if then do + guests
Thursday March 19th
4 - 6pm
free
@ The Bump N Grind
916 Commercial Drive (@ Venables)
IF THEN DO : Born in 2001, originally from Ottawa, if then do began lo-fi, with early shows manifesting as analog maelstroms of keyboards, bass, tapes, pedals and a karaoke machine, with a sound influenced as much by glitch music as it was by shoegaze, musique concrete and noise. However, the group quickly grew frustrated with the compositional and sonic limitations of their gear, and increasingly enamoured with the electronic sounds coming out labels such as Mego, Touch and Mille Plateaux, they went digital. Today, if then do is still influenced by its past, but looks forward to the future, mixing and mutating elements of dub, pop, electroacoustic, hip hop and other musical genres into an increasingly diverse musical stew, crafting complex arrangements and improvised sections packed with sonic detail and numerous variations and unusual tangents.
With a dynamic that is by turns brutal and tender, if then do teeter on the borderlines between genres, attempting to marry noise to melodicism, lo-fi detritus to hi-fi production, "experimental music" to some (decaying?) semblance of pop. It's their own logic; one that has landed an array of performing slots alongside disparate acts such as Mitchell Akiyama, Tim Hecker, Mono, Do Make Say Think, Xiu Xiu, The Acorn and Iszoloscope. This particular Vancouver if then do show features Ross Birdwise solo (Ejaculation Death Rattle, Unikron, A Thousand Plateaus) on laptop, playing an assortment of pre-composed if then do tracks and doing some improvisation (effected kazoo, contact microphones in mouth) and real-time processing on the fly.
http://www.myspace.com/ifthendo
