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This Was Then: A Brief History of Canadian Synth Music

Toronto DJs Geoff Snack and Gabe Knox give us the Canadian history behind synth music.

Up here in the Great White North, we don't like to toot our own horn. As a result, from the Avro Arrow to Neil Young, we've often let other countries (America) reap the benefits of our good ideas and talented people. We do, on occasion, celebrate our rich musical history, as recently published biographies of punk/hardcore bands like DOA and SNFU show. But years before those bands formed, young Canuck musicians in the mid 70s felt the same zit-encrusted angst, but found that the gates of rock Valhalla seemingly opened only for frontmen rocking inhuman bulges or groupie-sharking guitar gods. While the bum-rush that was punk rock would soon give musicians like Lou Champagne and Rational Youth the proverbial kick in the pants, they would turn to new, commercially available synthesizers in lieu of guitars, with an approach inspired more by Johnny Ramone than Rick Wakeman's two-hour keyboard jizz-athons.

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This turn to synth is a branch of Canadian music that's largely been ignored. Recognition is often given to Skinny Puppy, without whom there would be no Nine Inch Nails. Canada's post-punk cast of characters certainly didn't want for weirdos or eccentrics, besides Nivek and cEvin. Nash the Slash (RIP), never seen in public without his burn-victim bandages and top hat, had been creeping out audiences and scoring hits in the UK since the mid 70's, while on “The Drum”, Ohama's deadpan song intro “my name is Ohama, and I live on a potato farm” wins the award for “least sexy way to start a funky dance track, ever”.

The roots of Canadian synth music go even deeper, as Toronto DJs Geoff Snack and Gabe Knox illustrate on their compilation This Mix Volume 2, available to download for free on their Tumblr. The mix gives us a view of some of the very first musicians anywhere to screw around with expensive, impractical, wonderful tools whose purpose was a mystery to non-nerds. For more insight into our forgotten synth-y past, I spoke to Geoff and Gabe about this chunk of Canadiana and why we haven't heard it before.

Noisey: You're digging pretty deeply through the history of Canadian synth music in Volume 2. What were your criteria for selecting the songs?
Geoff: We tried to include songs that were interesting and notable, and that not many people had likely heard. We wanted to keep everything Canadian as well, that was central.

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Gabe: Canada day was coming up, so once we had that loose rubric for the mix there was some stuff we wanted shine a spotlight on, such as Hugh Le Caine. For a long time people were very unaware of who he was, he's a real pioneer.

He invented a precursor to the modern synth in the 1940s, the Electronic Sackbut.

Gabe: Yeah, and the thing about him that's pretty interesting to me is that Le Caine was working for the National Research Council, doing this as “proof-of concept” research stuff, whereas Robert Moog, an American who was doing concurrent research, did so with an eye on the marketplace. Moog tailored his stuff so that musicians would actually use it, and was probably the first engineer to ask for their feedback. As for Le Caine, and this is very indicative of how “Canadian” a story this all is, he was way ahead of his time, working in relative obscurity and not really appreciated by his country for his achievements until outsiders started to take notice. It's a standard story, to the point where it's a cliche, but in my experience it's a cliche that happens to be right.

The first This Mix had some very recognizable names like Soft Cell and OMD on it, but many of the Canadian bands on Vol. 2 are still very obscure. why do you think their history isn't as celebrated as say, Canadian rock or punk?
Geoff: That's a tough one, I would speculate that these sounds just weren't “in vogue” in the Canadian music industry at the time. In England and Europe they were more ready to accept this stuff, they had less of a rock-centric, more cosmopolitain mentality than the States and Canada, artists there were always moving in different directions genre-wise.

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Gabe: I have a suspicion that we tend to look back with rose-tinted glasses about the way electronic music was received (in the 80s), there was a lot of rhetoric about it not being “real” music that we're only starting to climb out of. Again, it's hard to say this with any kind of authority, but I have a suspicion that a lot of this stuff was overlooked because it was too far ahead of it's time in a weird way, even as it seems of it's time when we look back.

It does seem like in England or Europe, a musician like John Foxx could release an influential minimal synth record (1980's Metamatic) on a major label, and nobody really thought that was strange or offensive.
Gabe: Yeah, but at the same Gary Numan was getting beaten up by drunk chav-y guys, and wrote “Cars” about it. For sure though, the audience overseas were more ready to accept different sounds, like the way they embraced house music. The other thing, if you look at half the artists (on the mix), they were toiling away in their home studios in obscurity…

Geoff: Yeah, In Oakville (Ontario), or something.

Gabe: …Not like they weren't getting out there, because they were getting their stuff out, but mostly in small runs distributed through mail order, definitely more of a cottage industry as opposed to now.

Considering how guys like Ohama operated, how important do you think DIY ideals were to the artists on the mix, as well as to both of you personally? The first This Mix had “some assembly required” printable cassette covers on your Tumblr.
Gabe: I don't think we can say that, overall, the DIY aspect was important to the artists as a whole, as bands like Rough Trade recorded polished studio records, but DIY is a strong component of how we operate as people. When we made the cassette instructions, though, It was less “hey it'd be cool if people actually made the tape” than “hey let's make the details as long-winded and stupid as possible”. I mean, it's available for free on the internet.

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Geoff: I disagree with Gabe a bit on this one, I can only speculate, but I do think that due to lack of outside influence, and pressure to be profitable these artists were able to make music that was a bit displaced and out of time, and the DIY thing does play a role in that.

On the technological side, you had musicians like Lou Champagne inventing gear left and right to help them play their songs live without backing musicians.
Gabe: Yeah, If there's one thing you can say about (a musician like) Lou Champagne, there was nothing standing in the way of him expressing himself.

A cliche about Canada is that it's very isolated, which obviously in the age of internet culture is virtually impossible. I didn't want to harp on that in relation to these bands, but it does seem like there's a bit of an “isolation narrative” that comes up here.
Gabe: I think maybe part of that is journalists trying to attach a narrative, but if you came down to brass tacks their stories are pretty similar (to other musicians). I think you're right in calling it a cliche because it's easy to say, in the case of Ohama, “hey, here's this guy making music on a potato farm, he's basically Jandek”. It can be easy to misrepresent, and it's unfair to them as artists. It's danger you can run into making a mix like this, because you're using pretty rare, unheard records, so we didn't want to appear to be trying to re-write their stories.

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I'm not really aware of any online or print resources on Canadian synth music, any sources you've used that you want to tell us about?
Geoff: I'm not too aware of a book or compilation that captures the Canadian scene, but there are some labels that are doing a lot of work giving bits and pieces of the scene new life, Vinyl on Demand, Medical Records, Dark Entries being a few, they've all done recent re-releases.

Gabe: For local Toronto resources if you go to Lp's Lp's, Lorenz will sort you out, he's a guru on this stuff. I'm more of a person that, when I started buying more records, I would talk to crusty old guys in record stores who were more into jazz and wanted nothing to do with me.

Geoff: There's a really interesting oral history that gets passed down through guys that eventually end up owning record stores. I'd also buy records based on album covers…you can sort of tell by sight what a record will sound like.

So “This”…how did the name come about, and what do you plan on doing next?
Gabe: “This” as a name was kind of poking fun at that annoying thing people do on the internet, where they post an event with a meme picture and the word “this” above it. I hate “blase-ness”, it's infuriating because it's the opposite of what they're trying to do. Geoff and I have a DJ night (also called “This”) every third Friday at Unloveable, and it's hard out there, so we're still just trying to have fun with the night, make people laugh. The next mix will be more “dance-y”.

Geoff: Yeah, it's not that we're invested financially in any of this or quit our day jobs, it's more about just being able to play what we want.

Gabe: Totally. One of the cool things about living in 2014 is that we actually have access to all of this music, it's lovely that it's getting out there, because I mean these poor guys! If only some of the bands on the mix had had something like the internet back then, and were able to connect like we can, they might have been super-rich rock stars today, who knows.

Patrick Short is a writer and synth-pop artist living in Toronto - @KindestCuts