shoegaze | TOM BEEDHAM

Tom Beedham

Chuck Blazevic and Alice Hansen’s sample-based dream pop project You’ll Never Get To Heaven performing at The Silver Dollar for Wavelength Music Festival on Feb. 13, 2014. Photo by Tom Beedham

One might not expect to find purveyors of a particularly narcoleptic dream pop—a label once typified by guitar music and its effect pedal-oriented (and derisively labeled) “shoegazing” forebears—to make a point of deploying sampled material in it’s enchantments, but partners Alice Hansen and Chuck Blazevic have figured out a way to make a gig of relying on that technology almost exclusively.

Across the partners’ material, the chilly downtempo beats and tone washes that Blazevic spends the sets eliciting from his sampling machines are enough to carry you off to another plane of awareness. Less consistently present (though always welcome), Hansen’s atmospheric vocals aren’t held back and “buried” by any genre tendencies, but instead emerge from Blazevic’s impressionistic sound paintings, bringing listeners back down to earth. And considering the pair were tasked with opening the first night of a four-night festival (and effectually WL14 as a whole), it was easy to appreciate an act that sedated its listeners without charging them to reach for their pillows.

Photos:

Originally published by Aesthetic Magazine.

Program played a small crowd at The Garrison as a part of NXNE on June 12. (Photo: Tom Beedham)

Fitting in equally with Toronto’s apparent new wave (but not New Wave) of shoegaze bands and the recent realization of post-post-punk revival (can we just call them post-punk?) groups that seem to be popping up widely across the western world (and thus the Venn diagram of circles interested in hearing those forms collide), Program builds songs by methodically magnifying the impact of their smaller elements. They start small, arresting a bar for your initial consideration, and then inflating it with chord variations, pedal effects, and the addition of complimentary instrumental parts – all until they’ve arrived at a lapping, atmospheric wall of sound with plenty of introspective appeal.

Playing the generously cavernous and frankly underused space at the back of The Garrison, Program played to a relatively small (albeit captivated) audience on June 12, but the poor turnout wasn’t all a bad omen for the group; the thinned crowd just seemed to allow the delay-heavy guitar, keyboard and bass sounds that Program relies on a new, more physical route to warp-echoing their way into infinity.

TOM BEEDHAM

Arts & Culture Writer/Photographer

Tag Archives: shoegaze

WL14 Reviews: You’ll Never Get To Heaven @ The Silver Dollar Room – Feb. 13, 2014

NXNE Review: Program @ The Garrison, June 12, 2013