September 2002
INTERVIEW: RYAN MILLS
ANTIANTENNA RECORDINGS BOSS GETS BUSY BUILDING COMMUNITY
AntiAntenna, if you don't yet know, has established itself not only as a fine label, but also as an impressive resource to the local independent music scene. Of course, Wavelength fully endorses all such fostering of the local scene, and, as such, sent envoy Paddy O'Donnell to find out more about AA.
Ryan, introduce yourself -- tell us what you will.
I'm Ryan Mills. I'm 22 years old and I've moved 26 times. I live in an apartment on Queen Street right now- a big change from all the eastern Ontario small towns I've lived in the rest of my life. I spend way too much time on the internet and I drink too much Coca-Cola.
It seems that AntiAntenna is providing quite a service to the music community. (Visit www.antiantenna.com for the proof!) There's an amazing message board (including a Wavelength forum), tons of links, resources, show announcements, news, etc. It's clear that AntiAntenna is about more than just the bands on the label... how did this all come to be?
Being stuck in a small town during high school, the idea of an online community was a great interest of mine. I was interested in digital art, indie music, and other "big-city" ideas that just didn't exist in my town. My life really changed when I got involved in an online art group called Swanky in 1997. This environment allowed me to learn what I wanted to learn, and gave me the opportunity to find like-minded people from a much larger group than the 700 kids I went to school with. When AntiAntenna came to be, I wasn't sure if I was going to start an online community, a zine, or a record label. At times, I've wanted to do all three. Then, sometimes just one or two of those ideas at once. I'm new to running a record label, but I've been involved in online communities for years. I guess it's just taking me some time to get used to how the record-label structure has worked in the past, and interesting to look back on what I've been doing after I've figured out "the rules."
What's your favourite all-time message/thread/posting to the Antiantenna board?
There are a few different ways to communicate. To talk about people is the lowest form of communication. To discuss events is a bit more sophisticated. To communicate an idea is even more complex. I'm usually interested mostly in the discussion of ideas. The discussion about the involvement of Nike in the independent music scene was a good one. Also, any discussions about music business ethics in independent music strike a chord with me.
What do you think about AntiAntenna? Has the label surpassed your own expectations? Has it taken on a life of its own?
I started the label a year ago to help out some friends who wanted to release a CD and to learn how to start a small record label. I think those goals have been acheived. I'm really happy with where I'm at right now. I didn't really have any expectations in my first year. That's actually a goal for our second year -- to have expectations and goals that can be put in writing. This label is my main focus for the next year, as I'm not working a "real job" anymore.
Tell us briefly about the bands on the label.
Every band on the label fits a pretty simple idea. I don't work with bands who fit perfectly into a genre. Business-wise, that's my tragic flaw. I'm aware of it. Every label that's started out with this direction has fallen into a more mainstream focus because there really isn't much money in working with bands who push the envelope like the bands that I'm working with. Individually, Gaffer are the loud, metal/hardcore band. The Vermicious Knid are the clever, noisy emo band. White Star Line are the classic, witty pop band. I suggest visiting our website or attending a show to hear the music for yourself and make your own conclusions.
Tell us about this Wavelength showcase you've put together... what can people expect to see?
The show opens with White Star Line and ends with The Vermicious Knid. (ed.note: this was incorrectly reversed in the print zine.) It should be a pretty good rock show to celebrate the end of the label's first year.
Do you want to share any "inside" information re: AntiAntenna? What's in the works? Another comp? More website goodies? Any future signings or wish lists? Any big surprises you want to let out of the bag now?
The future will be pretty simple for the label. I'm focusing a bit more on the label and the bands themselves instead of trying to push things in a bunch of different directions. The Vermicious Knid and I are going on a 21-date east-coast US tour in October. That's about it for the rest of this year. I'm just trying to figure out what we're doing and to do it the best way we can.
ANTIANTENNA DISCOGRAPHY
ANT001 Various Artists
The 20 Year Design Theory CD
ANT002 Gaffer
Ending Again CD
ANT003 The Vermicious Knid Days That Stand Still EP
ANT004 White Star Line s/t CD
The AntiAntenna Campus Bender happens Sept. 15 at Wavelength 131.
Kurt Vonnegut... in 4D!
MISSIVES FROM THE OLD WORLD
PART FOUR: DOC PICKLES' GUIDE TO THE FOURTH DIMENSION
Coming all this way to write travelogues for Wavelength -- well, I've come for a myriad of other reasons as well, but let us put them aside for the purposes of this story -- has helped me broaden my understanding of the fourth dimension. So for this month's travelogue, let's pay a visit to the enigmatic fourth dimension.
While I was in Cannes, I had the opportunity to check my email and was puzzled to receive the following message from a friend of mine back home: "Duncan, I heard through the grapevine what you're really up to. That's pretty cool. Should be interesting to find out who bites and who doesn't!" Turns out that there is a wonderful rumour floating around that I have been hiding out in the east end of Toronto reading newsgroup stories about Italy and emailing my travelogues from there. Aside from the fact that I have absolutely nothing to gain from spending six months in Scarborough, the rumour is entirely believable and I found it intriguing.
People's thought forms alone had formed my identical twin. While I'm over here in Europe, there is a shell of me vitalized by other people's thought-forms performing a ghastly burlesque of life: walking the dog, going to work, bringing food back home, and attending my beloved Wavelength. While my soul inhabits this road-weary body, there is a ghostly duplicate of me in North America that possesses all of my quirks and idiosyncrasies, but none of my actual soul. This whole dualistic way of seeing things has given me a second perspective of reality, one from where I physically am, namely in Europe, and one from where I have an astral outpost, namely the east end of Toronto.
A single point has no dimension at all. Move that point and you have a line with one dimension. Move that line at a right angle and you have a plane, with two dimensions, length and width. Move that square and you have a cube with a third dimension, depth. Now imagine that you move that cube. That dualism -- where the cube was, suspended in your imagination, and where the cube physically is -- is the beginning of the fourth dimension. The place where the cube will be is also the fourth dimension. It is the movement of all places the cube was, and is, and will ever be, suspended simultaneously in your mind. It is the realization that all of this constant movement is really no movement at all. At this point I should add that I haven't smoked a blade of grass since I was at home in May.
On the shore of the Seine, I sat and thought about home. So with that thought I brought home back to me in my mind, or possibly I sent myself through thought back home. I have no proof that home even exists anymore, therefore to me home must only exist in my imagination. And all of you back home have no proof of me except for an image that lives on through memory, so you've no proof of my existence either, only an unreliable memory that I once was, and possibly "am". Therefore I have ceased for the time to exist in physical form, only as a ghostly recollection. So am I now a ghost? Like a ghost, I don't feel like one. All of you back home are also as ghosts to me. We carry with us a shell of recollections and impressions, a filter through which we experience reality, drawn up to conscious thought by each outside provocation in fragmented bits and pieces. What was and will be funnel through what "is" until we loosen the bands of chronology. Then we have entered the fourth dimension. And then there are ghosts, and then I am still at home, and then each of you is here with me.
The fourth dimension is like memorizing a novel, and knowing all the plots and crises simultaneously. There is no moving forwards or backwards through the narrative. It's like seeing the whole story at once, all the causes and effects rolled into one cohesive thought. It's the awareness of how one change of cause can write a whole new novel, with an entirely new set of infinite possibilities. Simultaneously.
If you have a chance, go see the Toronto band Slinky Kellogg. It's my humble opinion that SK is a 3D soundscape of the fourth dimension. They work seamlessly with sound loops, introducing an unlimited array of sounds, each one acting upon the existing ones. If a standard pop song evolves along a series of loosely wound loops suspended upon a rod, Slinky Kellogg takes a shortcut, and moves along the rod from one loop to the other. This movement along the rod that holds the loops of chronological existence is like movement through the fourth dimension.
There is a character from a Kurt Vonnegut novel that once gave an excellent explanation of the fourth dimension. I'm not sure which book the character exists in, since I read nearly all of his books at once in 1995 and they're all blended together in memory into one book about Kilgore Trout stranded in the Galapagos Islands, which serves as an accurate portrayal of the fourth dimension in its own right, but I digress. The character describes our limited frame of seeing the physical world as looking through a tube attached to the front of a train moving on tracks in a tunnel underneath a mountain range. The fourth dimension involves stepping back and seeing the whole range of mountains at once, with each peak representing a different event in a person's lifetime, the whole scheme of causes and effects laid bare for our consideration. The "I" is no longer a part of the narrative. The range is a cohesive whole, and our viewpoint is outside the limits of that range.
So here I am in Paris. Or here I am not. Or both. Reporting from Paris, or possibly not, this is Doc Pickles, over and out.