Goofy Fun and Silly Words with Gravity Wave

According to my macbook’s built-in dictionary:

gam-bol

verb (-boled, -bol-ing; Brit. –bolled, -bolling) [intrans.] run or jump about playfully : the man gamboled toward Connie.

noun [usu. in sing.] an act of running or jumping about playfully

“I guess this explains why I don’t really dance, I confuse running and jumping with dancing. I like to call myself a Song & Dance Man; I tried to explain that to Chris Eaton [Rock Plaza Central] – he had me and my fiancé over for dinner at his house the other night. Other friends of his were there and they asked me, musically, what do I do and I said ‘Well, I’m a Song & Dance Man.’ Chris says ‘You don’t dance.’ So what do I do up there? I guess shaking and stomping your feet doesn’t count as dancing anymore. I don’t know. Who’s he to be the dancing police?”

This man is Kenneth Farrell. He is also known as Gravity Wave. He is a Song & Dance Man.

Of Singin’, and of Dancin’, and of Taking a Bite of Your Kumquat

Gravity Wave is a curious entity, that’s for certain. Sometimes manic electro-pop madman, sometimes bouncy showtune crooner, occasionally quirky funk party leader and most often, purveyor of eccentric, assorted and extremely catchy pop tracks. The music of Gravity Wave takes the outlandish genre-bending junkyard eclecticism of early Beck and tosses it through a lo-fi electro blender to create a witty and fun set of party anthems that are sure to get all of you bookish-types grooving thoroughly.

Gambol, the new record from this loose collective based around Farrell, their first release with local label Fuzzy Logic Recordings (The Bicycles, Peter Project, Prairie Cat), moves distinctly away from Farrell’s days producing tracks on his Playstation and into broader and bolder new territory. From the opening lounge-funk of “Bangs” through to the acoustic jam of the final track, “HSGAS” (spoiler alert: this stands for “High School Girls Are Sluts”), listeners are treated to a set of tunes that, propelled by Farrell’s tongue-in-cheek songwriting and aloof, gravely voice, are just as likely to make you chuckle as make you dance.

“Gimme Every Love You Got” (a shoe-in for the Best Song Title I’ve Encountered Lately) is a menacing and downright filthy Waits-esque carnival/lounge lust parade that hypnotically lurches around its slow, festering groove with depraved, giddy joy. Meanwhile, “Kumquat” finds Farrell in a much more playful mood as here, he laces his Song & Dance routine with strings, horns and bizarre glitches that makes the song act as a kind of perverted companion piece to the Beatles’ “Piggies,” however much more suggestive.

“There’s always that one idea that when it comes together, it lays out the rest of the song for me,” he says, eyeing the bottom of his empty tea cup, “The minute I heard the word ‘kumquat,’ I knew that I had something where if I said it enough times as a chorus, a live audience wouldn’t be able to just turn their heads and ignore it.

“And, I think I was right, because we’ve started to test the new songs and play them at the live shows and every time we do it – and I love the mothers when they’re at the shows. Every time you look a mother in the eye and sing ‘Baby, let me get a bite of that kum-quat,’ she’s convinced you’ve said something just nasty to her.

“She’s embarrassed a little bit, she’s kind of shy. But you know, me instantly thinking about how she’s going to react to that gives me an idea of what I maybe want to do with the second line of the song, to maybe diffuse the situation. To make her feel like ‘No, I’m not just going to pull out my penis and show it to you, lady; we’re just going to have some goofy fun with silly words.’”

The Twenty-First Century Song & Dance Man

Of course, it is here in Gravity Wave’s stage performance where Farrell’s Song & Dance Man image is very much apparent. While he occasionally plays with a band, a typical Gravity Wave show is most likely to consist of Farrell, in true crooner mode, singing live to pre-recorded instrumentation. The image of bearded, laid-back Farrell in his leather jacket and flamboyantly patterned shirts on an otherwise bare stage, shaking and stomping, can indeed be considered the modern update of the classic pop singer – big band, minus the big band.

“For some shows I am able to travel with a drummer, a bass player and a DJ; when I go out west it’s going to be just me and the iPod, I’m going to go back to the very first set that I started with. Just be that stand-up, hold-the-microphone crooner that has disappeared from pop music. Well, disappeared except for your Britneys and your major American Idol pop stars, but to revive that: let’s see if those guys can’t be punk too because there’s something inherent in the genre that just forces you so far into the middle of the road that you can’t possibly bring anything new to it. I don’t really think that’s the case and I’ve been through this, I know it’s going to go pretty well.”

And really, it is fairly safe to say that there isn’t anyone doing quite what it is Gravity Wave is doing, whatever it is that might be. For a guy who started this musical project creating tracks on the Playstation game MTV Generator, Gravity Wave is a totally different beast than it was a few years ago and Gambol is certainly a big step by any measure. Graduating from the game console to Ableton Live, the sound is bigger, sleeker and more well-rounded than ever on this record with a wide range of instrumentation and concise, clever songwriting.

“Well, the new record is kind of the next logical step in my grand plan of eventually getting to lead a Lawrence Welk television orchestra on a variety show. If I’m going anywhere, it is to be the curator of an orchestra on a television show that can cull songs from all of my favourite writers and be performed not only as musical pieces but as theatrical skits by all of the talented people I know.

“So, first I had to make a record where I orchestrated everything by myself, which was the Playstation record. Then a producer friend of mine joined the project, so we had the Diamond Stud make an appearance on Twin Prime Conjecture which came after the Playstation record. From there we felt that we had enough to go ahead and try to make this kind of record that worked backwards from the orchestrating of digital sound and replacing it as much as possible with live players.

“There was an arranger, who is studying to be a composer, that came on board for this record to help me flush out these simple songs with melodies and counter-melodies into more complete symphonic parts. And he rounded up some volunteer musicians and we sneaked into studios that Finley has access to, paid for only what we must and got a pretty good record out of it."

Wherein Kenneth Discusses at Length the Philosophy of Hockey

So what does a twenty-first century Fred Astaire do with himself when he’s not busying himself with programming beats and trying to frighten middle-aged women? Farrell, a native of Fort McMurray, Alberta, spends time writing a column for a hockey magazine.

“It’s fun, you know, the guy asked me what I wanted to do for him – and I have a hockey background, so it’s not that I don’t know the game, I know the game as intricately as anybody.”

“Being from Fort McMurray,” I suggest.

“Yeah, I played for the Oil Barons and then I got the scholarship to go to school in the States [at the University of Massachusetts] and then I moved to Toronto and did my thing, worked as a hockey instructor. So I’ve got my pedigree, I’ve got my hockey resume to the point where I can talk about the game with anybody.

“But at the same time, I don’t write about the day-to-day who-got-traded, who-got-injured, who-scored-and-when kind of stuff. I’ve been writing these – well, I’ve been writing lies and writing stories that kind of use that common vocabulary of hockey where you talk about winning battles, competing and the game being ninety percent mental and trying essentially to extrapolate that philosophy outward. I guess I’m trying to write to hockey players what their game and what the lifestyle that it advocates actually extrapolates outward to as a culture with people who become leaders in business and such.

“Most of the kids that I work with, as much as they adore the game they don’t go on to be draft picks and superstars. Most of them play until their mid-teens and then they play in recreation leagues for however long they want, but they take these formative years from like four to sixteen and then they use a lot of what they’ve learned as an athlete to kind of inform their decisions for the rest of their lives. And it’s backwards, it’s stuck in olden times and it doesn’t change – it’s not that it doesn’t change, it’s that it’s resistant to change, it’s very entrenched and as a culture, it has some growing to do. And it’s fun to be pushing those boundaries but at the same time, the guy who’s editing it, isn’t always happy with what I’m writing. I submitted one that said, well that there is no absolute truth; that everything is perception – trying to talk to these people about the individual perspective.

“And so I promised them in one sentence, that everything I write will not be the absolute truth and then in the next line start talking about whose cock is the longest, whose cock is the thickest to explain that these are the things that don’t get said, nothing we say here is true, all we can really do here is enjoy it, let’s have some fun and say some stupid shit.

"Well, it turns out that’s not what he thinks is going to get us enough sponsorship to keep going. What can you do?”

Back to Bullshit: A Brief Conclusion

The twenty-first century crooner, an interesting niche for an interesting man; though surely it is a position that has begged to be filled. Really, what does our culture need more than a guy whose music oozes Beck, but who performs like Frank Sinatra? A dry, aloof man shaking manically about a stage by himself, looking like he just came in from the Jimmy Buffett convention.

He demands your panties. Throw them at him.