>>PREVIEW
THE ACORN
Friday, March 30
Broken City
Bands crave audience respect and admiration, a mutual understanding and trust between band and fan. This is not, however, the case when Ottawa’s The Acorn goes out on tour. The group has a charmingly offbeat way of getting respect and acknowledgment from its fans. "We really encourage the crowd to heckle us because I want to see what the city is all about. I love just egging the crowd on to heckle us and talk to us," says front man Rolf Klausener.
This laid-back, unpretentious attitude is precisely what characterizes the group’s music and performance style. Born in the shadow of fast-paced musical centres such as Toronto and Montreal, Klausener and his bandmates let their surroundings influence them just enough to capture the Ottawa vibe – folk-influenced rock and organic musicianship.
When Klausener and the band head out on tour this month to promote their latest EP Tin Fists, they are hoping to show people that there is more to Ottawa than just stuffy politics and cold weather. Hailing from a place and musical history that sometimes gets lost in the shadows of their towering neighbours, Klausener and fellow mates Jeff Debutte, Keiko Devaux, Howie Tsui and T. Jeffrey Malecki are looking to show that Ottawa has a sound all its own.
"Ottawa is a bit of a rural city, so there is a bit of a tradition of more acoustic-based instrumentation," says Klausener of his adopted city’s influence. "It is a bit removed from the fast-paced culture and the more competitive culture that you do get in bigger cities like Montreal and Toronto," he says.
The casual Ottawa vibe has been a large influence on the group’s latest LP, an album less cutting-edge and a lot closer to Klausener’s heart. Based on his mother’s life, the album incorporates traditional musical elements from her native Honduras. "It’s based on stories from her childhood and how she got from Honduras to Canada. It’s been a process of amalgamating elements of her life mixed with a lot of ethno-musicology research that I did at Carleton University last year," he says, recalling the arduous process of gathering all his research.
But last year, over-thinking this complex project and needing a break, the group recorded a few existing songs one weekend. What resulted was the unexpected birth of Tin Fists. "As the weekend was approaching we realized we had a couple more songs that we might as well just record for posterity… and then literally two days before we went into the studio I wrote three more songs, and then we just arranged them on the fly. Lo and behold, after the weekend we had this nice little album," says Klausener.
Once in Calgary, the group hopes audiences will show them the same strange love they have grown to appreciate. "We are excited to play Calgary and hopefully the Calgary crowd are ready to talk to us and communicate in whatever fashion they feel appropriate, whether it be heckling or laughing at our terrible jokes." |
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