my research, I spoke with Serge Arsenault, the organizer of the two races, last Friday.

Arsenault has been involved with road racing for more than 30 years. In 1974, he was a Radio Canada commentator for the UCI Road World Championships in Montreal, which the great Eddy Merckx won. From 1988 to 1991, Arsenault organized the races in Montreal that were part of the UCI’s World Cup circuit. His television stations, Serdy Vidéo and Canal Évasion, have broadcasted the Tour de France. Out of these experiences, Arsenault was able gain a UCI licence last summer to hold North America’s first ProTour races.

The Quebec City race, on Friday, September 10, is a 12.6 kilometre circuit that will take riders by the Plains of Abraham and through the old city 15 times. The Montreal race, two days later, is a 12.9 kilometre circuit that takes riders around Mont Royal 16 times. According to Arsenault, they are tough, aggressive courses. He figures only 40 per cent of the riders, out of roughly 170, will finish the race.

“A rider won’t win in Montreal and Quebec City by chance. He and his team will have to have a perfect day and execute their game of chess without mistakes,” Arsenault says alluding to the myriad tactics involved in winning a road race.

For Arsenault, these two races mark the future of professional cycling. From the early 1900s to the 1970s, cycling was a continental European sport dominated by riders from France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain. The riders from the U.K., North America and Australia have only been a fixture over the last 30 years, over which time the field has become even more international. There is pressure to make the ProTour races reflect this growing internationalism and to take the sport beyond Europe. While there are continental UCI races around the world, only Europe and Australia have had ProTour races.

“Both Russia and China want races,” Arsenault says, “In the next year—maximum two years—the U.S. will have race.”

Arsenault wants to be ahead of this wave of expansion and be a part of the new face of cycling. For the two Canadian Grand Prix races, he’s pulling out all of the stops. You know those motorcyclists who follow the cyclists in the Tour de France? The ones with a cameraman on the back. Arsenault has hired those guys because they are the best. It’s a good thing too. These races will be broadcast during the afternoon, Eastern Standard Time, but during prime time in Europe. Arsenault is also trying to create a festival atmosphere around the races. One proposed event is a festival express train that will take riders, journalists and fans from Quebec City to Montreal on the Saturday between the races. The train ride has been billed as an event in and of itself.

There may be one damper on the festivities already though. The races in Quebec will happen in the midst of the Vuelta a España, which is the last of the three Grand Tours, after the Giro d’Italia in May and the Tour de France in July. This arrangement doesn’t seem to worry Arsenault too much. The ProTeams have to send eight racers each to the Canadian races so there will be no problem stocking the event. But how attractive will these races be for riders? Will the big name cyclists want to ride in these new races, or participate in the Vuelta with its history and prestige? In terms of the points a rider can earn from these races, which determine his UCI World Ranking, Arsenault sees the Canadian races as a better deal.

“A winner at both Quebec and Montreal will get 160 points,” he said. “That’s in just two days. A win at the Vuelta, which is 21 days of racing, will bring 170 points.”

Arsenault added that the Vuelta is in decline. This year may be its 75th anniversary, but it also seems to be its last as a 21-day race. In 2011, it will run 14 days. The ProTour calendar is already pretty busy, and will get busier. There just doesn’t seem to be room of 21-day epics. However, the Vuelta still carries weight amongst riders. Dominique Rollin, a member of Cervélo Test Team, has some ambivalence over the Canadian races and the Spanish Grand Tour. He’s the only Canadian on the Canadian-backed team, which is, however, based in Switzerland. He knows it would be good from a marketing perspective to be in Quebec City and Montreal, but his sights are set on the Grand Tours and he would prefer to attend the Vuelta.

I can’t blame Rollin for wanting to go to Spain at the end of August for three weeks. But, I’m keen on watching the Canadian races in their respective cities, even if that press pass doesn’t work out. There are many reasons to go. One of those reasons, which Arsenault pointed out near the end of our conversation, is that cycling is the only professional sport that you can attend for free.

Right now, two blindfolded people are singing “love, love, love” a fragment from U2’s “Until the End of the World.” The woman, Annie Abrahams, is in Montpellier, France. The man, Curt Cloninger, is in Asheville, NC, USA and also playing a suitcase-model Rhodes piano. They’ve been at it for four hours, and will probably be at it for two hours more. When I checked out the live online broadcast of it at just before 2 p.m. Abrahams wasn’t in front of her web cam. Had she bailed? Or had she just taken a break? The two don’t have an “I’m done” signal, so any pauses in the singing could be just pauses or simply the end.

The performance is called Double Blind (Love) is being performed simultaneously in three spaces: the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Centre, in Asheville, NC, USA; Living Room espace de création contemporaine, Montpellier, France; and online at selfworld.net. The performance started at noon Eastern Standard time or 6 p.m. Central European time. The pair’s plan is to sing together for as long as they can. Yesterday, Cloninger figured the performance will go for close to five hours.

“Annie is hardcore,” he said.

Cloninger himself is quite hardcore. Not only does he have a background in punk and speed metal bands, but he’s sung a line from a pop song, for six hours, three times before. The Pop Mantras, as Cloninger calls them, involved “We ride tonight/ Ghost horses” from Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army”; “For a minute there/ I lost myself” from Radiohead’s “Karma Police” and ” and “Tonight/ Wait now” from the Ramones “I Just Want to have Something to Do.”

For Cloninger, these micro-focused music marathons, including Double Blind (Love), can be an attempt to communicate something to an audience.

“If there was a way to cause people feel what certain songs make me feel,” he said, “that would be valuable, but of course this is impossible. So then it’s this stupid brute force kind of Samuel Becket–inspired attempt to just continue to repeat that thing over and over and over as if that was going to do it. But of course it doesn’t. And something else happens.

“It’s a way to fail rigorously,” he adds. “You can’t just fail because it’s boring. Anybody can fail. But it’s valuable to try and achieve something that you know is not going to be achievable and just to push on that.”

The main challenge that Cloninger and Abrahams face is the delay inherent in sending audio/visual signals over the Web. Their improv is not in sync, and the time delay shifts because of buffering. Cloninger wrote about this challenge to their collaborating in an email to Abrahams:

We don’t have the luxury of being “in” the same time, and so much traditional composition is based on the assumption that the performers have the luxury of being in synchronized time. Our compositional variability (changes/differences) will have to be based on blunt phases (loud/soft, complex/simple, monotonous/erratic, a cappella/instrumentally-accompanied, etc.) Who knows what others we will develop. Each of these phase shifts can be initiated by either of us. We will just have to be attentive to the each other. And these phasings in and out will be sluggish and gradual, because we share a time with each other that is similar, but not exact.

We have given ourselves enough “time” to negotiate and explore this odd timescape. It is a time of “desire” (we only remain in it as long as we want to). And hopefully our changes will be motivated by desire rather than by mere “musical innovation.” In other words, we will change what we are doing not because we want to “entertain” anybody, but because we are personally bored and we desire to do something else, or because we are in communication with each other and we desire to connect, or because we are curious, or because we are following a flow to see where it leads, or whatever. And we can’t change the melody or the lyrics. We can only change the affective things that we can change. So we have taken most of the “elements” of music (rhythm, melody, harmony) and rigorously modified them. But I think the performance will still wind up functioning as a piece of music (at least in some sense, although that won’t be all it is doing).

And of course our faces will be doing whatever they are doing, but that will be a residual effect. We will be attentive to the audio and not as attentive to the video. Usually in new media art it is the other way around (visuals first, then audio as residual).

Over the past four hours the singing has shifted through various modes. The pair has just mumble sung, and other times, just drawn out phonemes from the word love. They’ve wailed and caterwauled. Sometimes it’s a dirge, other times it’s a fight.

Tomorrow I plan to speak with Cloninger to get his thoughts on this online collaboration. How did he feel in that moment when Abrahams disappeared. (She disappeared again as I was writing this.) I’m hoping Cloninger’s thoughts on online collaboration will give me some more insight into my search for LoK8Tr. Cloninger and Abrahams may be singing blind, but I’m writing in the dark with respect to my assignment.

My article on the LoK8Tr project took me to Guelph, Ont., last Saturday and live on the radio.

I met Porter Hall, the host of the Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour, at the University of Guleph campus radio station. He arrived just after 3 p.m., a few minutes after the scheduled start time for his weekly show on CFRU. As the automated public-service announcements, commercials and eventually the show’s intro were being broadcast, Porter Hall hooked up a sound processor and unloaded his backpack. The bag held a bunch of cassettes, including a Musicworks compilation (No. 28); a Buddy Greene record called Praise Harmonica (”sappy Christian tunes,” Porter said); ukulele player Tiny Tim’s 2nd Album; CDs, some with spoken samples that Porter had compiled; and a collection of instruments, such as an electronic toy piano (Piano Fun!), a trumpet mouthpiece on a 1/4″ piece of PVC pipe, a McDonald’s Happy-Meal prize that went “boing” and other hose-y bits. There was an electric toothbrush in that bag, but Porter didn’t bring it out for the show.

“My bag of tricks changes over time,” Porter Hall said. The host, whose pseudonym is taken from Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, then added: “Sometimes it’s quite random.”

All these “tricks” were for the Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour, an improvised sound-collage set. Once the gear was ready, Porter threw on a record, looped some spoken component from one of his CDs, and had whatever was on BBC World Service thrown on for good measure.

“What was that?” Porter asked when a sound caught his attention.

“Sometimes I don’t know what’s going on,” he admitted. Then the sound came through one of the myriad channels on the mixing board once again.

“Yeah. See? Where did that come from? Where did that come from?” he asked as he fiddled with the machines to try to catch and manipulate the sound.

The in-studio gizmos and media are only a part of the show. Porter Hall and his two long-time collaborators Really Happening and Gogo Godot form the core of Mannlicher Carcano (MC). Really, in L.A., and Gogo, in Winnipeg, call in most weeks, over the phone or Skype, and add their musical gestures to the mix. Porter looked on Skype for Rock Hill from Montreal. Some weeks there can be eight people in eight different cities. Pilot K9 in Peterborough, Ont., broadcasts the CHRU Web stream over Trent Radio and jams along with it too.

The three members of MC have known each other for years. Porter and Really have been friends since Grade 7. The trio started performing as MC with live, Fluxus-style, performance-art events that featured improvised audio collage around 1988 when all three were art-school students in Winnipeg. In 1990, Porter moved to San Diego, Calif., and in 1991, Really moved to L.A. The three collaborated occasionally following the moves, but it was in 1998, when Porter settled in Peterborough, that the group focused their artistic output to radio. Porter helmed the show at Trent Radio for four years. Then, in 2002, with Porter’s move to Guelph, the show came to CFRU.

I travelled to the university to learn more about Mannlicher Carcano because the radio show is going to mix in the LoK8Tr project when the latter is performed sometime in March 2010. I thought maybe MC could offer me some insights into the mysterious LoK8tr. At the very least, I could see how a musical/sound collaboration employs Skype, an application common to both endeavours.

But, the odd thing about Saturday’s show is that no one showed up to jam. Really Happening didn’t call. Neither did Gogo. Rocky Hill didn’t appear on Skype and there was some technical snafu that prevented Porter from streaming the Trent broadcast back into the Guelph broadcast for a kind of feedback jam.

At the start of the show, Porter generously invited me to join in with the audio collage. I was hesitant. Sure, the format was anything-goes, but still, I didn’t want to do anything that sounded dumb. About two thirds into the show, I felt comfortable enough to make some noise. I spun a record around with my hand, getting a slow-mo drone out of that devotional harmonica music. I couldn’t resist the Piano Fun! with notes that came out like electronic wheezes. I even shoved my voice recorder up to a mic and played what I had recorded from earlier in the show. Porter mixed and matched everything at the mixer. And, man, now I really get a kick out of hearing what came out of that session.

(To download the show, head to the archives at the CFRU site. Select Mannlicher Carcano from the drop-down menu, then click on the show with Saturday’s date. My contributions start at about minute 40.)

After the show had finished, we went to Porter Hall’s studio, where he works on his art installations, and discussed MC. (One installation, Robochorus, is now on at Gallery Lambton in Sarnia, Ont.)

The MC sound collages can be jarring at times, but they often enter the realms of trippy or hypnotic, especially when elements are looped and layered. Although the MC process is anarchic, there is an aesthetic operating.

“Various participants have favourite ways of processing sounds and there are favourite sounds that get mixed in different ways,” Porter said. “Also, we like to refer back to other times and events in our Mannlicher history. It’s like an extended, abstract conversation. I can reference some performance we did five years ago, something that had particular resonance, and just by dredging that up from our archives, it will send a recognizable link to the rest of Mannlicher. It’s a non-verbal means of communication. So, someone can bring in one thing and it will inspire the others to respond in kind, which is a way of saying ‘I get your reference.’”

For those who don’t share the MC vocabulary, I wondered if there were conventions or modes similar to those found in jazz improv.

“More formless kinds of jazz improvisation have to do with intense listening,” Porter said. “Whenever I hear jazz musicians speak of this type of improv, they all say the most important thing is to listen. It’s the same with Mannlicher and I don’t know if intense listening is work or a kind of meditative withdrawal. It always works best when the separation between yourself and the sound is lost. You become the sound.”

I admitted that my contribution to that day’s show felt a bit random even for a random process. I just made noise, not really sure how it fit into the existing sounds. I guess I was like a toddler just starting to babble. Porter, ever generous, said the studio set-up isn’t exactly conducive to proper collaboration, with me on one side of the table and him surrounded by players and computers. But I have a feeling I need to work on my listening if I were to jam with MC again (which I fully intend to do).

As for my mission to try and find out more about LoK8Tr, it wasn’t furthered along much. The person(s) behind LoK8Tr are as much of a mystery for Porter as he/she/they are for me. Months ago, Porter got an email from LoK8Tr asking if MC would be interested in participating in a project. Porter was receptive to the proposal even though, at the time, he had few details.

“I basically said that as long as we are allowed do anything with the sounds or samples we are given, then we’d be quite happy to use them,” Porter said.

I told Porter that at the beginning of my research, I had thought LoK8Tr was simply a new MC project. He, on the other hand, had thought I was the person behind LoK8tr coming to look into Mannlicher as part of my project.

“But I’m pretty sure you’re not,” he said.

Here’s what Jason van Eyk, Ontario regional director at the Canadian Music Centre, told me about LoK8Tr:

What I can tell you about LoK8Tr is that it’s a one-off project; it’s not an existing collective other than the fact that it is being formed as part of the Canadian Music Centre’s New Music in New Places series. This is a series that we’ve run nationally for five years now. It’s a series that allows Canadian composers and their collaborators to create projects to take their music out of the concert hall and out into the community where they work and live. One of the things we’ve been trying to do is encourage composers to consider the virtual environment as part of that—so to consider projects for the Web. The LoK8Tr is such a project. It is an online project that is going to be using a lot of social-networking tools to express its creative content. I understand that you are having some problems getting in touch with the artist(s) and that’s understandable. Anonymity is considered part of the concept for this project. And so we can certainly do our best to get you in touch with the lead creator in this collaboration for LoK8Tr. But we are going to have to find a way to do it so that the anonymity isn’t jeoporadized because they don’t really want to identify who the artists are in the collaboration and in the LoK8Tr project until the project has been completed. And that won’t be done until after it has actually been sent out and eventually stored on a website sometime in January 2010.

Really, I’m not totally comfortable about blogging a print article as I work on it. Magazine articles are always released as seemingly fully formed beings, the stitches removed, the gaps tightened and any false starts tucked away.  Only the writer and editor really see the pieces and connections; for the rest, the article is a lovely whole.

But with a blog, you let it all hang out—the dumb assumptions that you abandon, the head scratching, the raw data. Of course,  I could leave those bits out, but then, what’s left to keep a blog going?

In the case of the LoK8Tr project, my going Web is appropriate (so I’ve convinced myself) because I’m meeting the participants in their medium: the only place they operate right now. There you have it—I can blame them. Also, going meta on the article-writing process, another thing that makes me cringe, is justified because this project seems keen to go up that self-referential route. (”Self-referential”?! Crap. I haven’t used that since third year.)

Thank you LoK8Tr for sending me in this direction. Is it meta for you?